SKS Splitting and the Scale of Vertical Coherence of the Taiwan Mountain Belt

Abstract

Many continental orogens feature a pattern of SKS shear wave splitting with fast polarization directions parallel to the mountain fabrics and delay times of 1–2 s, implying that the crust and lithosphere deform consistently. In the Taiwan arc-continent collision zone, similar pattern of SKS splitting exists, and thereby lithospheric scale deformation due to collision has been assumed. However, recent dynamic modeling demonstrated that the SKS splitting in Taiwan can be generated by the toroidal flow in the asthenosphere induced by the subduction of the Philippine Sea plate and the Eurasian plate. To further evaluate this hypothesis, we analyzed a new data set using a quantitative approach. The results show that models with slab geometries constrained by seismicity explain the observed fast splitting direction to within 25°, whereas the misfit grows to ~50–60° if the toroidal flow is disrupted by the presence of a sizable aseismic slab beneath central Taiwan as often suggested by tomographic imaging. However, small sized aseismic slab or detached slab fragment can potentially reconcile the splitting observations. We estimated the scale of vertical coherence to be 10–40 km in the lithosphere and 100–150 km in the asthenosphere, making the former unfavorable for accumulating large delay times. The low coherence is caused by the subduction of the Eurasian plate that creates complex deformation different from what characterizes the compressional tectonics above the plate. This suggests that the mountain building in Taiwan is a shallow process, rather than lithospheric in scale.