Deepest earthquake ever recorded occurred 467 miles underground, surprising scientists | smart news

In 2015, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck under the Japanese Bonin Islands. Lee Render via Flickr

Between 1976 and 2020, nearly 57,000 earthquakes rocked our planet. The bulk of them were shallow, and only four percent of them occurred at a depth of 186 miles, which was thought to be the maximum depth of what scientists call “deep earthquakes,” according to a Maya Wee Haas report for National Geographic.

Now, a team of researchers has focused on what could be the deepest earthquake ever detected, shaking scientists’ understanding of it. In 2015, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck under the Japanese Bonin Islands. One of the aftershocks occurred at a greater depth than the original earthquake itself, at an altitude of 467 miles. It is so deep that it approaches the Earth’s layer known as the lower mantle, Andrei Ionescu reports for Earth.com.

“This is by far the best evidence for an earthquake in the lower mantle,” Douglas Wiens, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, tells National Geographic.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, used measurements collected by the High Sensitivity Seismological Network, a series of stations across Japan that record seismic data. They were able to trace the origin of the seismic waves generated by the 7.9-magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks, according to a press release.

What puzzled this team, however, was that the shock erupted in the lower mantle, near the Earth’s core. There, temperatures can exceed 6000 degrees Fahrenheit and pressure 1.3 million times the atmospheric pressure.

Deep earthquakes occur in subduction zones, where two tectonic plates collide and one is forced to degrade the other, sending shock waves through the Earth, National Geographic reports. But in such intense elements, the rocks tend to bend rather than break, asking the question: How did this earthquake happen?

The researchers offered some possibilities. First, the molecular structure of the minerals becomes unstable with increasing pressure in the mantle. This deformation may leave weak points in the rock, causing earthquakes. Another theory is that a larger earthquake caused a torn slab of the sea floor to shift, and even a tiny shift is enough to trigger an earthquake, according to a National Geographic report.

This discovery casts a heavy toll on what geologists thought they knew about earthquakes in the lower mantle. They were surprised that one of them could occur deep in the earth, which raised questions about the mechanisms operating under our feet.

earthquake geology

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