Together with Barbara Romanowicz and Scott French at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, we have developed a new method for imaging the Earth’s interior at higher resolution. This method has yielded new images, published today in the journal Science, that reveal a previously unknown finger-like pattern of higher-than-average temperatures beneath the Earth’s oceans. The structure interacts with large-scale flow associated with motions of tectonic plates, and with small-scale flow associated with plumes rising beneath hotspot volcanoes like Hawai’i and Tahiti. Therefore, it represents an intermediate scale of convection in the Earth’s mantle. Read the full article here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/09/04/science.1241514.full
Read more about the model here: http://seismo.berkeley.edu/~sfrench/SEMum2/
The University of Maryland press release here: http://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/1222