A Mysterious Blob of Hot Rock Is Building Up Under America’s Northeast
Something is rising from the depths.
by PETER DOCKRILL
Hot rock in the mantle rising toward the surface (Vadim Levin/Rutgers University-New Brunswick
A vast mass of hot rock is welling up underneath Vermont and extending into other subterranean regions below New England, new research shows.
Scientists used a network of thousands of seismic measurement devices in the largest geological study of its kind, detecting the enormous blob upwelling under Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts – and possibly elsewhere.
“The upwelling we detected is like a hot air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England,” says geophysicist Vadim Levin from Rutgers University – New Brunswick.
Since New England doesn’t have any active volcanoes, the huge build-up is thought to be a geologically recent phenomenon, although in this case that means it could have slowly but steadily been growing for tens of millions of years.