INDEPTH geophysical and geological observations imply that a partially molten midcrustal layer exists beneath southern Tibet. This partially molten layer has been produced by crustal thickening and behaves as a fluid on the time scale of Himalayan deformation. It is confined on the south by the structurally imbricated Indian crust underlying the Tethyan and High Himalaya and is underlain, apparently, by a stiff Indian mantle lid. The results suggest that during Neogene time the underthrusting Indian crust has acted as a plunger, displacing the molten middle crust to the north while at the same time contributing to this layer by melting and ductile flow. Viewed broadly, the Neogene evolution of the Himalaya is essentially a record of the southward extrusion of the partially molten middle crust underlying southern Tibet.

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In taking into account both compressional (P) and shear (S) waves, more geologic information can likely be extracted from the seismic data. The presence of shear and converted shear waves in both land and marine seismic data recordings calls for the development of elastic wave‐migration methods. The migration method presently developed consists of simultaneous migration of P- and S-waves for offset seismic data based on the Kirchhoff‐Helmholtz type integrals for elastic waves. A new principle of simultaneously migrating both P- and S-waves is introduced. The present method, named the Kirchhoff elastic wave migration, has been tested using the 2-D synthetic surface data calculated from several elastic models of a dipping layer (including a horizontal layer), a composite dipping and horizontal layer, and two layers over a half‐space. The results of these tests not only assure the feasibility of this migration scheme, but also demonstrate that enhanced images in the migrated sections are well formed. Moreover, the signal‐to‐noise ratio increases in the migrated seismic section by this elastic wave migration, as compared with that using the Kirchhoff acoustic (P-) wave migration alone. This migration scheme has about the same order of sensitivity of migration velocity variations, if [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] vary concordantly, to the recovery of the reflector as that of the Kirchhoff acoustic (P-) wave migration. In addition, the sensitivity of image quality to the perturbation of [Formula: see text] has also been tested by varying either [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text]. For varying [Formula: see text] (with [Formula: see text] fixed), the migrated images are virtually unaffected on the [Formula: see text] depth section while they are affected on the [Formula: see text] depth section. For varying [Formula: see text] (with [Formula: see text] fixed), the migrated images are affected on both the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] depth sections.

Abstract. Project INDEPTH (International DeepProfiling of Tibet and the Himalaya) has collected over 300 km of multichannel, deep seismic reflection data using explosive sources as part of a multidisciplinary effort to image the structure of the crust and uppermost mantle of the Tibetan plateau. The reflection profiles lie within the Yadong-Gulu rift and were acquired in the summers of 1992 and 1994. Data processing utilized typical industry tools, and a new method was used to migrate the data. Both unmigrated and migrated sections are presented here in large format to facilitate further interpretations.

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