Gravity Explorer Mission Still Unearthing Hidden Secrets About Our Planet
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Gravity Explorer Mission Still Unearthing Hidden Secrets About Our Planet:
New research published in Geophysical Journal International describes how scientists generated a new model of the lithosphere using the joint power of GOCE[*] gravity data and seismological observations combined with petrological data, which comes from the study of rocks brought to the surface and from laboratories where the extreme pressures and temperatures of Earth's interior are replicated.
Javier Fullea, from Complutense University of Madrid and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and also co-author of the paper, said, "Earlier global models of the crust or lithosphere suffered from limited resolution or were based on a single method or dataset.
"Only recently available models were able to combine multiple geophysical data, but they were often only on regional scales or they were limited by how the different data are integrated.
"For the first time, we've been able to create a new model that combines global-scale multiple terrestrial and GOCE satellite datasets in a joint inversion that describes the actual temperature and composition of mantle rocks."
Jesse Reusen, from Delft University of Technology, added, "This novel model provides an image of the present-day composition and thermal structure of the upper mantle that can be used to estimate the viscosity. In fact, it has already been used to estimate the remaining post-glacial uplift - or the rise of the land after the removal of weight of the ice - following the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet in Canada, improving our understanding of interactions between the cryosphere and the solid Earth. This research was published last year in the Journal of Geophysical Research."
The new model produced in ESA's 3D Earth study shows for the first time how dissimilar the sub-lithospheric mantle is beneath different oceans, and provides insight as to how the morphology and spreading rates of mid-oceanic ridges may be connected with the deep chemical and thermal structure.
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