Abstract
The Pamir plateau, located north of the western syntaxis of the India-Eurasia collision system, is regarded as one of the most possible places of the ongoing continental deep subduction. Based on a N-S trending linear seismic array across the Pamir plateau, we use the methods of the harmonic analysis of receiver functions and the cubic spline interpolation of surface wave dispersions to coordinate their resolutions, and perform a joint inversion of these datasets to construct a 2-D S-wave velocity model of the crust and uppermost mantle there. A spatial configuration among the intermediate-depth seismicity, Moho topography, and low-velocity anomalies within the crust and upper mantle is revealed, which provides new seismological constraints on the geodynamic processes of the continental subduction. These results not only further confirm the deep subduction of the Asian continental lower crust beneath the Pamir plateau, but also indicate the importance of the metamorphic dehydration of the subducting continental crustal material in the genesis of the intermediate-depth seismicity and the crustal deformation.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which significantly improved the manuscript. We appreciate the efforts of the TIPAGE and FERGHANA teams in collecting the data used in this study. The Generic Mapping Tools package (Wessel et al., 2013) is used to generate most of the figures. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFC0600402), the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB18000000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41804056, 41904055, 41374063), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2019M650034).
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Li, W., Chen, Y., Tan, P. et al. Geodynamic processes of the continental deep subduction: Constraints from the fine crustal structure beneath the Pamir plateau. Sci. China Earth Sci. 63, 649–661 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9587-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9587-3