Geophys. J. Int. (2023) 232, 1276–1292 https://doi.org/10.

1093/gji/ggac390
Advance Access publication 2022 October 08
GJI Seismology

Crustal and uppermost mantle structure beneath Tristan da Cunha

using surface wave phase velocity from horizontal components OBS
ambient seismic noise

Hao Zhang ,1,2 Wolfram H. Geissler,2 Mechita C. Schmidt-Aursch2 and

Raffaele Bonadio3

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1 KeyLab of Submarine Geosciences and Prospecting Techniques, Ministry of Education, and College of Marine Geosciences, Ocean University of China,
Qingdao 266100, China. E-mail: zhanghao@stu.ouc.edu.cn
2 Geophysics Section, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven 27570, Germany
3 Geophysics Section, Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies School of Cosmic Physics, Dublin D02Y006, Ireland

Accepted 2022 September 30. Received 2022 August 19; in original form 2022 May 17

SUMMARY
We applied ambient noise tomography on data from an ocean bottom seismometer (OBS)
experiment around Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, in order to determine the crust
and uppermost mantle shear velocity structure beneath this region. The determination of
the orientation of the horizontal seismometer components allowed to perform ambient noise
cross-correlation with all three components of 19 broad-band OBSs and two land stations. We
extracted the phase velocity dispersion curves from the first higher mode Rayleigh waves and
fundamental mode Love waves at periods of 3–8 s, which were only observed in the radial
and transverse components, respectively. Following the two-steps inversion of surface wave
tomography, we finally obtained a 3-D shear velocity model around Tristan da Cunha. Our
results concur with previous studies in this region. The 3-D shear velocity model documents that
there is a shallow conduit of low shear velocity underneath the volcanic archipelago, extending
to at least ∼25 km depth. This conduit in the lithosphere may represent the magmatic plumbing
system. We also observe indications for low shear velocities in the uppermost mantle beneath
the seamounts in the southwest of the island, in an area where the deeper Tristan mantle plume
is assumed.
Key words: Atlantic Ocean; Seismic noise; Seismic tomography; Surface waves and free
oscillations; Hotspots.

1 I N T RO D U C T I O N
Since the surface wave impulse response can be extracted from am-
bient noise cross-correlation, ambient noise tomography is widely
used for imaging the shear velocity structure in the crust and upper-
most mantle (e.g. Shapiro & Campillo 2004; Snieder 2004; Zhang
et al. 2020; Feng 2021; Zhang et al. 2021). However, its application
for deep-sea ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) data appear still to
be limited. Harmon et al. (2007) and Yao et al. (2011) found the
fundamental and first higher mode Rayleigh wave using vertical
components of OBSs and used them to invert for 1-D shear velocity
structure. Due to the unknown orientation of the horizontal compo-
nents, they could only utilize the vertical components. Other studies
(Takeo et al. 2013; Zha et al. 2014) observed only fundamental mode
Rayleigh wave on vertical components. Furthermore, Takeo et al.
(2013) found the first higher mode Rayleigh wave on the horizontal
components, while Zha et al. (2014) observed only the fundamental
mode Rayleigh and Love waves. Tomar et al. (2018) observed both
the first higher mode and the fundamental mode Rayleigh wave, but
the first higher mode is stronger than the fundamental mode on the
radial components. In addition to those experiments in the Pacific
Ocean, the ambient-noise Rayleigh waves from several recent OBS
experiments in the Atlantic Ocean (e.g. Harmon et al. 2020; Saikia
et al. 2021) and Mediterranean Sea (Wolf et al. 2021) were also
used to study the local ocean crust or lithosphere.
In this work, we used an amphibious data set from OBSs and land
stations deployed around and on Tristan da Cunha (TdC). We applied
seismic ambient noise cross-correlation on all three seismometer
components. By using the phase velocity at dominating periods
retrieved from 1st higher mode Rayleigh and fundamental mode
Love waves on horizontal components, we inverted the 3-D crustal
and uppermost mantle shear velocity structure in this region.
TdC is a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, located
∼400 km to the east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR, Fig. 1). It
is the main island of the TdC archipelago, consisting of the islands
of TdC, Nightingale and Inaccessible. The latest eruption on TdC

