Princeton, NJ - According to Catherine Zandonella of the Office of the Dean for Research, "Princeton geosciences professor Jeroen Tromp and his team have embarked on an ambitious project to use earthquakes to map the Earth's entire mantle, the semisolid rock that stretches to a depth of 1,800 miles, about halfway down to the planet's center and about 300 times deeper than humans have drilled. For the task, his team will use one of the world's fastest supercomputers, Titan, which can perform more than 20 quadrillion calculations per second and is located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee."
"Seismology is changing at a fundamental level due to advances in computing power," said Tromp, who earned his Ph.D. in geology from Princeton and is Princeton's Blair Professor of Geology, professor of applied and computational mathematics, and associate director of the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. "If someone had told me what seismology would look like 20 years from when I graduated from Princeton in 1992, I would have never believed it."
For the project, Tromp will use seismic waves from roughly 3,000 quakes of magnitude 5.5 and greater, recorded at thousands of seismographic stations worldwide and distributed via the National Science Foundation's Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. These stations make recordings, or seismograms, that detail the movement produced by seismic waves, which typically travel at speeds of several miles per second and last several minutes.
"The ultimate goal is a 3-D map on a global scale," said Tromp, who expects to have preliminary results at the end of this year. "We are specifically interested in the structure of mantle upwellings and plumes," he said, "but much of it will be investigating the images for unusual features."
For the full article: http://www.princeton.edu/research/news/features/a/?id=14671
For the project, Tromp will use seismic waves from roughly 3,000 quakes of magnitude 5.5 and greater, recorded at thousands of seismographic stations worldwide and distributed via the National Science Foundation's Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. These stations make recordings, or seismograms, that detail the movement produced by seismic waves, which typically travel at speeds of several miles per second and last several minutes.
"The ultimate goal is a 3-D map on a global scale," said Tromp, who expects to have preliminary results at the end of this year. "We are specifically interested in the structure of mantle upwellings and plumes," he said, "but much of it will be investigating the images for unusual features."
For the full article: http://www.princeton.edu/research/news/features/a/?id=14671