(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists of the Indian Institute of Science Debanjan Pal and Attri Ghosh announced that they were able to reveal the secret of a massive gravity hole with an area of three million square kilometers in the Indian Ocean. According to them, earlier studies looked at the anomaly itself, but did not address the question of how it could appear.
The force of gravity on Earth is constant, but our planet is not a perfect sphere. It is covered with boulders and hills, and the geology of a different plane “pulls” the regions located next to each other with varying degrees of force. The shape of the Earth is known as a geoid.
Deep beneath the Indian Ocean, this gravity weakens to an extremely low level, forming what is believed to be a massive gravitational “hole.” Ship surveys and satellite measurements have long shown that sea level near the edge of the Indian subcontinent has fallen due to the gravitational pull between the geoid low in the Indian Ocean and its gravitational “highs”.
And what exactly causes this weakening was unknown. Now scientists think they have solved this mystery.
According to them, the solution lies at a depth of thousands of kilometers under the earth’s crust. The cold, dense remnants of an ancient ocean about 30 million years ago plunged into the “graveyard of plates” under Africa, stirring up hot molten rock.
However, the research results are based on mathematical models. Further observations and data collection are needed to confirm these findings.
In the course of the study, scientists traced the formation of the geoid by simulating the movement of tectonic plates over the past 140 million years. At that time, the Indian tectonic plate was just beginning to separate from the Gondwana supercontinent to begin the meridional movement. As the Indian Plate advanced, the sea floor of the ancient ocean, called the Tethys Sea, sank into the Earth’s mantle, and the Indian Ocean opened behind it.
Scientists used more than 10 different models, but all of them had one thing in common: plumes of hot, low-density magma rising from beneath the depression. These plumes, as well as the characteristic structure of the mantle, can lead to a decrease in the geoid rock.
The first of these plumes appeared about 20 million years ago south of the Indian Ocean geoid low and about 10 million years after the old Tethys Sea sank into the lower mantle. As the plumes spread beneath the lithosphere and approached the Indian peninsula, the trough intensified.
However, some scientists who were not involved in the study disagree with the results. They note that there is currently no seismographic evidence of the existence of such plumes.
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