From secret volcanoes waiting to blow up the planet to incredible alien life thriving miles
beneath our feet, here are ten amazing things hidden under the Earth!
10: Underground Oceans How did we get our oceans??
There's a longstanding theory among scientists that the oceans of the Earth formed when icy
comets smacked into the planet.
But new research now offers us a different explanation for the origin of earth's oceans.
More recent studies propose that the oceans we know today actually seeped out from the
center of our planet.
These findings were recently published in the journal Science and experts are suggesting
that beneath our feet right now, there is a massive reservoir of water three times the
volume of water on the surface, hidden inside the mantle of the Earth, at least 400 miles
underground.
What's even more incredible is that all this water is trapped inside of rocks.
These rocks are called ringwoodite.
The rocks are bright blue and only form at high temperatures and intense pressures, two
things found inside the Earth’s mantle.
According to Steven Jacobson from Northwestern University, the water that makes up our oceans
would have been squeezed out of the rocks hundreds of millions of years ago, almost
as if they were sweating.
This newest information brings more complexity to the water cycle.
Water circulates between the atmosphere and the oceans, and it also extends deep into
the interior of the Earth.
It seeps into the mantle where it eventually becomes ringwoodite.
Smithsonian reports that the team of scientists used seismometers to measure the motion of
energy waves caused by earthquakes through the ground under the United States.
The waves slowed down as they passed through the region of the mantle containing ringwoodite.
The scientists suggest that the saturation of ringwoodite with water explains the sluggishness
of the waves through this particular region of Earth's center.
9: Strange Beasts Scientists have wondered for a very long time
just how deep down inside the Earth's crust animals can survive.
Well, some strange creatures living in the deep and dark depths of gold mines in South
Africa may have just answered this question.
Known as nematodes, these strange animals are currently the deepest living creatures
ever discovered by humans.
Nobody knows how these tiny worms ended up so far below the surface of the earth, but
scientists say they were probably living in the mines for thousands of years.
Their existence is suggesting that complicated lifeforms can indeed survive much deeper inside
the Earth than previously thought possible.
Far below your feet, the bowels of the Earth are hot and dark.
There's almost no oxygen and possibly dangerous gases.
There's very little food.
And this is why scientists have believed that only single-celled organisms could survive
in such harsh conditions.
But now it seems that incredible nematode worms are living in these exact conditions.
Nematode worms are able to survive extreme temperatures, cold, heat and even dehydration.
They have a special trick that allows them to survive in which they go into what is known
as the dauer stage, a type of hibernation in which they basically go to sleep and then
wake up again when there's some food to eat.
Nematodes are so hardy that they were on board the space shuttle Columbia.
They survived space and the spaceship’s disintegration as it fell back to Earth.
They've been found in every corner of the world, from the hottest deserts to the coldest
regions of Antarctica.
They've been found inside of humans and inside sperm whales.
And now, these harmless little worms are the deepest dwellers on our planet.
8: Slumbering Volcanoes Scientists have just revealed a hidden Jurassic
world of volcanoes found in Australia!
This field of volcanoes date back to the reign of the dinosaurs.
These volcanoes have been sleeping deep underground for millions of years, totally invisible to
everyone above ground.
There are about 100 of these volcanoes, and they've been dormant for roughly 180 million
years.
Covering an area of about 2900 square miles, they were discovered in Australia's Cooper
and Eromanga basins, a desert region in the center of the continent.
All those years ago, the volcanoes would have been above ground and would have spewed lava
from their mouths.
But they have since been buried under hundreds of feet of rock, hiding until just recently.
It was 30 years ago that drilling in Australia turned up the first evidence of rocks formed
because of cooled magma.
These rocks were roughly 200 million years old.
Simon Holford from the University of Adelaide’s Australian School of Petroleum says that because
of decades of fossil fuel extraction, the experts have gathered a huge amount of data
from this region.
This data was recently inspected by scientists, who then identified the sleeping volcanoes.
The good news for all of us Earth dwellers is that the volcanic network is not currently
active.
