Upper mantle structure of the Cascades from full-wave ambient noise tomography: Evidence for 3D mantle upwelling in the back-arc

- We image three low-velocity anomalies at the Cascade back-arc in the upper mantle.
- These low-velocity bodies are spatially correlated with the arc-volcano clusters.
- The geometry of the anomalies supports slab-induced decompressional melting.

Melt generation and volcanism at subduction zones may result from several possible processes: hydration of the mantle wedge by fluid released from the slab, subduction-induced mantle upwelling beneath the back-arc, and heating of downgoing sediments/oceanic crust atop the slab. Each process predicts a distinctly different spatial pattern of melt generation and can thus be distinguished with high-resolution seismic imaging. Here we construct an upper mantle model of the Pacific Northwest using a full-wave ambient noise tomographic method. Normalized vertical components of continuous seismic records at station pairs are cross-correlated to extract empirical Green's functions at periods of 7-200 s. We simulate wave propagation within the 3D Earth structure using a finite-difference method and calculate sensitivity kernels of Rayleigh waves to perturbations of Vp and Vs based on the Strain Green's Tensor database. Phase delays are extracted by cross-correlating the observed and synthetic waveforms at multiple frequency bands.Our tomographic result reveals three separate low shear-wave velocity anomalies along the back-arc in the upper mantle ∼200 km east of the Cascade volcanic arc, with the central one being the largest in size and lowest in velocity. These back-arc low-velocity anomalies are spatially correlated with the three arc-volcano clusters. The geometry of the low-velocity volumes relative to the slab and arc is consistent with the pattern of subduction-induced decompressional melting in the back-arc. Their along-strike variation suggests that the large-scale plate-motion-induced flow in the back-arc mantle wedge is modulated by small-scale convection, resulting in a highly 3D process that defines the segmentation of volcanism along the Cascade arc.