Mapping the chemistry of the Earth’s mantle

(© Image: Pexels) - The Earth's mantle makes up about 85% of the Earth's volume and is made of solid rock. But what rock types is the mantle exactly made of, and how are they distributed throughout the mantle? An international team of researchers - including UT researcher Dr Juan Carlos Afonso (Faculty of ITC) - have been able to reveal the existence of pockets of rocks with abnormal properties that suggest that they were once created at the surface, transported to vast depths along subduction zones, and accumulated at specific depths inside the Earth's mantle. There is no direct access to the deep Earth. Insights into the composition of the mantle, necessary to understand planetary evolution, rely on indirect observations. For example, seismologists look at specific features of seismic waves to unravel the type of material the waves passed through. In a recent study published in the prestigious journal PNAS, Dr Juan Carlos Afonso - a geophysicist - and collaborators used computer simulations and a vast amount of seismic data to reveal the fate of oceanic crust when it is subducted deep into the mantle. Anomalous accumulation of basaltic pockets.