Strange Large Structures Near The Earth's Core
The AI Sequencer that normally looks into space took a look at the Earth's Core and it found surprisingly large and numerous structures of dense, hot matter at the border of the Earth's core and mantle.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Université Paris Diderot - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
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The Earth's depths are literally under our feet. Yet, they might as well be as far away as some distant galaxies. They are a strange, extreme world and are still hiding many secrets. Now, a team of geophysicists from the University of Maryland analyzed thousands of recordings of seismic waves so we can get a better understanding of the environment that exists at the border of the molten core of our planet and the planet's mantle.
And the scientists were in for a surprise. Large and numerous heterogeneous structures that correspond to areas with unusually dense and hot material. This was certainly not expected. Doyeon Kim and his coworkers aren't exactly sure what are these structures made from. So, now they will focus their research on them because they might tell us a lot about the geological processes that occur inside the depths of the Earth, about tectonics, and how our planet's geology evolved.
Kim and his colleagues focused on echoes of seismic waves that traveled under the Pacific Ocean. Their analysis showed us a so far unknown deep structure under the Marquesas Islands – exotic volcanic islands that can be found in French Polynesia. And at the same time, it shows that the already known structure under the Hawaiian Islands is larger than we thought.
These structures are called ULVZs (ultralow-velocity zones). These areas have a lot of dense and hot material in them and they can be found at the border between the Earth's core and the mantle. And from these areas, convection plumes rise and wherever they reach the mantle, hot volcanic spots can be found.
Kim's team's research brought us the so far most detailed image of the border between the Earth's core and mantle. The researchers analyzed thousands of echoes of seismic waves and this gave them a completely new view on this extreme environment. In the end, we found that there are many more structures there than we knew about.
Analyzing large numbers of seismic waves is quite hard. This is why Kim and his team used the services of the AI Sequencer to analyze roughly 7 thousand seismograms. These seismograms come from hundreds of earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.5 and higher that happened between 1990 and 2018. The incredible thing is the fact that Sequencer was created to find patterns in the radiation of stars and galaxies. But seismologists are essentially trying to solve similar problems and thus the astrophysical AI found another place to help.
Kim's team discovered echoes in about 40 % of all the analyzed seismic waves. That was quite surprising. Initially, the scientists expected to detect much fewer echoes – that they will be rare. A large number of echoes found means the large anomalous structures are not that anomalous – instead they are quite common.
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