The deep Earth contains mountains with peaks three to four times higher than Mount Everest, scientists have found. According to the BBC, a team of experts from Arizona State University used seismology centres in Antarctica and found these astonishingly huge mountains in the boundary between the core and mantle, around 2,900 kilometres deep inside our planet.
"The mountain-like structures they revealed are utterly mysterious," the BBC report read. Scientists explained that these underground mountain ranges - dubbed ultra-low velocity zones or ULVZs - had managed to escape the experts' gaze all these years until earthquakes and atomic explosions generated enough seismic data to be spotted by them.
Scientists believe that these huge mountain ranges are over 24 miles (38 kilometres) in height, while Mount Everest is around 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometres) from the surface. "Analysing 1000's of seismic recordings from Antarctica, our high-definition imaging method found thin anomalous zones of material at the CMB [core-mantle boundary] everywhere we probed," Arizona State University geophysicist Edward Garnero said in a statement.
"The material's thickness varies from a few kilometres to 10's of kilometres. This suggests we are seeing mountains on the core, in some places up to 5 times taller than Mt. Everest," he added.
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Further, as per the report, experts explained the possible reason behind the formation of these mysterious mountain peaks. They believe that these ancient formations were created when oceanic crusts were formed into Earth's interior. They also argue that it might have begun with tectonic plates slipping down into our planet's mantle and sinking to the core-mantle boundary. These then slowly spread out to form an assortment of structures, leaving a trail of both mountains and blobs. This would, therefore, mean that these mysterious mountains are made of ancient oceanic crust, which is a combination of basalt rock and sediments from the ocean floor.
Now, with this recent discovery, scientists are seeking to argue that these underground mountains may play a critical role in how heat escapes the Earth's core. "Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet, and we are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought," study co-author and University of Alabama geoscientist Samantha Hansen said in a statement.
"Our research provides important connections between shallow and deep Earth structure and the overall processes driving our planet," she added.
