Menu

Investigating Mantle Flow Through Analyses of Earthquake Wave Propagation

Earth and Planetary Sciences researchers at Yale use Yale’s "Grace" supercomputer to study subduction systems, combining seismic data and geodynamic models to better understand how subduction works.

A recent study by Jonathan Wolf and Maureen Long uses earthquake waves and high-performance computing to analyze material flow deep in Earth's mantle, near the outer core boundary, around 3,000 km below the surface. Researchers found ancient slabs drive flow beneath the northeastern Pacific and detected upward flow at the Yellowstone plume. They also discovered that mysterious mantle features called ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs) can be moved by mantle flow, especially under the Himalayas. These findings link deep mantle dynamics to surface events like plate tectonics, volcanism, and Earth's magnetic field.

Maureen Long and Jonathan Wolf
Maureen Long : Bruce D. Alexander '65 Professor and Chair of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Research projects

Exact Gravitational Lensing by Rotating Black Holes
How Monkeys - and Machines - See in 3D
Tracking Environmental Health Risks
Supporting Data-intensive Social Science
Mapping the Universe with AI and Supercomputing
New Insights on Binary Black Holes
Supercomputing the Arctic
Learning Beyond Attention
All Research Projects

Collaborative projects

ALL Collaborative PROJECTS

OUTREACH & EDUCATION PROJECTS

See ALL Scholarships
100 Bigelow Street, Holyoke, MA 01040