Mystery structures discovered deep inside the Earth leaving scientists baffled

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Everywhere and it's leaving them gobsmacked.

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It's been established that ultra-low velocity zones (ULVZs) are situated near hotspots, which are areas of the mantle where hot rock rises, creating volcanic islands, but data from unusual earthquake waves suggests this phenomenon might occur more broadly than previously realised.

, Michael Thorne, a geologist and geophysicist at the Univ of Utah, said: "Here's one of the most extreme features we've come across anywhere inside the planet, and we're stumped: we don't know what they are, where they're coming from, what they're made of, or what they're for inside the Earth."

We've still got a heap of unanswered queries on our hands.

This all came to the surface when researchers were working on a completely separate project.

Scientists were looking to explore how PKP waves generated by massive earthquakes could propagate through the Earth's centre to the opposite side of the core via the mantle, the liquid outer core, and then the mantle once more.

They've been investigating another sort of wave, called precursor PKP waves, which pop up every now and then before PKP waves.

Findings from this study indicated something dramatic was impeding earthquake waves from dispersing energy.

A major large-scale, low-velocity zone (ULVZ) was discovered in the area researched by the scientific team under the western Pacific; the team also identified indicators of several large ULVZs while conducting a broader search in North America, North Africa, East Asia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest.

Thorne reckons this implies they're being dynamically spawned.

Further investigation is expected, but they reckon a better understanding could assist with comprehensively grasping volcanic hotspots as well as how the mantle moves along.

This article was first posted on September 2, 2024

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