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RedBallCompressibility of the Earth.

Although we use to think that the rocks are incompressible, a batch of mantle that flows from the uppermost mantle to the core-mantle boundary almost doubles in density!

In the figure below I plotted the density profile inside the Earth mantle (based on PREM). Most of the density increase in the upper mantle is due to the solid-solid phase transformations. In the lower mantle (below 670-km depth), however, densification occurs mainly due to the high pressure of what lies above.

Density&Gravity

Of course, depending on the density structure, the gravitational acceleration (and therefore the gravitational pull/push acting on the density anomaly inside the mantle) would be different. In the right-right figure you could see by how much does the g(r) change. The solid lines correspond to PREM-density and PREM-gravity. The dashed lines correspond to the constant-density mantle.

I begun to investigate Earth compressibility in my graduate school. My thesis advisor Bradford Hager and a collaborator Alessandro Forte took an active and willing participation in the study. We investigated the effects of Earth compressibility on the geoid and published results in the paper.