EPSS Colloquium winter-2020

Earth’s mantle is a key component of the Earth system: its circulation drives plate tectonics, the long-term recycling of Earth’s volatiles, and as such, holds fundamental implications for the Earth’s surface environment. In order to understand this evolution, a key parameter of the mantle must be known, namely its buoyancy. In this talk, I will discuss how Earth’s body tide can provide fresh and independent constraints on deep mantle buoyancy through a newly developed technique called Tidal Tomography. This comes at a time when other interesting and exciting data sets sensitive to deep mantle buoyancy, e.g., Stoneley modes, have been brought to bear, and we will explore our conclusions in the context of other recent finds.