New Delhi: The mysteries of the world never cease to amaze us and recently, a certain discovery has sent the scientific world in a fit of frenzy. According to reports, scientists may have potentially discovered potential patches of the ancient crust of Earth deep within the mantle and that crust is also known as the “sunken worlds”. The discovery has been possible due to a new way of mapping our planet’s interior. However, they have appeared in places they should not, which has left researchers scratching their heads.
A new study with added mystery about Earth
In the journal Scientific Reports, a new study has been published which says that the remnants of the tectonic plates which have been long lost are lurking below water bodies and within the interior of continents. However, it is not like the subducted slabs identified earlier which are found in areas where the tectonic plates at present collide and have collided earlier. According to the new findings, the new anomalies are located in areas where tectonic activity has never taken place, like below the western Pacific Ocean. Hence, the researchers are still scratching their head about how the plates ended up there.
The different theories behind the mystery
Researchers have put forward several theories to decipher the mystery. One theory states that the submerged plates are possibly made of material which are like crust and have been left over from the creation of mantle which took place around 4 billion years ago. Another theory states that the blobs may be comprised of similarly dense material which has grown inside the mantle for few hundred million years. Researchers have clarified that these are alternate theories and the identity of the blobs remains a massive mystery to them.
How did researchers found the ‘sunken worlds’?
So far, we have known about the interior of Earth by joining different seismographs which have been created from different earthquakes. But in this new study, researchers have used full-waveform inversion. It is a new method which uses computer models to get a single image of the seismographs. To pull it off, researchers ran the model on the Piz Daint supercomputer at Lugano’s Swiss National Supercomputer Center, which was once Europe’s most powerful computer.
A new study reveals the discovery of potential remnants of Earth’s ancient crust, dubbed sunken worlds, deep within the mantle. These anomalies, detected using full-waveform inversion, appear in unexpected locations, challenging existing theories of plate tectonics. knowledge Knowledge News, Photos and Videos on General Knowledge
