Something strange happens at 1.700 miles under your feet. Now we know why.

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Here’s what you will learn when you read this story:

  • More than a thousand miles from the surface, in the earth layer of the earth – to the right of the edge of the outer core of the liquid metal – there is a strange acceleration of seismic waves.

  • Experiments that recreate the phenomenon in a laboratory find that this is the result of crystals after Perovski, which are formed by Perovski.

  • The alignment of these crystals determines their hardness, which then determines how fast seismic waves can move through them.


Deep below the earth’s surface are layers of soil, rock layers, often embedded with fossils, magma magma and – backwards. Before your Trip to the center of land The mission can reach further, you will need to overcome streams of hard rock.

The layer D ”-separated between the layers of magma on top and the liquid scale of the outer core below-there is a mystification of scientists for decades. This is partly because if you had to go down with 2700 kilometers (1,700 miles), you will be jumping from the seismic peaches. The lower mantle, transforming into a form known as post-perioski near the layer D “. But that was not yet enough to explain the phenomenon.

Motochiko Murakami geo -core wanted to study what could possibly lead to a strange acceleration of the seismic wave known as D ”interruption. So an unusual increase in seismic waves.

The crystals after Perovski are anisotropic, which means that their physical properties are different when measured in different directions. They have two different types of textures-the one comes from the transformation (the phase transition from the PERSKIAN to the Post-Periovsky phase) and the other is the result of deformation (when the crystals after Perovski turn to the same direction). Murakami and his team realized that not only the transformation causes the roar. This actually happens with deformation.

“The texture forms caused by deformation when crystals undergo plastic deformation, causing their orientations to be aligned in certain directions. It is produced mainly by slip or crawling a dislocation,” Murakami said recently in The Journal Communication Land and EnvironmentS

How to align how the crystals after Perovski determine their hardness, and the speed at which seismic waves move through them depends on how difficult they are. Materials called peroviters can be created by any substances capable of being arranged in the same cubic crystalline structure. Perovski is a mineral of calcium titanium oxide (Catio3) While post-Perovian is a form of magnesium silicate (mgsio3) Achieved at extremely high pressure. Its crystal structure is orthorombic, which means that the correct corners of the cubes have uneven axes.

In order to bring the crystals after Perovski, all axes must be in the same position. Murakami uses mggeo3 to create crystals similar to post-Perovski. Like perovskite, mggeo3 Crystals are easily deformed when pressure is applied, so how they behave, it would be reflected, it lasts over a thousand miles underground. The crystals are heated by a laser, compressed and heated again to synthesize post-Perovski. They were then exposed to high -pressure sound waves and the wave speed was measured after these waves passed through the crystals.

It turns out that sound waves can experience a significant increase in speed when passing through aligned crystals after Perovski. Researchers also found that the reason for this alignment – which determines the hardness of the material and therefore the speed of sound waves in the laboratory and seismic waves deep into the ground is convection. As the hot material rises, the cooler material sinks as it does in convective storms such as hurricanes.

Murakami believes that the convection of materials in the mantle (such as the resurrected plum and the sinking of Slavs) is behind the deformation in the layer D.

“While previous theoretical work suggests that anisotropy may explain the observed seismic interruptions,” he said. “Our results obtained through in situ measurements of high -pressure Perovite speeds are the experimental examination of this hypothesis, overcoming the gap between theory and observation.”

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