[1] The two large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs) at the base of the lower mantle are prominent features in all shear wave tomography models. Various lines of evidence suggest that the LLSVPs are thermochemical and are stable on the order of hundreds of million years. Hot spots and large igneous province eruption sites tend to cluster around the edges of LLSVPs. With 3‐D global spherical ...

Bodies of rock that are detached (recovered) from subducting oceanic plates, and exhumed to Earth's surface, become invaluable records the mechanical chemical processing along subduction interfaces. Exposures interface rocks with high-pressure (HP) mineral assemblages provide insights into nature recovery, yet various inconsistencies arise when directly comparing record numerical simulations su...

[1] Documenting the mass flux through convergent plate margins is important to the understanding of petrogenesis in arc settings and to the origin of the continental crust, since subduction zones are the only major routes by which material extracted from the mantle can be returned to great depths within the Earth. Despite their significance, there has been a tendency to view subduction zones as...

A comparison of the geological and geophysical environments between the Himalaya-Sumatra and Taiwan-Ryukyu collision-subduction systems revealed close tectonic similarities. Both regions are characterized by strongly oblique convergent processes and dominated by similar tectonic stress regimes. In the two areas, the intersections of the oceanic fracture zones with the subduction systems are cha...

Creeping dislocations in an elastic half-space are commonly used to model interseismic deformation at subduction zones, and might also apply to major intracontinental thrust faults such as the Main Himalayan Thrust. Here, we compare such models with a more realistic 2-D finite element model that accounts for the mechanical layering of the continental lithosphere and surface processes, and that ...

We have obtained constraints on the strength and orientation of anisotropy in the mantle beneath the Tonga, southern Kuril, Japan, and Izu-Bonin subduction zones using shear-wave splitting in S phases from local earthquakes and in teleseismic core phases such as SKS. The observed splitting in all four subduction zones is consistent with a model in which the lower transition zone (520–660 km) an...