Crustal and upper-mantle structures beneath the Chinese continent from surface wave tomography

The Chinese continent regions are of worldwide interesting for geoscientists. Previous surface wave studies have been carried out to reveal dominant features of the continent, but most of which has limited resolution across and in depth because of their poor and/or uneven paths distribution and because of their using only data recorded by stations from global seismic networks. The present work collected about 7000 vertical component seismograms recorded by both global permanent CDSN and GSN stations and portable PASSCAL regional/local stations, from which Rayleigh-wave group velocity dispersion curves of good quality are retrieved. Improvement in lateral resolution and resolution in depth in the crust and lithosphere of our final model is hopefully expected since many short paths data (shorter than 10 deg) are included. Low S-velocity anomalies of the resulted upper crustal model (at 10-15 km) show an obvious correlation with most of the sedimentary basins in China. The resulted crustal thicknesses for the Chinese continent range from a minimum of about 25 km in the Bohai Bay to about 50-70 km beneath the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, with a thickening trend from east to west. The imaged upper-mantle S-velocities correlate well with known geotectonic units on a regional scale.