• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Unexplained Structures Found Deep Underneath The Pacific Ocean

March 28, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Geoscientists have used earthquakes to study the composition of the lower portion of the Earth’s mantle under the Pacific Ocean – and they’ve discovered something quite peculiar. There are zones where the seismic waves move in different ways, suggesting structures that are colder or have a different composition than the surrounding molten rocks. The team describes the presence of these structures as a major mystery.

ADVERTISEMENT

It is unclear what these structures are. If they were anywhere else, they could be portions of tectonic plates that have sunk in a subduction zone. But the Pacific is one large plate, so there should be no subduction material under it. The researchers are also uncertain about what kind of material these deep structures are made of or what this means for the internal structure of the planet.

“That’s our dilemma. With the new high-resolution model, we can see such 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 uncovered,” Thomas Schouten, first author and doctoral student at the Geological Institute of ETH Zurich, said in a statement.

Ocean

A visualization of where colder material in the mantle is located, courtesy of a new computer model.

Image Credit: Sebastian Noe / ETH Zurich

The presence of so many cold regions in the mantle suggests that maybe they formed at different times and from different sources. They are not just subduction plates from the last 200 million years.

“We think that the anomalies in the lower mantle have a variety of origins,” explained Schouten. “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.”

More work is necessary. The team is using just one single property of the waves, their speed, to work out so much of what goes on beneath our feet. Even with fantastic models, it is difficult to work out everything from just that. We cannot open up the Earth and see what’s inside.  

“We have to calculate the different material parameters that could generate the observed speeds of the different wave types. Essentially, we have to dive deeper into the material properties behind the wave speed,” explained Schouten.

ADVERTISEMENT

A paper describing these findings is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

An earlier version of this story was published in January 2025.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Voice chat is coming to Roblox
  2. Dollar at 2021 highs as traders brace for Fed taper
  3. Green Slimy Creature Flummoxes Tourists In Taiwan
  4. Mighty Megalodon Might’ve Been Long And Slender Rather Than A Monstrous Potato

Source Link: Unexplained Structures Found Deep Underneath The Pacific Ocean

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Adidas Jabulani: The World Cup Football So Bad NASA Decided To Study It
  • Beluga Whales Shake Their Blob-Like Melons To Say Hello And Even Woo A Mate, But How?
  • Gravitational Wave Detected From Largest Black Hole Merger Yet: “It Presents A Real Challenge To Our Understanding Of Black Hole Formation”
  • At Over 100 Years Of Age, The World’s Oldest Elephant Passes Away In India
  • Ancient Human DNA Reveals Earliest Zoonotic Diseases Appeared 6,500 Years Ago
  • Boys Are Better At Math? That Could Be Because School Favors Them Over Girls
  • Looptail G: Most People Can’t Recognize A Letter You Have Seen Millions Of Times
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version