The underground continents can be as old as the earth

According to a new study, underground continents located in the belly of the Earth could have formed when an ancient ocean of magma solidified on the planet's surface of babies.

The discovery was detailed in a fascinating story on the blog of the American Geophysical Union GeoSpace.

As journalist Abigail Eisenstadt explains, scientists know these blocks of hot and compressed rocks since the 1970s. Earthquake resonate through the rest of the mantle at a steady pace, but encounter serious slowdowns as they roar through these huge heaps of stone. These particular patterns of seismic activity have helped scientists locate the continents at the boundary of the mantle and the melted outer core of the Earth, but they still do not know when or how the structures emerged. Some scientists theorize that pieces of the planet the crust dipped in the coat, has been detached and aggregated over time, reported Geospace.

New analyzes of volcanic rock give a different picture: the underground continents can be as old as the Earth itself and have probably survived the planetary impact the authors of the study reported on July 31 in the newspaper Geochemistry, geophysics, geosystems.

It's amazing that these areas have survived most of the planet's land. volcanic history Curtis Williams, co-author of the study, geologist at the University of California at Davis, told GeoSpace that he was relatively intact.

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Williams and his colleagues have compiled new and existing data on geological samples from Hawaii, Iceland, Balleny Islands in Antarctica and other areas where incredibly hot rock bubbles from the core of the planet to the surface. Samples cross the crust like lava and cool to igneous rocks, according to GeoSpace. The samples born inside the planet carry old isotopes, or versions of atoms, such as helium-3, that were forged during the big Bang. This is because the exposure to oxygen removes a lot of these chemicals formed rocks near the crust. The team identified samples containing the primordial isotopes, then attempted to trace the path of the rocks to the surface.

In the past, many geological models assumed that mantle rock columns – called deep mantle feathers – were coming to the surface in straight, ordered lines, reported GeoSpace. But we know that these plumes ricochet and change course during their journey to the earth's crust. The researchers developed a model that identified the zigzag nature of deep plumes of the mantle and thus allowed some samples to be traced to subterranean continents.

"It's a more robust framework to try to answer these questions in terms of not taking into account this vertically increasing material, but rather to take into account the degree of deviation that these plumes have seen," Williams said. GeoSpace. From there, Williams and his team could deduct what materials were used to form the massive blobs and when they formed.

You can find out more about the study at GeoSpace.

Originally published on Science live.