There are two giant “spots” of dense material that hide in the lower depths of the Earth’s mantle, under West Africa and the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of miles wide, these “pieces” have been one of the best-kept secrets on the planet – and mysterious even to scientists for decades.
Now, there is tangible evidence that they may be the remains of an ancient protoplanet called Theia, which collapsed on Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, Science Magazine reports.
Scientists have previously suspected that there is a link between these strange shapes, formally known as large low-speed provinces (LLSVP), and the Moon. But most believed that LLSVPs were planetary “scars” from the impact of Theia, not parts of the alien world itself.
The Earth’s crust hides an old planet
For context, this is not the first time that scientists have speculated that these underground formations were fragments of Theia, Science reports. But Qian Yuan, an Arizona State University graduate student who presented the idea at last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, seems to have made the most convincing argument to date on the subject.
Yuan’s work shows seismological evidence that LLSVPs are chemically different from the rest of the rock around them. This suggests that these formations have extraterrestrial origins and are six times larger than the Moon.
Even if the research remains somewhat speculative, seismologists who have studied works such as Yuan’s are increasingly convinced that other parts of other worlds could be hiding beneath the Earth’s surface, according to Science. Their discovery could help reveal that the ancient past of the Earth was much more violent than what we know so far.
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