[iris-bulk] AGU Special Session DI07 on Earth's internal structure and interpretation

[Barbara Romanowicz]

Dear friends and colleagues,


Guy Masters, Goran Ekstrom and I are organizing a special session at AGU, under "SEDI":

DI07: "The Future of Imaging and Interpretation of Earth's Internal Structure"

the description of which you will find below. This session is cast broadly, to cover studies of the mantle and the core, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. This is an
opportunity to mark the progress made since the first paper on deep earth 3D structure by Dziewonski et al., 1977. We already have over 40 anticipated abstract submissions.

We would like to encourage you to contribute to the success of this session, by submitting an abstract in the spirit of Adam Dziewonski's broad vision of the subject. 

The deadline for submission of abstracts is September 10th. 

Regards

Barbara Romanowicz
Guy Masters
Goran Ekström
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Description of session DI07:

>From the development of seismic tomography over the last 25 years, we now have a good understanding of the first-order characteristics of the long-wavelength (~1,000-2,000 km) three-dimensional elastic structure of Earth's interior. It is tempting to 
interpret the large-scale features imaged throughout the mantle in terms of lateral variations in temperature. It is increasingly clear, however, that seismic images also chart compositional variations that are important for mantle dynamics. With the 
deployment, starting in the early 1980s, of high quality digital broadband seismic stations around the world, finer-scale imaging has become possible. Characterizing the sharpness of the heterogeneous structures deep inside the planet, and detecting and 
mapping small-scale heterogeneity, are the next steps. This presents several challenges: (1) extracting more information from seismograms than has traditionally been done. (2) overcoming the limitations of uneven sampling around the globe. 

New and exciting horizons have recently opened up, however, with increasing capabilities in theory and computation, acquisition of data from dense arrays, and corresponding processing techniques. Anisotropy and anelastic attenuation can now better 
characterized and provide additional information on flow directions, temperature variations and the presence of partial melting. 

As the images provided by seismologists become sharper, there is an increasing opportunity to work closely with other geoscientists - geochemists, geodynamicists and mineral physicists - to make the best of complementary constraints for the challenging 
'inverse problem' that the interior of our planet represents. We invite contributions addressing any of the present challenges towards the next generation of global mantle tomographic models and their interpretation.
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