Just when you think we've ticked off our bucket list of things to be worried about, scientists have given us something new to keep us up at night.
Sounding like something from 1958's The Blob, they've explained the origins of a puzzling 'blob' that is heading straight for New York City and is currently some 200 kilometers under our feet.
We've seen enough sci-fi movies about weird alien goop crashing to Earth and trying to consume the human race, so maybe it's not just the 'hostile alien' object we need to be looking out for.
What is the mysterious blob?
This 'blob' is said to span 350 kilometers and is known better as the Northern Appalachian Anomaly (NAA).
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Researchers from the United Kingdom's University of Southampton and Germany's Helmholtz Center for Geosciences discovered the NAA using seismic tomography.
This is effectively a giant CT scan for the Earth.
Currently lurking 200 km beneath us, the NAA is stretching across Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. As shared by EurekAlert!, the Northern Appalachian Anomaly is described as "a large region of unusually hot rock deep beneath the Appalachian Mountains."
Thought to have been created some 80 million years ago when Greenland and North America split apart, the NAA is apparently not due to plate tectonic movements when North America broke away from Northwest Africa 180 million years ago as was previously thought.
These hot spots are typically found near volcanoes, but the NAA is a special case because it's so far inland and sits beneath New England – somewhere with a distinct lack of active volcanoes.
When will the blob reach New York City?
The blob is currently on the move and is part of a sluggish 'mantle wave' that's heading straight for New Jersey. For those worried they'll need to pack up their bags and flee the Big Apple, the good news is that the NAA only moves about 20 km every one million years. Crunching the numbers, it means it will finally reach NYC in about 15 million years.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking note of anomalies like the NAA, because according to the research, other even older 'blobs' are lurking underneath us as part of a 'drip' that's affecting the USA.
Lead author Tom Gernon explained the 'puzzling' thermal upwelling and added: "Our research suggests it’s part of a much larger, slow-moving process deep underground that could potentially help explain why mountain ranges like the Appalachians are still standing.
"Heat at the base of a continent can weaken and remove part of its dense root, making the continent lighter and more buoyant, like a hot air balloon rising after dropping its ballast. This would have caused the ancient mountains to be further uplifted over the past few million years.”
The ‘mantle wave’ theory was included as a finalist in Science magazine’s 2024 Breakthrough of the Year, hyptohecizing that hot, dense rock comes away from the base of tectonic plates in a similar way to globules in a lava lamp.
These then ripple beneath continents for tens of millions of years and are thought to be linked to rare volcanic eruptions that bring diamonds up to the surface.