Oblique subduction and mantle flow control on upper plate deformation: 3D geodynamic modeling

Mantle Control of Plate Boundary Deformation

The seismic wavefield propagating along the recently instrumented Pacific-North American plate boundary (California) displays remarkable variation, with regional shear waves arriving at coastal stations up to 20 seconds earlier than equidistant stations in eastern California. Broadband modeling of this data reveals that coastal paths sample fast upper mantle typical of Miocene-aged ocean plate ...

Seismic images of crust and upper mantle beneath Tibet: evidence for Eurasian plate subduction.

Seismic data from central Tibet have been combined to image the subsurface structure and understand the evolution of the collision of India and Eurasia. The 410- and 660-kilometer mantle discontinuities are sharply defined, implying a lack of a subducting slab beneath the plateau. The discontinuities appear slightly deeper beneath northern Tibet, implying that the average temperature of the man...

New evidence for dislocation creep from 3-D geodynamic modeling of the Pacific upper mantle structure

Laboratory studies on deformation of olivine in response to applied stress suggest two distinct deformation mechanisms in the earth’s upper mantle: diffusion creep through diffusion of atoms along grain boundaries and dislocation creep by slipping along crystallographic glide planes. Each mechanism has very different and important consequences on the dynamical evolution of the mantle and the de...

Analogue modelling of continental collision: Influence of plate coupling on mantle lithosphere subduction, crustal deformation and surface topography

Subduction to the lower mantle – a comparison between geodynamic and tomographic models

It is generally believed that subduction of lithospheric slabs is a major contribution to thermal heterogeneity in Earth’s entire mantle and provides a main driving force for mantle flow. Mantle structure can, on the one hand, be inferred from plate tectonic models of subduction history and geodynamic models of mantle flow. On the other hand, seismic tomography models provide important informat...