[1] The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission was launched in March 2002 and has an expected 5-year lifetime. One potential application of GRACE measurements of time-variable gravity will be to isolate the postglacial rebound signal, which can then be used to estimate the Earth’s viscosity structure. In this paper we present a sensitivity analysis of simulated GRACE ...

rf method is now a well-known tool for studying crustal and upper mantle structure when such a complete data set is available. we compute p receiver functions to investigate the upper mantle discontinuity beneath the northwest of iran. we selected data from teleseismic events (mb ? 5.5, 30 ?>? > 95?) recorded from 1995 to 2008 at 8 three component short period stations from tabriz telemetry sei...

Introduction: It is generally assumed that the abundances of the siderophile elements in the terrestrial planet’s mantle are the result of core formation. High pressure experimental metal–silicate partitioning data for Ni, Co, V, Cr, Nb, Mn and Mo etc. were used to investigate the geochemical consequences of a range of models for core formation on Earth and the most popular model is a “deep mag...

Mantle convection--the creeping flow of solid mantle rock driven by buoyancy forces predominantly arising from thermal expansion--is the accepted paradigm for explaining the internal geological activity of the Earth. Its theoretical understanding is largely based on the simple concept of RayleighB6nard convection. Here, one assumes a fluid layer of infinite lateral extent and constant material ...

Since the discovery of plate tectonics, geophysicists have sought to understand the dynamic system driving the evolution of the earth, both at the surface and in the deep interior. While the deep earth contains far fewer phases than the crust, the inaccessibility of the mantle and core present a different challenge: unraveling the physical behavior of materials at conditions beyond our intuitiv...

Hot–spots are anomalous regions of magmatism that cannot be directly associated with plate tectonic processes. They are widely regarded as the surface expression of hot, columnar plumes, upwelling from deep within Earth’s 2900–km thick mantle. Hot–spots have variable life–spans, magmatic productivity and fixity. This suggests that a wide– range of upwelling structures co–exist within Earth’s ma...

Samarium-neodymium isotope data for six lunar basalts show that the bulk Moon has a 142Nd/144Nd ratio that is indistinguishable from that of chondritic meteorites but is 20 parts per million less than most samples from Earth. The Sm/Nd formation interval of the lunar mantle from these data is 215(-21)(+23) million years after the onset of solar system condensation. Because both Earth and the Mo...

Knowledge of the amount and distribution of radiogenic heating in the mantle is crucial for understanding the dynamics of the Earth, including its thermal evolution, the style and planform of mantle convection, and the energetics of the core. Although the flux of heat from the surface of the planet is robustly estimated, the contributions of radiogenic heating and secular cooling remain poorly ...

In the first decade of this century physicists discovered that the atom had a massive central core which they called a nucleus, and geophysicists discovered that the earth had a massive central nucleus which they called a core. The study of the interior of the atom, the smallest building block of matter, and the study of the interior of the earth, the largest piece of matter to which man has di...

A parameterized model of mantle convection that includes the effects of volatile exchange between the mantle and the surface reservoir and the softening of the mantle by the dissolved volatiles is used to study the thermal history of the Earth. It is assumed that the activation energy for temperature-dependent solid-state creep is a linear function of weight percent of volatiles. The mantle deg...