Mountains five times taller than Everest have been discovered at the center of the Earth

Science – Have you ever wondered what landscapes hide beneath your feet? If scientists knew that mountain-looking layers exist underground, a new study was published Wednesday, April 5 in the journal Nature science It reveals surprising details about the region between the mantle and core Land. Thanks to large-scale seismic imagery, researchers have remarkably been able to find out “structures” It can reach five times the height of Everest, according to reports Korean.

The team of researchers studied one of the strangest parts of the Earth, which is more than 2,900 kilometers under our feet, and it is called “primary mantle boundary”. It represents the transition between the layer beneath the thin planetary crust on which we live, and the core, the innermost part of our universe, defining the media Interesting geometry.

ancient sea floor

While the Earth’s core is too deep to explore directly, scientists can penetrate it through seismic waves generated by earthquakes. These waves slow down and speed up as they pass through different layers of our planet with different and subtle characteristics Vice. This mechanism makes it possible in particular to detect the famous “structures” hidden in the depths, also called ULVZ (Very low speed zones to “Very Low Speed ​​Zones”), Because waves ostensibly slow down as they pass through them.

Thanks specifically to seismic data collected in Antarctica, scientists led by Samantha Hansen, a geophysicist at the University of Alabama, have discovered, “Extensive and variable ULVZ along core-mantle boundary”.

For researchers, this reveals several secrets about this deep layer of Earth: ULZVs may have been on the ocean floor in the time of the dinosaurs. Then they would have sunk deep into the earth by subduction (Payment process a tectonic plate under another plate of lower density (ed).

read more

role in the evolution of the magnetic field

“The presence of ULVZs along these Earth’s core boundaries has been recognized in several previous studies, and so we knew that such structures were present in the lower mantle.”Samantha Hansen said in an email to the media Motherboard. “However, I think what struck me most was the abundance of these structures (…)”, I continued.

But these discoveries are not only important for understanding the stratigraphic structure of the Earth, they also allow us to better understand the geophysical activity of the Earth’s core. This core is vital to us because it feeds our planet’s magnetic field, thus blocking harmful solar radiation and stabilizing the atmosphere. The media adds that these underground structures could also play a role in geological and volcanic activities on the surface. Korean.

For Samantha Hansen, these regions hidden in the depths of the Earth affect our lives on the surface in countless ways. Which is why it plans to examine the ULVZ, thanks to new sensors and more complex geophysical models.

See also on Huff Post:

This “massive” black hole discovered by NASA makes the distance between the Earth and the Moon in 14 minutes

This new image of James Webb will be used for the autopsy of a star