Exploring Rare Mantle Rock: Unexpected Results from Drilling the Atlantis Massif in the North Atlantic Ocean

Jakarta – Drilling the Atlantis Massif or Mount Atlantis in the North Atlantic ocean yielded unexpected results. They found rare mantle rock.

Quoted from detikInet, with a drill from a ship named Joides Resolution that excavated at this location, geologists drilled a hole 1,267 meters deep into the mountain. The researchers took advantage of the ‘tectonic window’, an area where mantle rock is pushed above its usual place.

This is not the deepest drilling ever carried out into the ocean floor and is not technically digging into the Earth’s mantle either. They then extracted a staggering amount of serpentinite rock samples from Earth’s interior.

“On Earth, mantle rock is normally very difficult to access. The Atlantis Massif offers the rare advantage of gaining access to it, as it consists of mantle rock that is brought closer to the surface,” the researchers wrote in a blog, quoted by detikINET from Live Science, Friday (9/9/2019) 6/2023).

Geologists have been trying to extract Earth’s mantle since 1961, when scientists at Project Mohole drilled in the Pacific Ocean to reach the Mohorovicic discontinuity, the area where the Earth’s crust gives way to the mantle.

But the project’s drill only reached 183 m below the seafloor before sinking. A number of subsequent offshore drilling attempts also failed.

The mission aims to study chunks of the Earth’s mantle for clues to processes such as volcanism and magnetic fields. The geologists from the International Ocean Discovery Program on this mission actually do not aim to extract the mantle core, but examine the origins of life on Earth.

The Massif’s rock contains olivine, which reacts with water in a process called serpentinization to produce hydrogen, an important food source for microbes. But when they landed the drill on a horizontal fault on the ocean floor, the researchers were able to extract mantle rock core instead.

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(mud/mud)