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The crustal structure of the northern Juan de Fuca plate from multichannel seismic reflection data

University of British Columbia

The crustal structure of a young (<10 My) ocean basin is imaged by two multichannel seismic reflection lines comprising 230 km recorded over the central part of the northern Juan de Fuca plate off western Canada. The more northerly line ties previously interpreted deep seismic reflection lines across the Juan de Fuca ridge and the Cascadia subduction zone; the southern line ties with another interpreted line across the subduction zone. Both lines trend obliquely to the spreading direction. A marine refraction profile crossing the eastern end of the lines provides velocity constraints. The processing sequence applied to the data includes a prestack inside-trace mute of CMP gathers to reduce noise levels on the deep data, CMP stack, post-stack dip filtering, f-k migration and bandpass. Coherency-filtered stacks are helpful in tracing weaker reflectors. The stacked sections reveal a horizontally layered sedimentary sequence overlying a rugged and prominent basement reflector dipping slightly landward. A strong, fairly continuous reflection from the base of the crust at about 2 s two-way-time below the basement surface generally mimics the basement topography and shows the characteristic doubling and tripling of reflections seen in other similar surveys. Although in general the crust appears acoustically transparent, weaker, discontinuous intracrustal reflectors are observed over 40 km at the eastern end of the northern line, and are interpreted to arise from the oceanic Layer 3A/3B and Layer 2/3 boundaries. The im-persistence of these reflectors is an indication of the complexity of the processes producing intracrustal reflectivity, and an indication of the lateral variability of crustal formation. Pseudofault traces of propagating rifts are crossed at three different locations on the two lines, the first MCS crossings of such structures. Crust associated with the pseudofault traces is related to both subhorizontal and dipping subcrustal events which are interpreted as zones of crustal thickening or underplating. Although the crustal thickness elsewhere on the lines varies by only about 10%, crust associated with the pseudofaults is as much as about 25% thicker than average, suggesting that magma supply at transform-type offsets may at times be large. A small seamount discovered on the southern line may result from the excessive magma production at the ridge postulated at propagating rift zones.

Text

2010-11-08

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/29868

Geophysics

University of British Columbia

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