Evidence from Earthquake Data for a Partially Molten Crustal Layer in Southern Tibet
Earthquake data collected by the INDEPTH-II Passive-Source Experiment show that there is a substantial south to north variation in the velocity structure of the crust beneath southern Tibet. North of the Zangbo suture, beneath the southern Lhasa block, a midcrustal low-velocity zone is revealed by inversion of receiver functions, Rayleigh-wave phase velocities, and modeling of the radial component of teleseismic P-waveforms. Conversely, to the south beneath the Tethyan Himalaya, no low-velocity zone was observed. The presence of the midcrustal low-velocity zone in the north implies that a partially molten layer is in the middle crust beneath the northern Yadong-Gulu rift and possibly much of southern Tibet.
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R. Kind and Xiaohui Yuan, GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, 14473 Potsdam, Germany. James Ni, Jianxin Wu, C. Reese, T. Hearn, Department of Physics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA. Wenjin Zhao, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Beijing, China Lianshe Zhao, Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78759, USA. E. Sandvol, Department of Geological Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. J. Nabelek, College of Oceanography, Oregon State University, Corvalis, OR 97331, USA.
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