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Report it! During the past 7 days, Bolivia was shaken by 5 quakes of magnitude 4. Biggest quake: 4. Read More. Filter by magnitude: all. Show interactive Map. Showing quakes magnitude 0. Estimated combined seismic energy released: 1. Show more. Depth and magnitude of quakes versus time plot. In this study, we investigated scattered seismic waves traveling inside the Earth to constrain the roughness of the Earth's km boundary.
The researchers were surprised by just how rough that boundary is -- rougher than the surface layer that we all live on. Their statistical model didn't allow for precise height determinations, but there's a chance that these mountains are bigger than anything on the surface of the Earth. The roughness wasn't equally distributed, either; just as the crust's surface has smooth ocean floors and massive mountains, the km boundary has rough areas and smooth patches.
The researchers also examined a layer kilometers miles down, at the top of the mid-mantle "transition zone," and they did not find similar roughness. Their findings suggest that as earthquakes occur and seismic instruments become more sophisticated and expand into new areas, we will continue to detect new small-scale signals which reveal new properties of Earth's layers. The presence of roughness on the km boundary has significant implications for understanding how our planet formed and continues to function.
That layer divides the mantle, which makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume, into its upper and lower sections. For years, geoscientists have debated just how important that boundary is.
In particular, they have investigated how heat travels through the mantle -- whether hot rocks are carried smoothly from the core-mantle boundary almost 2, miles down all the way up to the top of the mantle, or whether that transfer is interrupted at this layer. Some geochemical and mineralogical evidence suggests that the upper and lower mantle are chemically different, which supports the idea that the two sections don't mix thermally or physically.
Other observations suggest no chemical difference between the upper and lower mantle, leading some to argue for what's called a "well-mixed mantle," with both the upper and lower mantle participating in the same heat-transfer cycle.
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