There are so many weird things in the ocean that it’s not surprising to hear that there is stuff down there that baffles scientists, too.
The phenomenon in question is a “gravity hole” belong the Indian Ocean. It’s a strange (and huge – over one million square miles) depression in the Earth’s crust.
It’s not a hole in the conventional sense, but a concentrated area where the effects of Earth’s gravity are far lower than average. And even though they still don’t know why it’s there, they do think they might have figured out how it appeared.
Our planet is not a perfect sphere. The poles are flat and there are bulges around the equator, both of which mean the exact gravitational pull varies based on location.
One of the gravitational “dips” has been dubbed the Indian Ocean geoid low (IOGL), which is what this new study examines more closely.
What they found is that the sea level of the surrounding ocean is around 350 lower than the average from around the globe. They ran a bunch of simulations and now think it could have been caused by the “African blob,” a huge mass in the Earth’s mantle.
It’s more than 600 miles beneath the African continent and is being pushed under the Indian Ocean.
The blob could have been formed by the remnants of the bottom of an ancient ocean known as the Tethys Ocean. It sat between two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, which existed around 200 million years ago. As Gondwana moved north it left behind the Indian Ocean, around 120 million years ago.
The paper argues that the IOGL took it’s current shape around 20 million years ago, after plumes of hot, low-density magma sunk into the mantle.
Scientists admit that simulations can never exactly mimic nature, so there could still be other factors involved at all.
Check out the video:
I don’t know about y’all, but I have some Googling to do.
Because not everyone took advanced geology classes in college.
Source: https://twistedsifter.com/2023/09/whats-up-with-the-gravity-hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-ocean/