The investigations on the structure and temporal variations of the continent crust have been the long-lasting topics of seismology. The artificial sources play the most important role in these studies for their well-known locations and occur times among all the sources producing elastic waves,so that precise results are obtained. In past decades,we have successfully excited the airgun sources in on-land water bodies such as reservoirs,expanding their applications in marine seismology. Large volume airguns have been used to produce low frequency signals which can travel hundreds of kilometers after stacking,providing a source connecting the exploration seismology and traditional seismology at regional scale. In this review,we introduce the changes through which we turn the airgun into scientific instruments by experiments. We also present the advances on imaging the continental crust structure and monitoring the velocity variations using the highly repeatable signals emitted by airgun sources. The potential applications such as imaging the subsurface of urban areas and high resolution illuminating of mines are proposed and the challenges for further investigations are also discussed.
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