Explore the mysterious missing mountains and oceans

Professor Van Hinsbergen and his team at Utrecht University hope their complete map will reproduce the panoramic image of the Earth's geology. Through studies involving subduction zones that have been active for the past 250 million years, the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions generated and sinking operations has also been elucidated.

Submerged suction zones contain ancient Earth information

At the intersections of tectonic plates across the globe, ocean arrays move directly into the mantle of the Earth's crust. This is part of a continuous cycle that contributes to the drift of the continental plates and is also the cause of volcanic eruptions and mountain-creating activities.

The movement down to the mantle and melting of continental plates is called subduction . This process transforms the Earth's surface, creating new oceans and mountains, and burying oceans and mountains that existed millions of years ago in our planet's past. "Every day, we are losing geological information from the surface of the Earth, It's like trying to assemble a broken piece of glass that has lost some important pieces" - Jonny Wu, Geologist from the University of Houston, Texas.

Earth is always moving.

But geologists have figured out how to get back those missing pieces to redraw a bigger picture. By using geological waves caused by earthquakes, the system creates a simulated image with the same function as a tomography machine in a hospital. Over the past few years, by improving the tomography techniques that scientists have discovered many submerged plaques are falling freely at a very slow speed down the melting layer near the Earth's core. , about 2900km from the Earth's surface.

Recently, complete x-ray images of the Earth are becoming a hot topic of research. In December, at the US Geological Federation conference in San Francisco, California, the Dutch team will publish a document on more than 100 submerged continental plates including information on age. , size and specific geological features based on the tomography models that the group has built.

Professor Douwe van Hinsbergen from Utrecht University, who presided over the program, said, "Step by step, we have gone deeper and deeper into submerged zones to obtain the ancient information of the Earth." .

Map "underground world"

A map of 100 existing subduction sites is built by Dutch researchers.

"Map of the underworld" , as its name suggests, holds the ghosts of a geographic past. By reversing the process and bringing tectonic plates back to the ground, scientists can find out the dimensions and locations of ancient oceans. Moreover, they can locate where the sinking plates will cause melting, release lava kilns to create volcanic systems and determine where the ancient mountains were raised and then eroded. go. To do that, they have to track the traces in vague rock records. "It was quite an interesting time to be able to pull all the plates together," said Mathew Domeier, an architectural modeler at the University of Oslo.

It is based on millions of seismic waves recorded by sensors scattered all over the world. Faster arrival time waves are thought to have passed through the low temperature rock layer of the submerged zone. But the accuracy of seismic data is quite patchy; The earthquake-source of seismic waves does not occur everywhere and wave signals are often interfering when crossing near the Earth core or transmitting over large distances.

"Usually the area where we need the most information is the most uncertain area," said Ved Lekic, a cutting-edge photo analyst at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"Research groups around the world use more than 20 models to explain tomography data, images and mantle structures of each model are often in conflict with each other," said Dr. Grace Shephard at Dai. Oslo announced. In the coming months, she will publish a comparison of 14 different models that will evaluate tectonic plates with the highest accuracy, Grace's results may have conflicts with some of the plates in the episode. map of Utrecht University. The inner images of the Earth are becoming more reliable, thanks to improving computational capacity and global projects.

The process of reconstructing ancient terrain also shows the lost mountains. In a study published a few months ago, a team from the University of Houston recreated the movement of 28 tectonic plates and modeling Philippine waters 50 million years ago. In addition to determining the ancient state that tectonic plates once existed, the team also said that a tectonic plate was completely buried in the mantle and created a chain of active volcanoes in Asia today. This process also explains the mysterious bending of rock and soil in Japan and the bottom of the East Sea.

The process of recreating subduction zones to build a model of ancient oceans buried.

Similarly, the array below the North American continent helped to make the continent's history of mountain creation clearer. By reversing time for one of those tectonic plates, Karin Sigloch, a geophysicist at Oxford University in England, showed that the western mountains of North America.

Professor Van Hinsbergen and his team at Utrecht University hope their complete map will reproduce the panoramic image of the Earth's geology. Through studies involving subduction zones that have been active for the past 250 million years, the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide Dioxine produced and the sinking activity has also been elucidated.

"We did it, if someone denied it, it was an utter coincidence," Van Hinsbergen said proudly.

However, we can only recreate the data until 250 million years ago, and further, the entire tectonic plate has been dissolved into the mantle so it cannot be recorded.