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Three-dimensional models of Earth’s seismic structure can be used to identify temperature-dependent phenomena, including mineralogical phase and spin transformations, that are obscured in 1-D spherical averages. Full-waveform tomography maps seismic wave-speeds inside the Earth in three dimensions, at a higher resolution than classical methods. By providing absolute wave speeds (rather than perturbations) and simultaneously constraining bulk and shear wave speeds over the same frequency range, it becomes feasible to distinguish variations in temperature from changes in composition or spin state. We present a quantitative joint interpretation of bulk and shear wave speeds in the lower mantle, using a recently published full-waveform tomography model. At all depths the diversity of wave speeds cannot be explained by an isochemical mantle. Between 1000 and 2500 km depth, hypothetical mantle models containing an electronic spin crossover in ferropericlase provide a significantly better fit to the wave-speed distributions, as well as more realistic temperatures and silica contents, than models without a spin crossover. Below 2500 km, wave speed distributions are explained by an enrichment in silica towards the core-mantle boundary. This silica enrichment may represent the fractionated remains of an ancient basal magma ocean.

 

Although observation of gravity perturbations induced by earthquakes is possible, simulation of seismic wave propagation in a self-gravitating, rotating Earth model with 3-D heterogeneity is challenging due to the numerical complexities associated with the unbounded Poisson/Laplace equation that governs gravity perturbations. Therefore, gravity perturbations are generally omitted, and only the background gravity is taken into account using the so-called Cowling approximation. However, gravity perturbations may be significant for large earthquakes (Mw ≥ 6.0) and long-period responses.

In this study, we develop a time-domain solver based on the spectral-infinite-element approach, which combines the spectral element method inside the Earth domain with a mapped-infinite-element method in the infinite space outside. This combination allows us to solve the complete, coupled momentum-gravitational equations in a fully discretized domain while accommodating complex 3-D Earth models. We compute displacement and gravity perturbations considering various Earth models, including Preliminary Reference Earth Model and S40RTS and conduct comprehensive benchmarks of our method against the spherical harmonics normal-mode approach and the direct radial integration method. Our 3-D simulations accommodate topography, bathymetry, rotation, ellipticity and oceans. Results show that our technique is accurate and stable for long simulations. Our method provides a new scope for incorporating earthquake-induced gravity perturbations into source and adjoint tomographic inversions.

 

We use source-encoded waveform inversion to image Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. The encoding method is based on measurements of Laplace coefficients of stationary wavefields. By assigning to each event a unique frequency, we compute Fréchet derivatives for all events simultaneously based on one ‘super’ forward and one ‘super’ adjoint simulation for a small fraction of the computational cost of classical waveform inversion with the same data set. No cross-talk noise is introduced in the process, and the method does not require all events to be recorded by all stations. Starting from global model GLAD_M25, we performed 100 conjugate gradient iterations using a data set consisting of 786 earthquakes recorded by 9846 stations. Synthetic inversion tests show that we achieve good convergence based on this data set, and we see a consistent misfit reduction during the inversion. The new model, named SE100, has much higher spatial resolution than GLAD_M25, revealing details of the Yellowstone and Iceland hotspots, subduction beneath the Western United States and the upper mantle structure beneath the Arctic Ocean.

 

For over 40 yr, the global centroid-moment tensor (GCMT) project has determined location and source parameters for globally recorded earthquakes larger than magnitude 5.0. The GCMT database remains a trusted staple for the geophysical community. Its point-source moment-tensor solutions are the result of inversions that model long-period observed seismic waveforms via normal-mode summation for a 1-D reference earth model, augmented by path corrections to capture 3-D variations in surface wave phase speeds, and to account for crustal structure. While this methodology remains essentially unchanged for the ongoing GCMT catalogue, source inversions based on waveform modelling in low-resolution 3-D earth models have revealed small but persistent biases in the standard modelling approach. Keeping pace with the increased capacity and demands of global tomography requires a revised catalogue of centroid-moment tensors (CMT), automatically and reproducibly computed using Green's functions from a state-of-the-art 3-D earth model. In this paper, we modify the current procedure for the full-waveform inversion of seismic traces for the six moment-tensor parameters, centroid latitude, longitude, depth and centroid time of global earthquakes. We take the GCMT solutions as a point of departure but update them to account for the effects of a heterogeneous earth, using the global 3-D wave speed model GLAD-M25. We generate synthetic seismograms from Green's functions computed by the spectral-element method in the 3-D model, select observed seismic data and remove their instrument response, process synthetic and observed data, select segments of observed and synthetic data based on similarity, and invert for new model parameters of the earthquake’s centroid location, time and moment tensor. The events in our new, preliminary database containing 9382 global event solutions, called CMT3D for ‘3-D centroid-moment tensors’, are on average 4 km shallower, about 1 s earlier, about 5 per cent larger in scalar moment, and more double-couple in nature than in the GCMT catalogue. We discuss in detail the geographical and statistical distributions of the updated solutions, and place them in the context of earlier work. We plan to disseminate our CMT3D solutions via the online ShakeMovie platform.

 

SUMMARY The uneven distribution of earthquakes and stations in seismic tomography leads to slower convergence of nonlinear inversions and spatial bias in inversion results. Including dense regional arrays, such as USArray or Hi-Net, in global tomography causes severe convergence and spatial bias problems, against which conventional pre-conditioning schemes are ineffective. To save computational cost and reduce model bias, we propose a new strategy based on a geographical weighting of sources and receivers. Unlike approaches based on ray density or the Voronoi tessellation, this method scales to large full-waveform inversion problems and avoids instabilities at the edges of dense receiver or source clusters. We validate our strategy using a 2-D global waveform inversion test and show that the new weighting scheme leads to a nearly twofold reduction in model error and much faster convergence relative to a conventionally pre-conditioned inversion. We implement this geographical weighting strategy for global adjoint tomography.