Six Mysterious Structures Discovered at the Edge of Earth’s Core

Nearly 2,900 kilometers beneath our feet, at the boundary between Earth's mantle and core, researchers have just identified six mysterious structures that had gone unnoticed until now. Their detection is no accident: it is the result of artificial intelligence capable of sorting through millions of seismic recordings accumulated over decades.

An AI That Listens to the Earth Tremble

To probe the planet's depths, scientists have no probe they can send down there: they rely instead on seismic waves generated by earthquakes, which travel through the globe and are distorted by the matter they encounter. The team behind this discovery trained a deep learning system to spot a particularly faint signal known as “PKP precursors,” tiny waves that arrive a few seconds before the main seismic waves and reveal anomalies at the core-mantle boundary.

By analyzing more than two million recordings, the algorithm isolated nearly 175,000 of these precursor signals, a mass of data no human team could have sifted through by hand. The result: the emergence of six vast bands of anomalies, beneath the North Atlantic, northern Eurasia, the South Atlantic, southern Africa, the Pacific, and the Antarctic region.

What Are These Zones, and Why Do They Matter?

These regions correspond to what geophysicists call ultra-low velocity zones: areas where seismic waves slow down markedly, a sign of material that differs from the rest of the deep mantle. Until now, these zones only appeared as isolated, scattered patches on maps. The new study links them into continuous bands, far more extensive than previously thought.

According to the authors, these structures likely result from a mix of several phenomena accumulated over hundreds of millions of years: ancient tectonic plates swallowed through subduction, chemical segregation between materials of different densities, and zones of localized melting at extremely high temperatures. A complementary map even suggests hidden terrain made of broad, flattened ridges, rising several dozen kilometers high along the core boundary.

What This Discovery Changes in Practice

• It offers new, precise targets for future exploration of Earth's deep interior, a field where direct observation remains impossible.
• It links these structures to active volcanic zones at the surface, since some hot spots may originate all the way down at the core boundary.
• It illustrates how artificial intelligence is transforming major international research programs, by revealing signals too faint or too numerous for conventional human analysis.
• It is a reminder that our understanding of our own planet is still advancing, at the same pace as our knowledge of more distant phenomena such as the fastest star ever observed in our galaxy.

This advance is part of a broader trend of major global scientific projects, much like the world record set by ITER's superconducting magnet: in both cases, years of data collection combined with cutting-edge technology are what make it possible to uncover secrets that were previously out of reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where exactly are these six structures located?

They sit at the boundary between Earth's core and mantle, about 2,900 kilometers deep, beneath the North Atlantic, northern Eurasia, the South Atlantic, southern Africa, the Pacific, and the Antarctic region.

How did researchers manage to detect them without going there?

By using artificial intelligence to analyze extremely faint seismic waves called PKP precursors, found within more than two million recordings of earthquakes that occurred around the world.

Do these structures pose any danger?

No, there is no direct risk to the surface associated with these zones. Their significance is primarily scientific: they provide information about the planet's composition and deep history.

Sources

Futura Sciences —
Phys.org —
Yahoo News

This article was written with the help of artificial intelligence. Editorial policy