A method for thermochemical full-waveform inversion: integrating mineral physics and seismology

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ID: 327882
2026
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Abstract
Summary Seismic imaging of the Earth’s interior has steadily improved in the past 40 years. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has been the most recent driver of global and local tomography. Although mineral physics experiments link seismic properties to temperature, pressure and composition of the mantle, direct integration of seismic observations and thermodynamic calculations has not yet been achieved. This work illustrates a framework that integrates FWI techniques with mineral physics to directly invert seismic waveforms for mantle temperature and chemical composition. The forward model is based on interpolation of pre-calculated tables of mantle properties, namely density and P- and S-wave speeds. The inverse problem is formulated as an optimization problem. The gradient of the objective function with respect to temperature and composition is computed using the chain rule which allows us to split it into independent seismic and thermodynamic parts. For the seismic part, the gradient is computed with the adjoint method. For the thermodynamic part, gradients of the pre-calculated tables are obtained by analytically deriving the interpolation function, while accounting for the pressure–density coupling, under the assumption of hydrostatic loading. As a proof of concept, we applied this approach on 2-D synthetic models containing thermal and compositional anomalies where P–SV elastic wave propagation is simulated. The optimization problem is solved using the L-BFGS algorithm. We mitigate the trade-off between the effect of temperature and composition by applying a linear transformation to the model parameters before carrying out the minimization and then transforming back once a solution is found. The proposed framework enables the integration of diverse geophysical datasets as well as the incorporation of additional information on the potential origin of certain mantle anomalies based on petrological constraints, which are crucial to tackle the non-uniqueness of the inverse problem.
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Authors Andrea Zunino, Federico Munch, Alessandro Ghirotto, Giacomo Aloisi, Andreas Fichtner
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Journal geophysical journal international
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/gji/ggag367
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggag367
Keywords Keywords not found

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