Up-to-fivefold reverberating waves through the Earth’s center and distinctly anisotropic innermost inner core

Abstract

Probing the Earth’s center is critical for understanding planetary formation and evolution. However, geophysical inferences have been challenging due to the lack of seismological probes sensitive to the Earth’s center. Here, by stacking waveforms recorded by a growing number of global seismic stations, we observe up-to-fivefold reverberating waves from selected earthquakes along the Earth’s diameter. Differential travel times of these exotic arrival pairs, hitherto unreported in seismological literature, complement and improve currently available information. The inferred transversely isotropic inner-core model contains a ~650-km thick innermost ball with P-wave speeds ~4% slower at ~50° from the Earth’s rotation axis. In contrast, the inner core’s outer shell displays much weaker anisotropy with the slowest direction in the equatorial plane. Our findings strengthen the evidence for an anisotropically-distinctive innermost inner core and its transition to a weakly anisotropic outer shell, which could be a fossilized record of a significant global event from the past.

This study presents hitherto unreported multiply-reverberating seismic body waves through the Earth’s center. Their travel times confirm a distinct internal shell within the inner core, existing possibly due to a past change in the inner core growth.