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Published December 2022 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

On the Origin of Small-Scale Seismic Scatters at 660-km Depth

Mao, Wei ORCID icon
Gurnis, Michael ORCID icon
Wu, Wenbo ORCID icon

Abstract

Strong small-scale seismic scatters (<10 km) have been recently observed at 660 km depth, but their origin remains uncertain. We systematically conduct both high-resolution 2-D geodynamic computations that include realistic thermodynamic properties, synthetic seismic waveforms, and insight from shallow seismic observations to explore their origin. We demonstrate that neither short-term subduction, nor long-term mechanical mantle mixing processes can produce sufficiently strong heterogeneities to explain the origin of such small-scale seismic scatters. Instead, the intrinsic heterogeneities inside the oceanic lithosphere which subducts into the mantle transition zone and the uppermost lower mantle can explain the observed short-wavelength scatter waves.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for careful reviews of the paper. This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation through EAR-2009935. The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. The authors are grateful to discussions during the Seismolab Deep Earth Seminar in Caltech, especially comments from Jennifer Jackson and Zhongwen Zhan. Data Availability Statement. Figures are drawn using the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT, www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt/). The hybrid SEM-DSM code is available at https://github.com/wenbowu-geo/SEM_DSM_hybrid. The thermodynamic computation code HeFESTo is available at https://github.com/stixrude/HeFESToRepository, Perple_X is available at https://www.perplex.ethz.ch. The mantle convection code Citcom is available at https://geodynamics.org/cig. All model input parameters are given in Table 1, and all data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19839763.v1.

Attached Files

Published - Geochem_Geophys_Geosyst_-_2022_-_Mao_-_On_the_Origin_of_Small‐Scale_Seismic_Scatters_at_660‐km_Depth.pdf

Supplemental Material - 2022gc010560-sup-0001-supporting_information_si-s01.docx

Files

Geochem_Geophys_Geosyst_-_2022_-_Mao_-_On_the_Origin_of_Small‐Scale_Seismic_Scatters_at_660‐km_Depth.pdf

Additional details

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August 22, 2023
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October 23, 2023