It’s been revealed that in order to probe the vast depths of the planet, experts have been using a machine learning algorithm that has been originally created to analyze distant galaxies.
After studying seismograms from hundreds of earthquakes that took place from 1990 until 2018, a team of experts that’s led by
Doyeon Kim, a seismologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, were surprised when finding some sort of massive structure comprised of dense material.
The structure is located between the Earth’s core and the lower mantle
This was located between our planet’s core and the lower mantle, according to the latest reports coming from the Motherboard.
The online publication continued and revealed that during the course of their study, the team of experts employed a machine learning algorithm that is called Sequencer that was “originally developed to analyze distant galaxies”.
“This study is very special because, for the first time, we get to systematically look at such a large dataset that actually covers more or less the entire Pacific basin,” Kim stated.
The experts’ study of seismograms of the shear waves and the echo-like signatures that they are producing when they are hitting the structures is showing the presence of anomalies that are called ultra low-velocity zones (ULVZs).
No one knows how the ULVZs are formed
Another important issue worth mentioning is the fact that no one knows how these ULVZs are formed or what exactly they’re comprised of
What is known these days is the fact that they are dense, and they have diameters of 100 km, and there’s also evidence of the distance of two “mega-ULVZs” which “stretch for about 1,000 kilometers or more”.
The team of experts plans to continue the study in order to learn more details on this issue.
“We’re hoping that Sequencer will be able to basically let us use all of these diverse datasets and bring them together to look for these lower mantle structures systematically,” Kim said as a conclusion.