Segmentation of the Farallon slab

Recent tomography images reveal a complex 3D mantle structure beneath western United States, with feature morphology varying rapidly with depth. By assimilating plate motion history, paleo-age of sea floor, and paleo-geography of plate boundaries in a 3-D numerical model, we simulate the Farallon–Juan de Fuca subduction during the past 40 Ma. We find that the highly segmented upper mantle structure of western U.S. is a direct result of the Farallon subduction. We show that the tilted ‘horseshoe’-shaped fast seismic anomaly beneath Nevada and Utah at 300–600 km depth range is in fact a segment of curled slab subducted since 15 Ma, and the shallower linear slab beneath the Cascades is younger than 5 Ma. The distinct morphology between these two parts of the subduction system indicates the strong influence of the fast trench rollback since 20 Ma, the northward migrating JF–PA–NA triple-junction, and the toroidal flow around slab edges. The observed mantle structures are used to constrain the rheology of the upper mantle through matching the shape, depth, and location of modeled subducted slab segments. The inferred viscosity for the asthenosphere is 5 × 1019 Pa s and those for the transition zone and lower mantle are 1.5 × 1021 Pa s and 2 × 1022 Pa s, respectively. The slab is found to be about 2 orders of magnitude stronger than the ambient mantle above 410 km depth, but of similar order of magnitude viscosity in the transition zone.