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Scientists found signs of an ancient hidden sea off Philippine coast
#1
[Image: 607d61b558c9479ca32984372026cb94.png]

The Philippine Sea today



Quote:Geologists have discovered remnants of a long-lost sea that once ran between today’s Pacific and Indo-Australian oceans, spanning more than 15 million square kilometres around 52 million years ago.

This ancient sea, which the team has dubbed the East Asian Sea, was likely 'swallowed up' by the surface of the planet millions of years ago, as the tectonic plates that intersected beneath it gradually sank into Earth’s mantle.


Source





Expecting that they would just have to map one tectonic plate in the area, they soon realised that it harboured a veritable 'slab graveyard', with signs of several plates that have been slowly been sinking into Earth’s mantle - the thick, dynamic layer that sits between Earth’s crust and its upper core.





Quote:While the mantle is mainly made up of silicate rocky material, it behaves more like a viscous fluid than a solid, because its temperatures are so close to the melting point. 

The mantle makes up 84 percent of Earth’s volume, and it can take up to 300 million years for a tectonic plate to sink all the way through it and disappear into Earth’s core below. Think of the plates' movements like giant leaves slowly sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool.

Using a technique called seismic tomography, which interprets seismic waves generated by earthquakes and allows you to turn them into three-dimensional reconstructions, Wu and his team retraced the movements of 28 huge slabs of Earth’s crust, which had sunk between 500 and 1300 kilometres deep into the mantle.



Once that jigsaw puzzle was complete, they found at least 70 million square kilometres' worth of these sunken slabs - equivalent to about one-seventh of the total Earth surface area.


Quote:Reconstructing the history of these plates allowed the team to see how 15 million square kilometres of this buried material would have served as the bottom of the ancient, now-defunct East Asian Sea some 52 million years ago - less than 10 million years after the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs. 

"We were seeing things that we didn’t even realise existed," Wu told Blakemore. "We didn’t know whether to believe it or not until we put it all together."



[Image: a24c4788dc4e4ce2ab43116a3b7c60ee.png]





Quote:
The researchers suspect that the East Asian Sea gradually started shrinking into nothing once the Philippine Sea Plate grew and migrated northwest, colliding with the East Asian Sea Plate, and directing it down into Earth's mantle. 

At the same time, the Indo-Australian, Pacific, and Caroline plates pushed down on the southern portion of the East Asian Sea plate.

"The southern area of the East Asian Sea Plate was eventually subducted by, or forced beneath, other neighbouring plates," Greg Uyeno explains for Live Science.


By about 10 million years ago, the entire sea was gone.


Amazing.....this is a very interesting scientific discovery most definitely.
 
Goes to show humans cannot stop a planet from going thru it's natural changes when it gets ready to.
All we are is just a 'blip' on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old.

 
 


Blame plate tectonics for the disappearance of this ancient sea


Quote:The area around the Philippine Sea is better known for being a political hotspot than a geological one. But it turns out that the tectonic plate named for it is just as volatile. It’s located at the intersection of the Eurasian, Pacific and Indo-Australian plates — three plates, that, millions of years ago, swallowed up an ancient sea.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research that sheds light on something scientists once thought they’d never be able to explore: the remnants of ancient tectonic plates.


They will be like kids in a candy shop, studying the ancient tectonic plates.
Would love to know what else they pick up from them.


Quote:It took five years for Wu and his colleagues to gather enough evidence to support the existence of the sea, which they think shrank over time as more and more plates in the area were subducted and lost. The shape of the sea fits in with a literal gap in plate tectonics — an area in the vicinity of the theorized sea whose lithology geologists haven’t been able to figure out. “Twenty-eight slabs later, we felt like we could answer that question,” he laughs.

Now Wu and Suppe have joined the faculty of the University of Houston, where they will try to delve even further into the past that’s buried beneath the Earth’s crust. Although they’re still refining their method, which is only as good as the seismic data collected by monitoring stations throughout the world, they hope that their work is just the beginning of a new way of looking at Earth’s history from the inside out.



“We’re filling in the other half of plate tectonics by looking inside the interior of the Earth,” says Wu. “Who knows how many other oceans there are to be found?”


Indeed....who knows how many other oceans there are to be found.
Great work guys!!

a.k.a. 'snarky412'
 
        

#2
That's Just  smallawesome
Now was it because of Global Warming 52 Million Years Ago that that Sea Was Swallowed Up My Melting Poles?  tinylaughing
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]
#3
Refreshing minusculebeercheers to hear of something Trump was not blamed for !
#4
(08-26-2016, 03:49 AM)727Sky Wrote: Refreshing minusculebeercheers to hear of something Trump was not blamed for !



I know, it's nice for a change! LOL

a.k.a. 'snarky412'
 
        



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