{"id":50452,"date":"2025-07-31T16:43:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T16:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/50452\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T16:43:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T16:43:07","slug":"weirdly-hot-rocks-in-new-england-traced-to-80-million-year-old-greenland-rift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/50452\/","title":{"rendered":"Weirdly Hot Rocks in New England Traced to 80-Million-Year-Old Greenland Rift"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roughly 124 miles (200 kilometers) beneath the Appalachian Mountains in New England lies the aptly named Northern Appalachian Anomaly (NAA), a mysterious 218-mile-wide (350-km) region of unusually hot rock.<\/p>\n

Researchers have long believed that the NAA resulted from the plate tectonic movement that broke North America off northwest Africa 180 million years ago. In a new study<\/a> published Tuesday in the journal Geology, however, a team of international researchers argue that the hot, subsurface rocks are related to when North America and Greenland split near the Labrador Sea between 90 and 80 million years ago.<\/p>\n

\"GreenlandResearchers suggest the NAA has been moving southwestward. \u00a9 University of Southampton <\/p>\n

The NAA \u201clies beneath part of the continent that\u2019s been tectonically quiet for 180 million years, so the idea it was just a leftover from when the landmass broke apart never quite stacked up,\u201d Tom Gernon, lead author of the study and an Earth scientist at the University of Southampton, said in a university statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To reach this conclusion, the team used advanced computer simulations, seismic tomography data (like an ultrasound, but for Earth\u2019s interior), and tectonic plate reconstructions. According to the study, the NAA may have developed around 1,119 miles (1,800 km) from its current position and, at the rate of around 12 miles (20 km) per million years, slowly moved southwestward to where it sits now.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research suggests it\u2019s part of a much larger, slow-moving process deep underground that could potentially help explain why mountain ranges like the Appalachians are still standing,\u201d Gernon added.<\/p>\n

The slow-moving process is the team\u2019s previously proposed \u201cmantle wave\u201d theory<\/a>, which hypothesizes that hot, dense chunks of material detach from the base of tectonic plates after continents separate, like blobs in a lava lamp.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeat at the base of a continent can weaken and remove part of its dense root, making the continent lighter and more buoyant, like a hot air balloon rising after dropping its ballast,\u201d Gernon explained. \u201cThis would have caused the ancient mountains to be further uplifted over the past few million years.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the blobs slowly \u201cdrip\u201d from the lithosphere\u2014the layer including Earth\u2019s crust and upper part of the mantle\u2014hotter mantle rocks rise to fill up the space, which creates a thermal anomaly. The same team\u2019s earlier work also revealed that these blobs can move over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe feature we see beneath New England is very likely one of these drips, which originated far from where it now sits,\u201d said Sascha Brune, study co-author and head of the Geodynamic Modelling Section at GFZ, Germany\u2019s national research center for Earth sciences. According to the team, the center of the NAA will likely move under New York in the next 15 million years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that rifting of continents can cause drips and cells of circulating hot rock at depth that spread thousands of kilometres inland makes us rethink what we know about the edges of continents both today and in Earth\u2019s deep past,\u201d admitted Derek Keir, another co-author of the study and a tectonics expert at the University of Southampton and the University of Florence.<\/p>\n

The researchers argue that their mantle wave theory could explain a similar anomalous hot zone under north-central Greenland\u2014basically a reflection of the NAA on the other side of the Labrador Sea.<\/p>\n

The study is ultimately a reminder to never judge a book by its cover\u2014or the Earth by its surface-level tectonic activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roughly 124 miles (200 kilometers) beneath the Appalachian Mountains in New England lies the aptly named Northern Appalachian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[12879,38956,79],"class_list":["post-50452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-geology","tag-plate-tectonics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}