Large low-velocity seismic anomalies have been detected in the Earth's lower mantle beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean that are not easily explained by temperature variations alone. The African anomaly has been interpreted to be a northwest-southeast-trending structure with a sharp-edged linear, ridge-like morphology. The Pacific anomaly, on the other hand, appears to be more rounded in shape. Mantle models with heterogeneous composition have related these structures to dense thermochemical piles or superplumes. It has not been shown, however, that such models can lead to thermochemical structures that satisfy the geometrical constraints, as inferred from seismological observations. Here we present numerical models of thermochemical convection in a three-dimensional spherical geometry using plate velocities inferred for the past 119 million years. We show that Earth's subduction history can lead to thermochemical structures similar in shape to the observed large, lower-mantle velocity anomalies. We find that subduction history tends to focus dense material into a ridge-like pile beneath Africa and a relatively more-rounded pile under the Pacific Ocean, consistent with seismic observations.

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[1] As high-performance computing facilities and sophisticated modeling software become available, modeling mantle convection in a three-dimensional (3-D) spherical shell geometry with realistic physical parameters and processes becomes increasingly feasible. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive benchmark studies for 3-D spherical mantle convection. Here we present benchmark and test calculations using a finite element code CitcomS for 3-D spherical convection. Two classes of model calculations are presented: the Stokes' flow and thermal and thermochemical convection. For Stokes' flow, response functions of characteristic flow velocity, topography, and geoid at the surface and core-mantle boundary (CMB) at different spherical harmonic degrees are computed using CitcomS and are compared with those from analytic solutions using a propagator matrix method. For thermal and thermochemical convection, 24 cases are computed with different model parameters including Rayleigh number (7 Â 10 3 or 10 5 ) and viscosity contrast due to temperature dependence (1 to 10 7 ). For each case, time-averaged quantities at the steady state are computed, including surface and CMB Nussult numbers, RMS velocity, averaged temperature, and maximum and minimum flow velocity, and temperature at the midmantle depth and their standard deviations. For thermochemical convection cases, in addition to outputs for thermal convection, we also quantified entrainment of an initially dense component of the convection and the relative errors in conserving its volume. For nine thermal convection cases that have small viscosity variations and where previously published results were available, we find that the CitcomS results are mostly consistent with these previously published with less than 1% relative differences in globally averaged quantities including Nussult numbers and RMS velocities. For other 15 cases with either strongly temperature-dependent viscosity or thermochemical convection, no previous calculations are available for comparison, but these 15 test calculations from CitcomS are useful for future code developments and comparisons. We also presented results for parallel efficiency for CitcomS, showing that the code achieves 57% efficiency with 3072 cores on Texas Advanced Computing Center's parallel supercomputer Ranger.

[1] Heterogeneous compositional mantle models are frequently invoked to explain some observations obtained from geochemistry and seismology. In particular, two regions in the Earth's lower mantle, under the Pacific and Africa, are often interpreted as being either piles or superplumes of dense material. We perform numerical modeling of thermochemical convection in a three-dimensional spherical geometry to investigate whether the geometry can focus a dense chemical component into a small number of isolated, rounded piles or superplumes of material. We study the effect of temperature and compositionally dependent viscosity, and we find two different modes of dense layer deformation. Temperature-dependent rheology leads to a low-viscosity dense layer which is passively swept aside by downwellings into linear piles that are spread throughout the entire lower mantle. The addition of compositionally dependent rheology in which the dense layer is more viscous results in active deformation of the dense material, forming large, isolated superplumes. Our results indicate that piles and superplumes are separate features which, in general, do not occur together and, in order for isolated, rounded superplumes to form, an intrinsic compositional viscosity increase is required for the dense material.