Seismic tomography

Summary

Seismic tomography is the imaging of the Earth's interior by geophysical inversion of seismic data recorded for many sources and receivers. The data are travel times, amplitudes or whole waveforms of seismic waves, and the unknowns are maps of wave speed, attenuation or anisotropy. Many wave paths cross each region from different directions. So the inversion can locate where the material differs from a reference model such as the Preliminary reference Earth model. It has produced images of subducting slabs, mantle plumes and the structure of the crust.