The reflection seismic method is the most frequently used exploration method for imaging and monitoring subsurface structures with high resolution. It has proven its qualities from the scale of regional seismology to the scale of near-surface applications that look just a few meters below the surface. The reflection method uses controlled active sources at known positions to give rise to reflections recorded at known receiver positions. The reflections’ two-wave travel time is used to extract desired information about and image the subsurface structures. When active sources are unavailable or undesired, one can retrieve body-wave reflections from application of seismic interferometry (SI) to sources of opportunity—quakes, tremors, ambient noise, or even man-made sources not connected to the exploration campaign. We show examples of imaging of subsurface structures using reflections retrieved from quakes and ambient noise. We apply SI by autocorrelation to global earthquake to image seismic and aseismic parts of the Nazca plate and the Moho at these places, SI by multidimensional deconvolution to P-wave coda from local earthquakes to image the Moho and the crust at the same places, and SI by autocorrelation to deep moonquakes to image the lunar Moho and to ambient noise to monitor CO2 sequestration.

In 30 years following NASA’s Apollo missions, numerous geophysical methods have been applied to determine the depth of the Lunar Moho. These methods, such as travel-time analysis and gravity inversion, have yielded inconsistent estimates. Here, we apply a seismic interferometry technique using body waves. We use deep moonquakes recorded by the Apollo stations to retrieve zero-offset reflection responses beneath each seismic station on the Nearside of the Moon. We call this application deep-moonquake seismic interferometry (DMSI). We present here the first pseudo-reflection imaging of the Lunar Moho, which we interpret to reside at around 50 km depth. Our interpretation agrees with JAXA’s SELENE result, and with earlier travel-time studies. Our DMSI results also show lateral inhomogeneity beneath the Moho, suggesting strong scattering within a zone characterized by seismic velocity that exhibits little variation at our resolution scale (0.2-2.0 Hz). This zone is where most of the shallow moonquakes are presumed to be occurring.