Post by demos on Jun 8, 2023 21:13:29 GMT
Thought this was pretty interesting...
The search for Earth's hidden mountains
It was a glaring summer's day in Antarctica. Through frozen eyelashes, Samantha Hansen blinked out at the featureless landscape: a wall of white, where up was the same as down, and ground blended seamlessly into sky. Amid these disorientating conditions, with temperatures of around -62C (-80F), she identified a suitable spot in the snow, and took out a spade.
Hansen was in the continent's bleak interior – not the comparatively balmy, picturesque Antarctica of cruise ship tours, but an unforgiving environment rarely even braved by the local wildlife. As part of a team from the University of Alabama and Arizona State University, she was looking for hidden 'mountain' ranges – peaks that no explorer has ever set foot on, no sunlight has ever illuminated. These mountains occur deep within the Earth.
It was 2015 and the researchers were in Antarctica to set up a seismology station – equipment, half-buried in the snow, that would allow them to study the interior of our planet. In total, the team installed 15 across Antarctica.
The mountain-like structures they revealed are utterly mysterious. But Hansen's team discovered that these ultra-low velocity zones or ULVZs, as they are known, are also likely to be almost ubiquitous – wherever you are in the world, they may be lurking far beneath your feet. "We found evidence for ULVZs kind of everywhere [we looked]," says Hansen. The question is – what are they? And what are they doing inside our planet?
Hansen was in the continent's bleak interior – not the comparatively balmy, picturesque Antarctica of cruise ship tours, but an unforgiving environment rarely even braved by the local wildlife. As part of a team from the University of Alabama and Arizona State University, she was looking for hidden 'mountain' ranges – peaks that no explorer has ever set foot on, no sunlight has ever illuminated. These mountains occur deep within the Earth.
It was 2015 and the researchers were in Antarctica to set up a seismology station – equipment, half-buried in the snow, that would allow them to study the interior of our planet. In total, the team installed 15 across Antarctica.
The mountain-like structures they revealed are utterly mysterious. But Hansen's team discovered that these ultra-low velocity zones or ULVZs, as they are known, are also likely to be almost ubiquitous – wherever you are in the world, they may be lurking far beneath your feet. "We found evidence for ULVZs kind of everywhere [we looked]," says Hansen. The question is – what are they? And what are they doing inside our planet?
