A 3-D Seismic Tomographic Study of Spreading Structures and Smooth Seafloor Generated by Detachment Faulting – the Ultra-Slow Spreading Southwest Indian Ridge at 64˚30’E
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At ultra-slow spreading ridges, with full spreading rates less than ~15-20 mm/yr, spreading is accommodated both by limited, highly spatially and temporally segmented magmatism, and by tectonic extension along large-scale oceanic detachment faults, which cut from the seafloor through into the upper mantle and exhume ultramafic material to the seafloor. Detachment faulting is highly asymmetric and alternates in polarity over time, producing a “flip-flopping” effect of subsequent detachment dips. The resulting seafloor in these regions displays a morphology termed “smooth seafloor” comprising elongate, broad ridges, which have peridotite/serpentinite lithologies distinct from the typical basalt-gabbro layered oceanic crustal structure. We refer to the outer layer, above the mantle, in this case as the “crustal section”.We conducted tomographic travel-time inversion of a 3-D wide-angle seismic dataset acquired over a region of smooth seafloor around 64˚30’E along the Southwest Indian Ridge (SISMOSMOOTH; Cruise MD199), to produce a seismic velocity volume through the crustal section and into the uppermost mantle. The resulting velocities support a non-magmatic origin for the crustal section, up to 100% alteration of originally ultramafic compositions to serpentinite, and a near-constant thickness of ~3.4 km into a transitional Moho zone which overlies the unaltered mantle. Patterns of velocity anomalies are interpreted as changes in the degree of alteration with depth resulting from spatial and temporal variations in fluid-rock interaction, controlled by faulting and tectonic damage processes and progressive porosity infill. The detachment faults show limited along-axis extent and are not simple planar structures at depth, instead mirroring the shapes of the bathymetric ridges they exhume. The boundaries between smooth seafloor and adjacent more magmatic segments are not vertical at depth, suggesting that detachment processes extend laterally at depth beyond their mapped extent seen at the seafloor. Magmatic input is overall highly limited and dominantly takes the form of individual flows forming superficial veneers, but there is one region on the lower part of an exhumed detachment footwall where the magmatic section is up to ~1.5 km thick, which may reflect changes in larger-scale magma segmentation which could contribute to detachment abandonment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".