Geophysicists from the ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have carried out a surprising discovery in the depths of the Pacific Ocean that “challenges our current understanding of the Earth’s plate tectonics” and poses a “great mystery” to researchers.
It is a series of massive structures inside the Earth that have been located where they had not been discovered until now and that, according to current theories, “should not be found” there. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reportshas used a high resolution model to study the earth’s mantle and find out where the material of the tectonic plates that have sunk into the Earth’s interior is located.
Until now, geophysicists had located tectonic plates submerged in the Earth’s mantle in an area known as subduction zonethe place where two tectonic plates meet and one subducts beneath the other into the Earth’s interior. However, scientists have discovered in this study more areas inside the Earth that seem remains of submerged plates and? “they are not located where expected”but are found under large oceans or in the interior of continents, far from plate boundaries, they explain in a statement.
Regarding this “lost world” found inside the Earth, said the lead author of the study, Thomas Schouten, a doctoral student at the Geological Institute of the ETH in Zurich. “Apparently, these areas in the Earth’s mantle They are much more widespread than previously thought. before,” he says.
One of these areas is located under the western Pacific, a place where, according to current knowledge of plate tectonics, this material from subducted plates should not exist “because it is impossible that there have been subduction zones close in recent geological history,” the researchers note.
This finding presents everything an enigma for scientists, since they do not know with certainty what material is involved in the process and what consequences it would have for the internal dynamics of the Earth: “That is our dilemma. “With the new high-resolution model, we can see these types of anomalies everywhere in the Earth’s mantle, but we don’t know exactly what they are or what material is creating the patterns we have discovered,” adds Schouten.
Given the uncertainty, all the answers are nothing more than hypotheses: “We believe that the anomalies in the lower mantle have a variety of origins“Suggests Schouten, who believes that it is not just material from cold plates that have been subducted in the last 200 million years.
“Could be silica-rich ancient material that has been there since the formation of the mantle about 4 billion years ago and has survived despite convective movements in the mantle, or areas where iron-rich rocks accumulate as a consequence of these movements of the mantle for billions of years years,” he says.
#Massive #structures #depths #Pacific #Ocean #exist
