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New Convection Models

For almost 50 years, scientists have debated whether the heat transfer called convection occurs throughout the entire mantle at once -- creating a huge mixing pot of essentially the same stew -- or separately in the upper mantle, which extends from near the surface to about 660 kilometers in depth, and the lower mantle, from 660 to about 2,880 kilometers. The second scenario would mean that like oil and water, there are two chemically distinct sections of the mantle that almost never mix.

Using computer simulations and mountains of data to create a kind of CAT scan of the Earth, the researchers demonstrated that previous evidence for separate upper and lower mantles may be explained by certain goings-on in the very depths of the mantle -- an area about 1,000 kilometers from the molten core.

In this area, shifts in densities due to increased quantities of iron and silicon, partially offset by skyrocketing temperatures, may account for minute, previously unexplained differences in the composition of magmas. Researchers have long noticed these differences in the mid-ocean ridges and ocean islands, where, after being heated deep within the planet, the mantle reveals itself in volcanic eruptions.

On the basis of a wide range of evidence from geophysics and geo-chemistry, the researchers argue that a transition in the mantle's structure and composition occurs in the middle of the lower mantle at about a depth of 1,700 kilometers, and that elusive "reservoirs" of high radioactive heat production and distinctive chemical composition reside in the bottom 1,000 kilometers of the mantle.