Scientists discover 'ghost' plume in Earth's mantle that likely rerouted India as it crashed into Eurasia
Scientists have discovered an ancient "ghost" plume lurking beneath Oman.
The magma plume is trapped beneath a thick portion of Earth's crust and the upper part of the mantle, the planet's middle layer. As a result, the material can't rise to trigger volcanic activity at the surface. Researchers don't know if the plume ever sparked eruptions, but evidence suggests it shifted the trajectory of the Indian tectonic plate during its collision with Eurasia tens of millions of years ago, according to a new study.
The plume sits beneath Oman's Salma Plateau (also spelled Salmah and Selma), which is up to 6,600 feet (2,000 meters) high, said study lead author Simone Pilia, a geophysicist and assistant professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia. The plateau likely formed because of the plume, although some scientists link the plateau's formation to the bending of Earth's crust created by the Makran subduction zone off the coasts of Pakistan and Iran, Pilia told Live Science.
"A plume is hot material that wants to rise, rise, rise — so it's underneath and it's pushing up, creating topography," Pilia said. "The uplift [at the Salma Plateau] is rather small, but it's still there. It's telling you that the plume is active."
Researchers discovered the plume thanks to seismic waves, or sound waves that travel through Earth at different speeds depending on the chemical makeup of the material. Oman has a dense network of stations that record seismic data, which made the research possible, Pilia said. He named the plume "Dani" after his son.
Related: Africa is being torn apart by a 'superplume' of hot rock from deep within Earth, study suggests
The Dani plume is the first clear example of an amagmatic "ghost" plume — a term the study authors coined to describe mantle plumes that don't trigger volcanic activity. Mantle plumes originate from the core-mantle boundary roughly 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) beneath Earth's surface. These plumes typically fuel volcanic eruptions because they undergo a process called decompression melting as they rise through the mantle and crust.
Many mantle plumes trigger volcanic eruptions in the middle of oceanic plates, including in Hawaii, Pilia said. But mantle plumes rarely trigger eruptions within continental plates; they can't rise or undergo decompression melting because they continental plates a thicker crust and upper mantle than oceanic plates do.
Researchers have generally assumed that the lack of volcanism from mantle plumes in continental plates means that there are no mantle plumes beneath continental plates, Pilia said. But "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he said. "If you don't have surface volcanism, it doesn't mean that you don't have a plume."
The Dani plume is proof that mantle plumes can exist without volcanic activity. "What we strongly believe is that there are many other ghost plumes that we don't know of," Pilia said.
Africa is a good candidate for ghost plumes because it sits above one of Earth's two large low-shear-velocity provinces — continent-size blobs that protrude from the core-mantle boundary and feed plumes. Like Oman, Africa has regions with a very thick crust and upper mantle, so any plumes would be prevented from rising to the surface, Pilia said.
"What we strongly believe is that there are many other ghost plumes that we don't know of."
The Salma Plateau is around 40 million years old, which means the Dani plume is at least as ancient, according to the study, which was published online June 6 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. This timing coincides with the collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates — and this got the researchers thinking, Pilia said.
The collision happened relatively close to what is now Oman, before the two plates moved northward to their current positions. Pilia and his colleagues reconstructed the trajectory of the Indian plate and found that it changed direction slightly between 40 million and 25 million years ago.
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"We made some other calculations and basically demonstrated that the shear stress produced by the plume was the reason for the change in azimuth [angle] of the Indian plate," Pilia explained.
Researchers already knew that plumes can redirect tectonic plates — but until now, without knowledge of the Dani plume, they hadn't tied this shift in trajectory to a specific plume.
Tectonic plates move, but plumes tend to stay in place, Pilia said. This means that scientists can sometimes trace the evolution of a plume through evidence left on tectonic plates as they move over the plume.
However, in the case of the Dani plume, this evidence has been swallowed and erased by the Makran subduction zone, Pilia said. "That evidence is gone forever."
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'Evolution can sometimes be 'lazy,' finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.' The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. 'We're sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,' Hermes said, 'not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.' During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease's evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that's still around today, he added. 'It's not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It's extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,' Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn't clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal's contaminated meat, he added. 'I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,' Poinar added. He, as well as the study's authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease's spread and evolution. While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it's rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. 'The takeaway is that humans aren't alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,' Light-Maka said. 'And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don't go and touch it.' Taylor Nicioli is a freelance journalist based in New York. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
