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The European Upper Mantle as Seen by Surface Waves

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Abstract

We derive a global, three-dimensional tomographic model of horizontally and vertically polarized shear velocities in the upper mantle. The model is based on a recently updated global database of Love- and Rayleigh-wave fundamental-mode phase-anomaly observations, with a good global coverage and a particularly dense coverage over Europe and the Mediterranean basin (broadband stations from the Swiss and German seismic networks). The model parameterization is accordingly finer within this region than over the rest of the globe. The large-scale, global structure of our model is very well correlated with that of earlier shear-velocity tomography models, based both on body- and surface-wave observations. At the regional scale, within the region of interest, correlation is complicated by the different resolution limits associated to different databases (surface waves, compressional waves, shear waves), and, accordingly, to different models; while a certain agreement appears to exist for what concerns the grand tectonic features in the area, heterogeneities of smaller scale are less robustly determined. Our new model is only one step towards the identification of a consensus model of European/Mediterranean upper-mantle structure: on the basis of the findings discussed here, we expect that important improvements will soon result from the combination, in new tomographic inversions, of fundamental-mode phase-anomaly data like ours with observations of surface-wave overtones, of body-wave travel times, of ambient “noise”, and by accounting for an a-priori model of crustal structure more highly resolved than the one employed here.

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Acknowledgments

This article was written after an invitation by Yu Jeff Gu, to whom we are grateful. We thank Stefan Heimers for porting our Unix code to Linux, and Marta Pérez-Gussinyé for many clarifying discussions on the strength and thickness of the European lithosphere. We thank the authors of all tomographic and geophysical models that we show and discuss. All figures except for Fig. 3 were generated with the Generic Mapping Tools software (Wessel and Smith 1991).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geophysics, E.T.H., Zürich, Switzerland

    Lapo Boschi, Bill Fry & Domenico Giardini

  2. G.N.S. Science, Wellington, New Zealand

    Bill Fry

  3. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA

    Göran Ekström

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  1. Lapo Boschi
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  2. Bill Fry
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  4. Domenico Giardini
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Correspondence to Lapo Boschi.

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Boschi, L., Fry, B., Ekström, G. et al. The European Upper Mantle as Seen by Surface Waves. Surv Geophys 30, 463–501 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-009-9066-2

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