Satellite Data Reveals How Earth's Crust Is 'Dripping' Beneath Turkey

A recent study has confirmed a fascinating geological phenomenon happening beneath Turkey. An analysis of satellite data revealed the Earth's crust below the Konya Basin in the Central Anatolian Plateau of Turkey has been reshaping over millions of years. The research, conducted by Earth scientists at the University of Toronto, was published in Nature Communications.

Researchers said experimental simulations, combined with geological, geophysical and geodetic data, explain the enigmatic sinking of the basin, inside the rising plateau interior.

It further adds to the existence of a new class of plate tectonics that have implications for other planets in the universe, like Mars and Venus, that do not have Earth-like plate tectonics.

The study suggests the sinking is due to the multi-stage lithospheric dripping — the phenomenon named for the instability of rocky material that creates the crust and upper mantle of the Earth.

Major landforms like basins and mountainous folding of the crust are formed at the surface as the dense rock fragments beneath get detached and sink into more fluid layers of the mantle of the planet, the research said.

“Looking at the satellite data, we observed a circular feature at the Konya Basin where the crust is subsiding or the basin is deepening,” said lead author Julia Andersen, a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth Sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.

This prompted the researchers to look at other geophysical data beneath the surface. There they witnessed a "seismic anomaly in the upper mantle and a thickened crust, telling us there is high-density material there and indicating a likely mantle lithospheric drip," Andersen added.

In the past, studies have suggested that the Central Anatolian Plateau has risen by around one kilometre over the past 10 million years due to the lithospheric dripping phenomenon.

How it happens

Russell Pysklywec, a co-author of the study, has given insight into the phenomenon and stated that when the lithosphere thickened and further dripped below the region, this led to the formation of a basin at the surface that "later sprang up when the weight below broke off and sank into the deeper depths of the mantle".

However, this process was not a one-time tectonic event, Pysklywec said and suggested that the "initial drip seems to have spawned subsequent daughter events elsewhere in the region, resulting in the curious rapid subsidence of the Konya Basin within the continuously rising plateau of Turkiye.”

To conclude, the research team recreated the dripping process in laboratory experiments and further analysed the observations.