Australian geology’s deep roots revealed

A new study has shown for the first time how Australia’s rich geological history is reflected deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

Study author Dr Caroline Eakin of the Australian National University (ANU) said Australia’s land mass is made up of different building blocks that merged over 1.3 billion years ago. years.

“Australia is a stable old continent,” said Dr Eakin.

“Australia’s various building blocks are reflected on the Earth’s surface, but it is not known how deep these geological differences would be reflected under the earth’s crust.”

Dr Eakin used observations of scattered surface waves, known as quasi-love waves, created by distant earthquakes to study the geological makeup of Australia.

“These near-amorous waves show deep boundaries in and around the Australian continent that correspond to the same tectonic boundaries seen on the surface,” Dr Eakin said.

“This suggests that these types of geological features are preserved for billions of years.”

According to Dr. Eakin, this new information about what is happening 100-200 kilometers below the Earth’s surface indicates that the deepest part of our continent is just as geologically diverse as the earth’s crust.

This is the most detailed analysis of this kind of data in Australia to date, taking into account more than 2,000 earthquake records from seismometers across the Australian continent.

The study was published in Earth & Environment Communications.