Luckily or not for us, our beloved planet Earth still has a lot of amazing insights to offer. While so many astronomers are evaluating and taking the idea of moving to another planet seriously, other scientists are amazed by new discoveries about our home planet. Almost three decades of earthquake data gathered are now revealing new structures deep under the surface of the Earth.
A team of scientists from the University of Maryland has found a huge structure made up of thick material 3000 kilometers (1,864 miles) below the surface, near the Earth’s core.
Location: the Pacific Ocean
The research team was led by Doyeon Kim, who is a seismologist and postdoctoral fellow from the University of Maryland. They had been using seismograms from hundreds of earthquakes that occurred between 1990 and 2018. They ultimately put the data into a machine learning algorithm that’s called Sequencer. One of the newfound large structures is located far below the Marquesas Islands from the Pacific Ocean, while the other one is far beneath the Hawaiian Islands. There were found two “mega-ULVZs” zones that span for at least 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).
Doyeon Kim declared:
This study is very special because, for the first time, we get to systematically look at such a large dataset that actually covers more or less the entire Pacific basin,
He further added:
This is very interesting because this might indicate that mega-ULVZs are special and may host primitive geochemical signatures that have been relatively unmixed since early Earth history,
Mega-ULVZs are big structures made up of exotic materials that date back to the times before Earth even had its Moon. Researchers are hoping that Sequencer will allow them to use all of the datasets and bring them together to take a better look for lower mantle structures.
Their new findings were published recently in Science.
