Unexpected discovery of the 'missing' crust of the Earth

According to Live Science, new work shows that modern plate tectonics - the process by which 15 pieces of Earth's crust are constantly switching places, sliding over each other and moving oceans and continents - has only happened about 1 billion years. via. In the process, the pieces are constantly colliding, sliding over each other. The fate of the pieces crushed and swallowed up in the ground remains a mystery.

The "missing" pieces of Earth's crust will become like a multi-segment toy snake similar to the geological elimination process in the image, but on a much larger scale - Photo: Cambridge University

New research led by ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Texas at Austin (USA) shows that shell fragments that are swallowed, crushed down below do not disintegrate, and are then recycled along with the deep material of the shell. underground as previously thought.

According to Phys.org, they will become weak, bent, and if you consider the cross-section, they will look like a multi-segment toy snake or a piece of wavy decorative wire.

To reach this conclusion, the team built a 2D model of the subduction zones and programmed the model using known geophysics about plate tectonics and how the Earth's rock material used and regenerated by the planet itself, combined with some actual observations.

The model shows that when a piece of crust - or a tectonic plate - gets under another plate, it suddenly bends and cracks. The bending causes the grains on the underside of the shell plate to become finer and weaker, giving rise to "weak spots" that will become concave areas. It will continue to slide beneath the upper tectonic plate for hundreds of millions of years, being stretched, concave, and completely deformed.

This simulation matches observations and deep seismic images in several subduction zones in Japan. The study has just been published in the scientific journal Nature.