Earthquakes are more than just earthquakes. The waves generated by earthquakes act like a giant MRI machine and provide clues to what lies inside the planet.
Seismologists have developed methods to take wave signals from the networks of seismometers at the Earth's surface and reverse engineer features and characteristics of the medium they pass through.
For a long time, seismic waves were treated like light rays. Major discoveries about the Earth's interior were made because of this approximation. Ebru Bozdag is an assistant professor in the Geophysics Department at the Colorado School of Mines.
She said that we are at a stage where we need to avoid approximations and corrections in our techniques to construct models of the Earth's interior.
Bozdag was the lead author of the first full-waveform inversion model, GLAD-M15, based on full 3D wave simulations and 3D data sensitivities at the global scale. The model was created with the help of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, KAUST, and the University of Marseille, as well as the open-sourced 3D global wave propagation solver SPECFEM3D_GLOBE. The work was praised by the press. The GLAD-M25 came out in 2020 and brought features like subduction zones, mantle plumes, and hotspots into view for further discussions on mantle dynamics.
We showed the feasibility of using full 3D wave simulations and data sensitivities at the global scale in our 2016 and 2020 papers. She said that it was time to use better parameters to describe the physics of the Earth's interior.
The results of Bozdag's research were presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
She said that the difference from observation and simulation data is minimized iteratively.
The research is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and enabled by the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which is the 13th fastest in the world.
With access to public data from all around the world, and the power of our modeling tools, we have started approaching the continental-scale resolution in our global full wave inversion models.
Bozdag wants to give better constraints on the water content of the upper mantle. To accurately locate earthquakes and other seismic sources, you need to have high-resolution crustal and mantle models.
From the deepest oceans to outer space.
Bozdag's work is relevant to everyone. She is a member of the science team that model the interior of Mars in numerical simulations.
The first details of the Martian crust were published in Science in September of 2021. Bozdag is working with the InSight team to analyze the marsquake data and resolve the details of the planet's interior with the help of 3D wave simulations.
The lack of data in some parts of the Earth, specifically beneath the oceans, was put in perspective by the Mars work.
She is working on integrating data from emerging instruments into her models in order to address that. Scientists can use the data from these submarines to study the ocean.
The community has access to seismology.
Bozdag was part of a team that received a $3.2 million award from the National Science Foundation to create a computational platform for the seismology community.
The SCOPED project will establish a computing platform, supported by Frontera, that delivers data, computation, and services to the seismological community to promote education, innovation, and discovery.
SphGLLTools is a visualization tool for large seismic model files. The community can easily plot and share global adjoint tomography models. The toolbox in Computers and geosciences was described by the team.
Bozdag said they provide a full set of computational tools to visualize our global adjoint models.
Robin Reichlin, Director of the Geophysics Program at the National Science Foundation says that they have new, improved full-waveform models, tools to lower the bar for community data access and analysis, and a supercomputing-powered platform to enable seismologists to discover the mysteries of the Earth.
More information: Caio Ciardelli et al, SphGLLTools: A toolbox for visualization of large seismic model files based on 3D spectral-element meshes, Computers & Geosciences (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cageo.2021.105007The structure and thickness of the martian crust was reported by Knapmeyer-Endrun et al. There is a science.abf8966
SphGll Tools is on the website of the Ciceroardelli family.
Journal information: Science Citation: Planet-scale MRI: High resolution illumination of Earth's interior down to the planet's core (2022, March 29) retrieved 29 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-planet-scale-mri-high-resolution-illumination.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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