CSEDI Collaborative Research: Investigation of Thermo-Chemical Heterogeneity in the Deep Mantle

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9905779Hager The investigators propose to carry out a collaborative, multidisciplinary study of proposed compositional stratification in the lowermost ~1200 kilometers of Earth's mantle. The investigators hypothesize that the existence of compositionally distinct regions can reconcile observational constraints from seismological, geochemical, heat flow, and other geophysical observations into a unified model of the dynamics of the deep mantle. Preliminary numerical models imply that a hot abyssal layer of material that is intrinsically about 5% more dense than the overlying mantle is dynamically stable, though its surface develops hundreds of kilometers of topography. The proposed work uses numerical models of thermochemical convection in 2-D and 3-D, seismological modeling of structure in the deep mantle, and calculations of model seismic velocities and other geophysical observables resulting from the numerical experiments to test this idea.