NEHRP Clearinghouse
- Title
- Geometry of the Subducted Lithosphere Beneath the Banda Sea in Eastern Indonesia from Seismicity and Fault Plane Solutions.
- File
- PB80129059.pdf
- Author(s)
- Cardwell, R. K.; Isacks, B. L.
- Source
- National Science Foundation, Washington, DC. Office for the International Decade of Ocean Exploration., cJune 1978, 15 p.
- Abstract
- The spatial distribution of hypocenters in eastern Indonesia, together with 41 new and previously published fault plane solutions, can be explained by a simple model of two lithospheric plates descending into the upper mantle beneath the Banda Sea. The major one, defined by the shallow to deep hypocenters located along the Banda arc, is a laterally continuous slab that has subducted at plate defined by the Java tranch-Timor trough-Aru trough system. The other slab descends toward the southwest to depths of about 100 km in the region of the Seram trough and may be joined to the Banda arc subduction system by the westward extension of the New Guinea Tarera-Aid-oena fault zone, which acts as an arc-to-arc transform. The Banda arc slab is contorted at the eastern end of the arc where the trench and the line of active volcanoes curve to the northeast. The contortion appears to be a lateral bend in the subducted slab. Similar orientations of stress axes also occur near the curved ends of other island arcs.
- Keywords
- Plate tectonics; Banda Sea; Tectonics; Models; Volcanoes; Indonesia; Lithosphere; Reprints; Stresses; International Decade of Ocean Exploration; Earthquakes; Geological faults