DI31A-4263:
Anisotropy of the Earth’s inner inner core from autocorrelations of earthquake coda in China Regional Seismic Networks

Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Han Xia1, Xiaodong Song1,2 and Tao Wang1, (1)Nanjing University, Nanjing, China, (2)Univ Illinois, Champaign, IL, United States
Abstract:
The Earth’s inner core possesses strong cylindrical anisotropy with the fast symmetry axis parallel to the rotation axis. However, recent study has suggested that the inner part of the inner core has a fast symmetry axis near the equator with a different form of anisotropy from the outer part (Wang et al., this session). To confirm the observation, we use data from dense seismic arrays of the China Regional Seismic Networks. We perform autocorrelation (ACC) of the coda after major earthquakes (Mw>=7.0) at each station and then stack the ACCs at each cluster of stations. The PKIKP2 and PKIIKP2 phases (round-trip phase from the Earth’s surface reflections) can be clearly extracted from the stacked empirical Green’s functions. We observe systematic variation of the differential times between PKIKP2 and PKIIKP2 phases, which are sensitive to the bulk anisotropy of the inner core. The differential times show large variations with both latitudes and longitudes, even though our ray paths are not polar (with our stations at mid-range latitudes of about 20 to 45 degrees). The observations cannot be explained by an averaged anisotropy model with the fast axis along the rotation axis. The pattern appears consistent with an inner inner core that has a fast axis near the equator.