...............................................................................................................................iv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Adjoint Method in Mantle Convection .............................................5 2.1 Theoretical Basis of the Adjoint Method ..........

This review is primarily concerned with the rupture process of large subduction-zone earthquakes determined by various seismological methods, and with its interpretation in terms of an asperity model. It is not possible to make a thorough and extensive review on the subject because of the limited length. Consequently, this review is inevitably biased toward the works in which I was directly inv...

[1] We conduct three-dimensional subduction experiments by a finite element approach to study flow around slabs, which are prescribed based on a transient stage of upper mantle subduction from a laboratory model. Instantaneous velocity field solutions are examined, focusing on the toroidal vs. poloidal components as a function of boundary conditions, plate width, and viscosity contrast between ...

For decades seismologists have sought causal relationships between maximum earthquake sizes and other properties of subduction zones, with the underlying notion that some subduction zones may never produce a magnitude ~9 or larger event. The 2004 Andaman Mw 9.2 earthquake called into question such ideas. Given multicentury return times of the greatest earthquakes, ignorance of those return time...

[1] Between June 2003 and September 2005, 20 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 profili...

TEMSPOL is an open MATLAB code suitable for calculating temperature and lateral anomaly of density distributions in deep subduction zones, taking into account the olivine to spinel phase transformation in a selfconsistent manner. The code solves, by means of a finite difference scheme, the heat transfer equation including adiabatic heating, radioactive heat generation, latent heat associated wi...

The thermal evolution of crustal exhumation subsequent to the subduction of the continental margin is modeled through numerical solutions to the two-dimensional heat conduction equation. The boundary conditions used in the modeling are basically constrained by available geophysical and geological observations in the Taiwan area. Temperature distributions are calculated at one-million-year inter...

Continuous Global Positioning System sites in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and northwestern Washington state, USA, have been moving landward as a result of the locked state of the Cascadia subduction fault offshore. In the summer of 1999, a cluster of seven sites briefly reversed their direction of motion. No seismicity was associated with this event. The sudden displacements are best...

An extensive analysis of the strong ground motion Mexican data base was conducted using Soft Computing (SC) techniques. A Neural Network NN is used to estimate both orthogonal components of the horizontal (PGA h ) and vertical (PGA v ) peak ground accelerations measured at rock sites during Mexican subduction zone earthquakes. The work discusses the development, training, and testing of this ne...

High attenuation of short-period body waves and extremely low surface-wave group velocities have been found for seismic paths that traverse the crust and upper mantle beneath the concave side of the Lesser Antilles island arc (eastern Caribbean). The observations can be explained in terms of the currently accepted models of lithospheric plate subduction at other island arcs such as Fiji-Tonga, ...