Crustal Thickness Variations Along the Southeastern Caribbean Plate Boundary From Teleseismic and Active Source Seismic Data

Insight into the topography of the Moho discontinuity beneath Venezuela has been progressively gained since the 1990's through seismic refraction studies carried out in the south and east of the country. More recently, both active and passive, land and marine seismic data were acquired by the U.S. BOLIVAR and Venezuelan GEODINOS projects to understand accretion processes and mechanisms for continental growth. The passive component includes an 18-month deployment of 27 PASSCAL broadband seismographs, a 12-month deployment of 15 OBSIP broadband instruments and an ongoing deployment of 8 Rice broadband seismometers. Additionally, data from the 34 BB stations of the national seismic network of Venezuela and the GSN SDV station, give a seismic dataset from 84 stations covering an area of ~750,000 km2. The active component includes 4 onshore-offshore refraction/wide angle reflection profiles as well as the recording of airgun blasts from offshore seismic lines by BB stations in mainland Venezuela and the Leeward Antilles. This abundance of datasets allows us to estimate Moho depths using different methods such as receiver functions, and forward and inverse modeling of wide-angle datasets, but also poses the challenge of reconciling the different values obtained to achieve robust results. Generally the active source and receiver function estimates are close to one another. We present a composite crustal thickness map showing a highly variable crustal thicknesses ranging from 15 km beneath the Caribbean LIP, to ~55 km beneath eastern Venezuela. Crustal thickness is strongly correlated with geologic terranes, but not always as expected. The thickest crust is found to exist in the east of the country, beneath the sedimentary basins north of the Orinoco River where depth to Moho exceeds 50 km. Crustal thickness beneath most of the Precambrian Guayana Shield is fairly constant at ~38 km . In contrast, we observe relatively thin (~25-30 km) crust in the eastern and western coastal mountains, suggesting a significant portion of the high topography of the costal mountain ranges has a dynamic origin. Crustal thickness changes of more than 10km are observed crossing the coast in the plate boundary zone, but are not always directly associated with the surface expression of the strike-slip fault system.