Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Seismic Anisotropy And Subduction-Induced Mantle Fabrics Beneath The Arabian And Nubian Plates Adjacent To The Red Sea, Ahmed A. Elsheikh, Stephen S. Gao, Kelly H. Liu, Abdelnasser A. Mohamed, Youqiang Yu, Raafat E. Fat-Helbary

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

For most continental areas, the mechanisms leading to mantle fabrics responsible for the observed anisotropy remain ambiguous, partially due to the lack of sufficient spatial coverage of reliable seismological observations. Here we report the first joint analysis of shear-wave splitting measurements obtained at stations on the Arabian and Nubian Plates adjacent to the Red Sea. More than 1100 pairs of high-quality splitting parameters show dominantly N-S fast orientations at all 47 stations and larger-than-normal splitting times beneath the Afro-Arabian Dome (AAD). The uniformly N-S fast orientations and large splitting times up to 1.5 s are inconsistent with significant contributions from …