![]() These grow diagonally upward until they reach a depth of 1,000 to 800 kilometers at this point, the tops of these branches sprout vertically rising thin branches. ![]() The top of the trunk, dubbed the cusp, appears to grow thick branches of hot matter from its western and eastern extremities. The African giant blob, 2,900 kilometers below the surface, grows up from its middle to form a “trunk,” reaching a depth of 1,500 kilometers. As these branches approach the crust, they seem to sprout smaller, vertically rising branches-super hot plumes that underlie known volcanic hot spots at the surface.īut as the team looked at the entire region, the data began to reveal a spectacular sight. Instead, a titanic mantle plume “tree” rises from the fringes of the planet’s molten heart, with superheated branchlike structures appearing to grow diagonally out of it. The team reported in June in Nature Geoscience that the plume isn’t a simple column. Nearly a decade later, the team has revealed that the mantle is stranger than expected. ![]() In 2012, a team of geophysicists and seismologists set out to map the plume, deploying a giant network of seismometers across the vast depths of the Indian Ocean seafloor. A giant asteroid strike would be the coup de grâce for the dinosaurs, but the Deccan Traps have long muddled the picture of the climatic conditions the dinosaurs had to contend with. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.Īround 65 million years ago, when the plume was under what is now India, a series of lava floods named the Deccan Traps smothered 1.5 million square kilometers of land-enough to bury Texas, California, and Montana-in a mere 700,000 years, a geologic heartbeat. ![]()
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