Journal
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 42, Issue 21, Pages 9270-9278Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1002/2015GL066237
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Office of Nuclear Detonation Detection within the National Nuclear Security Administration
- U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [DE-AC52-07NA27344.LLNL-JRNL-668546]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Ancient subducted tectonic plates have been observed in past seismic images of the mantle beneath North America and Eurasia, and it is likely that other ancient slab structures have remained largely hidden, particularly in the seismic-data-limited regions beneath the vast oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Here we present a new global tomographic image, which shows a slab-like structure beneath the southern Indian Ocean with coherency from the upper mantle to the core-mantle boundary region-a feature that has never been identified. We postulate that the structure is an ancient tectonic plate that sank into the mantle along an extensive intraoceanic subduction zone that migrated southwestward across the ancient Tethys Ocean in the Mesozoic Era. Slab material still trapped in the transition zone is positioned near the edge of East Gondwana at 140 Ma suggesting that subduction terminated near the margin of the ancient continent prior to breakup and subsequent dispersal of its subcontinents.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available