During the Jurassic Period, things were a bit different.
These volcanoes were extremely active, belching lava and ash almost constantly.
But for now, we can all rest easy knowing that these underground volcanoes aren't going
to suddenly explode right underneath our feet.
7: The Kola Super Borehole The Kola Super Borehole was an ambitious project
during the Cold War to drill a hole as deep as humanly possible straight through the Earth.
Fortunately, the hole didn't open up on the other side of the earth, giving the Russians
a direct passage through the center of the planet to U.S. soil!
Instead, the hole, which of course was drilled on the Kola Peninsula in the Arctic Circle
by a team of Soviet scientists, revealed just how inept we are at exploring the interior
of our own planet.
The hole is to this day the deepest artificial point on Earth.
It measures 40,230 feet deep.
Locals have denounced it as an entrance to hell, with some people swearing that you can
actually hear the screams of tortured souls suffering in the great infernal plane of damnation.
It’s probably just the wind tunnel, and the sounds of the earth but scary nonetheless.
Even after drilling every day for 20 years, they made it one-third of the way through
the Earth’s crust.
That says a lot about how thick our Earth is.
They couldn't even reach the mantle.
The Earth's crust is about 25 miles thick at its thinnest point, and the mantle beneath
it is 1800 miles thick.
And beyond the mantle is the core of our planet – which in all likelihood, humans will never
lay eyes on.
The Kola Super Borehole was given up during the chaos of the Soviet Union’s dissolvement.
The hole still exists, but nobody’s really doing anything interesting with it.
According to the BBC, the Japanese are starting a hole of their own – so let’s wait and
see just how far they get.
6: A New Layer of the Earth’s Core 2021 has been a shocking year for earth science.
It was very recently unveiled that the earth has a special layer that nobody knew about.
Researchers discovered a brand-new layer of our planet and they're calling it the innermost
inner core.
And yes, this is a monumental discovery.
The study came out of Australian National University and was published in the Journal
of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
Researchers proved there is a fifth layer sitting beyond the inner core.
Scientists say that a slight change in the structure of iron deep inside the earth indicates
two separate cooling events occurred in our planet’s history.
Joanne Stephenson, the lead author of the study, still doesn't know what event transpired
or why there are two inner cores.
All she knows is that the core is composed of two distinct layers.
Further research still needs to be done for us to understand the evolution of our planet,
and before schools all over the world are forced to rewrite their textbooks.
But feel free to tell your friends all about the extra layer of the Earth!
And now for something even crazier but first be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out
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5: Life Inside the Mantle I told you about the nematodes, those complex
worms that live very deep inside the earth's crust.
But an international team of scientists who recently returned from a six-week expedition
to the mid-Atlantic are now claiming that they found life even deeper inside the earth.
This life was microbial.
They apparently found it dwelling inside of the actual mantle, which scientists have previously
thought impossible.
This is because the mantle of the earth is molten.
It's basically fire.
The team excavated samples from an extremely deep region known as the Atlantic Massif.
This is an area underwater in which new oceanic crust is born from deep in the planet.
The rock here is also found deep inside of the mantle and it’s known as green peridotite.
These rocks have been pushed out of the mantle, which is how the scientists could study them.
Within the rock were tiny microbial life forms.
But don't get too excited yet.
Researchers are still unsure whether the life they found originated inside the mantle or
came from mantle rocks that had been pushed up to the seafloor thousands and thousands
of years ago.
4: Hollow Earth One of the strangest and most controversial
theories about what is hidden underneath the Earth’s crust is known as Hollow Earth theory.
Hollow Earth says that there are in fact hidden underground pockets deep beneath the surface
of the planet which could harbor life unlike anything we have ever seen before.
Hollow Earth would mean that there is a subterranean world filled with animals and monsters that
not even H.P Lovecraft could detail.
And while Hollow Earth theory has long been seen as a crackpot theory, like flat Earth
theory, it was once seriously considered by respectable scientists.
The beginning of Hollow Earth theory came from cultural mythologies that described a
world beneath our own.
