The thickness of the material ranges from a few kilometers to more than 30 kilometers. This suggests that we’re seeing mountains up to four times the height of Mount Everest in some places,” said Edward Garnero, co-author and professor of geophysics at Arizona State University.
deep in Antarctica
Huge mountains lie beneath Antarctica, where a team from the University of Alabama and Arizona State University has been tracking continuous readings of earthquakes from ice-strewn equipment since 2015.
The measurements captured seismic waves from earthquakes around the world, which can be used to study the echoes of sound waves at the boundary between Earth’s core and mantle.
When researchers recently looked at seismic waves from 25 earthquakes, they found that the waves were slowed by the irregularity of the underlying mantle boundary.
These irregularities could have arisen because the basalt was accreted with sediments from the ocean floor, resulting in unprecedentedly high mountains deep within the Earth.
They are created by tectonic plates
According to the researchers, the mountain formations formed when ancient ocean crusts were pushed toward Earth’s core and sank to the core-mantle boundary.
These then slowly expanded to form a series of structures: basalt and sedimentary mountains.
According to scientists, these subterranean mountains can have a significant impact on the distribution of heat from the Earth’s core to the surface.
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