Mid-mantle deformation inferred from seismic anisotropy

With time, convective processes in the Earth's mantle will tend to align crystals, grains and inclusions. This mantle fabric is detectable seismologically, as it produces an anisotropy in material properties—in particular, a directional dependence in seismic-wave velocity. This alignment is enhanced at the boundaries of the mantle where there are rapid changes in the direction and magnitude of mantle flow, and therefore most observations of anisotropy are confined to the uppermost mantle or lithosphere and the lowermost-mantle analogue of the lithosphere, the D" region. Here we present evidence from shear-wave splitting measurements for mid-mantle anisotropy in the vicinity of the 660-km discontinuity, the boundary between the upper and lower mantle. Deep-focus earthquakes in the Tonga–Kermadec and New Hebrides subduction zones recorded at Australian seismograph stations record some of the largest values of shear-wave splitting hitherto reported. The results suggest that, at least locally, there may exist a mid-mantle boundary layer, which could indicate the impediment of flow between the upper and lower mantle in this region

Construction of regional and local seismic anisotropic structures from wide-angle seismic data : crustal deformation in the southeast of China

We present a method to obtain spatial distributions of seismic anisotropy associated with regional stress and local faulting in the crust from wide-angle seismic data. The method contains three steps. The first step consists of obtaining radial- and transverse-component seismic sections using a pre-stack depth migration algorithm from the S-wave velocity model determined by conventional interpretation of picked intra-crustal seismic events. In the second step, we compute time delays between split shear-waves and polarizations of fast split shear-waves by minimizing the transverse-component seismic energy. The time delay and polarization in each layer are derived using a layer-stripping method. The final step is to estimate the average splitting parameters along the whole profile. Thus, the average time delay and polarization can be regarded as caused by the effects owing to regional structure and stress fields, whereas the residual values of the splitting parameters are considered to be related to local structures and local faulting. Our method allows us to construct multi-layer anisotropic images, which may later be interpreted in terms of intra-layer coupling/decoupling or deformation. We present results from a set of three-component seismic data acquired by a controlled source experiment in the southeast region of China. The results demonstrate that the average polarizations and time delays are consistent with the direction and strength of the stress field, and their lateral variations related to local anisotropy match the spatial distribution of surface faulting crossing the acquisition seismic profile