Supercomputer unveils unexpected anomalies lurking in Earth’s lower mantle
STUDY FINDS
ZURICH, Switzerland — Miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, in a region of Earth’s mantle where conventional wisdom says nothing unusual should exist, scientists have discovered something extraordinary. Using innovative technology to analyze seismic waves, researchers have identified massive structures that challenge fundamental theories about how our planet formed and evolved. It’s as if we’ve discovered a new geological continent – not on Earth’s surface, but deep within it.
Just as doctors use ultrasound waves to peer inside the human body without surgery, geophysicists employ seismic waves from earthquakes to study Earth’s deep interior. When earthquakes occur, they send waves in all directions through the planet. These waves travel at different speeds depending on the materials they encounter, getting bent, bounced, and scattered along the way. By recording these waves at seismic stations worldwide, scientists can create images of structures deep within Earth, much like creating a medical scan of our planet.
For decades, this technique revealed fast-moving wave patterns primarily beneath areas where tectonic plates collide and one plate dives beneath another – a process called subduction. These patterns were thought to be the remains of ancient tectonic plates that had sunk into Earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and core. However, the earth-shattering new study, published in Scientific Reports, has uncovered something unexpected.
Using one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the Piz Daint at CSCS in Lugano, researchers from ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have discovered similar wave patterns in places where they shouldn’t exist – beneath vast oceans and continental interiors, far from any known plate boundaries. “Apparently, such zones in the Earth’s mantle are much more widespread than previously thought,” says Thomas Schouten, the study’s lead author and doctoral student at ETH Zurich’s Geological Institute, in a statement.
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