Seismic Structure of the Mantle Discontinuities beneath Northeast Asia

Seismic structure of the upper mantle discontinuities is important for understanding the thermal structure, composition of the mantle, and scales of mantle circulation as well. Northeast Asia is located at the front edge of the subducting Pacific slab, which is an ideal place to study the interaction between the upper mantle discontinuities and the subducting slab. Seismic tomography images have revealed different morphologies of slabs in the deep mantle. A prominent stagnant slab is trapped in the MTZ beneath Japan Sea and southern Kuril trench; while the slabs penetrate into the lower mantle directly beneath the northern Kuril and southern Izu-Bonin trench. Due to the sparse distribution of seismic stations in the sea, investigation of the deep mantle structure beneath the broad sea regions is very limited. In this study, we applied the multiple-ScS reverberations analysis to waveforms recorded by the Chinese Regional Seismic Network and F-net. We took advantage of the dense distribution of stations and spatial clusters of intermediate and deep earthquakes occurred beneath Okhotsk Sea, Russia and Northeast China, and conducted a common-reflection-point (CRP) stacking to the data, that allows us to map the topography of the 410-km and 660-km discontinuities beneath Japan Sea, Kuril, and adjacent regions in detail. We also compiled previous results obtained from the high frequency receiver function and S-to-P converted wave analyzes, and compared the results in the overlapping island or continental margin regions. The comparison shows that the array stacking technique to long-period signals is effective in extracting the robust features of the upper mantle discontinuities. It can be used not only as a complimentary method to short-period waveform analysis, but also as an independent way which can be applied to regions with limited station coverage. This is the first time to show systematically a complete view of the topography of the 410-km and 660-km discontinuities beneath the broad sea regions in the Northwestern Pacific Subduction zone. A broad depression of the 660-km discontinuity and local complex pattern of uplift and depression of the 410-km discontinuities are observed, and a thermal structure and composition of the upper mantle are investigated based on this map.