Geologists used to assume this layer was hard as rock — but it seems to be going soft.
Coincidentally, the idea of studying the asthenosphere came to UT geoscience postdoctoral researcher and primary study author Junlin Hua "while studying seismic images of the mantle beneath Turkey" — which was just the site of athat's left thousands of people dead — while he was a doctoral student at Brown.
When studying those images, Hua was surprised to discover "signs of partly molten rock under the crust" and, upon compiling other seismic images from around the world until he had a composite map of the asthenosphere, found that the partially-molten rock just below the Earth's crust wasn't anomalous at all, but seemed to be replicated at various points "wherever the asthenosphere was hottest.
"We cannot drill deep down to the asthenosphere," Cornell earth scientist and study co-author Esteban Gazel said, "but we can illuminate that part of the planet using seismic imaging and the chemical compositions of samples that came from the deep Earth, just as a medical doctor would use a sonogram and blood chemistry to determine the condition of a patient."
The asthenosphere's strange characteristics have long puzzled geologists, and with this new discovery of a hidden molten layer that could, the researchers hypothesize, make up half of Earth's entire asthenosphere, we've gotten one step closer to understanding this strange planet of ours.
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