Sediment thickness of the contiguous United States from seismic receiver
functions
Abstract
Sediment thickness is a crucial measure for many seismic studies. The
slow velocities associated with thick sedimentary sequences can be
problematic when inverting for tomographic images of the crust and upper
mantle structure, and is an essential piece of information for better
constraining ground motion models as sediments are known to amplify
shaking. Yet there is currently no self-consistent map of sediment
thickness across the conterminous United States that can be used for
these purposes. In this work we measure the delay time of P to S
conversions at the sediment-basement interface from a set of teleseismic
receiver functions, and demonstrate the geographical correlation with
known sedimentary provinces. From this we produce two maps of sediment
thickness, (i) using a borehole derived empirical relation and (ii) a
tomographic velocity model. While the former is likely an underestimate,
the latter is an excellent first-order representation of sediment
thickness across the continent.