Essentially a computed tomography, or CT scan, of Earth’s interior, the picture emerged from a supercomputer simulation at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The new picture also shows that the bases of these plumes are anchored at the core-mantle boundary in two huge blobs of hot rock, each about 5,000 kilometers in diameter, that are likely denser than surrounding rock. Senior author Barbara Romanowicz, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science estimates that those two anchors — directly opposite one another under Africa and the Pacific Ocean — have been in the same spots for 250 million years.
