Sri Widiyantoro

Stagnant slabs in the upper and lower mantle transition region

We made a region-by-region examination of subducted slab images along the circum-Pacific for some of the recent global mantle tomographic models, specifically for two high-resolution P velocity models and two long-wavelength S velocity models. We extracted the slab images that are most consistent among different models. We found that subducted slabs tend to be subhorizontally deflected or flattened in the upper and lower mantle transition region, the depth range of which corresponds roughly to the Bullen transition region (400–1000 km). The deflected or flattened slabs reside at different depths, either above or across the 660-km discontinuity as in Chile Andes, Aleutian, Southern Kurile, Japan, and Izu-Bonin; slightly below the discontinuity as in Northern Kurile, Mariana, and Philippine; or well below it as in Peru Andes, Java, and Tonga-Kermadec. There is little indication for most of these slabs to continue “directly” to greater depths well beyond the transition region. Mantle downflow associated with present slab subduction appears to be blocked strongly to turn into predominantly horizontal flow in the transition region. Recent global tomographic models show also a group of lithospheric slabs deeply sinking through the lower mantle, typically the presumed Farallon slab beneath North and Central America and the presumed Indian (Tethys) slab beneath Himalaya and the Bay of Bengal. These remnant slabs are not connected to the surface plates or to the presently subducting slabs and appear to sink independently from the latter. The presence of these deeply sinking slabs implies that the pre-Eocene subduction occurred in much the same way as in the present day to accumulate slab bodies in the transition region and that the consequent unstable downflow occurred extensively through the transition region in the Eocene epoch to detach many of the surface plates from the subducted slabs at depths and hence to cause the reorganization of global plate motion.

Joint seismic tomography for bulk sound and shear wave speed in the Earth's mantle

High-quality P and S travel times are now available from careful reprocessing of data reported to international agencies. A restricted data set has been extracted for which comparable ray coverage is achieved for P and S, and used for a joint inversion to produce a three-dimensional model for shear and bulk sound velocities represented in terms of 2° × 2° cells and 18 layers in depth through the mantle. About 106 times for each of P and S are combined to produce 312,549 summary rays for each wave type. Linearizing about the ak135 reference model, 583,200 coupled tomographic equations are solved using an iterative partitioned scheme. Clear high-resolution images are obtained for both bulk-sound speed and shear wavespeed. The bulk and shear moduli have differing sensitivity to temperature and mineral composition, and so the images of the two velocity distributions help to constrain the nature of the processes which produce the variations. Different heterogeneity regimes can be recognised in the upper mantle, the transition zone, most of the lower mantle, and the lowermost mantle. In the upper mantle, many features can be explained by thermal effects; but in some orogenic zones (e.g. western North America), the opposite sense of the bulk-sound and shear wave speed variation requires compositional effects or volatiles to outweigh any thermal effects. In the lower mantle, pronounced narrow structures which may represent remnant subduction are most marked in shear. The level of large-scale variations in bulk sound speed compared to shear diminishes with depth in the lower mantle reaching a minimum near 2000 km. Below this depth, the variability of both wave speeds increases. Near the core-mantle boundary the variations of the two wave speeds show little concordance, suggesting the presence of widespread chemical heterogeneity.

Structure and Evolution of Lithospheric Slab Beneath the Sunda Arc, Indonesia

Tomographic imaging reveals seismic anomalies beneath the Sunda island arc, Indonesia, that suggest that the lithospheric slab penetrates to a depth of at least 1500 kilometers. The Sunda slab forms the eastern end of a deep anomaly associated with the past subduction of the plate underlying the Mesozoic Tethys Ocean. In accord with previous studies, the lithospheric slab was imaged as a continuous feature from the surface to the lower mantle below Java, with a local deflection where the slab continues into the lower mantle. The deep slab seems to be detached from the upper mantle slab beneath Sumatra. This complex slab structure is related to the Tertiary evolution of southeastern Asia and the Indian Ocean region.

A low seismic wavespeed anomaly beneath northwestern India: a seismic signature of the Deccan plume?

Abstract Seismic tomography of the Indian region using P wave arrival times reveals an approximately cylindrical region of lowered seismic velocities in the upper mantle to the north of the Gulf of Cambay and the present exposure of the Deccan flood basalts. This anomaly with low velocities interrupts the characteristically high seismic velocities in the lithosphere beneath peninsular India and extends from shallow depth down to a more extensive low velocity zone beneath 200 km. The centre of the low velocity anomaly lies just below the earliest alkaline magmatism which has been directly associated with the Deccan plume, in the northern portion of the Cambay graben. These magmatic events precede the main Deccan flood eruptions by at least 3 Myr. The lowered seismic wavespeeds link into the ancient Narmada lineament and to some extent to the south, but here unfortunately the tomographic image runs out of resolution. Synthetic tests indicate that such a zone of lowered wavespeeds can be recovered with some loss of amplitude towards the south. The association of the current seismic anomaly with the Deccan traps is intriguing, since the Cambay graben remains a place of raised heat flow. One explanation would be that the seismic anomaly represents the signature of the initial conduit through which plume material forced its way through the lithosphere beneath the Cambay rift. The zone of lowered seismic velocities beneath the Indian lithosphere might then represent the remains of the initial plume head which would need to have moved with India over the 65 Myr since the Deccan eruptions.

