Dense regions called ultra-low velocity zones, at the bottom edge of Earth's mantle, may be linked to a 4.5-billion-year-old collision.
Unfortunately, their origin is just as murky as anything else about them. Some scientists thought ULVZs might be the source of magma for volcanic hot spots, since they lie under volcanoes in Hawaii and Samoa in the Pacific. But many other known ULVZs don’t align with volcanoes, so that seemed to make little sense.
Thorne, Pachhai, and their colleagues focused on one area of ULVZs: located deep under the Coral Sea, northeast of Australia, home to the Great Barrier Reef. It’s an ideal location, since earthquakes are a frequent occurrence there. Those earthquakes give plenty of seismic waves that scientists can use to visualize the inside of the Earth.
The best match to their work corresponded to a scenario in which ULVZs don’t have single layers, but rather multiple ones. Pachhai says that, to their knowledge, this is the first study that’s shown evidence of this.
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