Scientists have identified mysterious formations deep in Earth’s mantle, raising new questions about the planet’s interior. These strange shapes, often referred to as “blobs,” or “sunken worlds,” resemble ancient fragments of Earth’s mantle but appear in places where such material shouldn’t exist.
The discovery, published recently in Scientific Reports, was made possible through a new imaging technique called full-waveform inversion. This method combines data from multiple seismographs into a single, detailed image of Earth’s interior.
Unlike traditional seismic imaging, which stitches together data from individual earthquakes, this advanced approach provides a clearer picture of what lies beneath the surface.
Use of the Piz Daint supercomputer to detect anomalies
Using the Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputer Center, researchers processed the massive amounts of data required for the study.
The computational effort paid off, revealing anomalies scattered throughout the mantle, some in locations with no history of tectonic activity.
One such area is beneath the western Pacific Ocean, where no known tectonic collisions have occurred. These findings challenge long-standing assumptions about the mantle’s composition and the behavior of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Sunken worlds under the Pacific? The understanding of the Earth's interior, especially in terms of plate tectonics and mantle dynamics, might need reevaluation or expansion to account for newly detected patterns. Geophysicists from ETH Zurich and the California Institute of… pic.twitter.com/7dyNJpYqWW
— Nirmata (@En_formare) January 8, 2025
“That’s our dilemma,” Thomas Schouten, a doctoral candidate at the ETH Zurich Geological Institute in Switzerland, said in a statement released Jan. 7. “With the new high-resolution model, we can see such anomalies everywhere in the Earth’s mantle. But we don’t know exactly what they are.”
The anomalies may be ancient subducted slabs—fragments of crust pulled into the mantle at tectonic plate boundaries. These slabs form when one plate slides beneath another in a process known as subduction.
Scientists suggest this possibility because seismic waves travel through the blobs at similar speeds as they do through known slabs. However, this similarity doesn’t confirm the blobs’ identity.
Blobs could comprise leftover materials from 4 billion years ago
Other theories propose that the blobs could be made of materials left over from the mantle’s formation 4 billion years ago. Alternatively, they might consist of dense substances that developed within the mantle over hundreds of millions of years.
Andreas Fichtner, a seismologist at ETH Zurich and co-author of the study, likened the discovery to advancements in medical imaging.
“Imagine a doctor has been studying the circulatory system for decades,” Fichtner said. “Then, if you give [them] a new, better examination tool, [they] suddenly see an artery in the buttock that doesn’t really belong there,” Fichtner explained. “That’s exactly how we feel about the new findings.”
The study marks a significant step forward in understanding Earth’s interior, but much remains unknown. Further research is needed to determine the blobs’ composition and origin.
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