Scientists Find 'Underground Mountains' Four Times the Height of Mt Everest!

Our understanding of what lies beneath the Earth's surface is mostly restricted to the stuff printed in our school textbooks: a solid inner core, a mantle, and the crust. But a recent study has the scientific community abuzz with news that can reshape our perception of the planet's geological processes.

Scientists found mountains — mountains that can never be scaled and have never seen the light of day — hidden deep inside the Earth a few years ago. And we now know that some of these monstrosities are over 3-4 times as high as Mt Everest!

A team of seismologists from Arizona State University have discovered startlingly massive mountain-like structures sandwiched between the planet's core and mantle, approximately 2,900 kilometres within the Earth.

Dubbed ultra-low velocity zones or ULVZs, these mysterious underground mountain ranges have managed to escape humanity until now. Their detection was only made possible after earthquakes and atomic explosions generated enough seismic data to help scientists spot them.

The analysis of thousands of seismic recordings from Antarctica using a high-definition imaging method revealed thin anomalous zones of material at the core-mantle boundary everywhere the researchers probed, said ASU geophysicist Edward Garnero.

This material's thickness ranged from a few to tens of kilometres, while the underground mountains' heights sometimes reached 38 kilometres. If you want a sense of just how humongous this is, the world's tallest peak — Mount Everest — stands 8.8 kilometres tall.

As for how these ancient formations came to be, experts suspect that they were created when oceanic crusts were forced into Earth's interior. Or, they could have begun with tectonic plates slipping down into Earth's mantle and sinking to the core-mantle boundary.

The researchers hypothesise they likely spread out to form an assortment of structures gradually, leaving a trail of mountains and blobs.

This would imply that both these structures are made from ancient oceanic crust: a combination of basalt rock and sediments from the ocean floor transformed by intense heat and pressure.

The recent discovery has also led researchers to claim that these underground mountains probably play a crucial role in how heat escapes the Earth's core and also show just how complicated Earth's inner morphology is.

"Our research provides important connections between shallow and deep Earth structure and the overall processes driving our planet," said Samantha Hansen, study co-author and University of Alabama geoscientist.

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