Crustal structure beneath the Galapagos Archipelago from ambient noise tomography and its implications for plume-lithosphere interactions

To constrain the seismic velocity structure of the crust beneath the Galapagos Archipelago, we conducted a tomographic study using high-frequency Rayleigh waves obtained from cross correlations of ambient noise. We analyzed waves with periods between 5 and 8.5 s, sensitive to shear wave velocity (VS) structure between about 3 and 10 km depth, after accounting for the effect of water depth. Crustal velocities are up to 25% lower than those of very young crust at the East Pacific Rise and are comparable to those of Hawaii. We attribute the lower than normal velocities to the combined effect of heating and the presence of melt in the crust above the Galapagos plume as well as the construction of a highly porous volcanic platform emplaced atop preexisting oceanic crust. On average, VS between 3 and 10 km depth beneath the western archipelago is up to 15% lower than beneath the eastern archipelago. We attribute the west-to-east velocity increase to a decrease in porosity of the volcanic platform and to cooling of the crust after its passage above the Galapagos plume. The results of this study, in combination with previous work, indicate that many of the unusual aspects of the Galapagos Archipelago are the result of variations in the thickness and internal structure of the chemical and thermal lithospheres. Our findings indicate that observed variations in the flexural response to loading observed in the Galapagos cannot be explained by the current thermal state of the lithosphere. Instead, the flexural response likely represents varying elastic strength at the time of loading. We also propose that the northwest and northeast trending alignments of volcanic centers found throughout the archipelago (the Darwinian lineations) may be associated with preexisting zones of weakness in the lithosphere formed during earlier episodes of ridge jumping and ridge propagation that were later reactivated by stresses generated by plume-lithosphere interactions.