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Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2022. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 49(12), (2022): e2022GL097779, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL097779., Outer-rise faults are predominantly concentrated near ocean trenches due to subducted plate bending. These faults play crucial roles in the hydration of subducted plates and the consequent subducting processes. However, it has not yet been possible to develop high-resolution structures of outer-rise faults due to the lack of near-field observations. In this study we deployed an ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) network near the Challenger Deep in the Southernmost Mariana Trench, between December 2016 and June 2017, covering both the overriding and subducting plates. We applied a machine-learning phase detector (EQTransformer) to the OBS data and found more than 1,975 earthquakes. An identified outer-rise event cluster revealed an outer-rise fault penetrating to depths of 50 km, which was inferred as a normal fault based on the extensional depth from tomographic images in the region, shedding new lights on water input at the southmost Mariana subduction zone., This study is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 91858207, 92158205, 41890813), Hong Kong Research Grant Council Grants (No. 14304820), Award from CORE (a joint research center for ocean research between QNLM and HKUST), Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. Y4SL021001, QYZDY-SSW-DQC005), and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (No. GML2019ZD0205), Faculty of Science at CUHK., 2022-12-06

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 48(15), (2021): e2021GL093309, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093309., Reduction of seismic velocities has been employed to study the hydration of incoming plates and forearc mantle in recent years. However, few constraints have been obtained in the Southern Mariana Trench. We use an ocean bottom seismograph (OBS) deployment to conduct Rayleigh wave tomographic studies to derive the SV-wave velocity structure near the Southern Mariana Trench. Measured group and phase velocities as a function of period are inverted to determine the SV-wave velocity using a Bayesian Monte Carlo algorithm. The incoming Pacific Plate is characterized by low velocities (3.6–4.1 km/s) within the upper ∼25 km of the mantle near the trench, indicating extensive mantle hydration of the incoming plate in southern Mariana. The velocity reduction in the forearc mantle is not as large as in central Mariana, most likely indicating a lower forearc serpentinization in this region, which is consistent with the absence of serpentinite mud volcanoes., This study is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council Grants (No. 14304820), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 91858207, 41890813, and 91628301), Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. Y4SL021001, QYZDY-SSW-DQC005, 133244KYSB20180029, and COMS2019Q10), and National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2018YFC0309800, 2018YFC0310105, and 2018YFC0308003), Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (No. GML2019ZD0205), Faculty of Science at CUHK., 2022-01-26

To investigate the seismic velocity structure of the shallow sediments in the Bohai Sea of China, we conducted a shearwave velocity inversion of the surface-wave dispersion data from a survey of 12 ocean-bottom seismometers (OBSs) and 377 shots of a 9000 in3 air gun. With OBS station spacing of approximately 5 km and air-gun shot spacing of approximately 190 m, high-quality Scholte-wave data were recorded by the OBSs within 0.4–5 km offset. We retrieved the Scholtewave phase-velocity dispersion for the fundamental mode and first overtone in the frequency band of 0.9–3.0 Hz with the phase-shift method and inverted for the shear-wave velocity structure of the shallow sediments with a damped iterative least-squares algorithm. Pseudo-2D shear-wave velocity profiles with a depth of approximately 400 m revealed coherent features of relatively weak lateral velocity variation. We also estimated the uncertainty in shear-wave velocity structure based on the pseudo-2D profiles from six trial inversions with different initial models, which suggested a velocity uncertainty less than 30 m∕s for most parts of the 2D profiles. The layered structure with little lateral variation may be attributable to the continuous sedimentary environment in the Cenozoic sedimentary basin of the Bohai Bay basin. The shear-wave velocity of 200–300 m∕s in the top 100 m of the Bohai seafloor may provide important information for offshore site response studies in earthquake engineering. Furthermore, the very low shear-wave velocity structure (150–600 m∕s) down to 400 m depth could produce a significant traveltime delay of approximately 1 s in the shear-wave arrivals, which needs to be considered to avoid serious bias in shear-wave traveltime tomographic models.