Browsing by Author "Carbonell, R."

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    Crustal thickness and velocity structure across the Moroccan Atlas from long offset wide-angle reflection seismic data: The SIMA experiment
    (American Geophysical Union, 2014) Ayarza, P.; Carbonell, R.; Teixell, A.; Palomeras, I.; Martí, D.; Kchikach, A.; Harnafi, M.; Levander, A.; Gallart, J.; Arboleya, M.L.; Alcalde, J.; Fernández, M.; Charroud, M.; Amrhar, M.
    The crustal structure and topography of the Moho boundary beneath the Atlas Mountains of Morocco has been constrained by a controlled source, wide-angle seismic reflection transect: the SIMA experiment. This paper presents the first results of this project, consisting of an almost 700 km long, high-resolution seismic profile acquired from the Sahara craton across the High and the Middle Atlas and the Rif Mountains. The interpretation of this seismic data set is based on forward modeling by raytracing, and has resulted in a detailed crustal structure and velocity model for the Atlas Mountains. Results indicate that the High Atlas features a moderate crustal thickness, with the Moho located at a minimum depth of 35 km to the S and at around 31 km to the N, in the Middle Atlas. Upper crustal shortening is resolved at depth through a crustal root where the Saharan crust underthrusts the northern Moroccan crust. This feature defines a lower crust imbrication that, locally, places the Moho boundary at ~40–41 km depth in the northern part of the High Atlas. The P-wave velocity model is characterized by relatively low velocities, mostly in the lower crust and upper mantle, when compared to other active orogens and continental regions. These low deep crustal velocities together with other geophysical observables such as conductivity estimates derived from MT measurements, moderate Bouguer gravity anomaly, high heat flow, and surface exposures of recent alkaline volcanism lead to a model where partial melts are currently emplaced at deep crustal levels and in the upper mantle. The resulting model supports the existence of a mantle upwelling as mechanism that would contribute significantly to sustain the High Atlas topography. However, the detailed Moho geometry deduced in this work should lead to a revision of the exact geometry and position of this mantle feature and will require new modeling efforts.
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    Finite-frequency Rayleigh wave tomography of the western Mediterranean: Mapping its lithospheric structure
    (American Geophysical Union, 2014) Palomeras, I.; Thurner, S.; Levander, A.; Liu, K.; Villasenor, A.; Carbonell, R.; Harnafi, M.
    [1] We present a 3-D P wave velocity model of the crust and shallowest mantle under the Italian region, that includes a revised Moho depth map, obtained by regional seismic travel time tomography. We invert 191,850 Pn and Pg wave arrival times from 6850 earthquakes that occurred within the region from 1988 to 2007, recorded by 264 permanent seismic stations. We adopt a high-resolution linear B-spline model representation, with 0.1° horizontal and 2 km vertical grid spacing, and an accurate finite-difference forward calculation scheme. Our nonlinear iterative inversion process uses the recent European reference 3-D crustal model EPcrust as a priori information. Our resulting model shows two arcs of relatively low velocity in the crust running along both the Alps and the Apennines, underlying the collision belts between plates. Beneath the Western Alps we detect the presence of the Ivrea body, denoted by a strong high P wave velocity anomaly. We also map the Moho discontinuity resulting from the inversion, imaged as the relatively sharp transition between crust and mantle, where P wave velocity steps up to values larger than 8 km/s. This simple condition yields an image quite in agreement with previous studies that use explicit representations for the discontinuity. We find a complex lithospheric structure characterized by shallower Moho close by the Tyrrhenian Sea, intermediate depth along the Adriatic coast, and deepest Moho under the two mountain belts.
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    Piecewise delamination of Moroccan lithosphere from beneath the Atlas Mountains
    (American Geophysical Union, 2014) Bezada, M.J.; Humphreys, E.D.; Davila, J.M.; Carbonell, R.; Harnafi, M.; Palomeras, I.; Levander, A.
    The elevation of the intracontinental Atlas Mountains of Morocco and surrounding regions requires a mantle component of buoyancy, and there is consensus that this buoyancy results from an abnormally thin lithosphere. Lithospheric delamination under the Atlas Mountains and thermal erosion caused by upwelling mantle have each been suggested as thinning mechanisms. We use seismic tomography to image the upper mantle of Morocco. Our imaging resolves the location and shape of lithospheric cavities and of delaminated lithosphere ∼400 km beneath the Middle Atlas. We propose discontinuous delamination of an intrinsically unstable Atlas lithosphere, enabled by the presence of anomalously hot mantle, as a mechanism for producing the imaged structures. The Atlas lithosphere was made unstable by a combination of tectonic shortening and eclogite loading during Mesozoic rifting and Cenozoic magmatism. The presence of hot mantle sourced from regional upwellings in northern Africa or the Canary Islands enhanced the instability of this lithosphere. Flow around the retreating Alboran slab focused upwelling mantle under the Middle Atlas, which we infer to be the site of the most recent delamination. The Atlas Mountains of Morocco stand as an example of large-scale lithospheric loss in a mildly contractional orogen.