Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate - written on the gates of hell. "Give up hope, everyone who enters here." A great way to welcome a visitor to hell. But there is also a real underground world, in which, however, there are fewer dogs and sinners do not cook in cauldrons anywhere. Scientists have worked extensively on the complete dungeon map. You can call it a hell card, in a way.
The earth is made up of tectonic plates, huge pieces of crust and mantle, scattered around and crushing each other, causing processes like volcanism, earthquakes and continental drift. In the process of the so-called subduction, one plate slides under the other and part of the Earth sinks into the mantle. A team of European scientists worked on the Atlas of the Underworld, a map of these sinking plates, studying the Earth's mantle and the history and geography of this subsurface world. And so they published a scientific paper, in which they described their work in detail, in the journal Tectonophysics.
“Now we can not only track the movements of plates on the surface, but also their subsidence at the core-mantle boundary,” Duu van Hinsbergen of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands told Gizmodo. "As for me, this is cool - we can study physics inside the Earth."
You probably thought that the plates that dive deep into the mantle just melt, but in fact they get stuck there for a long time and can sink as much as 3000 kilometers down, explains van Hinsbergen. This catalog has become "the first large basis for the interpretation of the current global structure of the mantle and its physical properties, as well as how it relates to the dynamic evolution of our planet over the past 300 million years," the article says.
This hellish Atlas is the result of 17 years of work matching data from various plate imaging studies. For visualization, scientists use seismic tomography. It is similar to medical imaging, except in this case, sound waves, not light waves, travel through the Earth at speed and create an image.
Scientists use this information to compile the history of many plates and their impact on the planet. The Bitterroot Plate, for example, is located 200 kilometers deep in western North America. Scientists have concluded that the plate underwent subduction 46-66 million years ago and led to a surge in volcanic activity in the Challis Absaroka arc. This 50-million-year-old volcanic zone today only makes itself felt in the residual rocks in the northwestern United States. The slabs are younger, leaving more prominent features such as the Andes and Himalayas.
Johnny Wu of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study, says the project was somewhat similar to creating a human genome, but for planet Earth. "Like a genome map, this project will provide us with a platform for further discoveries about our planet."
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And this is just the beginning. “If you look at the first atlas of the world in the 16th century, this work was not bad, but significantly different from our modern atlas,” says van Hinsbergen. “I think this atlas will also look different in 10-20 years. We will find slabs everywhere."
Well hell is real. The earth is sucked into the very thick of the mantle as the planet evolves, giving rise to literally outstanding landmarks on the surface and complex behavior below it. You can look at it yourself.
Ilya Khel
