The Okinawa Trough, lying to the east of China, is a back arc basin formed by extension within continental lithosphere behind the Ryukyu trench‐arc system. Middle to late Miocene uplift, associated with normal faulting of the initially adjacent Ryukyu nonvolcanic arc and the Taiwan‐Sinzi folded belt, corresponds to the first rifting phase. The timing of rifting is supported by the presence of marine sediments of corresponding age drilled in the northern Okinawa Trough. The rifting occurred after a major early Miocene change in the motion of the Philippine plate with respect to Eurasia and ceased during the Pliocene. A second rifting phase started about 2 m.y. ago, at the Plio‐Pleistocene boundary and has continued until the present time. It has proceeded to a more advanced stage in the middle and southern Okinawa Trough than it has farther north. Detailed bathymetric (Sea Beam), seismic reflection, and magnetics data collected during the POP 1 cruise of the R/V Jean Charcot reveal the principal features of the extensional processes. The back arc spreading phase started very recently in the southern and middle Okinawa Trough, as exemplified by several en échelon and, in some cases, overlapping active, central graben oriented N70°E–N80°E. Some of these depressions are intruded by volcanic ridges of fresh back arc basalt with associated large magnetic anomalies. Transform faults between these en échelon active rifts are not obvious. We suggest that the major part of the southern Okinawa Trough is underlain by a thinned continental crust and that except for the system of en échelon rifts of the southern Okinawa Trough, the back arc basin oceanic domain is limited to a width of a few tens of kilometers or less in the axial portion of the trough. The system of axial back arc volcanic ridges that occur in the rifts ends at the latitude of Okinawa Island whereas active volcanoes in the Ryukyu arc occur only north of Okinawa Island. We refer to this transition between active arc and back arc volcanism as the volcanic arc‐rift migration phenomenon (VAMP). Globally, back arc volcanism propagated from the southern Okinawa Trough to the Okinawa VAMP area. Rifting continues to occur in the northern Okinawa Trough but is not yet accompanied by associated volcanism. The Okinawa VAMP area is characterized by a series of parallel basaltic ridges oriented N75°E with associated linear magnetic anomalies characteristic of dyke intrusions. We suggest that the formation of the back arc oceanic domain took place along the axial back arc extensional zone trending N75°E and that this zone presently ends at the southern extremity of the active volcanic chain. The initial phase of formation of back arc basin oceanic crust is non‐steady state and is characterized by the lack of a developed fracture zone pattern. The termination of the VAMP area in the direction of the volcanic zone of the arc is consistent with the suggestion of Molnar and Atwater that the volcanic arc is a fundamental line of weakness which determines where initial back arc...

[1] Tomographic models based on hypothetically infinite frequency ray interpretation of teleseismic travel time shifts have revealed a region of relatively low P and S wave speeds extending from shallow mantle to 400 km depth beneath Iceland. In reality, seismic waves have finite frequency bandwidths and undergo diffractive wave front healing. The limitation in ray theory leaves large uncertainties in the determinations of the magnitude and shape of the velocity anomaly beneath Iceland and its geodynamic implications. We developed a tomographic method that utilizes the banana-shaped sensitivity of finite frequency relative travel times from the paraxial kernel theory. Using available seismic data from the ICEMELT and HOTSPOT experiments, we applied the new method to image subsurface velocity structure beneath Iceland. Taking advantage that the sensitivity volume of broadband waveforms varies with frequency, we measured relative delay times in three frequency ranges from 0.03 to 2 Hz for P and 0.02 to 0.5 Hz for S waves. Given similar fit to data, the kernel-based models yield the root-mean-square amplitudes of P and S wave speed perturbations about 2-2.8 times those from ray tomography in the depths of 150-400 km. The kernel-based images show that a columnar low-velocity region having a lateral dimension of $250-300 km extends to the base of the upper mantle beneath central Iceland, deeper than that resolved by the ray-based studies. The improved resolution in the upper mantle transition zone is attributed to the deeper crossing of broad off-path sensitivity of travel time kernels than in ray approximation and frequency-dependent wave front healing as an intrinsic measure of the distance from velocity heterogeneity to receivers.

