Earthquake Science (Dec 2023)
Topography of the 660-km discontinuity within the Izu-Bonin subduction zone and evidence of slab penetration near the Bonin Super Deep Earthquake (∼680 km)[Key points]
Abstract
The Izu-Bonin subduction zone in the Northwest Pacific is an ideal location for understanding mantle dynamics such as cold lithosphere subduction. The slab produces a lateral thermal anomaly, inducing local topographic changes at the boundary of a post-spinel phase transformation, considered to be the origin of the ‘660-km discontinuity.’ In this study, the short-period (1–2 Hz) S-to-P conversion phase S660P was used to obtain the fine-scale structure of the discontinuity. More than 100 earthquakes that occurred from the 1980s to the 2020s and were recorded by high-quality seismic arrays in the United States and Europe were analyzed. A discontinuity in the ambient mantle with an average depth of ∼670 km was found beneath the 300–400-km event zone in the northern Bonin region near 33°N. Meanwhile, the ‘660-km discontinuity’ has been pushed upward, away from the slab, possibly because of a hot upwelling mantle plume. In the central part of the subduction zone, the 660-km discontinuity is depressed to an average depth of (690 ± 5) km within the slab at approximately 150 km below the coldest slab core, indicating a (300 ± 100) °C cold anomaly estimated using a post-spinel transformation Clapeyron slope of (−2.0 ± 1.0) MPa/K. In southern Bonin near 28°N, the discontinuity was found to be further depressed at an average depth of (695 ± 5) km below the deepest event and with a focal depth of ∼550 km. The discontinuity is located where the slab bends abruptly to become sub-horizontal toward the west-southwest. Near the zone of the isolated Bonin Super Deep Earthquake, which occurred at ∼680 km on May 30, 2015, the discontinuity is depressed to ∼700 km, suggesting a near-vertical penetrating slab and an S-to-P conversion in the coldest slab core, where a large low-temperature anomaly should exist.
