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Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment
The Earth’s engine is driven by unknown proportions of primordial energy and heat produced in radioactive decay. Unfortunately, competing models of Earth’s composition reveal an order of magnitude uncertainty in the amount of radiogenic power driving mantle dynamics. Recent measurements of the Earth...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017162/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27611737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep33034 |
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author | Šrámek, Ondřej Roskovec, Bedřich Wipperfurth, Scott A. Xi, Yufei McDonough, William F. |
author_facet | Šrámek, Ondřej Roskovec, Bedřich Wipperfurth, Scott A. Xi, Yufei McDonough, William F. |
author_sort | Šrámek, Ondřej |
collection | PubMed |
description | The Earth’s engine is driven by unknown proportions of primordial energy and heat produced in radioactive decay. Unfortunately, competing models of Earth’s composition reveal an order of magnitude uncertainty in the amount of radiogenic power driving mantle dynamics. Recent measurements of the Earth’s flux of geoneutrinos, electron antineutrinos from terrestrial natural radioactivity, reveal the amount of uranium and thorium in the Earth and set limits on the residual proportion of primordial energy. Comparison of the flux measured at large underground neutrino experiments with geologically informed predictions of geoneutrino emission from the crust provide the critical test needed to define the mantle’s radiogenic power. Measurement at an oceanic location, distant from nuclear reactors and continental crust, would best reveal the mantle flux, however, no such experiment is anticipated. We predict the geoneutrino flux at the site of the Jinping Neutrino Experiment (Sichuan, China). Within 8 years, the combination of existing data and measurements from soon to come experiments, including Jinping, will exclude end-member models at the 1σ level, define the mantle’s radiogenic contribution to the surface heat loss, set limits on the composition of the silicate Earth, and provide significant parameter bounds for models defining the mode of mantle convection. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5017162 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50171622016-09-12 Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment Šrámek, Ondřej Roskovec, Bedřich Wipperfurth, Scott A. Xi, Yufei McDonough, William F. Sci Rep Article The Earth’s engine is driven by unknown proportions of primordial energy and heat produced in radioactive decay. Unfortunately, competing models of Earth’s composition reveal an order of magnitude uncertainty in the amount of radiogenic power driving mantle dynamics. Recent measurements of the Earth’s flux of geoneutrinos, electron antineutrinos from terrestrial natural radioactivity, reveal the amount of uranium and thorium in the Earth and set limits on the residual proportion of primordial energy. Comparison of the flux measured at large underground neutrino experiments with geologically informed predictions of geoneutrino emission from the crust provide the critical test needed to define the mantle’s radiogenic power. Measurement at an oceanic location, distant from nuclear reactors and continental crust, would best reveal the mantle flux, however, no such experiment is anticipated. We predict the geoneutrino flux at the site of the Jinping Neutrino Experiment (Sichuan, China). Within 8 years, the combination of existing data and measurements from soon to come experiments, including Jinping, will exclude end-member models at the 1σ level, define the mantle’s radiogenic contribution to the surface heat loss, set limits on the composition of the silicate Earth, and provide significant parameter bounds for models defining the mode of mantle convection. Nature Publishing Group 2016-09-09 /pmc/articles/PMC5017162/ /pubmed/27611737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep33034 Text en Copyright © 2016, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Šrámek, Ondřej Roskovec, Bedřich Wipperfurth, Scott A. Xi, Yufei McDonough, William F. Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title | Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title_full | Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title_fullStr | Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title_full_unstemmed | Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title_short | Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment |
title_sort | revealing the earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the jinping neutrino experiment |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017162/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27611737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep33034 |
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