Researchers have been able to explain the existence of a giant gravitational hole under the Indian Ocean, which is located in an area that extends for about 3 million km.
The “gravity hole”, called the geoid depression, forms a circular depression that starts off the southern tip of India.
The hole was discovered by Dutch geophysicist Felix Andries Venning Mainz in 1948 and has remained a mystery ever since.
This vast area under the ocean has an unusually low gravitational force, and has been a mystery for many years, but researchers from the Indian Institute of Science in India said they believe they have been able to find out the reason, which is the molten lava that leads to the formation of volcanoes.
The Indian team used supercomputers to simulate how the region might have formed 140 million years ago, and how tectonic plates move over the mantle, the surrounding area.
They found that the simulations that matched the current gravitational hole involved the presence of plumes of molten rock around the geode depression, which, along with mantle structures in the vicinity, are thought to be responsible for the formation of the gravitational hole.
The co-supervisor of the study, Atreye Ghosh, associate professor at the Center for Earth Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science, said that our planet is not homogeneous in its density and characteristics, as some areas are denser than others, which affects the Earth’s surface and gravity.
