The identification and interpretation of upper mantle travel-time branches from measurements of dT/dΔ made on data recorded at the Yellowknife seismic array

Abstract

There is broad agreement among various seismological studies that the upper mantle has two regions where very high positive velocity gradients or transition zones exist. In most cases, the presence of these zones implies that two major triplications are likely to exist in the body-wave travel-time curve for distances less than 30°. Because of the difficulties in observing and identifying later arrivals belonging to the various travel-time branches, the inversion of the seismic data is often very difficult. In this paper an adaptive processing technique was employed to examine the variations in slowness that occur along the first 36 s of the short-period P-wave trains recorded at the Yellowknife medium aperture seismic array. Over 100 earthquakes from the Alaska Peninsula and California regions were selected. From the California results we were able to clearly observe the 12–13 s/deg slowness branch as a later arrival out to distances as great as 26°. Other later arrival branches as well as cusps associated with the 400 and 650 km discontinuities were not well defined even though the cross-over point as determined from slowness measurements on first arrivals were clearly located. An inversion of the data showed that the '650 km' transition zone occurred at a much shallower depth west of the array compared to the corresponding region to the south.