The Ethiopian rift is a unique natural environment to study the different stages of evolution from initial continental rifting to embryonic sea-floor spreading. We study the crust and uppermost mantle of the Afar, Main Ethiopian Rift and the adjoining plateaus using hierarchical Bayesian ambient seismic noise tomography. A shear wave velocity model of the crust is produced based on the point-wise linearized inversion of the dispersion curves extracted from the group velocity maps.

This dataset provides 3-D shear velocity results from Eshetu et al. (2021).

The file “3dmod.dat” contains the shear wave velocity model for the Ethiopian rift, sampled onto a regular grid. Poorly imaged cells are set to “nan”, see the main text for details. Note that the model primarly resolves S wave structure (Vs). P wave velocity (Vp) is not independently constrained but, during the inversion, calculated from Vs using empirical relations (Brocher, 2005).