Unexpected structures found deep below Pacific Ocean could change our understanding of Earth
Scientists believe they’ve found a window into the early days of Earth and it's at the bottom of the ocean.
A team of geoscientists have used earthquakes to study the composition of the lower portion of the Earth’s mantle under the Pacific Ocean – and they've discovered something quite peculiar.
Leader of the team Simon Lamb, of the University of Wellington and scientist Cornel de Ronde, of GNS Science, said the key to our planet's past points to a connection between two parts of the world.
One is a remote corner of South Africa and the other is on the seabed off the coast of New Zealand. Their findings could help us piece together the origins of our planet - and maybe even life itself.
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The studies began when de Ronde mapped the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa’s highveld region.
“The geological formations in this region have proved difficult to decipher, despite many attempts,” the pair wrote. “There was, however, something very strange about this seafloor.
According to De Ronde’s map, the seafloor contains some of the oldest rocks on Earth, dating back 3.3 billion years, when the world was a mere 1.2 billion years old.
Their arrangement didn’t fit the commonly accepted theory of how Earth’s tectonic plates behaved in the past.
However, they claim, their new research has offered up 'the key to cracking this code.'
They added: “And it has taken our study of rocks laid down in New Zealand, at the other end of the Earth’s long history, to make sense of it.”
Turns out, the rock formations in South Africa looked very similar to the chaotic seafloor structures found near New Zealand.
More specifically, they resembled submarine landslides caused by earthquakes along New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone.
If this is true, it challenges the long-held belief that early Earth was too soft and molten for major tectonic activity. Instead, researchers believe the planet was already experiencing massive earthquakes billions of years ago, which helped shape its surface—just like we see today.
More research needs to be done as there are still gaps in their understanding, for example, what kind of material these deep structures are made of.
"That's our dilemma. With the new high-resolution model, we can see such anomalies everywhere in the Earth's mantle. But we don't know exactly what they are or what material is creating the patterns we have uncovered," said Thomas Schouten, first author and doctoral student at the Geological Institute of ETH Zurich.