Moho depth of Qinghai-Tibet plateau revealed by seismic probing

Abstract

The Qinghai (青海)-Tibet plateau is the newest and biggest orogenic belt in the world and a natural laboratory for researching continental geodynamics, such as continent-continent collision, convergence, subduction, and plateau uplift. From the 1950s to the present, there have been many active-source (deep seismic sounding and deep seismic reflection profiling) and passive-source seismic probing (broadband seismic observations) implemented to reveal the crust-mantle structure. In this article, the authors mainly summarize the three seismic probings to discuss the Moho depth of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau based on the previous summaries. The result shows that the Moho of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau is very complex and its depth is very different; the whole outline of it is that the Moho depth is deeper beneath the south than the north and deeper in the west than in the east. In the Qiangtang (羌塘) terrane, the hinterland of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, the Moho is shallower than both the southern and the northern sides. The deepest Moho is 40 km deeper than the shallowest Moho. This trend records the crustal thickening and thinning caused by the mutual response between the India plate and the Eurasia plate, and the eastward mass flow in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.