Seismic tomography of the mantle
Tomografía sísmica del manto
- Date
- 1976-1984 · confidence medium
- Place
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Keiiti Aki, Adam Dziewonski and colleagues
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
By inverting thousands of earthquake arrival times and waveforms, Aki and colleagues (1976) and later Dziewonski and Woodhouse (1984) obtained three-dimensional images of the Earth's interior. They showed cold slabs sinking through the mantle and two large hot masses beneath Africa and the Pacific.
There are several pioneers: Aki, Christoffersson and Husebye (1976-1977) with P-wave tomography near the surface; Dziewonski, Hager and O'Connell (1977), and Woodhouse and Dziewonski (1984) for the global mantle. Attribution to a single group is debatable.
What it led to
- images of subducted slabs and mantle plumes
- convection models using real data