Mantle Studies

摘要

Convection in the Earth's mantle provides the driving force for plate-tectonic processes and the heat source for fluid transport in the Earth's crust. Understanding the relationships between mantle composition and convection and its interaction with continental and oceanic crust provide a major challenge to modern petrologists and geochemists. This challenge can only be resolved by indirect studies, such as tomography and geochemical inversions on mantle-derived products, or by direct studies on rarely sampled upper mantle products in mantle xenolith suites and the barely accessible in situ outcrops on mantle in oceanic fracture zones.