[1] Geophysical and geological observations suggest that a degree-one mantle flow pattern, consisting of one upwelling and one downwelling, may have existed at some time in the mantles of Mars, the Moon, and perhaps even for the Earth during times of supercontinent formation. Simple fluid experiments utilizing isoviscous rheologies predict shorter wavelength flow patterns, and it is therefore i...

[1] Mantle density heterogeneities, imaged using seismic tomography, contain information about timedependent mantle flow and mantle structures that existed in the past. We model the history of mantle flow using a tomographic image of the mantle beneath southern Africa as an initial condition while reversing the direction of flow and analytically incorporating cooling plates as a boundary condit...

Convection in an isolated planet is characterized by narrow downwellings and broad updrafts--consequences of Archimedes' principle, the cooling required by the second law of thermodynamics, and the effect of compression on material properties. A mature cooling planet with a conductive low-viscosity core develops a thick insulating surface boundary layer with a thermal maximum, a subadiabatic in...

D′′ (Dee double prime), the lowermost layer of the Earth’s mantle, is the thermal boundary layer (TBL) of mantle convection immediately above the Earth’s liquid outer core. As the origin of upwelling of hot material and the destination of paleoslabs (downwelling cold slab remnants), D′′ plays a major role in the Earth’s evolution. D′′ beneath Central America and the Caribbean is of particular g...

D″ (Dee double prime), the lowermost layer of the Earth's mantle, is the thermal boundary layer (TBL) of mantle convection immediately above the Earth's liquid outer core. As the origin of upwelling of hot material and the destination of paleoslabs (downwelling cold slab remnants), D″ plays a major role in the Earth's evolution. D″ beneath Central America and the Caribbean is of particular geod...

A P-SV hybrid method is developed for calculating synthetic seismograms involving two-dimensional localized heterogeneous structures. The finite difference technique is applied in the heterogeneous region and generalized ray theory solutions from a seismic source are used in the finite difference initiation process. The seismic motions, after interacting with the heterogeneous structures, are p...

Analyses of the relative motion using hotspot tracks, age progressions and plate circuits, and of the absolute motion using paleolatitude data indicate that three major long-lived surface hotspots geographically within a very low velocity province (VLVP) at the base of the Earth's mantle, Tristan, Marion and Kerguelen, exhibit small relative motions (b9 mm/yr) in the past 80 Ma. The geochemical...

Continents, especially their Archean cores, are underlain by thick thermal boundary layers that have been largely isolated from the convecting mantle over billion-year timescales, far exceeding the life span of oceanic thermal boundary layers. This longevity is promoted by the fact that continents are underlain by highly melt-depleted peridotites, which result in a chemically distinct boundary ...

Stacks of global seismic data reveal the time and distance dependence of high-frequency (1-hertz) precursors to the seismic phase PKKP. Synthetic seismogram modeling shows that scattering from random small-scale topography at the PKKP core-mantle–boundary reflection point generates precursory arrivals similar to those seen in the data. Models with a root mean square core-mantle–boundary topogra...