The effect of subducting slabs in global shear wave tomography

Abstract

Subducting slabs create strong short wavelength seismic anomalies in the upper mantle where much of Earth's seismicity is located. As such, they have the potential to bias longerwavelength seismic tomography models. To evaluate the effect of subducting slabs in global tomography, we performed a series of inversions using a global synthetic shear wave traveltime data set for a theoretical slab model based on predicted thermal anomalies within slabs. The spectral element method was applied to predict the traveltime anomalies produced by the 3-D slab model for paths corresponding to our current data used in actual tomography models. Inversion tests have been conducted first using the raw traveltime anomalies to check how well the slabs can be imaged in global tomography without the effect of earthquake mislocation. Our results indicate that most of the slabs can be identified in the inversion result but with smoothed and reduced amplitude. The recovery of the total mass anomaly in slab regions is about 88 per cent. We then performed another inversion test to investigate the effect of mislocation caused by subducting slabs. We found that source mislocation largely removes slab signal and significantly degrades the imaging of subducting slabs-potentially reducing the recovery of mass anomalies in slab regions to only 41 per cent. We tested two source relocation procedures-an iterative relocation inversion and joint relocation inversion. Both methods partially recover the true source locations and improve the inversion results, but the joint inversion method worked significantly better than the iterative method. In all of our inversion tests, the amplitudes of artefact structures in the lower mantle caused by the incorrect imaging of slabs (up to ~0.5 per cent S velocity anomalies) are comparable to some large-scale lower-mantle heterogeneities seen in global tomography studies. Based on our inversion tests, we suggest including a-priori subducting slabs in the starting models in global tomography studies and use joint relocation in the inversion.