1276 
C The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.

Figure 1. Bathymetrical map of study region using the ETOPO2 bathymetry data. The red triangles mark the location of both OBSs and land stations used
in this paper. The black lines indicate the age of oceanic crust (Müller et al. 2008). The inset in the right-bottom shows the position of TdC within the South
Atlantic. MAR, Mid-Atlantic Ridge; TdC, Tristan da Cunha island and RGR, Rio Grande Rise.
occurred in 1961, and there were reports on a submarine eruption
south of the island in 2004 (e.g. O’Mongain et al. 2007).
The classic plume theory assumes that there is a deep mantle
plume (Tristan hotspot) beneath the region, affecting already the
Gondwana plate ∼132 Ma ago and contributed to the separation
of the South American and the African continents and finally the
breakup of the South Atlantic (Morgan 1971; Morgan 1997; Cour-
tillot et al. 2003; Hoernle et al. 2015). The aseismic Walvis Ridge
is suggested to represent a classical hotspot track, with TdC as the
active end of it. The Walvis Ridge–Tristan hotspot track represents
the classic evolution of a hotspot (Richards et al. 1989). It has been
termed one of the seven hotspots most likely to be sourced from
the lowermost mantle from a ‘primary’ plume (Courtillot et al.
2003) with its base currently located at the margin of the African
large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVP, Torsvik et al. 2006;
Burke et al. 2008). French & Romanowicz (2015) also define the
Tristan hotspot as ‘clearly resolved’ plume based on global wave-
form tomography. Geochemical and geochronological researches
(Humphris et al. 1985; O’Connor & Duncan 1990; Gibson et al.
2006; Hicks et al. 2012; O’Connor et al. 2012; Rohde et al. 2013;
Weit et al. 2017) show that volcanism within the Walvis Ridge–Rio
Grande Rise volcanic system is fundamentally age-progressive. The
global P- and S-wave velocity structures from Zhang & Tanimoto
(1993), Masalu (2015) and Celli et al. (2020) show that the MAR
low-velocity anomaly in this region extent deeper and is shifted
OBS ambient seismic noise 1277
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off-axis toward the Tristan side, which may suggest existence of a
deep mantle plume.
However, some scientists have different explanations (Foulger
& Natland 2003; Anderson 2005; Fairhead et al. 2005) for the
volcanism in this region; they argued that it is not the product of
a deep mantle plume or the Tristan hotspot, but possibly related
to shallow geodynamic processes as a consequence of the South
Atlantic opening.
Recently, local geophysical studies were applied in order to obtain
more detailed structures in this region (Baba et al. 2017; Geissler
et al. 2017; Ryberg et al. 2017; Schlömer et al. 2017; Bonadio
et al. 2018; Geissler et al. 2020), yet the results of those stud-
ies show different indications. The magnetotelluric results of Baba
et al. (2017) show no evidence of a mantle plume. Schlömer et al.
(2017) obtained local P-wave velocity structure with potential deep
upper-mantle plume conduit in the southwest. Ryberg et al. (2017)
found a shallow low shear velocity anomaly directly under the is-
lands. Receiver functions from Geissler et al. (2017) show weak
hotspot indications in the west/southwest at mantle transition zone.
Petrological modelling and probabilistic Rayleigh-wave inversion
from Bonadio et al. (2018) indicates a moderately hot mantle in
this region. The study of multibeam echosounders and sub-bottom
profiler data (Geissler et al. 2020) indicate reduced magma supply
in this region and weak plume–ridge interaction at present time,
but on the other hand documents sparse volcanic activity at the
1278 H. Zhang et al.
seafloor to the west/southwest of the islands. Since most of the pre-
vious studies focus on the deep structures, the analysis of shallower
structures is lacking. In this paper, we obtain crustal and uppermost
mantle shear velocity structure using ambient noise tomography,
which would provide a new insight into the formation of volcanic
archipelagos in this region.
2 D ATA A N D M E T H O D S
The data analysed in this paper stem from a 11-month deployment
of 24 broadband OBS from the German DEPAS pool (Deutscher
Geräte-Pool für Amphibische Seismologie, Schmidt-Aursch &
Haberland 2017). The stations were deployed and recovered during
two cruises with R/V Maria S. Merian in early 2012 (cruise MSM
20/2, Jegen et al. 2015) and end of 2012/early 2013 (cruise MSM
24, Geissler 2014). All OBS are equipped with a three-components
broad-band seismometer (Güralp CMG-40T) and an ultralow fre-
quency hydrophone (HTI-01-PCA/ULF and HTI-04-PCA/ULF).
Usable data were recovered from 20 OBSs, which recorded con-
tinuously for ∼350 d from 2012 February to 2013 January. The
network included a temporary land station (NIG01) on Nightingale
Island. We also retrieved few data of a permanent station TRIS
(Global Seismograph Network) (Albuquerque Seismological Labo-
ratory 1988) on TdC island. The locations of all stations are shown
in the Fig. 1. The probabilistic power spectral density (PPSD, McNa-
mara & Buland 2004) of each channel of all stations are calculated
first for quality control and spectral analysis. The spectra as well
as the power spectral density (PSD) curves suggest that noise level
of oceanic environments is relatively high comparing with the stan-
dard model, with dominating signal periods around 1–10 s period
(Fig. S1, Supporting Information).
OBS cannot rely on the precise GPS time unlike land seismo-
logical stations. The clock synchronization can therefore only be
achieved before the deployment and after the recovery. The time
drift between the OBS log and GPS is referred to as skew. There-
fore, time correction is crucial for the analysis and interpretation
of OBS data (e.g. in our case, it directly affects the stacking of
ambient noise cross-correlations). We applied the noise-correlation
method (Hannemann et al. 2014) to calculated the clock drift for
the OBSs of which clock synchronization failed, and also check the
trend of the time drift. An example before and after time correction
are shown in Fig. S2 (Supporting Information).
2.1 Orientation determination
The orientation of the two horizontal seismometer components is
unknown when the OBS settles down onto the seafloor. In order
to utilize all three components, the determination of orientation is
crucial but also difficult for the passive source OBS data, compar-
ing with the active source experiments using the artificial source
such like air guns to help determining the direction of horizontal
components. Several methods were proposed using different sig-
nals such like: body wave polarization, surface wave polarization,
ambient noise, or ship noise (e.g. Stachnik et al. 2012; Zha et al.
2013; Scholz et al. 2016). For our OBS data set, the orientation
was previously estimated by P and Ps wave polarization, neces-
sary to analyse receiver functions (Geissler et al. 2017). In this
study, we used the polarization of Rayleigh surface waves of nat-
ural earthquakes. Compared with P waves and other signals, the
natural Rayleigh waves have the strongest energy and highest am-
plitude, and their lower frequency content make it distinguished
from other signals with relatively good signal-to-noise ratio (Fig.
S3, Supporting Information). We thus applied the method of Stach-
nik et al. (2012) to determine the horizontal orientations of OBS
stations, which is based on the Rayleigh-wave polarization charac-
teristic of a 90◦ phase shift between vertical and radial directions.
Following Stachnik et al. (2012), we keep rotating the two horizon-
tal component and calculating the correlation coefficient between
the each ‘radial’ components and the Hilbert transform (includes
the 90◦ phase shift) of vertical component. Taking the maximum
correlation coefficient, we could determine the true radial direction
between the earthquake and OBS. This way, the orientation also can
be calculated. Fig. 2 illustrates the general progress of this method
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using one earthquake event as example. For each OBS, the orien-
tation is determined by the following three steps: (1) we download
the events catalog of earthquakes (Mw ≥ 6.0) from USGS, and cut
the Rayleigh waves waveforms of each event; (2) for each event,
the peak correlation coefficient and the peak angle are calculated as
mentioned above; (3) we selected the events with the correlation co-
efficient larger than 0.6, which indicate the waveforms are probably
well recorded, and the final orientation is estimated by the median
angles of the selected events (Fig. S4, Supporting Information). We
finally obtained reliable orientations for 19 OBS stations (Table S1,
Supporting Information). One of OBSs (TDC18) has a technical
problem with its horizontal components.
2.2 Ambient noise cross-correlation
Impulse response or the empirical Green’s function retrieved from
cross-correlation of ambient noise can be used to analyse the sur-
face wave dispersion between two stations, which is widely used
to investigate the shear velocity structure of the subsurface (e.g.
Shapiro & Campillo 2004; Snieder 2004).
We used the three seismometer components of all usable stations.
The data were split into one-day long segments and decimated into
two samples per second for further analysis and process. After
time correction, the two horizontal components are first rotated into
radial-transverse coordinate system according to the estimated ori-
entation (see above). The daily seismograms are split into 2000
s windows which overlap 50 per cent. We performed the cross-
correlation for each time window and the daily cross-correlation
functions (CCFs) are averaged of all the windows in one day. Fi-
nally, we stacked all daily CCFs to obtain yearly CCFs. Often, the
normalization methods such like one-bit or running mean average
(Bensen et al. 2007; Ritzwoller & Feng 2019) are suggested to
suppress natural earthquakes in the data. We found they does not
affect the signal at the dominating periods (1–10 s), but only make
the impulses at longer period (10–30 s) weaker (see Fig. S5 and
Table S2, Supporting Information). Thus, we decided to not use
any normalization in our case for the further analysis. Fig. 3 shows
all the CCFs of vertical, radial and transverse components. We can
observe the empirical Green’s function of Rayleigh waves on the
vertical and radial components, and Love waves on the transverse
components, according to the particle motion of surface waves.
As shown in the Fig. 3, the final CCFs are bandpass filtered in
two different period bands (1–10 and 10–30 s), and the dominating
periods are 1–10 s which are consistent with ambient noise spectrum
from PPSD.
In the period of 10–30 s, there are weak impulses/signals on both
vertical and radial components. We tried to apply methods such as
spectral whitening (Bensen et al. 2007; Ritzwoller & Feng 2019) or
three-station interferometry (Zhang et al. 2020; Feng 2021; Zhang
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Figure 2. An example of orientation calculation for OBS TDC01 using one earthquake (Mw = 7.1, 2012 March 25). (a) Shows the waveforms of Rayleigh
waves on three components (bandpass filter: 0.02–0.5 Hz). (b) and (c) are envelopes and correlation coefficients at each orientation angles calculated following
Stachnik et al. (2012). The blue line is the true orientation angle with the highest coefficient. (d) and (e) show the particle motion in transverse and radial
directions after orientation correction. An ellipse in the radial direction is shown, which demonstrates the polarization characteristics of Rayleigh waves.

