No abstract

Vrancea, Eastern Romania, presents a significant intermediate-depth seismicity, between 60 and 170 km depth, i.e. pressures from 2 to 6.5 GPa. A debate has been lasting for decades regarding the nature of the seismic volume, which could correspond to the remnant of a subducted slab of Tethyan lithosphere or a delamination of the Carpathians lithosphere. Here we compile the entire seismicity dataset (≈ 10,000 events with 2 ≤ Mw ≤ 7.9) beneath Vrancea for P > 0.55 GPa (> 20 km) since 1940 and estimate the pressure and temperature associated with each hypocenter. We infer the pressure and temperature, respectively, from a depth-pressure conversion and from the most recent tomography-based thermal model. Pressure–temperature diagrams show to what extent these hypocentral conditions match the thermodynamic stability limits for minerals typical of the uppermost mantle, oceanic crust and lower continental crust. The stability limits of lawsonite, chloritoid, serpentine and talc minerals show particularly good correlations. Overall, the destabilization of both mantle and crustal minerals could participate in explaining the observed seismicity, but mantle minerals appear more likely with more convincing correlations. Most hypocentral conditions match relatively well antigorite dehydration between 2 and 4.5 GPa; at higher pressures, the dehydration of the 10-Å phase provides the best fit. We demonstrate that the Vrancea intermediate-depth seismicity is evidence of the current dehydration of an oceanic slab beneath Romania. Our results are consistent with a recent rollback of a W-dipping oceanic slab, whose current location is explained by limited delamination of the continental Moesian lithosphere between the Tethyan suture zone and Vrancea.

A newly compiled high-quality ground-shaking dataset of 207 intermediate-depth earthquakes recorded in the Vrancea region of the south-eastern Carpathian mountains in Romania was used to develop region-specific empirical predictive equations for various intensity measures: peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and 5%-damped pseudo-spectral acceleration up to 10 s. Besides common predictor variables (e.g. moment magnitude, depth, hypocentral distance, and site conditions), additional distance scaling parameters were added to describe the specific attenuation pattern observed at the stations located not only on the back and fore but also along the Carpathian arc. In this model, we introduce a proxy measure for the site as the fundamental frequency of resonance to characterize the site response at each recording seismic station beside the soil classes. To additionally reduce the site-to-site variability, a non-ergodic methodology was considered, resulting in a lower standard deviation of about 25%. Statistical evaluation of the newly proposed ground-motion models indicates robust performance compared to regional observations. The model shows significant improvements in describing the spatial variability (at different spectral ordinates), particularly for the fore-arc area of the Carpathians where a deep sedimentary basin is located. Furthermore, the model presented herein improves estimates of ground shaking at longer spectral ordinates (>1 s) in agreement with the observations. The proposed ground-motion models are valid for hypocentral distances less than 500 km, depths over 70 km and within the moment magnitude range of 4.0–7.4.