Crustal structure beneath the eastern Nepal Himalayas and southern Tibet from receiver function analysis

Arjun Sharma Neupane, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

The Himalayas are the results of continental collision between the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate and serve as a natural site to study the physical causes and process of mountain building. The crustal structure beneath the Himalayas has been subject to numerous geophysical studies and the variation in the velocity structure across the Himalayan region suggests significant differences in the crustal structure between the southern and northern portion in that region. In this research, a P receiver function analysis has been conducted on data collected for 14 years (2000-2014) from 211 different stations in Eastern Nepal and Southern Tibet, to better understand the seismic velocity structure in the region. The stations cover a large area encompassing the south eastern plains of Nepal, Lesser and Greater Himalayas and the Southern Tibetan Plateau and provide an excellent geometry for seismic structure research. Following the rotation of the two horizontal components to the radial and transverse components and the time iterative deconvolution to obtain the receiver functions the H-K stacking method of Zhu and Kanamori(Zhu and Kanamori, 2000) has been used to convert the time domain receiver functions into H-K domain and obtain the values of crustal thickness and the ratio of the P and S wave velocities. The main trend in the receiver function analysis across the Himalaya from our study reflects the deepening of the moho from about 40 km beneath southern Nepal in the foothills of the Himalaya to about 80 km in southern Tibet. A locally steeper moho deep is obtained in the high range of Himalayas.

Subject Area

Geophysics

Recommended Citation

Neupane, Arjun Sharma, "Crustal structure beneath the eastern Nepal Himalayas and southern Tibet from receiver function analysis" (2015). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI1602396.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI1602396

Share

COinS