broadband, three-component seismometers were deployed along the MacKenzie-Liard Highway in Canada's Northwest Territories as part of the joint Lithoprobe-IRIS Canada Northwest Experiment (CANOE). These stations traverse a paleo-Proterozoic suture and subduction zone that has been previously documented to mantle depths using seismic reflection profiling. Teleseismic receiver functions computed from $250 earthquakes clearly reveal the response of the ancient subduction zone. On the radial component, the suture is evident as a direct conversion from the Moho, the depth of which increases from $30 km to $50 km over a horizontal distance of $70 km before its signature disappears. The structure is still better defined on the transverse component where the Moho appears as the upper boundary of a 10 km thick layer of anisotropy that can be traced from 30 km to at least 90 km depth. The seismic response of this layer is characterized by a frequency dependence that can be modeled by upper and lower boundaries that are discontinuous in material properties and their gradients, respectively. Anisotropy can be characterized by a ±5% variation in shear velocity and hexagonal symmetry with a fast axis that plunges at an oblique angle to the subduction plane. The identification of this structure provides an unambiguous connection between fossil subduction and fine-scale, anisotropic mantle layering. Previous documentation of similar layering below the adjacent Slave province and from a range of Precambrian terranes across the globe provides strong support for the thesis that early cratonic blocks were stabilized through processes of shallow subduction.
We assemble P and S waveforms of 2301 teleseismic earthquakes registered at 413 broadband seismic stations spanning the Indian plate from the southern tip of India to the Himalayan collision belt and generate an accurate data set of 52,050 P and 30,423 S arrival times through the multichannel crosscorrelation approach. These traveltimes are then inverted to obtain 3-D P and S velocity structures of the subcontinent at a 2 3 2 lateral resolution. The heterogeneous nature of the Indian lithospheric mantle revealed in this study suggests that the lithospheric roots are not uniformly thick on a regional scale. The key cratonic segments of the Indian shield are characterized by pockets of high velocity anomalies ( 3%) at shallow depths (<300 km), with the diamondiferous regions like Wajrakarur revealing high shear wave anomalies down to 300 km. In contrast to the southern Deccan volcanic province (DVP), the northwestern DVP is underlain by low velocity anomalies at similar depths suggesting that the upper mantle retains imprints of Deccan volcanism which was facilitated by the reactivation of the rift systems.
Over the past two decades, teleseismic receiver functions have proved to be a useful tool to investigate crustal structure. Because they represent a first-order approximation to the Swave component of the teleseismic-P Green's function, receiver functions provide valuable information on physical properties related to shear modulus. However, the implicit use of the P-component seismogram as a proxy for the source precludes the recovery of information on discontinuous structure involving contrasts in compressional modulus. By deconvolving improved estimates of complex source time functions generated by earthquakes, one may move beyond the conventional receiver function paradigm to a more accurate approximation of the earth's Green's function. Using a new deconvolution method, we present estimates of the P-component of the teleseismic-P Green's functions at several stations of the Canadian National Seismic Network ͑CNSN͒ that clearly show the receiver-side pure P-wave crustal multiple. The identification and characterization of these signals in studies of the lithosphere will afford better constraints on subsurface lithology and represent a narrowing of the gap between active-and passive-source seismic imaging.
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