© Vadim Levin/Rutgers University-New BrunswickSeismic data revealed a rising balloon of warm rock beneath New England.
"We did not expect to find abrupt changes in physical properties beneath this region," researcher Vadim Levin said.Deep beneath New England, a giant mass of warm rock is slowly but steadily rising toward the surface. The revelation undermines some of what scientists thought they understand about plate tectonics and the geology of the mantle.
"The upwelling we detected is like a hot air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England," researcher Vadim Levin, a geophysicist and professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick,
said in a news release.
The mass of rock is not on the scale of Yellowstone. It measures a couple hundred miles across, and though it may one day form a new volcanic system, it is unlikely to yield an eruption for millions of years.
Scientists were first alerted to something peculiar after noticing a temperature anomaly deep beneath New England.Levin and his colleagues used seismic data collected by the EarthScope project. For two years, a nation-wide system of seismic sensors, each positioned 46.6 miles apart, measured seismic waves traveling through the continental United States.
Seismic waves can reveal details about the medium through which it's traveling -- in this case, the lithosphere, which includes the upper mantle and crust.
"We're interested in what happens at the interface between tectonic plates -- thick, solid parts that cover our planet -- and material in the upper mantle beneath the plates," Levin said. "We want to see how North America is gliding over the deeper parts of our planet. It is a very large and relatively stable region,
but we found an irregular pattern with rather abrupt changes in it."
Earthscope data analyzed by Levin and his partners revealed
a mass of rock 300 degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding rock. The seismic observations suggest the upwelling is centered under central Vermont and western New Hampshire.
The unexpected findings -- published this week
in the journal Geology -- could force scientists to rethink their models of tectonic plate evolution.
"The Atlantic margin of North America did not experience intense geologic activity for nearly 200 million years," Levin said. "It is now a so-called 'passive margin' -- a region where slow loss of heat within the Earth and erosion by wind and water on the surface are the primary change agents. So we did not expect to find abrupt changes in physical properties beneath this region,
and the likely explanation points to a much more dynamic regime underneath this old, geologically quiet area."
Now that researchers know the upwelling is there, they hope to find out what's causing it.
Reader Comments
Supposedly, around the mid 1990's the earth encountered a violent space storm which had been preceded by lesser storms that tore holes in the upper atmosphere. Recall here the stories of Ozone holes, another supposedly man made problem right? Enter the climate change platform and man made global warming shilling by every propagandist on the payrolls, that and of course the sudden change in ...cough...jet fuels and the rise in discussions over whether chemtrails were real, were vapor trails, and to where we are now. Where they now want us to pay for dumping carbon waste products in the sky. So no longer denying the last 20 years of solid lies.
What some think is that we had/have a very large and dangerous hole in the upper regions of the atmosphere which they have attempted to keep covertly obscured in order to exploit an agenda for taxations via the global carbon tax scheme which is based on the criminal construct that man made activities created climatic changes.
Over these last 20 years, mostly unknown by the willfully unawares, there has been extensive debate and study of this idea that what is going on is actually a planetary expansion phase. That together with what appears to be reason to believe that we are also on the edge of a dawning mini-ice age, rather unfortunately, and all of which is gaining increasing support by the associated stories surrounding involving sink holes, booming, sounds and trumpets, and an assortment of unexplained explosions, and other phenomena. These all seem to suggest that the Earths' Core is a plasma creating matter which is in turn propelled to the surface.
In my opinion there are simply too many wrongs with tectonic plates to be correct. There are too many illogical positions against planetary expansion which itself does logically explain Earth History, and so I think that it is possible that we are all perched on the edge of an abyss. Time will tell but there's nothing anyone can do about any of it. Just don't help crime inc with their theft by taxations scheme is all I ask.