Earth science: trouble under Tonga?
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George Helffrich
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Seismological constraints on core composition from Fe-O-S liquid immiscibility.
Earth's core is composed primarily of iron (Fe) with about 10% by weight of lighter elements. The lighter elements are progressively enriched in the liquid outer core as the core cools and the inner core crystallizes. Thermodynamic modeling of Fe-O-S liquids shows that immiscible liquids can exist at outer-core pressures (136 to 330 gigapascals) at temperatures below 5200 kelvin and lead to layering in the outer core if the concentrations of the lighter elements are high enough. We found no evidence for layering in the outer core in the travel times and wave forms of P4KP seismic waves that reflect internally in the core. The absence of layers therefore constrains outer-core compositions in the Fe-O-S system to be no richer than 6 +/- 1 weight % (wt %) O and 2 to 15 wt % S. A single core liquid composition of 10.5 +/- 3.5 wt % S and 1.5 +/- 1.5 wt % O is compatible with wave speeds and densities throughout the outer core.
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Chemical and seismological constraints on mantle heterogeneity.
Recent seismological studies that use scattered waves to detect heterogeneities in the mantle reveal the presence of a small, distributed elastic heterogeneity in the lower mantle which does not appear to be thermal in nature. The characteristic size of these heterogeneities appears to be ca. 8 km, suggesting that they represent subducted recycled oceanic crust. With this stimulus, old ideas that the mantle is heterogeneous in structure, rather than stratified, are reinterpreted and a simple, end-member model for the heterogeneity structure is proposed. The volumetrically largest components in the model are recycled oceanic crust, which contains the heat-producing elements, and mantle depleted of these and other incompatible trace elements. About 10% of the mantle's mass is made up of recycled oceanic crust, which is associated with the observed small-scale seismic heterogeneity. The way this heterogeneity is distributed is in convectively stretched and thinned bodies ranging downwards in size from 8 km. With the present techniques to detect small bodies through scattering, only ca. 55% of the mantle's small-scale heterogeneities are detectable seismically.
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