• 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

We May Know What’s Causing The Huge Gravity Anomaly Beneath The Indian Ocean

July 3, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

In the Indian Ocean, there is an anomaly. The gravity there is lower (compared to what we’d expect) than anywhere else on the planet, and now, a team of researchers may have figured out why.

According to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, objects attract other objects with a force determined by their masses and the square of the distance between them. In simple terms, the more mass the more gravity, the closer to the object the more you will be affected by (and affect) it. 

Advertisement

Though you may think of gravity on Earth as uniform, it isn’t. This is because the mass of the planet is not evenly distributed like a solid rubber ball. Instead, we have mountains and trenches, and a whole lot of other objects and mysterious structures way below our feet, and bulge out at the equator, causing a varied gravity across the surface.

A gravity map of Earth.

A gravity map of Earth.

We know that gravity differs across the planet. However, there are areas where gravity differs from what we would expect to find in that area, which is known as a gravity anomaly.

One such area is in the Indian Ocean, where the gravity is lower compared to what we would expect than at anywhere else on Earth. The problem has puzzled scientists for some time. We know the principles: lower gravity means that mass is missing. However, we didn’t know what had caused this lack of mass.

A team from the Centre for Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science believe they have the answer. According to the team’s paper, which modeled tectonic plate and global mantle convection over 140 million years, the anomaly may be caused by ancient tectonic plates which have sunk down underneath the Indian Ocean. As a result, they believe a plume of hot mantle – less dense than the sunken crust – rose above it.

Advertisement

“Flow induced by downwelling Tethys slabs perturbs the African Large Low Shear Velocity province and gives rise to plumes that reach the upper mantle,” the team write in their paper. “These plumes, along with the mantle structure in the vicinity of the geoid low, are responsible for the formation of this negative geoid anomaly.”

The paper is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Take Five: Big in Japan
  2. Struggle over Egypt’s Juhayna behind arrest of founder, son – Amnesty
  3. Exclusive-Northvolt plots EV battery grab with $750 million Swedish lab plan
  4. What Is The Heaviest Object In The Universe?

Source Link: We May Know What's Causing The Huge Gravity Anomaly Beneath The Indian Ocean

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • 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