The fate of the slabs interacting with a density/viscosity hill in the mid-mantle

In the last two decades it has been proposed several times that a non-monotonic profile might fit the average lower mantle radial viscosity. Most proposed profiles consist in a more or less broad viscosity hill in the middle of the mantle, at a depth roughly between 1200. km and 2000. km. Also many tomographic models display strong signals of the presence of " fast" material lying at mid mantle depths and a recent spectral analysis of seismic tomography shows a very clear transition for degree up to around 16 at a less than 1500. km depth. Finally latest works, both theoretical and experimental, on the high-to-low-spin transition for periclase, have suggested that the high-spin to low-spin transition of Fe++ might lie at the heart of all these observations. To verify the dynamical compatibility between possible mantle profile and observed tomographic images and compare them with possible mineral physics scenarios, such as the spin transition, we employ here a recently developed Fast Multipole-accelerated Boundary Element Method (FMM-BEM), a numerical approach for solving the viscous momentum equation in a global spherical setting, for simulating the interaction of an individual slab with a mid mantle smooth discontinuity in density and viscosity. We have focused on the complexities induced to the behaviour of average and very large plates O (2000-10,000. km), characteristic of the Farallon, Tethys and Pacific plate subducting during the Cenozoic, demonstrating that the a mid mantle density and/or viscosity discontinuity produces a strong alteration of the sinking velocity and an intricate set of slab morphologies. We also employ the Kula-Farallon plate system subducting at 60. Ma as a paradigmatic case, which reveals the best high resolution tomography models and clearly suggests an interaction with a strong and/or denser layer in the mantle. Our 38 models show that a plate might or might not penetrate into the lowest mantle and might stall in the mid lower mantle for long periods, depending on the radial profiles of density and viscosity, within a realistic range (viscosity 1, 10 or 100 times more viscous of the rest of the mantle, and a change of differential density in the range -2% to 2%), of a transitional layer of 200. km or 500. km. We conclude that a layer with high viscosity or negative density would naturally trigger the observed geodynamic snapshot. We finally propose a scenario in which the long time accumulation of depleted slabs in the mid mantle would give rise to a partially chemically stratified mantle, starting from the less prominent high-spin to low-spin contribution on the basis of mantle density and rheology.