Topography of Earth's inner core boundary from high-quality waveform doublets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Precise determination of the topography of a major internal boundary of the Earth is difficult because of the trade-off with the unknown velocity structure above it. However, the discoveries of the inner core (IC) rotation and high-quality teleseismic waveform doublets make the precise mapping of the topography of the inner core boundary (ICB) possible. Here we examine IC refracted (PKP-DF) and reflected (PKP-CD) waves recorded at the Yellowknife Array and other global stations from 14 high-quality doublets, among a large collection of doublets in S. Sandwich Islands that are recently discovered. Our results show clear evidence for spatial and temporal variations of IC reflections in traveltimes and in waveforms. If the time separation (dT) between the two members of the doublet is less than 3 yr, the IC arrivals show little temporal change in traveltimes or waveforms. If dT is greater than about 6 yr, some doublets show large variations but some others do not. The ICB regions beneath Atlantic and Indian Oceans show little temporal change. The regions that show large variations are beneath Africa and the Central America, which coincide with large seismic anomalies at the core–mantle boundary (CMB). Inside these two ICB regions, there are fine-scale (km scale) variations. The largest temporal changes of IC reflections are about 0.10 to 0.14 s, corresponding to a topographic variation of up to about 3.7 to 5.2 km. The results suggest ICB topography of a few kilometres on fine to regional scales. The geographical coincidence of the ICB and CMB anomalies may suggest strong thermal coupling of the mantle and the core. Dynamic models include a bumpy ICB rotating with the IC itself or a transient slurry boundary containing a mixture of molten materials and solidified patches of iron crystals, which is rapidly modified by the turbulence at the base of the convecting outer core. If the former is the main cause of the observed temporal change of the topography, the IC rotation is required to be an oscillation, whose half period has an upper limit of a few hundred years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".