Normal mode observability of radial anisotropy in the Earth’s mantle

Abstract

SUMMARYObservations of seismic anisotropy provide useful information to infer directions of mantle flow. However, existing global anisotropic tomography models are not consistent, particularly in the lower mantle. Therefore, the interpretation of seismic anisotropy in terms of mantle dynamics and evolution remains difficult. While surface and body waves are commonly used to build radially anisotropic tomography models, they provide heterogeneous data coverage and the radial anisotropy structure retrieved using these data may be biased by the use of imperfect crustal corrections. Normal modes, the free oscillations of the Earth, automatically provide global data coverage and their sensitivity to shear wave (vs) and compressional wave (vp) velocity makes them suitable to study both vs and vp anisotropy in the mantle. In this study, we assess whether current normal mode splitting data have sufficient sensitivity to lower mantle anisotropy to potentially constrain it. We consider the uncertainties in the data and the effect of inaccuracies in crustal thickness corrections and the assumed scaling between vp and vs. We perform forward modelling of normal mode data using six different 3-D global radially anisotropic tomography models to document how strong and widespread anisotropy has to be to be observable in current normal mode data. We find that, on average 50% of the spheroidal and 55% of the toroidal modes investigated show significant sensitivity to vs anisotropy, while roughly 57% of the spheroidal modes also have strong sensitivity to vp anisotropy. Moreover, we find that the normal mode data fit varies substantially for the various anisotropic tomography models considered, with the addition of anisotropy not always improving the data fit. While we find that crustal thickness corrections do not strongly impact modes that are sensitive to the lower mantle, we observe a trade-off between radial anisotropy and vp scaling for these modes. As long as this is taken into consideration, our findings suggest that existing normal mode data sets can provide valuable information on both vs and vp anisotropy in the mantle.