et al. 2021) to enhance the longer period range (10–30 s) but failed.
The real source of those impulse responses is questionable, since
they only occur in the daily CCFs of days with strong teleseismic
earthquakes. Thus, those impulse responses might be not caused by
ambient noise but natural earthquakes, and we decided to not to use
this period band for the further analysis. No impulses/signals are
observed in the transverse components, which indicate that those
signals are related to Rayleigh waves from earthquakes. This way,
it proved again that the orientation corrections calculated before are
reliable. The impulse responses at dominating periods 1–10 s can be
observed in all daily CCFs independent of the occurrence of large
teleseismic earthquakes.
In contrast to the Rayleigh waves recorded on land, the Rayleigh
waves observed at the seafloor are actually called Scholte–Rayleigh
waves (Scholte 1947; Yao et al. 2011). For simplicity, we call
them Rayleigh waves in this paper. Those waves propagate near
the liquid–solid interface, and their fundamental mode is very sen-
sitive to the water layer, especially in period range of 1–10 s. On the
other hand, the presence of the water layer makes the slow funda-
mental mode and the fast first higher mode Rayleigh waves clearly
separated. Therefore, it makes it easier to observe and analyse first
higher mode Rayleigh waves.
In the dominating periods of 1–10 s, only fundamental mode
Rayleigh waves are visible on the vertical components. The group
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Figure 3. Record section of the CCFs for three different components of vertical (ZZ), radial (RR) and transverse (TT). The CCFs are filtered in two period
bands: 1–10 and 10–30 s. All traces are normalized, and the amplitude of 10—30 s is much weaker than that of 1–10 s. The red and blue lines represent
velocities of 1.5 and 4.5 km s−1 , respectively.

