A new finding has been revealed on the GeoSpace blog by the American Geophysical Union, which claims that underground continents may have been formed alongside the Earth itself when an ocean of magma solidified on a higher layer. Not less than 4.5 billion years have passed after that moment, more than enough for the former hot Earth to cool and be transformed into the mini paradise we all know today.
But what exactly are these underground continents?
If you thought by any chance that they’re habitable, I hate to disappoint you, but you’re hugely mistaking. Underground continents are nothing else than buried blobs of hot and compressed rock. Scientists were able to find such underground massive structures by studying peculiar patterns of seismic activity.
Research published on July 31st in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, and Geosystems reports that the continents survived Earth’s collision with another planet, which later led to the formation of our Moon. Curtis Williams, the study co-author and a geologist at the University of California, takes one step further by saying that it’s impressive how the regions survived most of Earth’s volcanic history, relatively untouched.
The underground continents survived the impact which led to the formation of the Moon
Before the study published in the GeoSpace blog, other geological studies assumed columns of rock from the Earth’s mantle rose to the surface in straight lines. While it was known that these rocks were changing course on the road to the crust, the researchers tried to anticipate their route and created a model as to how they thought samples would follow their paths to the underground continents.
“It’s a more robust framework to try and answer these questions in terms of not making these assumptions of vertically rising material but rather to take into account how much deflection these plumes have seen,” Williams told GeoSpace.
It’s fascinating for anyone to find out how unwelcomed Earth was at its beginnings, and how it has become until now so full of millions of species of animals and plants. The most significant step in science is to come with an obvious explanation of how Earth got so many life-sustaining elements, like oxygen, abundant liquid water, the atmosphere blocking the harmful sunlight radiation, the electromagnetic field, and so on.
