Faulting and hydration of the upper crust of the SW Okinawa Trough during continental rifting: Evidence from seafloor compliance inversion

The elastic response of seafloor to ocean gravity wave loading, or seafloor compliance, provides a constraint on the elastic properties of the crust. We measured seafloor compliance at three ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) sites around Taiwan—two in the southwestern (SW) Okinawa Trough and one on the Ryukyu arc—and performed inversion for crustal structures beneath them. Models best fitting the data demonstrate a decrease in upper crustal shear velocity and an increase in the compressional/shear velocity ratio from the arc site to the trough sites with increasing amount of back‐arc extension. This variation suggests that the upper continental crust is highly faulted and hydrated during rifting of the Eurasian lithosphere.