Orange with 6Medias, published on Sunday, April 09, 2023 at 10:45 p.m.
The discovery was made possible thanks to seismic imagery. Located at the “core-mantle limit”, more than 2,900 kilometers underground, these “structures” would be five times higher than Everest.
The area between the Earth’s core and its mantle is full of secrets.
One of them was revealed on Wednesday April 5 by the review Science. Specifically, researchers have been able to discover “structures“a height equivalent to five times Mount Everest, thanks to seismic imaging. They were able to obtain these results by studying the”core-mantle boundary“, located more than 2,900 kilometers underground.
Use of seismic waves
But to achieve this, scientists have not dug a tunnel to the center of the Earth: the core is much too deep. They then used seismic waves resulting from earthquakes. Passing through different layers of our planet, the speed of these waves increases and decreases, thus making it possible to detect said “structures”, reports the Huff Post.
The team of scientists led by geophysicist Samantha Hansen, who teaches at the University of Alabama, then unearthed “extensive and variable ULVZs along the core-mantle boundary“, identified thanks to seismic information collected in Antarctica. In addition to new data useful for understanding the structure of the Earth’s layers, the mysteries surrounding the geophysical activity of the Earth’s core could be solved by this discovery.