Even with humanity’s ability to reach out into far space and distant galaxies, scientists are still confused about what lies beneath the surface of our own planet. It leads one to wonder just what is the mystery of the continent sized blobs within the Earth’s core.
Amidst humanity’s goals for distant space, the structure of our own globe continues to be a mystery to us.
There are giant lamps deep under the Earth’s core that are thought to be the size of a continent, and scientists are still trying to figure out where they came from and what affect they have on our world.
They go by several names: some call them “thermo-chemical piles” while others call them “large low-shear velocity provinces” or merely “the blobs.”
As per a 2016 study (read below), the two largest “blobs” are situated deep beneath the Pacific Ocean and Africa, and they account for almost 10% of the total weight of the mantle (4.01 × 1024 kg). They are also considered to be hotter than the surrounding environment.
The more research done to learn more about the “blobs” the more strange they appear. In 2020, Doyeon Kim, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, and his colleagues reported that using data from seismic wave analysis, scientists may get a proper look at the elusive inner-Earth lamps.
“By looking at thousands of core-mantle boundary echoes at once, instead of focusing on a few at a time, as is usually done, we have gotten a totally new perspective,” he said. “This is showing us that the core-mantle boundary region has lots of structures that can produce these echoes, and that was something we didn’t realize before because we only had a narrow view.”
The 2020 study, in particular, discovered a newly unknown structure underneath the volcanic Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, as well as demonstrating that the structure beneath the Hawaiian Islands is far bigger than scientists had previously assumed.
Many details of the “blobs” are unknown. Scientists, for example, are unaware of when and how they developed, implying that they could be the product of a cosmic collision. According to University of California, Davis professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, if those objects are “truly ancient,” their origin “tells us something about how our planet formed.”
Even with humanity’s ability to reach out into far space and distant galaxies, scientists are still confused about what lies beneath the surface of our own planet. Doyeon Kim, on the other hand, believes that this is “what makes our field of study so exciting.”
Read the full study below:
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