Scientists Found Undiscovered Massive Structures Deep inside Earth’s Core

As a part of their discoveries on Earth, University of Maryland (UMD) scientists now have discovered vast structures beneath the surface of the Earth. These unknown structures were found at a depth of around 2,900 km from the surface of Earth near its boundary at the molten core and solid mantle.

This new discovery is paving the way towards developing a new map showing the details of things found in the interior of Earth above the liquid iron core.

According to reports, these newly discovered structures posses a diameter of about 1000 kilometres and a depth of about 25 kilometres

Scientists led by a seismologist Doyeon Kim, UMD in the US  have made this discovery after they have analyzed the data acquired from 7000 recorded earthquakes. This data acquired includes the major earthquakes which were recorded in the  Pacific Ocean region between the years 1990 and 2018.

From this data, researchers had discovered ultra-low velocity (ULV) zone,  a place where seismic waves travel at slower velocities. But the scientist, are not sure about the composition of the structure, and their layout.

For discovering this, the scientists used Sequencer which is a machine learning algorithm, which was developed by scientists from the Johns Hopkins University and Tel Aviv University, who are co-authors. This study has been published in the issue of the journal Science on June 12, 2020,

With the help of seismological studies scientists focussed on relatively small datasets of regional earthquake activity, but with the help of this Sequencer, scientists to analyze 7,000 measurements of earthquakes, and each with a magnitude of at least 6.5.

The analysis of the scientists has detected widespread, heterogenous structures which consists of areas of unusually dense and hot rock which were present at the core-mantle boundary.

Kim said that analysing thousands of echoes instead of just a few was very much helpful and has given a totally new perspective and the core-mantle boundary region consists of a lot of structures that can produce echoes.

The map which was created by this UMD team highlighted a large area under the Pacific and revealed a hot and dense regions were present below the Hawaii and Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.

Even the co-author of the study Vedran Lekic expressed his surprise over discovering the such a big feature beneath the Marquesas Islands, which they even didn’t even know earlier.