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Deep-Focus Mantle Earthquakes in the Eastern Part of the Caucasian Isthmus

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Abstract—Based on the distribution of mantle seismicity and the sets of focal mechanisms of the earthquakes, the existence and deformation type of an allantoid mantle body within the eastern part of the Caucasus Isthmus is established. The body is inclined and plunges from the southeast to the northwest to a depth of 160 km. The shape of the mantle body and the type of its stress state which is fundamentally different from that for the Earth’s crust in the region precludes us from accepting plate-tectonic interpretation of this formation in the form of a concept implying the subsidence of the subducting part of the Arabian lithospheric plate underneath the Eurasian plate. We hypothesize that this phenomenon is associated with the tectogenesis process developing in the subcrustal mantle of the Caucasus irrespective of the collision processes.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to I.P. Gabsatarova for providing the publications where she presents focal mechanisms for a number of earthquakes in the Caucasus which we used in this paper. We also thank A.A. Godzikovskaya for initiating the interest in studying the deep earthquakes in the Caucasus. We are grateful to A.V. Deshcherevsky for his help in creating the electronic database of the earthquakes in the Caucasus for the period 2000–2016 and for calculating the vertical sections of seismicity through the region of the deep earthquakes in the Caucasus.

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This paper was prepared as part of the state contract of the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences for laboratory 303 for 2017–2019.

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  1. Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, 123242, Moscow, Russia

    V. I. Shevchenko & A. A. Lukk

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  1. V. I. Shevchenko
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Correspondence to V. I. Shevchenko.

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Translated by M. Nazarenko

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Shevchenko, V.I., Lukk, A.A. Deep-Focus Mantle Earthquakes in the Eastern Part of the Caucasian Isthmus. Izv., Phys. Solid Earth 56, 189–206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1069351320020093

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