Rayleigh Wave Phase Velocity in the Indian Ocean Upper Mantle

Abstract:

Current understanding of the seismic properties of the oceanic upper mantle is heavily weighted toward studies of the Pacific upper mantle. However, global seismic models indicate differences in upper-mantle properties beneath the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. Furthermore, factors such as spreading rate, absolute plate motion, and the presence of intraplate volcanism vary between these regions. It is thus important to consider the broad range in parameters when forming ideas about mantle dynamics and lithosphere evolution within ocean basins. We are developing a high-resolution basin-wide seismic model of the Indian Ocean upper mantle. The Indian Ocean contains 16,000 km of mid-ocean ridge, with spreading rates ranging from approximately 14 mm/yr along the Southwest Indian Ridge to 55-75 mm/yr along the Southeast Indian Ridge. It also contains 12 volcanic hotspots, overlies a portion of a large low-shear-velocity province in the lower mantle, and is home to the Australian-Antarctic Discordance and a negative geoid anomaly just south of India, among other features.

We measure phase velocity in the period range 30-130 seconds for fundamental-mode Rayleigh waves traversing the Indian Ocean; the data set includes 831 events that occurred between 1992 and 2014 and 769 stations. In order to isolate the signal of the oceanic upper mantle, paths with >30% of their length through continental upper mantle are excluded. Variations in phase velocity in the Indian Ocean upper mantle are explored with two approaches. One, phase velocity is allowed to vary only as a function of seafloor age. Two, a general two-dimensional parameterization is utilized in order to capture perturbations to age-dependent structure. Our preliminary results indicate a strong dependence of phase velocity on seafloor age, with higher velocity associated with older seafloor, and perturbations to the age-dependent trend in the vicinity of the Australian-Antarctic Discordance and the Marion and Kerguelen hotspots. Because the ridges in the Indian Ocean span a wide range of spreading rates, our results also provide a unique opportunity to investigate how the lateral averaging inherent to seismic waves can introduce an apparent spreading-rate dependence of phase velocity.