At Washington University in St. Louis a seismologist has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping – diminishing – deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir.

Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth’s lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes.

Source: Physorg