D" reflection polarities inform lowermost mantle mineralogy

Abstract

The lowermost mantle of the Earth, the D" region (Bullen, 1949), is characterized by a range of seismic structures that have been studied with a variety of seismic methods, in order to understand their formative processes and mineralogy in the deep Earth (for overviews, see Garnero, 2000;Lay, 2015). One prominent feature of the lowermost mantle is a seismic discontinuity at the top of the D" region that generates reflections for S and P waves (see