‘Is there a lost world beneath the Pacific Ocean?’
New research reveals a “major mystery” deep beneath the planet’s bodies of water and crust, and now experts are rethinking what they know about Earth’s terrain.
They suggest it could even mean “a lost world” under the sea.
According to scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Swiss research university ETH Zurich, a new method for analyzing the Earth’s mantle — the layer below the crust and above the molten core — has revealed strange characteristics of tectonic plates below bodies of water and within the interior of continents.
What’s peculiar is that the remains of the plates were found in unexpected areas that scientists had not anticipated, they said, and were often colder or of different composition than their counterparts.
The discovery even led the ETH Zurich announcement to bluntly ask, “Is there a lost world beneath the Pacific Ocean?”
The Earth’s mantle is home to strange structuring that is baffling experts. anuwat – stock.adobe.com
Their locations below large water sources — including the western Pacific — and deep into landmasses mean they are far away from normal plate boundaries, an anomaly for such huge areas.
“Apparently, such zones in the Earth’s mantle are much more widespread than previously thought,” said author Thomas Schouten, published in Scientific Reports.
Essentially, no recent geological history explains the unorthodox plates, and the researchers — who analyzed earthquake waves to unearth their findings — are also puzzled by the materials they comprise.
“That’s our dilemma. With the new high-resolution model, we can see such anomalies everywhere in the Earth’s mantle,” he added. “But we don’t know exactly what they are or what material is creating the patterns we have uncovered.”
For the time being, experts can only speculate about the findings — at least until humans can actually journey to the center of the Earth.
“We think that the anomalies in the lower mantle have a variety of origins,” Schouten said, adding that he believes they may be colder temperature material that has changed over the past 200 million years.
“It could be either ancient, silica-rich material that has been there since the formation of the mantle about 4 billion years ago and has survived despite the convective movements in the mantle, or zones where iron-rich rocks accumulate as a consequence of these mantle movements over billions of years,” he said.
