Crust Uppermost Mantle Structure beneath Eastern Asia: Progress towards a Uniform, Tightly Constrained, High Resolution 3-D Model

Abstract:

In the past decade, large and dense seismic arrays have been deployed across much of eastern Asia (e.g., the “CEArray” and the “China Array” deployed by the China Earthquake Administration (CEA), the NECESS Array deployed collaboratively by China, Japan and the US, Korean Seismic Network, KNET and other networks in Japan, and historical PASSCAL installations), which have been used to produce increasingly well resolved models of the crust and uppermost mantle at different length scales. These models, however, do not cover eastern Asia uniformly. In this presentation, we report on an effort to generate a uniform high resolution 3-D model of the crust and uppermost mantle beneath eastern Asia using state-of-art surface wave and body wave inversion techniques. Highlights of this effort include: 1) We collect ambient noise cross-correlations using more than 1,800 seismic stations from multiple seismic arrays in this area and perform uniform surface wave tomography for the study area. 2) We collect P-wave receiver functions for over 1,000 stations and Rayleigh wave H/V ratio measurements for over 200 stations in this area. 3) We adopt a Bayesian Monte Carlo inversion to the Rayleigh wave dispersion maps and produce a uniform 3-D model with uncertainties of the crust and uppermost mantle. 4) In the areas where receiver functions and/or Rayleigh wave H/V ratios are collected, we replace the surface wave inversion by a joint inversion of surface waves and these seismic observables. The resulting model displays a great variety and considerable richness of geological and tectonic features in the crust and in the uppermost mantle which we summarize and discuss with focus on the relationship between the observed crustal variations and tectonic/geological boundaries and lithospheric modifications associated with volcanism in Northeast China.