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P-wave tomography beneath Greenland and surrounding regions-I. Crust and upper mantle
  • Genti Toyokuni,
  • Takaya Matsuno,
  • Dapeng Zhao
Genti Toyokuni
Tohoku University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Takaya Matsuno
Tohoku University
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Dapeng Zhao
Tohoku University
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Abstract

We study the 3-D P-wave velocity (Vp) structure of the crust and upper mantle beneath Greenland and surrounding regions using the latest P-wave arrival-time data. The Greenland Ice Sheet Monitoring Network (GLISN), initiated in 2009, is an international project for seismic observation in these regions, and currently operating 35 seismic stations. We use a regional-scale seismic tomography method to simultaneously invert both absolute P-wave arrival times of local earthquakes and P-wave relative travel-time residuals of teleseismic events. These data are extracted from the ISC-EHB catalog, but for the teleseismic events, we newly picked arrival times from seismograms using the cross-correlation analysis. In the tomographic inversion, the grid intervals in the longitudinal direction depend on the latitude in the polar regions, so we apply the coordinate transformation that moves the study region to the equator. Our results reveal a remarkable low-Vp anomaly elongated in the NW-SE direction at depths ≤ 250 km beneath central Greenland, which may reflect the residual heat when the Greenlandic plate passed over the Iceland plume at ~80−20 Ma. Although previous studies have suggested this feature, our results first show that the low-Vp zone is within the Greenlandic lithosphere and its spatial distribution agrees very well with the high crustal heat-flow regions. Our results also indicate possible existence of residual heat from the Jan Mayen plume.
Dec 2020Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth volume 125 issue 12. 10.1029/2020JB019837