Researchers have discovered a geological secret passage underneath Panama that could explain why rocks from Earth¡¯s mantle were found around 1,609 kilometres from their origin.?
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This entry point, around 100 kilometres below the surface of the Earth could allow a flow of mantle materials to flow all the way from beneath the Galapagos islands to right under Panama.
David Bekaert, a postdoctoral scholar in marine chemistry and geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says this could also hold the secret to the mystery of why Panama has a few active volcanoes.?
Towards the west coast of Central America, the Cocos tectonic plate is going downwards, pushing oceanic crust under the continental crust of the North American, Caribbean and Panama tectonic plates, resulting in a phenomenon dubbed subduction.
This is known to create a sort of ¡®subduction zone¡¯ and by extension, the creation of a line of volcanoes called the Centra American Volcanic Arc where lava pushes through the boundaries, only to stop in western Panama, above the Panama Plate.
Researchers, in their study published in PNAS, claims that the culprit could be a window-like opening in Coco¡¯s tectonic plate that¡¯s being pushed towards the centre of the Earth.?
Researchers, to better understand the geochemistry of the region, collected volcanic rock samples as well as gas and fluid samples from hot springs.?
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They were keen on looking at ratios of molecular isotopes -- essentially variations of the same atoms with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. In this situation, they focussed on isotopes of helium and lead.?
The mantle mostly consists of silicate rocks -- rocks that have a particular structure of silicon and oxygen atoms, however, the exact composition can vary dramatically, based on different regions, but they found even stranger anomalies under Central America.?
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Bekaert, in a?conversation?with LiveScience, said, "We found that in particular places of Central America, namely western Panama and behind the volcanic arc in Costa Rica, we have some exotic signatures [of geochemistry] that really resemble what you have in the Gal¨¢pagos Islands."
According to Bekaert, this was truly surprising as there was no other way how mantle elements from the Galapagos could get all the way to Panama. Researchers then looked at seismic imaging of the mantle that uses earthquake waves to map what¡¯s beneath the surface, only to find that deep beneath Panama, there¡¯s a hole through which this mantle surfaces.?
This could be a result of a natural crack in the subducting Coco¡¯s crust or it could be a place where the crust snapped during subduction. Either way, it allows materials to pass from one side of the plate to the other, like dust travelling through an open window.
But researchers don¡¯t really know what¡¯s making this move. They feel it could be that a typical, large-scale mantle circulation pushes the material through the opening in the subducting slab. They claim that when the modelling of the mantle circulation is complete, you can expect this deep global mantle to flow.
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