Not just on Earth's surface, wind blows deep inside too: Scientists

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Not just on Earth's surface, wind blows deep inside too: Scientists (Image: Pixabay)
Not just on Earth's surface, wind blows deep inside too: Scientists (Image: Pixabay)

New Delhi : A team of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in US have discovered a 1500 kilometre (900 mile) long passageway deep beneath Panama in Central America and the Galapagos Islands in East Pacific Ocean. 

On the passage, materials from the Earth’s middle layer, the mantle, blow through a slab window below Panama in what they call 'mantle wind'.

The new findings came to light after the scientists found "anomalous geochemical compositions" underneath Panama. The results from their findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences back in November. 

David Bekaert, postdoctoral scholar at WHOI, and lead author of the paper, explained, “We can compare volcanic systems to the body of a living organism; when the organism bleeds, it's kind of like magma bleeding out of the Earth. And you can measure the composition of that magma, just like you can measure a blood type. In this study, we measured an unexpected volcanic gas composition, sort of like when a human has a rare blood type. In the case of the Earth, we then try to explain where it came from in terms of deep geological processes."

The findings have proved that the air which flows on the surface of the earth also flows in the parts of middle layer.

Lead author Bekaert said about the findings, “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 Galápagos Islands”

He added, “Just beneath Panama, there is a hole, a window through the slab, that allows for the influx of this mantle component.”