Fresh basalt had just fallen. An international team of scientists would drill nearly a mile into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and extract a mixture of the different chemically and mineral volcanoes from any known type. before.
The team examined a 49-million-year-old stone pole formed just two million years after the Ring of Fire, that famous half-moon of volcanic activity that stretches out the Pacific Rim. For the first few million years after it was lit, the ring is pressurized with intense heating that the team says created a unique type of stone.
They drew up this evidence for the history of the Earth from nearly 5 miles below the surface of the ocean. Their analysis reveals that the fires created by the rock were warmer and more diffuse than previously thought. They had the results published last week in Nature Communications.
“The rocks we recovered are completely different from rocks of this type that we are already familiar with,” said co-author Ivan Savov, a geologist and volcanologist at the University of Leeds. the university press release. “In fact, they could be as different from the known ground basalts on Earth as the Earth’s basalts to the Moon’s basalts. ”
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Basalt is a very common igneous rock that emerges from cold lava flows, emanating from currently active volcanoes. But the pressure and temperature from which the stones come completely change their properties. The stone, the team reports, may have been created near the end of the volatile beginning of the Circle of Fire. It has not been previously discovered due to its extremely remote (and difficult to access) location.
Although ancient, the Ring of Fire is young in terms of Earth’s tectonic history. Some volcanic rock dates back billions of years, much older than 49 million years of new rock.
The team would drill the sample using the JOIDES Secret, a drilling rig capable of drawing samples from 6 miles below the surface. (Not at a depth of 5 miles, the newly reported basalt did not even push the boundaries of the rig.) Under a microscope, a cross-section of the stone looks like a frozen frame from a kaleidoscope, a collection of slate locks. and sea green. It comes from the Amami Sankaku Lake, about 600 miles off the coast of Japan. Savov said that knowledge of the conditions created by this basalt will help Earth scientists better understand the development of the larger form from which it was extracted.
“At a time when we are right to look at the results of space exploration, our findings show that there is still a long way to go on our own planet,” said Savov. university message.
Rocks can tell us a lot about the history of the planet. Just recently, scientists studying rocks in Greenland found evidence of a cuan magma that was when the Earth was just a baby, shortly after the creation of the moon.