Prospecting for dead slabs

At subduction zones that have only recently ceased to be active, the lithospheric slab may retain a seismic velocity greater than that of the surrounding mantle even after the slab becomes seismically dead. To seek the subduction zone thought to have been recently active along the western margin of North America, we examined the variation with propagation direction of P-wave travel time residuals from sources at various distances and azimuths to seismograph stations in Washington and California. The uncertainty in source location and origin time was removed by referring the travel-time delay to a nearby station overlying presumably more uniform mantle. An eastward-dipping band of anomalously early arrivals at several stations on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada and California Cascades may imply that a dead slab is present beneath northern California, though a definitive conclusion is premature at present because of a paucity of seismic sources in eastern North America. The position of the dead slab speculatively suggested by the travel-time data is roughly consistent with that predicted by others on the basis of heat flow and geochemistry in the Sierra Nevada, and the southward decrease in the magnitude of the travel-time advance associated with such a slab is in agreement with the history of subduction of the Farallon plate as reconstructed from ocean floor magnetic anomalies and continental tectonic activity.