Upper mantle seismic anisotropy of South Victoria Land/Ross Island, Antarctica from SKS and SKKS splitting analysis

• Main Authors: Mitchell Barklage, Douglas A. Wiens, Andrew Nyblade, Sridhar An
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: East Antarctica; Ross Island; Transantarctic Mountains; Victoria Land; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.573.2415; http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1047/ea/of2007-1047ea027.pdf

Summary We determine shear wave splitting parameters of teleseismic SKS/SKKS phases at stations in Antarctica as part of the TAMSEIS experiment. Our data indicate that the anisotropy is fairly uniform from the Transantarctic Mountains into the interior of East Antarctica with a slight change of fast direction near the Vostok Highlands. The data show fairly consistent fast direction of anisotropy oriented approximately N60E with splitting times of about 1 second for stations in the vicinity of the Transantarctic Mountains, along the coast, and into East Antarctica. However, stations in the vicinity of the Vostok Highlands show a small rotation of approximately 20 degrees of the fast direction of anisotropy as well as a decrease in magnitude of the splitting time of about 0.5 second.