S U M M A R YThe maximum intersection (MAXI) method, which derives from the master station method (MSM), determines within a 3-D velocity model the absolute hypocentral location based on observed arrival times. First, the spatial node that better satisfies the arrival time differences computed at all station pairs, plus or minus an error tolerance value (in seconds), is defined as the preliminary hypocentral solution (PRED). Second, because PRED depends neither on the estimate of origin time nor on the residual root mean square (rms), residual outliers are objectively detected and cleaned out from the original data set without any iterative process or weighting. Third, a statistical minimization (residual rms) is conducted in a small domain around the PRED node, which results in a unique FINAL solution. The MAXI method is applied to the determination of earthquake hypocentres (with the proper station correction terms) in the southernmost extremity of the Ryukyu subduction zone, where several dense seismic clusters occur near the seismogenic plate interface. The location of earthquakes, recorded at both the Taiwanese and Japanese networks, is obtained for about a thousand events (between 1992 and 1997). The process uses a detailed 3-D velocity model based on multiple geophysical data sources obtained in the junction area between subduction and collision (east of Taiwan). The earthquake clustering and the significant drop in residual statistics (1.20, 0.80 and 0.35 s, for Taiwanese catalogue, MSM and MAXIM solutions respectively) indicate the accuracy of the method, which can be used to routinely determine absolute hypocentre location based on observed arrival times.

Summary Seismic traveltime tomography is commonly discretized by a truncated expansion of the pursued model in terms of chosen basis functions. Whether parametrization affects the actual resolving power of a given data set as well as the robustness of the resulting earth model has long been seriously debated. From the perspective of the model resolution, however, there is one important aspect of the parametrization issue of seismic tomography that has yet to be systematically explored, that is, the space–frequency localization of a chosen parametrization. In fact, the two most common parametrizations tend to enforce resolution in each of their own particular domains. Namely, parametrization in terms of spherical harmonics with global support tends to emphasize spectral resolution while sacrificing the spatial resolution, whereas the compactly supported pixels tend to behave in the opposite manner. Some of the significant discrepancies among tomographic models are very likely to be manifestations of this effect, when dealing with data sets with non‐uniform sampling. With an example of the tomographic inversion for the lateral shear wave heterogeneity of the D″ layer using S–SKS traveltimes, we demonstrate an alternative parametrization in terms of the multiresolution representation of the pursued model function. Unlike previous attempts of multiscale inversion that invoke pixels with variable sizes, or overlay several layers of tessellation with different grid intervals, our formulation invokes biorthogonal generalized Harr wavelets on a sphere. We show that multiresolution representation can be constructed very easily from an existing block‐based discretization. A natural scale hierarchy of the pursued model structure constrained by the resolving power of the given sampling is embedded within the solution obtained. It provides a natural regularization scheme based on the actual ray‐path sampling and is thus free from a priori prejudices intrinsic to most regularization schemes. Unlike solutions obtained through spherical harmonics or spherical blocks that tend to collapse structures onto ray paths, our parametrization imposes regionally varying Nyquist limits, that is, robustly resolvable local wavelength bands within the obtained solution.

The underthrusting of continental crust during mountain building is an issue of debate for orogens at convergent continental margins. We report three-dimensional seismic anisotropic tomography of Taiwan that shows a nearly 90° rotation of anisotropic fabrics across a 10- to 20-kilometer depth, consistent with the presence of two layers of deformation. The upper crust is dominated by collision-related compressional deformation, whereas the lower crust of Taiwan, mostly the crust of the subducted Eurasian plate, is dominated by convergence-parallel shear deformation. We interpret this lower crustal shearing as driven by the continuous sinking of the Eurasian mantle lithosphere when the surface of the subducted plate is coupled with the orogen. The two-layer deformation clearly defines the role of subduction in the formation of the Taiwan mountain belt.