The recent downward revision of solar photospheric abundances of Oxygen and other heavy elements has resulted in serious discrepancies between solar models and solar structure as determined through helioseismology .
In this work we investigate the possibility of determining the solar heavy-element abundance without reference to spectroscopy by using helioseismic data .
Using the dimensionless sound-speed derivative in the solar convection zone , we find that the heavy element abundance , Z , of 0.0172 \pm 0.002 , which is closer to the older , higher value of the abundances .