Research Projects

The Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Mountain belt formed due to collision and post-collision processes between the Indian and Eurasian plates around 50 Ma. The main cause of Himalayan orogeny is under thrusting of the Indian lithosphere. The Himalaya and southern Tibet are critical to monitoring efforts due to the complexity of the geologic structure across the Indo-Eurasian plate boundary. Seismic anisotropy and attenuation studies are essential for understanding collision zone dynamics and future challenges in this active region. Regional seismic phases exhibit significant lateral variability in travel time, amplitude, and frequency content due to the complexity of the collision zone. Seismic attenuation investigations are more important than velocity in detecting the presence of melt or fluid in the crust and lithospheric mantle. Depth-dependent lithospheric seismic anisotropic measurements play a critical role in understanding past and ongoing lithospheric deformation. This project proposes to construct and validate frequency dependent regional phases attenuation models and depth dependent lithospheric seismic anisotropy models for the Himalaya and southern Tibet, which is important for understanding the tectonics of the Indian-Eurasian Plate boundary. The project will use the Two Station Method and the Reverse Two Station Method to create Q models at various frequencies, and depth-dependent seismic anisotropy will be obtained using the directional dependence of receiver functions.