Publication Date:
1999-03-19
Description:
Tomographic imaging indicates that slabs of subducted lithosphere can sink deep into Earth's lower mantle. The view that convective flow is stratified at 660-kilometer depth and preserves a relatively pristine lower mantle is therefore not tenable. However, a range of geophysical evidence indicates that compositionally distinct, hence convectively isolated, mantle domains may exist in the bottom 1000 kilometers of the mantle. Survival of these domains, which are perhaps related to local iron enrichment and silicate-to-oxide transformations, implies that mantle convection is more complex than envisaged by conventional end-member flow models.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉van der Hilst RD -- Karason -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1999 Mar 19;283(5409):1885-8.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10082455" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
