The Bermuda triangle. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Look, all that mysteriousness is more than likely due to that part of the world being heavily trafficked and plagued by horrible weather. That combo can easily sink ships and crash planes, but that’s not as mysterious as the conspiracy theorists wanted to be.
Still, Bermuda is not devoid of mystery. It’s loaded with it, it’s just not above the waterline, it’s deep underground. Scientists have just discovered a massive, never-before-seen rock layer under Bermuda that’s about 12.4 miles thick.
It’s wedged between the oceanic crust and Earth’s mantle. At first blush, it sounds unimpressive. It’s below the surface of the earth. Of course, there are rocks and stuff down there. Big whoop, right? Nope.
That nearly 12 ½-mile-thick rock formation should not be there, and, according to researchers who spoke with Live Science, no one can explain why it’s there. As researchers from Carnegie Science and Yale University explain in a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, the rock formation is a mystery.
But it might explain another mystery: why Bermuda sits on a raised “oceanic swell” despite being volcanically dead for about 31 million years. As seismologist William Frazier told Live Science, claimed that the swell is “this other layer that is emplaced beneath the crust, within the tectonic plate that Bermuda sits on.”
Scientists Found Something Strange Lurking Under Bermuda
Island chains like Hawaii stay elevated because they sit atop active mantle hotspots. When volcanic activity stops, the swell usually sinks. For some currently inexplicable reason, that didn’t happen to Bermuda.
Using seismic data from distant earthquakes, researchers imaged the structure beneath the island. They found that this mystery layer is less dense than the surrounding rock, presenting yet another mystery to be solved.
The leading theory is that Bermuda’s last eruptions injected mantle material into the crust, where it cooled and solidified. That frozen slab now acts as a geological flotation device, keeping the seafloor about 1,640 feet higher than the surrounding Atlantic Ocean.
Previous studies of Bermuda’s volcanic rocks suggest they came from carbon-rich material pulled from deep within the mantle. That carbon may have been shoved downward hundreds of millions of years ago when Pangea formed. In other words, Bermuda’s weirdness could be the aftershock of ancient continental shifting.
Researchers are scanning other islands to see if Bermuda is unique or if it’s actually one of several landmasses with gargantuan slabs of out-of-place rock wedged beneath it.
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