Abstract Processes controlling the formation of continental whole-lithosphere shear zones are debated, but their existence requires that lithosphere is mechanically coupled from base to top. We document a dextral, zone in Death Valley region (DVR), southwest United States. Dextral deflections depth gradients lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary and Moho stacked vertically, defining 20–50-km-wide,...

Detailed knowledge of the lithospheric structure is essential for a better understanding tectonic evolution Xing'an-Mongolian Orogenic Belt (XMOB). We constrained across XMOB by receiver function imaging and shear wave splitting analysis from dense seismic array. The lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB) coherently imaged in different blocks. mid-lithospheric discontinuity also identified at...

The amount of carbon present in Earth's mantle affects the dynamics of melting, volcanic eruption style and the evolution of Earth's atmosphere via planetary outgassing. Mantle carbon concentrations are difficult to quantify because most magmas are strongly degassed upon eruption. Here we report undegassed carbon concentrations from a new set of olivine-hosted melt inclusions from the Mid-Atlan...

Seismicity along continental transform faults is usually confined to the upper half of the crust, but the Newport-Inglewood fault (NIF), a major fault traversing the Los Angeles basin, is seismically active down to the upper mantle. We use seismic array analysis to illuminate the seismogenic root of the NIF beneath Long Beach, California, and identify seismicity in an actively deforming localiz...

[1] The electrical conductivity of mantle minerals is highly sensitive to parameters that characterize the structure and state of the lithosphere and sublithospheric mantle, and mapping its lateral and vertical variations gives insights into formation and deformation processes. We review state‐of‐the‐art conductivity models based on laboratory studies for the most relevant upper mantle minerals...

[1] Laboratory and numerical experiments show that when a chemically different layer overlies a hotter but otherwise denser layer, analogous to continental mantle lithosphere over asthenosphere, convective stability depends strongly on both the critical Rayleigh number and the buoyancy number, B, of the lithosphere-like layer. Sufficient cooling at low buoyancy number results in an oscillatory ...

[1] The initial oceanic crust along volcanic passive margins is a factor of 3 greater than that of typical oceanic crust (20 versus 6–7 km). Convection driven by the edge of the continental lithosphere may cause mantle material to circulate through the shallow zone of significant melting beneath the nascent ocean basin and cause the volume of melted mantle to exceed that required to replace the...