velocity of those is relatively slow, less than 1.5 km s−1 (Fig. 3).
However, on the radial component we observe both fundamental
mode and first higher mode Rayleigh waves. On the transverse
component, the fundamental mode of the Love waves is visible. Due
to the strong sensitivity of the velocity of the fundamental Scholte–
Rayleigh wave to the water layer (instead of deeper structure) in
this period range, we choose to analyse only the fundamental mode
of Love waves and first higher mode of the Rayleigh waves on the
two horizontal components. Unlike the observations of Yao et al.
(2011) and Harmon et al. (2007) with two clear modes of Rayleigh
waves on the vertical components, in our case, the first higher mode
Rayleigh surface waves are extremely weak and invisible on the
vertical components while strong enough on the radial components,
which concur with observations of Takeo et al. (2013).
2.3 Phase velocity measurement
We measured the phase velocity dispersion in frequency domain
based on the theory of Aki (1957) following the method proposed by
Ekström et al. (2009) which used the zero-crossings of the spectrum
in the frequency domain. The advantage of this method compared
to the time domain method (Bensen et al. 2007) is, that we can
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Figure 4. Examples of measuring the phase velocity dispersion from fundamental mode Love and first higher mode Rayleigh waves between OBS TDC01 and
OBS TDC02 (distance = 87.03 km). (a) Stacked waveforms on the radial components, blue line is the entire CCF including fundamental mode Love wave and
black line is the waveform applied a time window for subsequent measurement. (c) Colorful dots are the sets of possible phase velocity values calculated from
the zero-crossings of the real part of spectra shown in (e). The blue line is a reference curve calculated from modified AK135 model (Table S2, Supporting
Information) to guide the selection, and the red line is the selected dispersion curve. (e) Real part of spectra curve of the black waveform in (a). (b), (d) and (e)
are similar but on the radial components.

measure the phase velocity when the interstation distance is in the
same order as the wavelength, which means it works well in the case
of short interstation distances and high frequency.
In the implementation of this method, we applied at first a win-
dow on the CCFs in time domain to remove the irrelevant signals
and to smooth the spectrum. Then, the CCFs are transformed into
frequency domain, and the zero-crossings of the real part of the
frequency spectrum are used to calculated the possible phase ve-
locities at the corresponding frequency, following Ekström et al.
(2009). Then we picked the dispersion curves manually. An exam-
ple is shown in the Fig. 4. Due to the circumstance that the frequency
of phase velocities between different paths are not the same, the dis-
persion curves had to be interpolated in a next step with an interval
of 0.1 s. We finally obtained reliable measurements in the period
range 3.0–8.0 s with the peak count of 162 and 155 measurements
on the radial and transverse components, respectively. For the sub-
sequent tomography, we only use the dispersion curves at 3.5–7.5 s
with more than 100 individual measurements at each period. Fig. 5
shows all the dispersion curves we extracted from the radial and
transverse components and their averages.
2.4 Phase velocity map tomography
To invert 2-D phase velocity maps at each period, we applied the
method of Barmin et al. (2001) based on the generalized least-
squares theory. We used a uniform grid of 0.2◦ ×0.2◦ for tomog-
raphy. During the inversion, we used the average velocity from all
the dispersion curves as the input velocity at each period. The ray
paths between station pairs are computed using the fast marching
method (Rawlinson & Sambridge 2004). In the inversion problem,
the penalty function was defined following Barmin et al. (2001) as:
(Gm−d)T C−1 (Gm−d)+mT Qm
With
Q = α 2 FT F + β 2 HT H (2)
where vector d and vector m are the perturbations of traveltimes
and slowness comparing with a reference model, respectively. The
matrix G is the forward operator containing the length of each path
in every cell. The first term represents the misfit of data, where C is
the covariance matrix which should be diagonal. The second term
include two parts.
The matrix F controls the spatial smoothing:
Si j
Fi j = δi j +  (3)
j Si j
δi j is the Kronecker symbol and Si j ∝ exp(−di2j /2σ 2 ), where di j
is the distance between the ith and jth nodes.
The matrix H is used to penalize the weighted norm of the model:
Hi j = exp (−λρi ) δi j (4)
where the ρi is the paths density of ith cell. The parameters α, β, λ
and σ are used to ensure the model smoothness and reduce extreme
value, after many tests, they are chosen as 23, 35, 100 and 0.9 in
our case, and their resolution test will be analysed later.
With these definitions, the optimal slowness vector m was calcu-
lated by:
 −1 T
m = GT C−1 G + Q G d (5)
2.5 Shear velocity inversion
We jointly inverted the phase velocity of fundamental mode Love
waves and first higher mode Rayleigh waves at each grid node
using code surf96 (Herrmann 2013), which is based on the iterative
(1) linearized inversion. The velocity model contains a water layer of
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Figure 5. All the phase velocity from first higher mode Rayleigh and fundamental mode Love waves in the study region. Bottom: the grey curves are the
individual dispersion curves of the first higher mode Rayleigh and fundamental mode Love waves. The blue and green lines are the corresponding averages,
respectively. The top panels show the number of individual measurements at each period.

variable thickness on the top, 10 layers of 1 km thickness, 5 layers of
2 km thickness below and 2 layers of 5 km thickness at the bottom.
At first, we invert for an average 1-D model using the average
Rayleigh and Love wave dispersion curves. The start model in-
cludes a 3.4 km thick water layer which is the average depth of
seafloor in the region, and a constant velocity of 5 km s−1 below.
We tested different start models (also with velocities >5 km s−1 ),
and the inversion results always converge to same model (see Fig.
S6, Supporting Information). The final 1-D velocity model and the
corresponding dispersion curves are shown in Fig. 6.
The average 1-D velocity model was used as initial model to invert
the shear velocity structure at each grid node to construct a 3-D
velocity structure. Since the water depth is crucial for the inversion
(Ryberg et al. 2017), we use the average water depth around each
single grid node with a diameter of the average interstations distance
using to ETOPO2 bathymetric data.
3 R E S U LT S
the phase velocities of both surface wave types are significantly
reduced in the vicinity of the islands, which already indicates that
the shear velocity around the volcanic island is lower in both the
crust and the uppermost mantle based on the sensitivity kernels.
The velocity anomaly of the Love waves is much weaker than that
of the first higher mode Rayleigh waves, meanwhile, as the period
increases, the amplitude of velocity anomalies decreases for both
wave types. At the periods of 4.0 and 5.0 s, the maximum pertur-
bation of the low-velocity anomaly is around 20 per cent for Love
and 15 per cent for Rayleigh waves. At the longest studied period
of 7.0 s, the perturbation drops to 10 per cent and 5 per cent, re-
spectively. Additionally, the positions of this anomaly for those two
surface wave types are slightly different, as anomaly of first higher
mode Rayleigh waves is offset to southwest compared with that of
Love waves at each period. Compared to the low-velocity anomaly
near the islands, the amplitude of the velocity variation in other
areas seem not to be significant. The phase velocity of Love waves
northeast of the islands is relatively higher at all periods, suggesting
a higher shear velocity in the crust.

