Title
Lithospheric structure beneath the northern Central Andean Plateau from the joint inversion of ambient noise and earthquake-generated surface waves
Date Issued
01 November 2016
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
The Central Andean Plateau (CAP), as defined by elevations in excess of 3 km, extends over 1800 km along the active South American Cordilleran margin making it the second largest active orogenic plateau on Earth. The uplift history of this high Plateau, with an average elevation around 4 km above sea level, remains uncertain as paleoelevation studies along the CAP suggest a complex, nonuniform uplift history. As part of the Central Andean Uplift and the Geodynamics of High Topography (CAUGHT) project, we image the S wave velocity structure of the crust and upper mantle using surface waves measured from ambient noise and teleseismic earthquakes to investigate the upper mantle component of plateau uplift. We observe three main features in our S wave velocity model including (1) a positive velocity perturbation associated with the subducting Nazca slab; (2) a negative velocity perturbation below the sub-Andean crust that we interpret as anisotropic Brazilian cratonic lithosphere; and (3) a high-velocity feature in the mantle above the slab that extends along the length of the Altiplano from the base of the Moho to a depth of ~120 km. A strong spatial correlation exists between the lateral extent of this high-velocity feature and the relatively lower elevations of the Altiplano basin suggesting a potential relationship. Determining if this high-velocity feature represents a small lithospheric root or foundering of orogenic lithosphere requires more integration of observations, but either interpretation implies a strong geodynamic connection with the uppermost mantle and the current topography of the northern CAP.
Start page
8217
End page
8238
Volume
121
Issue
11
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Geología
Geoquímica, Geofísica
Ingeniería ambiental y geológica
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85005877152
Source
Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
ISSN of the container
21699313
Sponsor(s)
This work was funded in part by NSF grants EAR-1415914, EAR-0943991, and EAR-0907880. The facilities of the IRIS Data Management System, and specifically the IRIS Data Management Center, were used for access to waveform and metadata required in this study. The IRIS DMS is funded through the National Science Foundation and specifically the GEO Directorate through the Instrumentation and Facilities Program of the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement EAR-1063471. The Global Seismographic Network (GSN) is a cooperative scientific facility operated jointly by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). We acknowledge the GEOFON Program of GFZ Potsdam as an additional source of waveform data. Data used in this study can be found at the IRIS Data Management System (http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/data/) and at the GFZ Seismological Data Archive (http://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/waveform/). Initial processing of waveforms was handled using the Seismic Analysis Code (SAC) software [Goldstein et al., Goldstein and Snoke,], and figures were plotted using the Generic Mapping Tool (GMT) software [Wessel et al.,]. We also acknowledge the thoughtful comments from Don Forsyth and one anonymous reviewer. Finally, we thank Estela Minaya and the entire staff of the San Calixto Observatory in La Paz, Bolivia, for their invaluable long-term assistance with our seismic deployments in southern Bolivia as well as Sanja Knezevic Antonijevic for assistance with the TPWT method.
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