The Pn wave velocities and the relief of Moho in the Tibetan Plateau

Eleven PASSCAL broadband digital seismic stations were employed in the Tibetan Plateau by the Sino-US team from September, 1991 to June, 1992. Seven of them were distributed along the Qinghai-Tibet highway, others in Maqin and Yushu of Qinghai Province, Linzhi and Xigatze of Tibet. The data included 31 local earthquakes recorded by these stations from July, 1991 to January, 1992. Considering the characters of digital data, we identified the seismic phases carefully in several methods using SAC softwares (Seismic Analysis Code) in SUN workstation. We compared the seismic phases after converting the seismograms of the single stations to the seismic profiles; analyzed the first arrivals of P waves in the incident planes by rotating 3 component seismic records; identified the seismic phases from the particle motion pictures. The Pn apparent velocities were calculated in the distance range of 230–1200 km from Linzhi earthquakes, western Changtang earthquakes, Xitieshan and Gonghe earthquakes and the earthquakes in India. The results show that the Pn velocities change slightly in the Tibetan Plateau (8.0–8.1 km/s). These values near the velocities at the uppermost mantle of the normal continents. The Moho undulation in the Tibetan Plateau was also studied by using Pn data by the time-term method. The primary results indicate that the Moho beneath the Tibetan Plateau is flat, and its depths are 67–70 km. The Chinese version of this paper appeared in the Chinese edition ofActa Seismologica Sinica,14, Supp., 593–600, 1992.