The Crust and Upper Mantle Structure of Northeastern Iran from Joint Waveform Tomography Imaging of Body and Surface Waves

The deformation resulting from the Arabian-Eurasian collision at the longitude of Iran is concentrated in the Zagros, Alborz and Kopeh Dagh Mountains. The Zagros and Alborz Mountains have been the focus of a number of studies but little is known about the structure of NE Iran and the Kopeh Dagh. The Kopeh Dagh form a linear intracontinental fold-and-thrust belt trending NW-SE between the stable Turkmenistan platform and Central Iran, and mark the northern limit to deformation in NE Iran. To the south of the Kopeh Dagh lie a series of elongated mountain ranges: the Binalud, which is a structural and geological eastward continuation of the Alborz, the Siah Kuh near Sabzevar and the Kuh-e-Sorkh near Kashmar. Between August 2006 and February 2008 we operated 17 broadband seismographs along a profile from Sarakhs, near the northeastern political border of Iran with Turkmenistan, across the Kopeh Dagh Mountains, to Yazd in Central Iran. We apply a combination of the teleseismic body wave waveform tomography technique of Roecker et al (2010) with an extension of this technique to surface waves (Roecker et al, 2011) to analyze this data to determine the elastic wavespeed structure of this area. The joint inversion of these different types of waves affords similar types of advantages that are common to combined surface wave dispersion/receiver function inversions in compensating for intrinsic weaknesses in horizontal and vertical resolution capabilities. We compare results recovered from a several different inverse methods, starting with simple gradient techniques to the more sophisticated pseudo-Hessian or L-BFGS approach, and find that the latter are generally more robust. Modelling of receiver functions and surface wave dispersion prior to the analysis is shown to be an efficacious way to generate starting models for this analysis.