Structural elements of the southern Tethyan Himalaya crust from wide-angle seismic data

A deep seismic common midpoint (CMP) profile, shot across the southern margin of the Tethyan Himalaya as the first stage of Project International Deep Profiling of Tibet and the Himalaya (INDEPTH), imaged the top (Main Himalayan Thrust or MHT) and bottom (Moho) of the Indian continental crust underthrusting the Himalaya. We used portable seismographs to record the CMP-profile shots at a wide range of offsets, up to 155 km. Our short-offset data corroborate the CMP-profile data, while our large-offset data are dominated by a band of reflectivity. We interpret the bright onset of this reflective band as the basal detachment of the South Tibetan Detachment system and a phase at the end of the reflective band as the MHT. We used the CMP-profile first-break data to model the uppermost 2 km in detail. The depth of young extensional basins of the Yadong rift system along the CMP profile was constrained to a maximum of 2 km, yielding a throw of 4.6 km across the eastern flank of the rift and a rough estimate of approximately 1.5% east-west extension by normal faulting in the Tethyan Himalaya The wide-angle data were used to construct a crustal seismic-velocity model down to the MHT. The South Tibetan Detachment System (STDS) basal detachment reflector is observed dipping 12.5 degrees NNE from a depth of about 6 km beneath the surface under the south end of the CMP profile to a depth of 22 km, then flattening to a dip of only 2.5 degrees NNE. Thus our observations suggest that the STDS basal detachment is a deep-rooted basement fault. For the MHT we observe a dip of 7.5 degrees NNE from 20 km depth below sea level at the crest of the High Himalaya crystalline sheet to 36 km below sea level (40 km beneath the surface) at a distance of about 70 km south of the Indus-Yarlung Suture (IYS). From geometrical arguments we suggest that Indian crust underthrusts the surface expression of the IYS within the crust but does not form the lower crust of central and northern Tibet.