Deep in the Earth beneath us lie two blobs the size of continents. One is under Africa, the other under the Pacific Ocean.
The blobs have their roots 2,900 km below the surface, almost halfway to the centre of the Earth. They are thought to be the birthplace of rising columns of hot rock called"deep mantle plumes" that reach Earth's surface.When these plumes first reach the surface, giant volcanic eruptions occur – the kind that contributed to the extinction of the65.5 million years ago.
Scientists have known the blobs existed for a long time, but how they have behaved over Earth's history has been an open question. In new research, we modeled a billion years of geological history and discoveredAbove: Earth's blobs as imaged from seismic data. The African blob is at the top and the Pacific blob at the bottom.The blobs are in the mantle, the thick layer of hot rock between Earth's crust and its core. The mantle is solid but slowly flows over long timescales.
Scientists generally agree the blobs are linked to the movement of tectonic plates at Earth's surface. However, how the blobs have changed over the course of Earth's history has puzzled them.One school of thought has been that the present blobs have acted as anchors, locked in place for hundreds of millions of years while other rock moves around them.
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