Shear Wave Splitting and Mantle Anisotropy: Measurements, Interpretations, and New Directions

By M. Long, P. Silver. 2009

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Measurements of the splitting or birefringence of seismic shear waves that have passed through the Earth’s mantle yield constraints on the strength and geometry of elastic anisotropy in various regions, including the upper mantle, the transition zone, and the D″ layer. In turn, information about the occurrence and character of seismic anisotropy allows us to make inferences about the style and geometry of mantle flow because anisotropy is a direct consequence of deformational processes. While shear wave splitting is an unambiguous indicator of anisotropy, the fact that it is typically a near-vertical path-integrated measurement means that splitting measurements generally lack depth resolution. Because shear wave splitting yields some of the most direct constraints we have on mantle flow, however, understanding how to make and interpret splitting measurements correctly and how to relate them properly to mantle flow is of paramount importance to the study of mantle dynamics. In this paper, we review the state of the art and recent developments in the measurement and interpretation of shear wave splitting—including new measurement methodologies and forward and inverse modeling techniques,—provide an overview of data sets from different tectonic settings, show how they help us relate mantle flow to surface tectonics, and discuss new directions that should help to advance the shear wave splitting field.

Subfields: Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/045524bdb081776eb7a59e569dbc48a583d735cc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Geophysics

Citations in the corpus

Seismic imaging: From classical to adjoint tomography (2012, background): “, 1971) and shear-wave birefringence (Long and Silver, 2009).”
Mantle dynamics and seismic anisotropy (2010, background): “…beneath the wedge, fast directions are generally trenchparallel, which could be due to trench-parallel sub-slab mantle flow induced by trench migration (e.g., Russo and Silver, 1994; Long and Silver, 2008, 2009b) or due to serpentinized aligned cracks in the shallow slab (Faccenda et al., 2008).”