3.1 Phase velocity maps 3.2 Resolution and sensitivity kernels analysis
The 2-D phase velocity maps of first higher mode Rayleigh and As proposed by Barmin et al. (2001), the resolution matrix R was
fundamental mode Love waves are shown in Fig. 7. At each period, calculated by (GT C−1 G + Q)−1 GT C−1 G, the rows of which are the
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Figure 6. The average 1-D shear velocity model. (a) Red line is the inverted average model using the average dispersion curves of both first higher mode
Rayleigh and fundamental mode Love waves; black dashed line is shear velocity model of equatorial MAR from Saikia et al. (2021). Green marks are the
shear velocity of 20–50 Ma Pacific lithosphere from Nishimura & Forsyth (1989). (b) Black dots are the measured average phase velocity of first higher mode
Rayleigh waves. The black line is the predicted dispersion curve for the average 1-D velocity model. (c) Same but for fundamental mode Love waves.

resolution maps at each grid node. The spatial resolution was defined
as the radius of the fitted cone in each resolution map (Goutorbe
et al. 2015). We calculated the spatial resolution as can be seen
from Fig. 8, the relatively higher resolution near the TdC island is
∼70 km with better ray coverage, and the average spatial resolution
is ∼100 km. To test the resolution of our tomographic grid in
more qualitative way, we also applied checkerboard tests. The tests
confirm that potential velocity anomalies can be recovered well by
both first higher mode Rayleigh and fundamental mode Love waves,
especially near the islands.
We use the average 1-D shear velocity model in the Fig. 6 to
calculate the sensitivity kernels of the phase velocity inversion,
as shown in Fig. 9. We find that the Love waves at period of 4–
7 s are mainly sensitive to the velocity structures above 10 km,
while the first higher mode Rayleigh waves are more sensitive
to the deeper structures up to ∼25 km. Therefore, we assume
that the velocity structure of the joint inversion is reliable above
25 km.
3.3 Shear velocity structure
As shown in Fig. 6, our average shear velocity model is consistent
with the study on the equatorial MAR (Saikia et al. 2021), and the
shear velocities for the deeper parts are also similar to the Pacific
lithosphere (20–50 Ma, Nishimura & Forsyth 1989). Fig. 10 shows
the local average 1-D shear velocity profiles in the northeast, south-
west and central TdC island region calculated from local grid nodes.
The TdC islands have the lowest shear velocities from seafloor to at
least 25 km depth. In the northeastern and southwestern areas, the
shear velocities are similar above 15 km. Below 15 km depth, shear
velocities in the southwestern area are slightly reduced compared
to the northeastern area. but are still lager than for the central TdC
area. Due to missing depth sensitivity, we cannot say if the shear
velocity profiles from the southwestern and the central areas may
converge at deeper depths.
The horizontal slices of relative shear velocity are shown in
Fig. 11. Limited by the station distribution and data quality, we
only analyse the velocity anomalies with horizontal width larger
than 70 km based on the resolution analysis. Our shear velocity
model clearly shows that the shear wave velocity beneath the TdC
islands is about 10 per cent lower than the average 1-D model at
all depths. In addition, the low-velocity anomaly below the vol-
canic island shifted slightly to the southwest in the upper mantle
(>10 km). The velocity in the northeast is higher at a depth of
6 km. A continuous low-velocity anomaly appears in the south-
west at ∼14 km depth, and its lateral extent expands as the depth
increases.
Fig. 12 shows one latitudinal, one longitudinal vertical and one
southwest–northeast slice of the 3-D shear velocity model, all cross-
ing the island. The slices show obvious low shear velocity at the
shallow depth above ∼6 km (L1), and a low-velocity conduit at
depth from ∼10 to 25 km (L2) underneath the TdC islands. Com-
pared with the average shear velocity model, the diameter of the low-
velocity conduit in the latitudinal cross-section is around ∼100 km,
while that in longitudinal cross-section is narrower with ∼70 km
diameter at depths from 12 to 20 km. The cross-section (c) shows
a low velocity (L3) appears in the southwest at upper mantle and
seems to be connected to the low-velocity conduit below the island.
Our result can’t image the fracture zone close to TdC due to the
limitation of resolution.
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Figure 7. (a) Fundamental mode Love and (b) first higher mode Rayleigh wave phase velocity anomalies (per cent) at period of 4, 5, 6 and 7 s.

