A watered-down primordial lower mantle

For more than a decade, conflicting evidence between seismic tomography and isotope geochemistry of rare gases has thwarted the construction of a unifying convection model and blurred our vision of lower mantle chemistry and mineralogy. All body wave models vividly depict lithospheric plates penetrating the 660~km discontinuity such as the Farallon and the Tethyan plates. In contrast, the presence of helium with a high ³He/⁴He ratio and, even more, of solar neon in OIB attests to the presence of undegassed material at depth. Current models of tracer redistribution by convection do not resolve this conflict and are limited to the description a whole range of regimes with variable extent of layering. We addressed this problem through the residence time distribution theory, which shows that the time different parcels of mantle survive extraction and degassing from a well-stirred mantle is exponentially distributed. Whole mantle mixing only destroys the primitive signature of the average lower mantle (at the scale of the global reservoir) but leaves some small parcels untouched since terrestrial accretion. From available isotopic data, we assess that the lower part of a unhindered convective mantle may contain several percent primordial material. If the 660~km discontinuity is a partial hindrance to vertical mixing, this proportion is significantly higher. The most likely texture of the lower mantle is an intricate layering of material recycled from the surface and primordial material while its chemical composition is geochemically enriched with respect to the upper mantle. This simple concept accounts for the coexistence of the primordial character of rare gases, the recycled character of lithophile-element isotope compositions in OIB, the apparent lack of ¹⁴²Nd anomalies, and the missing component inferred from a number of geochemical systems. The marble cake incorporates different ingredients at different depths: mostly residual mantle and recycled oceanic crust at the top and more oceanic plateaus and primordial material at the bottom.