Deep Mantle Seismic Modeling and Imaging

Detailed seismic modeling and imaging of Earth's deep interior is providing key information about lower-mantle structures and processes, including heat flow across the core-mantle boundary, the configuration of mantle upwellings and downwellings, phase equilibria and transport properties of deep mantle materials, and mechanisms of core-mantle coupling. Multichannel seismic wave analysis methods that provide the highest-resolution deep mantle structural information include network waveform modeling and stacking, array processing, and 3D migrations of P- and S-wave seismograms. These methods detect and identify weak signals from structures that cannot be resolved by global seismic tomography. Some methods are adapted from oil exploration seismology, but all are constrained by the source and receiver distributions, long travel paths, and strong attenuation experienced by seismic waves that penetrate to the deep mantle. Large- and small-scale structures, with velocity variations ranging from a fraction of a percent to tens of percent, have been detected and are guiding geophysicists to new perspectives of thermochemical mantle convection and evolution.