4 DISCUSSION Philippine Sea (Takeo et al. 2013) but different to observations

4.1 Surface waves responses extracted from ambient noise
of OBS
In our case, the horizontal components are very important, from
which we retrieved not only the fundamental mode Love but also
the first higher mode Rayleigh waves to jointly invert shear velocity.
The first higher mode Rayleigh wave is too weak to utilize on
the vertical components, which is similar to observations in the
in the southern central Pacific (Harmon et al. 2007; Yao et al.
2011).We think that this may be due to the sediments and shallow
structures close to seafloor affecting the ellipticity characteristics of
the Rayleigh surface waves (Boore & Nafi Toksöz 1969; Tanimoto
& Rivera 2008) and also the difference of the ellipticity between
the fundamental and first higher mode Rayleigh. The reason for this
should be further discussed and investigated, but it is beyond the
scope of this study.
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Figure 8. Resolution analysis of tomographic phase velocity maps. (a) and (c) Resolution lengths calculated from the resolution matrix at 5 s in radial and
transverse components, respectively. (b) and (d) Checkerboard test results. Input perturbation anomalies have size of 1◦ by 1◦ and amplitude of 20 per cent.
The station locations are shown as red dots.

Figure 9. (a) The phase velocity dispersion curves and (b) 1-D depth sensitivity kernel of fundamental mode Love, (c) fundamental mode Rayleigh and (d)
first higher mode Rayleigh waves at different periods. All simulation results are calculated using the average 1-D velocity model in Fig. 6.
1286 H. Zhang et al.
Figure 10. 1-D shear velocity profiles for different local areas. (a) Central/volcanic islands (red); southwest area (blue) and northeast area (green). Each profile
is the average of local area velocity structure. (b) Bathymetric map shows the positions of the subregions (circles). The small triangles mark the grid nodes
used to calculate the average regional velocity model in (a).
The phase velocity of fundamental mode Rayleigh waves from
ambient noise cross-correlations cannot be utilized in this study.
For the longer periods of 10–30 s, we mentioned the reasons before
in Section 2.2. For the fundamental mode Rayleigh wave(s) with
dominating periods (1–10 s) it is not possible to pick the phase
velocity (see Fig. S7, Supporting Information) when the interstatio
-distance is large (>50 km) and the velocity is low (<1.5 km s−1 ).
Moreover, the dispersion curve for our average 1-D shear velocity
model shows that phase velocity of the fundamental mode Rayleigh
wave decreases dramatically with decreasing periods below ∼10 s
(Fig. 9a). Also, for the periods less than 10 s, the phase velocity
of the fundamental mode Rayleigh wave becomes sensitive and
closer to the compressional (P wave) velocity in the ocean (Ew-
ing et al. 1957) and is therefore less sensitive for the structure of
the crust and uppermost mantle. The first higher mode Rayleigh
wave in the oceanic environment is in a sense analogous to the
fundamental-mode wave on the continent (Harmon et al. 2007; Yao
et al. 2011; Takeo et al. 2013). For these reasons, we finally utilize
only the dominating periods of the fundamental mode Love and the
first higher mode Rayleigh waves in our ambient noise tomography.
These two types of surface waves are observed only in the hori-
zontal components of our OBS data. Due to the short periods band
of our dispersion data and the large difference in depth range of
sensitivity between those two types of surface waves (Fig. 9), we
chose to use joint inversion without considering the ‘Rayleigh–Love
discrepancy’ caused by radial anisotropy (e.g. Feng & Ritzwoller
2019). In addition, compared with using only the vertical compo-
nent as studied by Ryberg et al. (2017), the joint inversion of the
fundamental mode Love and first higher mode Rayleigh waves can
obtain a more reliable/constrained and deeper-reaching (now up to
25 km depth) shear (wave) velocity structure beneath the study area.
4.2 Regional crust and uppermost mantle structure
It is difficult to obtain the sharp discontinuity like the crust–mantle
boundary (Moho) by surface wave inversion, therefore we can
only get rough depth estimates of the Moho in this work. In our
1-D velocity profiles (Fig. 10), the velocity changes dramatically at
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depths shallower than ∼10 km. From the cross-sections through the
3-D model (Fig. 12), it also can be seen that at the depth greater
than ∼9 km, the velocity change is no longer significant. Therefore,
we assume that the crustal thickness in this area is about 7±2 km
after subtracting the thickness of oceanic water layer, which is in
accordance with the results of receiver-function analysis (Geissler
et al. 2017).
The crustal age of this region is ∼10–30 Ma (Müller et al.
2008) and the normal average thickness of the Atlantic Ocean is
6.97 ± 0.57 km (White et al. 1992). If there is strong mantle plume
directly under the whole region influencing also the magmatic pro-
duction at the mid-ocean spreading center, the crust may be thick-
ened due to the plume–ridge interaction. However, already Geissler
et al. (2017) measured the crustal thickness to ∼5.5–7.5 km, which
should be the normal crustal thickness. Our observations also show
that there is no obvious crustal thickening in the entire region, and
there is only a low-velocity crustal anomaly underneath and close
to the volcanic islands. This proofs that the oceanic crustal struc-
ture around the volcanic area is affected only locally by the mantle
plume and not regionally. In the cross-sections (Fig. 12), we inter-
pret the shallow low-velocity anomaly L1 (above ∼6 km) as related
to the volcanic edifices constructed by volcanic activity onto the
pre-existing oceanic crust (Fig. 13).
As shown in Fig. 10, our regional 1-D shear velocities away
from the islands show a good agreement with the average shear
velocity model of equatorial MAR (Harmon et al. 2020; Saikia
et al. 2021), which represent a fast lithosphere. Their model also
shows the boundary between crust and upper mantle at the depth of
∼10 km. For our case, we thus draw a velocity contour of 4.4 km s−1
to indicate roughly the Moho as well as the low-velocity zone in the
mantle in Figs 12 and 13 for interpretation.
4.3 Magmatic plumbing system in the uppermost mantle
beneath TdC archipelago
From the regional 1-D profiles (Fig. 10) and cross-sections (Fig. 12),
we image a shallow conduit of low shear velocity underneath the
volcanic islands (anomaly L2). We observe that the low-velocity

