ALBERT

Description: The temporary seismic array of MySCOLAR in northern Myanmar consists of 30 broadband stations. The overall scientific goals are to understand the transition from continental collision to oceanic subduction, to quantify the partitioning of deformation in the accretionary prism, in the Burma Plate and along the strike-slip Sagaing fault system and to image the subducting Indian Plate beneath Myanmar and southwest China. The seismological analysis methods applied to this dataset will include location of local earthquakes and determining their focal mechanisms, surface wave tomography from ambient noise and earthquake data, body wave tomography from local and teleseismic earthquakes, full waveform inversion for Earth structure, receiver functions, and shear wave splitting. A subset of the stations was transmitting data in real time, and these stations contributed to real-time earthquake analysis by the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) in Myanmar and the GEOFON earthquake monitoring service. Waveform data are available from the GEOFON data centre, under network code 6C.

Description: The Pamir plateau protrudes ∼300 km between the Tajik- and Tarim-basin lithosphere of Central Asia. Whether its salient location and shape are caused by forceful indentation of a promontory of Indian mantle lithosphere is debated. We present a new local-seismicity and focal-mechanism catalog, and a P-wave velocity model of the eastern part of the collision system. The data suggest a south-dipping Asian slab that overturns in its easternmost segment. The largest principal stress at depth acts normal on the slab and is orientated parallel to the plate convergence direction. In front (south) of the Asian slab, a volume of mantle with elevated velocities and lined by weak seismicity constitutes the postulated Indian mantle indenter. We propose that the indenter delaminates and overturns the Asian slab, underthrusts the Tarim lithosphere along a compressive transform boundary, and controls the location and shape of the Pamir plateau.

Description: We present a new seismic tomography model for the crust and upper-mantle beneath the Central Andes based on multi-scale full seismic waveform inversion, proceeding from long periods (40–80 s) over several steps down to 12–60 s. The spatial resolution and trade-offs among parameters are estimated through the multi-parameter point-spread functions. P and S wave velocity structures with spatial resolution of 30–40 km for the upper mantle and 20 km for the crust could be resolved in the central study region. In our study, the subducting Nazca slab is clearly imaged in the upper mantle, with dip-angle variations from the north to the south. Bands of low velocities in the crust and mantle wedge indicate intense crustal partial melting and hydration of the mantle wedge beneath the frontal volcanic arc, respectively and they are linked to the vigorous dehydration from the subducting Nazca plate and intermediate depth seismicity within the slab. These low velocity bands are interrupted at 19.8°–21°S, both in the crust and uppermost mantle, hinting at the lower extent of crustal partial melting and hydration of the mantle wedge. The variation of lithospheric high velocity anomalies below the backarc from North to South allows insight into the evolutionary foundering stages of the Central Andean margin. A high velocity layer beneath the southern Altiplano suggests underthrusting of the leading edge of the Brazilian Shield. In contrast, a steeply westward dipping high velocity block and low velocity lithospheric uppermost mantle beneath the southern Puna plateau hint at the ongoing lithospheric delamination.

Description: Break-off of part of the down-going plate during continental collision occurs due to tensile stresses built-up between the deep and shallow slab, for which buoyancy is increased because of continental-crust subduction. Break-off governs the subsequent orogenic evolution but real-time observations are rare as it happens over geologically short times. Here we present a finite-frequency tomography, based on jointly inverted local and remote earthquakes, for the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, where slab break-off is ongoing. We interpret our results as crustal subduction on top of a northwards-subducting Indian lithospheric slab, whose penetration depth increases along-strike while thinning and steepening. This implies that break-off is propagating laterally and that the highest lithospheric stretching rates occur during the final pinching-off. In the Hindu Kush crust, earthquakes and geodetic data show a transition from focused to distributed deformation, which we relate to a variable degree of crust-mantle coupling presumably associated with break-off at depth.

Description: The Pamir plateau protrudes ~300 km between the Tajik- and Tarim-basinlithosphere of Central Asia. We present a new local-seismicity catalog, a focal-mechanism catalog, and a P-wave velocity model of the of the collision system between the Pamir plateau and the Tarim basin. The data suggest a south-dipping Asian slab that overturns in its easternmost segment. The largest principal stress at depth acts normal on the slab and is orientated parallel to the plate convergence direction. In front (south) of the Asian slab, a volume of mantle with elevated velocities and lined by weak seismicity constitutes the postulated Indian mantle indenter. The data set consists of an earthquake catalog, an earthquake focal mechanism catalog and a subsurface P-wave velocity model of the central and eastern Pamir plateau and the adjacent north-western Tarim basin; between 36.8–40.0 °N and 72.2–78.0 °E. It was collected to identify the deep tectonic structures that determine the lithospheric architecture of the Pamir plateau. Earthquakes were recorded by two temporary seismic deployments. Earthquakes that occurred between 1st August 2008 and 6th June 2010 were primarily recorded by the TIPAGE network (Yuan et al., 2008); those, between 3rd August 2015 and 23rd June 2017 by the East Pamir and Sarez aftershock networks (Yuan et al., 2018a, b). The earthquake catalog contains 1,493 seismic events at depth 〉50 km. They were localized in the present 3-D velocity model. Some events were re-located with hypoDD. The focal mechanism catalog consists of double-couple fault-slip parameters for 38 events, 29 of which are newly determined using the HASH algorithm and 9 are moment tensors from Kufner et al. (2016). The P wave-velocity model has been determined using simulps from 2,264 seismic events with well-constrained P- and S-wave arrivals. It is parameterized as velocity gradients between nodes with a horizontal and vertical spacing of 40 and 15 km, respectively. Unresolved nodes were masked using a checkerboard resolution test. The full description of the methods is provided in the data description file.