Upper mantle shear wave velocity structure of the east Anatolian-Caucasus region

The Eastern Anatolian-Caucasus region is a relatively young part of the Alpine- Himalayan orogenic belt and has been formed as the result of the ongoing continental collision of Arabia and Eurasia. In spite of a number of geological studies that have been conducted in this area, there is still no consensus within the geoscience community about the regional tectonic settings and a model for the late Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the Anatolian Plateau. Knowledge of the upper mantle velocity structure in this region can provide the geological community with important constraints that are crucial for developing an understanding of the regional geology and the processes associated with early stages of mountain building.;In the present dissertation, I describe two studies of the regional upper mantle S wave velocity structure. In order to derive the absolute velocity structure of the upper mantle, I have applied surface wave tomography to model Rayleigh wave phase velocities as a function of period. Then I inverted the Rayleigh phase velocities to obtain S wave velocities as a function of depth. The resulted high-resolution 3-D S wave velocity model of the regional upper mantle is characterized by a better depth resolution than any preexisting tomographic models. I also conducted an S wave splitting analysis using traditional methods and developed a two-layer grid search algorithm in order to infer the upper mantle anisotropic structure. The results of the S wave splitting analysis for the stations located in Azerbaijan are the first in the region. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).