Figure 11. Horizontal slices of velocity perturbation relative to the average Vs model at different depths. The average velocities and depths are shown in the
top left corner.
conduit L2 extends into the upper mantle down to at least 25 km
depth, with a diameter of ∼100 km in the east–west direction and a
narrower width of ∼70 km in the north–south direction. We interpret
the reduced shear velocities as related to the presence of melts.
Reduced seismic velocities were also inferred by 1-D modelling
of receiver functions (Geissler et al. 2017; Weit et al. 2017), see
Fig. 13. Petrologic and geochemical studies of magmatic rocks
suggested magma storage and crystallization at depths of about 24–
36 km, and the melting depth with its base at 80–100 km and a top
at 60 km (Gibson et al. 2005; Weit et al. 2017).
Deep magmatic plumbing system were previously imaged, both
in continental and oceanic setting by a variety of geophysical meth-
ods, for example, seismicity (El Hierro, Canary Islands–González
et al. 2013); local earthquake tomography (Kamchatka, Russia–
Koulakov et al. 2017, Mayotte, Comoros Islands–Foix et al. 2021),
magnetotellurics (Tongariro, New Zealand–Hill et al. 2015) and
ambient noise (Mount St. Helens, USA–Wang et al. 2017, Katmai,
OBS ambient seismic noise 1287
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Alaska–Bai et al. 2021). However, still it is very challenging, since
not always all methods provide concurring results, as it is also the
case for the deeper upper-mantle structure beneath the Tristan da
Cunha region that was studied by magnetotellurics and teleseis-
mic earthquake tomography (e.g. Baba et al. 2017; Schlömer et al.
2017). Since those studies focus on the deeper structure (>50 km)
and have limited lateral resolution (>200 km) at shallower part of
this region, more detailed shallow information might be missed in
both studies.
Combining our results (Fig. 12c) with the ones of the study
of magmatic system from Weit et al. (2017), we believe that the
volcanic islands of TdC archipelago and nearby seamounts share
the same primary magmatic plumbing system as show in Fig. 13,
causing the ongoing volcanic activity around the TdC. The TdC
main island formed ∼1.3 Ma ago (O’Connor and le Roex 1992),
and the South Atlantic mid-ocean ridge is spreading at a rate
of 3.2 cm yr−1 (Argus et al. 2011). Thus, this recent plumbing
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Figure 12. Vertical cross-sections of absolute Vs. The line on the top show the seafloor topography of the cross-section. Due to the variable seafloor topography,
the depth of velocity section starts from 4 km. (a) Slice at latitude = 37.40S. (b) Slice at longitude = 12.40 W. (c) SW–NE slice cross the island (d) the position
of three slices. The red dash circle marks the location of deeper Tristan conduit at depths greater than 50 km (Schlömer et al. 2017). The red solid circle marks
the location of the L2 conduit in the uppermost mantle at depth of 14 km. The black solid lines in each section represent the velocity contour of 4.4 km s−1 . N,
Nightingale island; R, Rockhopper Seamount and T, Tristan da Cunha island.

system exist since at least ∼1.3 Ma ago, and the position of vol-
canic activities around TdC should also be affected by eastward
drift of the oceanic crust and lithosphere of about 50 km. In fact,
a prominent seamount (Rockhopper Seamount) is indeed found at
∼50 km southwest of the main TdC island. The topographic section
of Fig. 12(c) clearly shows three islands/seamounts from northeast
to southwest, the sizes of which also seem to indicate different time
of formation. However, due to the lack of age data or samples for
all the islands/seamounts, the order of formation is still unknown.
The vertical slices (Fig. 12) show that the L2 low-velocity conduit
in the uppermost mantle is located at the southwest/west of the TdC
main island with the largest size instead of directly below. In our
view, the reason for this is the spreading of the mid-ocean ridge and
plate motion, causing the islands to drift towards northeast, together
with their volcanic edifices ontop of the crust (shallow low-velocity
anomaly L1). As shown in Fig. 12(c), the conduit L2 in the upper-
most mantle, interpreted as magmatic plumbing system, is closer
to the seamount/island (Rockhopper Seamount and Nightingale Is-
land) at the southwest. Therefore, the low-velocity anomaly shifts
slightly to southwest from the crust to the uppermost mantle. The
horizontal slices (Fig. 11) also show that the centre of low-velocity
anomaly shifts to southwest as depth increases from the crust to the
uppermost mantle. Since the ongoing volcanic activities around the
TdC archipelago are fed by this same existing magmatic plumbing
system located at the southwest side, we believe that the future lo-
cal volcanic activities will concentrate at the southwest/west of the
archipelago (see also Schlömer et al. 2017; Geissler et al. 2020).
4.4 Southwest upper-mantle anomaly
The upper-mantle low-velocity anomaly L3 is located partly beneath
the area of ‘western volcanic cones’ of Geissler et al. (2020). Also,
the 1-D regional shear velocity model (Fig. 10) hint at reduced
velocities in the uppermost mantle compared to the area northeast
of the islands. Unfortunately, the anomaly L3 and its extent could not
be imaged due to the limited extent of the seismological network.
Also, due to the missing of depth sensitivity, we cannot get the
velocity structure of the whole lithosphere/asthenosphere system.
Therefore, any interpretation has to be considered with cautions.
By teleseismic P-wave tomography, Schlömer et al. (2017) found a
deeper (>50 km) and larger (>200 km in diameter) Tristan plume
conduit in this region (Fig. 12d). Geissler et al. (2017) also observed
 OBS ambient seismic noise 1289

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Figure 13. Sketch to illustrate our interpretation. It is based on the cross-section in Fig. 12(c). The figure on the right is shear velocity mode under Nightingale
Island from receiver function which indicates two melt reservoirs in the uppermost mantle. Arrows indicate potential magma pathways. N, Nightingale island;
R, Rockhopper Seamount and T, Tristan da Cunha island.

