Earth’s Underworld is Real and Scientists Just Mapped It

“A team of European scientists have been working on the Atlas of the Underworld, a map of these slabs, to learn about the Earth’s mantle and the history and geography of this sub-surface world. They’ve now published a scientific paper detailing their results in the journal Tectonophysics.

This hellish Atlas is a 17-year-long effort, compiling troves of data from troves of research in which these slabs were imaged. To image these slabs, the researchers used seismic tomography. It’s a lot like medical imaging but using the speed of sound waves through the Earth to reconstruct images, rather than light waves interacting with some other surface.”

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