The geophysical characteristic of the lower lithosphere and asthenosphere in the marginal zone of the East European Craton

Seismic P- and S-wave velocities of the lower lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere at the SW margin of the East European Craton in northern Poland were obtained with different seismic techniques: seismic refraction, P-residuals of the first arrivals from teleseismic earthquakes, P-wave receiver function, and inversion of the Rayleigh surface wave dispersion curves, the last two using data collected in the passive seismic experiment “13 BB star”. The uniform array consisted of 13 stations deployed in a 120 km in diameter area. Below the depth of 180–220 km a decrease of about 6% of the S-wave velocity is interpreted as a thermal gradient zone corresponding to a lithosphere–asthenosphere transition. The average mantle velocities down to a depth of 300 km beneath the array are relatively high, exceeding values for other Precambrian cratons by 0.1–0.2 km/s, and cannot be modeled by reasonable mantle peridotite compositions in the lithospheric part of the profile. We suggest that significant peridotite anisotropy could explain the misfit between measured and calculated seismic velocities in the lithosphere.