Mantle Flow and Seismic Anisotropy

Seismic anisotropy records both the past and present deformation inside the solid Earth. In the mantle, seismic anisotropy is mainly attributed to the lattice preferred orientation (LPO) of mineral fabrics, caused by the shear deformation due to mantle flow. With a recently developed software package DRexS, we predict azimuthal seismic anisotropy at different depths based on mantle flow and generate synthetic shear wave splitting (SWS) measurements at Earth's surface. Our results provide a good match to both depth-dependent surface wave anisotropy and various land-based SWS records. See Hu et al. (2017).

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