Bromery Seminar Series: Harriet Lau

Description

Harriet Lau, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, will present a talk entitled "Tidal Tomography: What an Often-Neglected Phenomenon Known as Earth Tides Can Tell Us about Buoyancy in the Deepest Part of the Mantle" as part of the Randolph Bromery Fall 2018 Seminar Series.

Abstract:

Earth's mantle is a key component of the Earth system: its circulation drives plate tectonics, the long-term recycling of Earth's volatiles, and, as such, holds fundamental implications for the Earth's surface environment. In order to understand this evolution, a key parameter of the mantle must be known, namely its buoyancy. In this talk, Lau will discuss how Earth's body tide can provide fresh and independent constraints on deep mantle buoyancy through a newly developed technique called Tidal Tomography. This comes at a time when other interesting and exciting data sets sensitive to deep mantle buoyancy, e.g., Stoneley modes, have been brought to bear, and we will explore our conclusions in the context of other recent finds.