Off the coast of New Zealand, the Earth is swallowing its own ocean

A young subduction zone off the coast of New Zealand has helped scientists explain the mystery of how one tectonic plate was able to break through Earth's hard rock crust and start the process of diving into another.

Research just published in Nature Geoscience describes how a small fault in a tectonic plate is continuously squeezed and pulled for millions of years, until the pressure is strong enough and starts a geological process. mighty.

Work began in 2018 with an expedition aboard the research vessel Marcus G. Langseth off the coast of New Zealand. Here Dr. Brandon Shuck from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory collected detailed seismic images of the seafloor.

Earth has a nascent subduction zone off the coast of New Zealand

The images are stitched together with samples from other oceanic expeditions, providing geological timelines to reconstruct a tumultuous historical period.

According to PHYS, the evidence shows that 16 million years ago, a small crack started to appear in the Australian tectonic plate. This crack slowly grows as it collides with other tectonic plates - because as we all know, tectonic plates, roughly speaking, pieces of the Earth's crust, are always in motion.

When the fracture was long and large enough, the heavier portion of the Australian Plate was able to penetrate the Earth's rocky crust and gradually burrow underneath over the past 800 million years. This is a relatively small subduction zone on a global tectonic scale, but evidence suggests that the rift will continue to grow, extending to Antarctica and gradually changing the landscape over the next hundreds of millions of years.

As many other studies show, the Earth's crust is not seamless like most other planets but is composed of 15-20 large and small pieces. These pieces are constantly sliding over each other, under each other through the process of subduction. pulling what they carry on top are constantly changing continents and oceans.

This whole process is collectively known as "plate tectonics", which sounds downright scary but is crucial in helping Earth stabilize its environment, atmosphere, and sustain life.

This process repeatedly caused the land on the planet to merge into a supercontinent, surrounded by a super ocean, and then repeatedly pulled apart, separating into many of the continents today.