Dongdong Tian is a seismologist. His research is directed toward understanding the structure of the Earth’s deep interior, mechanisms of seismic sources (e.g., microseismic, explosions, and collapse), and seismic wave propagation in complex media.
He received his Ph.D. degree in Geophysics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2018, advised by Prof. Lianxing Wen. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Michigan State University, collaborating with Prof. Songqiao Shawn Wei.
He is also a big fan of open-source and serves as a core developer of the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), a widely-used software for processing and visualizing geophysical data in Earth Science, and its Python wrapper, PyGMT.
Ph.D. in Geophysics, 2018
University of Science and Technology of China
BSc in Geophysics, 2012
University of Science and Technology of China
2020-10-22: Dongdong, collaborating with Dr. Jiayuan Yao, Dr. Li Sun, and Prof. Lianxing Wen, make a comment on the paper “Origin of temporal changes of inner-core seismic waves” by Yang and Song (2020). The comment is published on Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Dr. Jiayuan Yao is the first author.
2020-10-02: Our new global survey of the 520- and 560-km mantle discontinuities, based on seismic observations (SS precursors) and thermodynamic modeling, is published on Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
2020-06-20: Dongdong serves as an instructor of the 2020 UNAVCO Short Course “The Generic Mapping Tools for Geodesy”, online via Zoom.
2019-07-29: Dongdong particats the GMT Developer’s Summit at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, USA, Jul. 29–Aug. 2, 2019.
2019-07-22: Dongdong serves as an instructor of the 2019 UNAVCO Short Course “The Generic Mapping Tools for Geodesy”, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, USA, Jul. 22–23, 2019.
Although existence of a mushy zone in the Earth’s inner core has been hypothesized several decades ago, no seismic evidence has ever been reported. Based on waveform modeling of seismic compressional waves that are reflected off the Earth’s inner core boundary, here we present seismic evidence for a localized 4–8 km thick zone across the inner core boundary beneath southwest Okhotsk Sea with seismic properties intermediate between those of the inner and outer core and of a mushy zone. Such a localized mushy zone is found to be surrounded by a sharp inner core boundary nearby. These seismic results suggest that, in the current thermo-compositional state of the Earth’s core, the outer core composition is close to eutectic in most regions resulting in a sharp inner core boundary, but deviation from the eutectic composition exists in some localized regions resulting in a mushy zone with a thickness of 4–8 km.