Featured Image Credit: @ Didier Marti / Gary Qian / Getty
Since Mount Everest was discovered by surveyors in 1852, it's been known as the tallest mountain on Earth, with its highest point towering some 29,029 feet above sea level. This puts it some way ahead of K2's 28,251 feet. On the morning of May 29, 1953, New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay stood on the tallest point on planet Earth, and since then, humanity has been obsessed with scaling Mount Everest.
Sadly, this has led to over 340 people dying while trying to reach the mountain's elusive summit.
While climbing Everest has lost some of its unique appeal due to over 7,000 people making it there, there's an even bigger mountain that no one will ever be able to hit the peak of.
Advert
As reported by The Times and originally published in Nature, scientists have discovered two of the planet's biggest mountains, both being continent-sized 'islands' of rock that dwarf Mount Everest by up to 100 times.
Lying a whopping 2,000km beneath the Earth’s surface, the two mountains rest on top of the Earth's core at the very bottom of the lower mantle.
One is lurking beneath Africa and the other is under the Pacific Ocean, but at heights of 1,000km, they're monsters compared to Everest's 8.8km height.
Arwen Deuss, a seismologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, led the research, saying that these mountains lie in a 'graveyard' of rock slabs that have sunk from the Earth's surface.
Unlike the rest of the rock slabs being made of fine grains because they've recrystallized as they sank, LLSVPs "must consist of much larger grains."
Discussing the discovery, Deuss admitted: "Nobody knows what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years."
He continued: "The islands are hot and because of their large viscosity they don’t move very easily, so they have been staying where they are at the base of the mantle for at least a billion years, but perhaps much longer. They form huge mountains, with a height of almost 1,000km."
Geologists discovered this region a few years ago when they spotted anomalies in the seismic waves caused by earthquakes when drifting through the mantle.
The mantle isn't red-hot liquid magma like you might think, but is more like semi-solid rock.
Dubbed 'large low-shear-velocity provinces', these LLSVPs are named because of how their heat slows the movement of seismic waves. The LLSVPs have helped scientists create a clearer picture of our planet's internal structure.
As for what formed these mountains, Deuss mused: "I think that they may well be a remnant from the time when our planet was originally formed."
He suggested they might be "reservoirs [of] primordial chemical elements” that scientists theorize have been sitting in the planet’s mantle “untouched since the Earth originated."
Utrecht University's Sujania Talavera-Soza from Utrecht University concluded: "Those mineral grains do not grow overnight, which can only mean one thing: LLSVPs are lots and lots older than the surrounding slab graveyards.
"The LLSVPs, with their much larger building blocks, are very rigid. Therefore, they do not take part in mantle convection, the flow in the Earth’s mantle."
In terms of what these monstrous mountains mean, it goes against standard geography books by suggesting the Earth's mantle 'cannot be well mixed' and doesn't flow like we previously thought.
