Errors in focal depth determination and the depth of seismicity in Iran and Turkey

Summary. It is the supposed presence of intermediate depth earthquakes in areas of continental collision which supports the existence of subducting slabs in regions such as the Zagros mountains of Iran. Mounting field evidence from that region suggests that intermediate focal depths allocated by tele-seismic locations are wrong. No pP depth control exists for earthquakes in the Zagros and all teleseismic locations use P phases alone.
This paper examines the effect of random noise in arrival-time data on the variances calculated for origin time and hypocentral depth. These can be simply related to the distribution of recording stations and it can be shown that in any one region the smaller shocks will tend to have greater errors in depth than the larger. However, this effect cannot alone account for all the probable mislocation in depth of some small shocks in the Zagros. The discrepancy may, however, be explained by the difference in the quality of arrival-time data between large and small events. It is also shown that crustal earthquakes will have greater errors in depth than earthquakes of equivalent size in the mantle. If reliably read, PKP phases can help contribute to the accuracy of hypocentral depth. The conclusion is that although errors in origin time and depth are well correlated for teleseismic locations of all earthquakes, the value of the errors themselves may be small for the bigger shocks, and this may explain why standard bulletin locations seem to give very reasonable focal depths for the biggest events in Iran. Thus the focal depths of the smaller earthquakes (which include all the published deeper ones in the Zagros) are unreliable, while the focal depths for the largest events are likely to be much better.