indications of a deep-reaching plume at mid-mantle in the area. in the uppermost mantle that might be above the present head of
Bonadio et al. (2018) mentioned the main thermal anomaly may Tristan mantle plume located in the southwest of TdC.
be located closer to the MAR instead of directly beneath the TdC.
Celli et al. (2020) also found strongly decreased velocities in the
upper mantle between MAR and TdC, which could, in our view, AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
possibly represent the shallowest part (head) of the Tristan mantle
We thank the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and ‘Sen-
plume. We therefore speculate that the low-velocity anomaly L3 in
atskomission für Ozeanographie’ for funding SAMPLE (South At-
the uppermost mantle could be spatially related to the mantle plume
lantic Margin Processes and Links with onshore Evolution) Priority
underneath. L3 seems unlikely to be a consequence of shallow
Program 1375 (JE296/9–1, GE 1783/4–2). Also, we thank the mas-
causes less than 20 km depth since we find no abnormal crustal
ter Ralf Schmidt and the crew of Maria S. Merian. We thank the
structure (crustal thickness) in the southwest area. The actual deeper
DEPAS (Deutsche Geräte-Pool für amphibische Seismologie, ht
conduit seems to be offset to the west/southwest by ∼200 km from
tps://jlsrf.org/index.php/lsf/article/view/165) instrument pool. This
TdC as documented by (see also Schlömer et al. 2017). Actually,
study was also sponsored by China Scholarship Council (no.
the L2 is at the position where the top of the plume was expected
202006330084). We thank Wessel & Smith for the free use of GMT
by plate kinematic calculations, whereas L3 is directly above the
software. Most figures were plotted by GMT Open-source software
deeper lying imaged plume conduit. The anomaly L3 may represent
(https://www.generic-mapping-tools.org) and Obspy python Tool-
a new growing plumbing system since already several seamounts
box (http://obspy.org) was used for data processing. Furthermore,
could be mapped on the seafloor above it (Geissler et al. 2020).
we thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that
greatly improved the manuscript. The OBS data used for this study
are archived at Alfred Wegener Institute (www.awi.de) and can be
5 C O N C LU S I O N
requested from ’wolfram.geissler@awi.de’.
Analysing OBS data around TdC, we extracted the Green’s func-
tions of surface waves from three seismometer components and
separated different modes of Rayleigh surface waves on the radial D ATA AVA I L A B I L I T Y
components, which are different from the observations on the land,
The data used in this study are available upon request by contact with
as well as Love waves on the transverse components. We applied
’wolfram.geissler@awi.de’. The data of station TRIS are available
ambient noise tomography to obtain a 3-D shear velocity structure
at IRIS (https:/ds.iris.edu/mda/IU/TRIS/).
in this region, using the phase velocities measured from the first
higher mode Rayleigh and fundamental mode Love waves. The re-
sults show that the crustal structure and thickness is normal in most
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S U P P O RT I N G I N F O R M AT I O N
Supplementary data are available at GJ I online.
Figure S1. PPSD for the entire deployment for the three seismome-
ters and one hydrophone components of OBS station TDC01. The
black lines are the mean PSD curves. The standard low and high
noise model (McNamara & Buland 2004) are also plotted.
Figure S2. An example of time correction (Hannemann et al.
2014). (a) The cross-correlation and daily time drifts before time
correction between land station NIG01 and OBS TDC14 (dis-
tance = 56.88 km), noted that NIG01 has no clock drift. The time
drift is linear. The jump at the middle (2013 July 1) is caused by
a leap second of GPS time system. (b) Same after time correction.
The clock drift is eliminated, and leap second was removed.
Figure S3. An earthquake (Mw = 7.1, 2012 March 25, latitude
= −35.2◦ and longitude = −72.217◦ ) recorded by all stations on
vertical components. We can observe strong and clear Rayleigh
waves.
Figure S4. Orientation results for all earthquakes following method
of Stachnik et al. (2012) in Fig. 2. (a) All the max peak correla-
tion coefficient and the peak angel of station TRIS. Each red dot
represents the results of one event. Blue dashed line indicates the
final orientation of TRIS. (b) Rose Chart show the directions of the
selected events (coefficient > 0.6). (b) and (d) Same but for TDC02.
(e) and (f) Same but for NIG01. (g) and (h) Same but for TDC22.
Figure S5. A test of different normalizations for the CCF from the
station pair TDC01–TDC02 following Ritzwoller & Feng (2019).
The left-hand table shows different combination of normalization.
The diagrams in the middle and right show the corresponding wave-
forms in two different period bands. The shade parts indicate the
trailing noise used to calculate SNRs in Table S2.
Figure S6. Average models inverted using different start models
with constant upper-mantle shear velocity. Black dashed line is
shear velocity model of equatorial MAR from Saikia et al. (2021).
1292 H. Zhang et al.

Figure S7. A failure example of measuring the phase veloc- Table S3. Modified AK135 model for the reference dispersion
ity dispersion (Ekström et al. 2009) from fundamental mode curves.
Rayleigh waves between OBS TDC01 and OBS TDC02 (dis- Table S4. Average velocity model in our study region.
tance = 87.03 km), similar as Fig. 4 shows. However, the potential
Please note: Oxford University Press is not responsible for the con-
phase velocities are too close to pick the right curve.
tent or functionality of any supporting materials supplied by the
Table S1. Location, orientation and skew of stations.
authors. Any queries (other than missing material) should be di-
Table S2. SNR suing trailing noise for Fig. S4 for different normal-
rected to the corresponding author for the paper.
ization test in two period bands.

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