Extending shear-wave tomography for the lower mantle using S and SKS arrival-time data

Seismic tomography using S wave travel times faces the difficulty imposed by the interference between S and SKS phases near 83° epicentral distance, as the SKS phase overtakes the S waves in the mantle. If the cross-over is avoided completely by excluding S data beyond 82° then no resolution is available below 2200 km in the lower mantle. A partial solution is to try to pick up the S phase beyond the cross-over which improves coverage and resolution in depth. However, a much larger improvement can be made by following the first arrival with S character and including SKS information with S.Arrival times for both S and SKS phases and the event hypocentres have been taken from the reprocessing of data reported to international agencies. Each event has been relocated, including depth phase information, and later phases re-associated using the improved locations to provide a set of travel times whose variance is significantly reduced compared with the original data catalogues.S travel-time tomography including SKS information out to 105°, provides tomographic images with improved rendition of heterogeneity in the lower mantle. The three-dimensional models of SV wavespeed relative to the ak135 reference velocity model show a significant increase in heterogeneity at the base of the mantle which matches the behaviour seen in results derived from waveform inversion.For most of the mantle there is a considerable similarity between the patterns of heterogeneity in the S wave images and recent P wave tomographic results, but greater differences develop in the lowermost mantle. In the D″ region the SV wavespeed patterns also show some differences from recent SH wavespeed results which mostly correlate with regions of recognised structural complexity.

Subducting slab structure below the eastern Sunda arc inferred from non-linear seismic tomographic imaging

Abstract Detailed P-wave speed velocity structure beneath the Sunda arc has been successfully imaged by applying a non-linear approach to seismic tomography. Nearly one million compressional phases from events within the Indonesian region have been used. These include the surface-reflected depth phases pP and pwP in order to improve the sampling of the upper-mantle structure, particularly below the back-arc regions. We have combined a high-resolution regional inversion with a low-resolution global inversion to minimize the mapping of distant aspherical mantle structure into the study region. In this paper, we focus our discussion on the upper mantle structure beneath the eastern part of the Sunda arc. The tomographic images confirm previous observations of a hole in the subducted slab in the upper mantle beneath eastern Java. The images also suggest that a tear in the slab exists below the easternmost part of the Sunda arc, where the down-going slab is deflected in the mantle transition zone. In good agreement with previous studies, the properties of the deflected slab show a strong bulk-sound signature.

Preliminary results of teleseismic double-difference relocation of earthquakes around Indonesian archipelago region

Indonesian archipelago region is located in active tectonic setting and high seismicity zone. During the last decade, Indonesian was experienced with destructive major earthquakes causing damage and victims. The information of precise earthquake location parameters are very important in partular for earthquake early warning to the society and for advance seismic studies. In this study, we attempted to improve hypocenter location compiled by BMKG for time periods of April, 2009 up to June, 2014 for about 22,000 earthquake events around Indonesian region. For the firts time, we applied teleseismic double-difference relocation algorithm (teletomoDD) to improve hypocenter region in Indonesia region combining regional and teleseismic stations. Hypocenter relocation was performed utilizing local, regional, and teleseismic P-wave arrival time data. Our relocation result show that travel-time RMS errors were greatly reduced compared to the BMKG catalog. Seismicity at shallower depth (less than 50 km) shows signif...

Hypocenter relocation using a fast grid search method and a 3-D seismic velocity model for the Sumatra region

Determination of earthquake hypocenter in Indonesia conducted by the Meteorological, Climatological, and Geophysical Agency (MCGA) has still used a 1-D seismic velocity model. In this research, we have applied a Fast Grid Search (FGM) method and a 3-D velocity model resulting from tomographic imaging to relocate earthquakes in the Sumatran region. The data were taken from the MCGA data catalog from 2009 to 2011 comprising of subduction zone and on land fault earthquakes with magnitude greater than 4 Mw. Our preliminary results show some significant changes in the depths of the relocated earthquakes which are in general deeper than the depths of hypocenters from the MCGA data catalog. The residual times resulting from the relocation process are smaller than those prior to the relocation. Encouraged by these results, we will continue to conduct hypocenter relocation for all events from the MCGA data catalog periodically in order to produce a new data catalog with good quality. We hope that the new data catalog will be useful for further studies.

Unexpected earthquake of June 25th, 2015 in Madiun, East Java

An earthquake with magnitude 4.2 struck Madiun and its vicinity on June 25, 2015. According to Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), the earthquake occurred at 10:35:29 GMT+7 and was located in 7.73° S, 111.69 ° E, with a depth of 10 km. At least 57 houses suffered from light to medium damages. We reprocessed earthquake waveform data to obtain an accurate hypocenter location. We manually picked P- and S-waves arrival times from 12 seismic stations in the eastern part of Java. Earthquake location was determined by using Hypoellipse code that employs a single event determination method. Our inversion is able to resolve the fix-depth and shows that the earthquake occurred at 10:35:27.6 GMT+7 and was located in 7.6305° S, 111.7529 ° E with 14.81 km focus depth. Our location depicts a smaller travel time residual compared to that based on the BMKG result. Focal mechanism of the earthquake was determined by using HASH code. We used first arrival polarity of 9 seismic records with az...

Analysis of spatiotemporal variation in b-value for the Sunda arc using high precision earthquake location

The Sunda arc is one of the most active tectonic regions, which has a complex tectonic setting due to different tectonic regimes and subduction geometry along this arc. We analyzed variation in b-value for this region in order to obtain better information regarding the state of stress in this region. For the first step, we relocated earthquake hypocenters taken from the BMKG catalog for the period 2009 – 2015 by employing a teleseismic double-difference (DD) relocation method and using a 3D velocity model. There are 10,440 earthquakes that were successfully relocated with greatly reduced residual errors. Based on its tectonic feature and earthquake distribution, we divided the study area into 8 regions, i.e. northern Sumatra, central Sumatra, southern Sumatra, Sunda strait, western Java, eastern Java, lesser Sunda islands, and Sunda-Banda transition zone. For b-value analysis we combined the BMKG catalog with the International Seismological Centre (ISC) catalog from 2006 to 2009 to obtain a longer time pe...