Brazilian scientists to study further the Earth's lower mantle

A team of scientists at the University of São Paulo (USP) started this week a geological survey project to study the lower mantle without depending on tragedy conditions such as last Saturday's Chilean earthquake. The research will reproduce the thermodynamic conditions of the internal layer at depths between 670 and 2,700 kilometers and temperatures of up to 1,700 degrees Celsius and their effect on minerals.

The study is expected to take three years and will be conduced by professor João Francisco Justo Filho at USP's engineer college (Politécnica). The group will adopt methods such as measurement of black-body thermal radiation, commonly used in astrophysics and that measures radiation emitted by the interior of a body – the Earth –, at the surface. It permits to deduce the radiation path from the center to the surface.

One of the goals of the study is to work out a correlation map between temperatures and depths of the planet's layers, still a challenge to scientists studying the lower mantle.