In the early days of science, some believed that the Earth was not very dense, meaning
there could be room for monsters.
And believe it or not, you can actually take the planet Venus and stuff it inside of the
Earth.
Even with the thick outer crust, there would be sufficient room for an entire Earth-like
landscape with its own atmosphere.
There could theoretically be around 178 million square miles for titanic animals and great
beasts to roam.
Sort of like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Of course, this is all impossible considering what we know today.
The Earth’s core is solid iron and there is a huge layer of molten rock.
But even if that molten rock weren’t there, the hollow space in the Earth would have roughly
20 times the pressure of what we experience at the surface.
200 miles beneath the surface, the pressure would be so intense that nothing in the fictional
subterranean world we're talking about could survive.
Still, it's a fun theory.
3: The Liquid Core New research has finally determined the age
of the solid inner core of our planet.
Beneath all the layers of the giant onion that we live on, a solid inner core is wrapped
inside a ball of liquid iron, and that liquid is slowly turning solid.
Scientists know today that the solid inner core is actually getting larger as the liquid
iron around it cools and crystallizes.
This process of crystallization is what creates the magnetic field surrounding our planet,
thus protecting us from cosmic radiation that would otherwise cook us into mutants.
Despite all we know about the core, we haven't really figured much out about its history.
The giant iron ball is 1500 miles wide, and throughout the years, estimates of its age
have gone from half a billion years to over 4 billion years.
We do know that the Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old.
And now, thanks to researchers, we have discovered that the approximate age of the core is between
1 and 1.3 billion years old.
How did scientists figure this out?
According to Live Science, they took a tiny scrap of iron and pressed it between two diamonds
before blasting it with lasers.
This recreated the conditions of the core’s original creation by superheating the piece
of iron and squeezing it between the diamonds.
According to the results, the core was made over 3 billion years after the Earth itself
was formed.
2: Alien Planet Theia Did you know there is an alien planet buried
deep inside of our own planet??
And scientists have just located its remains.
This alien planet collided into ours roughly 4.5 billion years ago.
The alien planet was roughly the size of Mars, and its collision with the Earth resulted
in the creation of the moon.
It also resulted in two slivers of itself being lodged into the Earth’s mantle.
The planet’s name is Theia.
Researchers around the globe have never disputed the existence of this alien planet.
Everyone knows that Theia crashed into Earth and a piece got knocked loose, getting stuck
in orbit and becoming the moon.
But a new study led by a geodynamics researcher named Qian Yuan from Arizona State University
believes the two chunks of planet Theia, each of which is roughly the size of a continent,
are currently stuck beneath West Africa and the Pacific Ocean.
Here's how this information was gathered.
Seismologists studying the rock layers in which pieces of planet Theia are believed
to be located discovered that seismic waves produced by earthquakes slow as they pass
through these rock layers.
These are the only two incidences in which this phenomenon occurs.
The suggestion is that the rock here is chemically different and denser than all the surrounding
rocks.
The best theory scientists have is that they’re so different because they came from a different
planet – planet Theia.
1: Secret Magma Pools A new study has revealed a threat hiding just
under the surface of the Earth.
Volcanologists have found shallow magma pools previously undetectable by seismic imaging
technologies.
These strange pools of magma are too small and too close to the surface for imaging technology
to pick them up.
The implications of this study are that small magma bodies could be more widely distributed
across the planet than previously thought.
What this means is that planning and estimating risks of volcanic eruptions in the future
might be a little more difficult.
A hidden magma body could add fuel to an eruption that scientists otherwise estimated as being
mild or non-lethal.
Experts say that the risk varies depending on the volcano, but the fact that secret magma
pools that are basically undetectable could be lurking under seemingly non-hazardous volcanoes
means that an ordinary eruption could turn into a super eruption without any warning.
First you get a bit of smoke, then an unexpected torrent of lava that could wipe out a city
– a city that everyone thought was safe.
Thanks for watching!!
Hope you learned something new!!
Did you learn about any of this in school??
What else do you think is hidden below the Earth’s crust?
Let me know in the comments below!!
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