Surface waves across the Pacific

Abstract

Making use of Rayleigh and Love wave dispersion data, Santô divided the Pacific into seven regions. From his map and compiled group velocity dispersion curves, upper mantle structure in the Pacific in which the depths of the low velocity layer and the shear wave velocity are changing systematically from continent to ocean is obtained. In orogenic regions such as Japan and its surroundings, extremely low velocity layer in which the shear wave velocity is about 4.3 km/sec is just under the Moho. In the oceanic side of this region, the layer is overlain by the normal mantle material with shear wave velocity of about 4.6 km/sec and in the pure oceanic region this extremely low velocity layer disappears. The so-called ‘low velocity layer’ which is believed to begin at the depth of about 60 km under the ocean is present in the oceanic region but the shear wave velocity in the layer may be a little higher than that obtained by earlier works.