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The underside of North America can “drop” in the bottom of the coat. | Credit: Timothy Hodgkinson about Alamy
An ancient shrink of the earth’s crust, which is buried deep below the middle west, sucks huge color fields of the North American crust in the coat today, say researchers.
The train of the plate has created huge “drops”, which, according to a new study, hang from the underside of the continent to about 640 kilometers deep in the coat. These drops are under an area that extends to Nebraska and Alabama from Michigan, but their presence seems to influence the entire continent.
The dripping area looks like a large funnel, with rocks from all over North America being pulled horizontally before they are depressed. As a result, large parts of North America lose material on the underside of their crust, the researchers said.
“A very wide area has a certain thinning,” said the leading author of Study, Junlin Hua, a geoscientist who carried out research during a postdoctoral scholarship at the University of Texas (UT) in Austin. “Fortunately, we also have the new idea of what drives this thinning,” said Hua, now a professor at the University of Science and Technology in China.
The researchers found that the drops from the downward power of a piece of the oceanic crust resulted from an old tectonic plate called Farallon Plate.
The Farallon plate and the North American plate once formed a subduction zone along the west coast of the continent, the former sliding under the latter and its material recycles. The Farallon plate bubbled about 20 million years ago before the priority of the Pacific plate, and the remaining plates under the North American plate changed slowly.
One of these plates is currently covering the border between the coat transition zone and the lower coat, which is about 660 km below the middle west. These “Farallon Slab” referred to and showed for the first time in the nineties in the 1990s. According to the new study, which was published in the magazine on March 28, this piece of oceanic crust is responsible for a process Nature geoscientific.
A diagram that shows how the crust and upper coat of the earth (known together as a lithosphere) can drop into the coat due to the Farallon plate. | Credit: Hua et al. Nature geoscientific (2025)
The cratonic thinning refers to the wear of craters, the regions of the continental crust of the earth and the upper coat, which have mainly remained intact for billions of years. Despite their stability, Kratons can be able to Undergo changesAccording to the study, however, this was never observed in action due to the enormous geological scales.
For the first time, researchers have documented the cratonic thinning in the view. The discovery was possible thanks to a more comprehensive project by HUA to map, which is under North America using a high-resolution seismic imaging technology called “Full-Waveeform Inversion”. This technology uses different types of seismic waves to extract all available information about physical parameters underground.
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“This type of thing is important if we want to understand how a planet has developed for a long time,” said co-author Thorsten Becker, a respected chair in geophysics at Ut Austin, in the explanation. “Due to the use of this full wave shape method, we have a better representation of this important zone between the deep coat and the flatter lithosphere [crust and upper mantle]. “
In order to test their results, the researchers simulated the effects of the Farallon plate on the Kraton above with a computer model. A dripping area that was formed when the plate was present, but it disappeared when the plate was absent, and confirmed that – at least theoretically – a sunken plate can pull into the interior of the earth.
The drop in the middle west will not soon lead to changes on the surface, the researchers said and added that it could even stop if the Farallon plate drops deeper into the lower coat and its influence on the Kraton hikes.
The results could help the researchers spend the enormous puzzle as the earth looks like it does today. “It helps us to understand how they make continents, how they break them and how they recycle them,” said Becker.
Originally published on Livescience.com.
