Long-Wavelength Topography and Multiscale Velocity Heterogeneity at the Core-Mantle Boundary

The structure of the lowermost mantle and the core-mantle boundary (CMB) has profound implications for Earth's evolution and current-day dynamics. Whilst tomographic studies of V-S show good agreement in the lowermost mantle, consensus as to V-P and especially CMB radius has not yet been reached. We perform a hierarchical Bayesian inversion for V-P in the lowermost 300 km of the mantle and the radius of the CMB using differential travel time data. Concurrent with finding V-P perturbations of 0.56% RMS amplitude that spatially agree with previous studies in areas of low posterior variance, we find 4.5 km RMS amplitude CMB radius perturbations with a broadly north-south hemispherical character, with spherical harmonic power evenly distributed between degrees 1-3. These results suggest that CMB radial processes are set by a longer scale process than the V-P perturbations.