'Dynamic duo' develops framework for Earth's inaccessible interior

The image is shown from space, centered over the Pacific Ocean, with a cut-away displaying anomalous heterogeneities in the mantle of the Earth: red and blue regions depict zones where... Click here for more information.

TEMPE, Ariz. – A new model of inner Earth constructed by Arizona State University researchers pulls past information and hypotheses into a coherent story to clarify mantle motion.

“The past maybe two or three years there have been a lot of papers in Science and Nature about the deep mantle from seismologists and mineral physicists and it’s getting really confusing because there are contradictions amongst the different papers,” says Ed Garnero, seismologist and an associate professor in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

“But we’ve discovered that there is a single framework that is compatible with all these different findings,” he adds.

Garnero partnered with geodynamicist and assistant professor Allen McNamara, also in the School of Earth and Space Exploration in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to synthesize the information for their paper to be published in the May 2 issue of Science.

“Our goal was to bring the latest seismological and dynamical results together to put some constraints on the different hypotheses we have for the mantle. If you Google ‘mantle’ you’ll see 20 different versions of what people are teaching,” explains McNamara.

According to the ASU scientists, all this recent research of the past few years fits into a single story. But what is that story" Is it a complicated and exceedingly idiosyncratic story or is it a straightforward simple framework"

“In my opinion,” explains Garnero, “it’s simple. It doesn’t really appeal to anything new; it just shows how all those things can fit together.”