Rudolph, who studies geological fluid mechanics, plans to use the 3D mantle representation in his own research to model mantle flows. Members of the team were able to show that the lower parts of the upwellings have a different, denser composition than the upper parts, which allows them to last for hundreds of millions of years instead of being transient features, said Moulik. For example, there has been some debate among geologists about the structure of rare, thousands-of-kilometers-wide mantle upwellings. ![]() In crunching the data, the team has already made new discoveries about the mantle. “And I think the fact that this has taken so long to come to maturity really reflects the monumental nature of the undertaking,” he said. Max Rudolph, an assistant professor in the University of California, Davis’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, agreed that community involvement from deep-Earth researchers around the world makes this project stand out. “Incorporating all of these diverse constraints and the broad expertise in the community is a challenge because there are substantial differences in techniques,” said Moulik, who stressed that it was “remarkable” how much data-and time-other deep-Earth researchers contributed to the project. And they incorporated four different kinds of waves, each of which better reflects a different part of the mantle, to finely tune the model. The number of data points is staggering: Researchers received 227 million surface wave measurements. But what makes the REM-3D project unique is that the team collected data and feedback from geologists and other scientists around the world. ![]() This process, called seismic tomography, is not new. This chart outlines the four prongs (data, theory, model, and community) and underlying tenets of the 3D reference Earth model (REM-3D) project.
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