The Earth has always been full of mysteries, and new discoveries constantly unravel these puzzles, questioning our understanding of the world we live in.
But what if what we perceive is only a fraction of reality? Imagine that beneath the surface lies a hidden dimension, a realm of ancient secrets and unknown forces that outline our existence. Could there be more to life than what our eyes just see? These questions challenge us to look beyond the visible directly into the unknown territories of our planet.
For decades, scientists have used seismographs to create 3D images of Earth’s interior by analyzing how seismic waves from earthquakes reverberate through the planet. This method has helped identify ancient sections of the crust, known as subducted slabs, pulled into the mantle through subduction zones where tectonic plates converge. In October 2024, researchers discovered a section of seafloor that had sunk into the mantle below Easter Island.
In the study published on 4 November 2024, researchers revealed that the creation of several expected subducted slabs within Earth’s interior had been shown with a technique known as seismographic imaging. Researchers have released some information about blob sizes, forms, and specific blob locations.
However, contrary to previously determined subducted slabs found over areas with known tectonic collisions, some new anomalies lie under regions without any recorded tectonic collisions below the western Pacific Ocean. This is such an unexpected result that scientists now struggle with the question of how these slabs came to these locations.
The overall understanding of Earth’s interior prior to this study was fashioned out of the seismographs produced globally by separate individual earthquakes. In contrast, the method utilized in this research, full-waveform inversion, brings together all these seismographs into a single, clear image through the use of computer models. In fact, this computationally thorough technique needed the Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputer Center in Lugano to process all the data.
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