Structure and variability of oceanic crust on the flanks of the East Pacific Rise between 11° and 13°N

Abstract

We use over 500 seismograms collected by five ocean bottom seismometers to examine the structure and variability of 0.5‐m.y.‐old crust in the Rivera Ocean Seismic Experiment (ROSE) area of the East Pacific Rise between 11° and 13°N. There are no significant differences among the first arrival travel times for 10 independent refraction line segments along the isochron. Amplitude patterns recorded on the individual lines, however, suggest that structural boundaries within the upper crust vary by hundreds of meters in depth over lateral distances of tens of kilometers within this 200‐km segment of lithosphere. On the basis of the modeling of amplitude patterns at ranges of 5–10 km and of comparisons with the upper crust sampled at Deep Sea Drilling Project hole 504B and in ophiolite complexes, layer 2 can be divided into three units: 2A corresponds to extrusive volcanics with a steep velocity gradient, 2B to extrusives with a near‐zero velocity gradient, and 2C to a complex region of transition from extrusives to sheeted dikes. The total thickness of layer 2 varies by about 0.7 km over the length of the line. Another amplitude peak which varies in range between 14 and 21 km may be related to the downward transition from sheeted dikes to isotropic gabbros within layer 3. The variability of these two amplitude patterns provides direct evidence that the along‐strike structure of oceanic crust in the ROSE area is definably heterogeneous and that the process of crustal accretion is likewise variable on the scale resolved by amplitude and travel time information.