| Session Details | |
| Section | SE - Solid Earth Sciences |
| Session Title | Upper Mantle Structures Beneath USA and East Asia, Two Sides of the Opening Pacific |
| Main Convener | Prof. Risheng Chu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) |
| Co-convener(s) | Prof. Brandon Schmandt (University of New Mexico, United States) Prof. Daoyuan Sun (University of Science and Technology of China, China) Prof. Yingjie Yang (Macquarie University, Australia) Prof. Yong Zheng (Key Laboratory of Dynamic Geodesy, Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) |
| Session Description | Opening of the Pacific Ocean created a series of convergent boundaries around the Pacific plate, which accounts for about 80% of global earthquakes. The subduction systems along the western USA and East Asia show distinct patterns. For example, the Farallon slab has been subducted to the lower mantle and the Juan de Fuca slab can only be seen at the Pacific Northwestern USA. By contrast, the older western Pacific oceanic lithosphere is found to be stagnant in the transition zone beneath eastern China revealed by different studies. Thus, the upper-mantle structures beneath the USA and East Asia can provide important information about seismic hazards and the tectonic history which shaped the surface topography and the lithospheric structures. With the deployment of the dense seismic arrays in both regions, such as USArray and Chinese national digital seismic networks, various seismic methods have been applied to obtain high-resolution upper-mantle images beneath these two regions. In this session, we welcome contributions from various seismic studies from tomography, receiver function analysis, surface-wave imaging, waveform modeling, etc. |