The TIMEleSS team has a new publication! In the December 2023 issue of American Mineralogist, former TIMEleSS student Estelle Ledoux present an In-situ study of microstructures induced by the olivine to wadsleyite transformation at conditions of the 410 km depth discontinuity.

The olivine-wadsleyite transformation is believed to occur at depths of about 410 km in the Earth, producing a major seismic discontinuity in this region of the Earth’s mantle. The mechanism of this phase transition controls the microstructures of the newly nucleated wadsleyite, the major phase of the upper part of the mantle transition zone, and thus impacts seismic observations in the region.

In this work, we study the microstructures produced by the olivine-wadsleyite transformation using in situ laboratory experiments at pressures and temperatures relevant for the mantle transition zone and measure the orientation and size distribution of individual sample grains using multigrain crystallography at synchrotron radiation sources. We find that the olivine to wadsleyite transformation is incoherent at the conditions of the mantle transition zone, and is probably dominated by nucleation of wadsleyite at grain boundaries of the parent olivine.

Thus, we expect that seismic anisotropy near 410 km would drop significantly due to the randomized lattice preferred orientation of newly nucleated wadsleyite induced by the incoherent transformation.

Former TIMEleSS student Estelle Ledoux is the first author of Deformation Mechanisms, Microstructures, and Seismic Anisotropy of Wadsleyite in the Earth’s Transition Zone, published in gold open-access in AGU’s Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems.

Rocks deep inside the Earth mantle are deforming plastically under the effect of mantle convection. In return, the way minerals accommodate deformation impacts the properties of the whole rock and controls mantle flow. The deformation mechanisms of upper mantle minerals have been studied extensively. The behavior of minerals found deeper in the Earth, however, still remains debated and poorly understood.

Wadsleyite is the high pressure polymorph of olivine and the major phase of the upper part of the mantle transition zone (MTZ) (at 410–520 km depth) and then is suspected to control the deformation of that region of the mantle. Investigations of deformation mechanisms in wadsleyite have been scarce and only made recently possible with in-situ measurements at relevant pressure and temperature.

Here, using in-situ deformation experiments, multigrain X-ray crystallography, literature results, and numerical simulations, we propose a new view of plastic deformation of wadsleyite in the Earth’s MTZ. We show that it will be strongly affected by both temperature and water content. We then provide models that could be used for the seismic detection of its anisotropic behavior and mapping mantle flow using seismic measurements.

Congratulations Estelle!

TIMEleSS PhD student Federica Rochira has a new paper! Along with TIMEleSS PI C. Thomas, Federica is the first author of On the Importance of Using Directional Information in the Search for Lower Mantle Reflectors. The paper is available in Gold Open Access in The Seismic Record.

In this work, Federica focuses on SS precursor signals. SS precursors are signals from S-waves reflected from structures in the Earth’s mantle. Those waves are interesting because they are sensitive to the local thermal and compositional structure deep in the Earth’s mantle.

She analyses how to model the location of the reflections of the wave and shows that a full account of the wave travel path can lead to differences of up to ∼150 km in regard to more simple geometrical calculations. These results hence indicate that the travel‐path deviations of SS precursors should be considered to avoid misinterpretation of mantle discontinuities and potentially reduce previously observed scatter in discontinuity depth.

Congratulations to Federica for the nice work!

The TIMEleSS-tools were developed in the course of the TIMEleSS project to streamline the processing of multigrain crystallography data from diamond anvil cell experiments. They were actively developed in the course of the project, guided by our needs for data processing, and used in all TIMEleSS publications involving multigrain X-ray diffraction. They are a set of python programs, open-source, under the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2, and part of the more general FABLE-3DXRD project.

After years of development, we finally reach the time for a 1.0.0 release. TIMEleSS-tools were uploaded to PyPI and will now be easily installable on any python distribution, by simply typing those three magical words pip install timeless-tools. The latest and most up-to-date version will remain at our TIMEleSS-tools github homepage, but this release is easier to install for starting users.

This official release also come with our first user publication! Robin Fréville, Agnès Dewaele, and co-authors published a Physical Review B paper on a Comparison between mechanisms and microstructures of α−γ, γ−ε, and α−ε−α phase transitions in iron on March 14, 2023. It is the first non-TIMEleSS published paper that relies on the TIMEleSS-tools. Congratulations to all!