The type of collision between the European and the Adriatic plates in the easternmost Alps is one of the most interesting questions regarding the Alpine evolution. Tectonic processes such as compression, escape and uplift are interconnected and shape this area. We can understand these ongoing processes better, if we look for signs of the deformation within the Earth's deep crust of the region. By collecting records from permanent and temporary seismic networks, we assemble a receiver function dataset, and analyze it with the aim of giving new insights on the structure of the lower crust and of the shallow portion of the upper mantle, which are inaccessible to direct observation. Imaging is accomplished by performing common conversion depth stacks along three profiles that crosscut the Eastern Alpine orogen, and allow isolating features consistently persistent in the area. The study shows a moderately flat Moho underlying a seismically anisotropic middle-lower crust from the Southern Alps to the Austroalpine nappes. The spatial progression of anisotropic axes reflects the orientation of the relative motion and of the stress field detected at the surface. These observations suggest that distributed deformation is due to the effect of the Alpine indentation. In the shallow upper mantle right below the Moho interface, a further anisotropic layer is recognized, extended from the Bohemian Massif to the Northern Calcareous Alps.

Frequency-dependent Love and Shida numbers, which characterize the Earth response to the tidal forces, were estimated in a global adjustment of all suitable geodetic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) sessions from 1984.0 to 2011.0. Several solutions were carried out to determine the Love and Shida numbers for the tidal constituents at periods in the diurnal band and in the long-period band in addition to values of the Love and Shida numbers common for all tides of degree two. Adding up all twelve diurnal tidal waves that were estimated, the total differences in displacement with respect to the theoretical conventional values of the Love and Shida numbers calculated from an Earth model reach 1.73 ± 0.29 mm in radial direction and 1.15 ± 0.15 mm in the transverse plane. The difference in the radial deformation following from the estimates of the zonal Love numbers is largest for the semi-annual tide with 1.07 ± 0.19 mm.