P-wave tomography beneath Greenland and surrounding regions-I. Crust and
upper mantle
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.