By Steve Drury First PUBLISHED ON March 31, 2022

The World-Wide Standardised Seismograph Network (WWSSN) records the arrivals of waves generated by earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s interior. There are two types of these body waves: S- or shear waves that move matter at right angles to their direction of movement; compressional or P-waves that are a little like sound waves as materials are compressed and expanded along the direction of movement. Like sound, P-waves can travel through solids, liquids and gases. Since liquids and gases are non-rigid they cannot sustain shearing, so S-waves only travel through the solid Earth’s mantle but not its liquid outer core. However, their speed is partly controlled by rock rigidity, which depends on the temperature of the mantle; the hotter the lower the mantle’s rigidity.

Analysis of the S-wave arrival times throughout the WWSSN from many individual earthquakes enables seismologists to make 3-D maps of how S-wave speeds vary throughout the mantle and, by proxy, the variation of mantle rigidity with depth. This is known as seismic tomography, which since the late 1990s has revolutionised our understanding of mantle plumes and subduction zones, and also the overall structure of the deep mantle. In particular, seismic tomography has revealed two huge, blob-like masses above the core-mantle boundary that show anomalously low S-wave speeds, one beneath the Pacific Ocean and another at about the antipode beneath Africa: by far the largest structures in the deep mantle. They are known as ‘large low-shear-wave-velocity provinces’ (LLSVPs) and until recently they have remained the enigmatic focus of much speculation around two broad hypotheses: ‘graveyards’ for plates subducted throughout Earth history; or remnants of the magma ocean thought to have formed when another protoplanet impacted with the early Earth to create the Moon about 4.4 billion years ago.

Qian Yuan and Mingming Li of Arizona State University, USA have tried to improve understanding of the shapes of the two massive blobs (Yuan, Q. & Li, M. 2022. Instability of the African large low-shear-wave-velocity province due to its low intrinsic density. Nature Geoscience, v. 15  DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-00908-3) using advanced geodynamic modelling of the seismic tomography. Their work reveals that the Pacific LLSVP extends between 500 to 800 km above the core-mantle boundary. Yet that beneath Africa reaches almost 1000 km higher, at 1300 to 1500 km. Both of them are less rigid and therefore hotter than the surrounding mantle. In order to be stable they must be considerably denser than the rest of the mantle surrounding them. But, because it reaches much higher above the core, the African LLSVP is probably less dense than the Pacific one. A lower density suggests two things: the African blob may be less stable; the two blobs may have different compositions and origins.

Both the Pacific Ocean floor and the African continent are littered with volcanic rocks that formed above mantle plumes. The volcanic geochemistry above the two LLSVPs differs. African samples show signs of a source enriched by material from upper continental crust, whereas those from the Pacific do not. Yuan and Li suggest that the enrichment supports the ‘plate graveyard’ hypothesis for the African blob and a different history beneath the Pacific. The 3-D tomography beneath Africa (see above) shows great complexity, perhaps reflecting the less stable nature of the LLSVP. Interestingly, 80 % of the pipe-like African kimberlite intrusions that have brought diamonds up from mantle depths over that last 320 Ma formed above the blob.

But why are there just two such huge blobs of anomalous material that lie on opposite sides of the Earth rather than a continuous anomaly or lots of smaller ones? The subduction graveyard hypothesis is compatible with the last two distributions. In a 2021 conference presentation the authors suggest from computer simulations that the two blobs may have originated at the time of the Moon’s formation after a planetary collision (Yuan, Q. et al. 2021. Giant impact origin for the large low shear velocity provinces. Abstracts for the 52^nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference: Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston). Specifically, they suggest that the LLSVPs originated from the mantle of the other planet (Theia) after its near complete destruction and melting, which sank without mixing through the magma ocean formed by the stupendous collision. Yet, so far, no geochemists have been bold enough to suggest that there are volcanic rocks of any age that reveal truly exotic compositions inherited from deep mantle material with such an origin. If Theia’s mantle was dense enough to settle through that of the Earth when both were molten, it would be sufficiently anomalous in its chemistry for signs to show up in any melts derived from it. There again, because of a high density it may never have risen in plumes to source any magma that reached the Earth’s surface …

If you’d like to read more of Steve’s blog….. https://earthlogs.org/homepage/

Many thanks to Steve Drury for permission to republish his article and to Bernie Bell for sending it into The Orkney News