Up-to-fivefold reverberating waves through the Earth's center and distinctly anisotropic innermost inner core.

ABSTRACT: Probing the Earth's center is critical for understanding planetary formation and evolution. However, geophysical inferences have been challenging due to the lack of seismological probes sensitive to the Earth's center. Here, by stacking waveforms recorded by a growing number of global seismic stations, we observe up-to-fivefold reverberating waves from selected earthquakes along the Earth's diameter. Differential travel times of these exotic arrival pairs, hitherto unreported in seismological literature, complement and improve currently available information. The inferred transversely isotropic inner-core model contains a ~650-km thick innermost ball with P-wave speeds ~4% slower at ~50° from the Earth's rotation axis. In contrast, the inner core's outer shell displays much weaker anisotro

SUBMITTER: Pham TS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9944935 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature