The role of plume-lithosphere interaction in Hawaii-Emperor chain formation.

Paleolatitudes of volcanic rocks reveal that prominent changes in volcanic trend of the Hawaii-Emperor hotspot chain represent meridional migration of the magma source. However, models assuming latitudinal plume migration fail to explain the observed age distribution, rock composition, and erratic paleolatitude changes of the oldest Emperor seamounts. Here we use data-assimilation models to better reproduce the Hawaii-Emperor hotspot track by systematically considering plate reconstruction, plume-lithosphere interaction, and simplified melt generation and migration.

Adjoint traveltime tomography unravels a scenario of horizontal mantle flow beneath the North China craton.

The North China craton (NCC) was dominated by tectonic extension from late Cretaceous to Cenozoic, yet seismic studies on the relationship between crust extension and lithospheric mantle deformation are scarce. Here we present a three dimensional radially anisotropic model of NCC derived from adjoint traveltime tomography to address this issue. We find a prominent low S-wave velocity anomaly at lithospheric mantle depths beneath the Taihang Mountains, which extends eastward with a gradually decreasing amplitude.

A unified poroviscoelastic model with mesoscopic and microscopic heterogeneities.

The wave-induced fluid flow (WIFF) is considered to be the main cause of dispersion and attenuation of seismic waves in fluid-saturated porous media. Among numerous theories, the mesoscopic and microscopic heterogeneities are considered to be the primary mechanisms causing the WIFF. Furthermore, in most rocks, the mesoscopic and microscopic heterogeneities exist simultaneously and can cause obvious transitions of the fast P-wave velocity, which means it is necessary to consider the influence of the two mechanisms on the dispersion and attenuation simultaneously.

Full waveform inversion based on the ensemble Kalman filter method using uniform sampling without replacement.

Full waveform inversion (FWI) has been increasingly more and more important in seismology to better understand the interior structure of the Earth. FWI, by taking advantage of both the traveltime and amplitude in the data, provides high-resolution model parameters of the earth which can produce images with high resolution. However, this inversion method conventionally suffers from non-uniqueness due to many local minima of the objective function and large computing costs.