A Chinese neural network analyzed more than two million seismic charts, helping to create a new map of the Earth's lower mantle.
It is known that the Earth's mantle, deep beneath our feet, at a depth of approximately 2,900 kilometers, transforms into a liquid core. The dynamics at these depths control the movement of tectonic plates, contributing to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. However, directly studying these depths is impossible.
In a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences used artificial intelligence algorithms, enabling them to explore the planet's interior to depths far exceeding what any mechanical drill could reach.
Geophysicists used an archive of seismic data spanning 35 years, from 1990 to 2024. Scientists typically manually search through earthquake recordings for faint signals known as "PKP wave precursors".
These waves scatter at small, inconsistent structures near the mantle-core boundary, then return to Earth's surface shortly before the arrival of the stronger main pulses. Manually searching for these subtle structures among millions of recordings is an extremely laborious and time-consuming task.
To speed up the process, the researchers trained a deep learning system. The algorithm sorted the records according to their quality and analyzed more than two million seismic maps resulting from about 5,000 earthquakes.
The researchers manually checked and corrected errors in the neural network, then fed the corrected examples back into the model to improve its performance. Ultimately, the AI detected 174,929 high-quality weak signals—nearly ten times the total number detected in previous studies.
The new dataset has changed geologists' understanding of Earth's lower mantle. Instead of previous maps showing only isolated and random anomalies, the new data shows that these regions are connected to form extended and interconnected belts.
These "thermochemical clusters" may have a very ancient origin. Scientists believe they could be remnants of oceanic crust dragged deep into the Earth by tectonic processes. Another hypothesis suggests they may be fragments of the planet Theia, whose collision with Earth billions of years ago is believed to have contributed to the formation of the Moon.
Under the influence of enormous pressures and high temperatures, these materials may have partially melted or their properties changed.
The new map identified six previously undocumented anomalous regions, including areas located below high latitudes in Eurasia, Central Asia, and the South Atlantic.
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