PLANET EARTH
Giant blobs deep inside Earth are ‘evolving by themselves’
WORDSSTEPHANIE PAPPAS
Two enormous blobs deep inside Earth appear to be the remnants of oceanic crust that was pushed down into the mantle
© ESO / Getty / Shutterstock
We finally know where two giant blobs in Earth’s middle layer came from – and they’re a mismatched pair. These strange regions in Earth’s mantle, known as ‘large low-velocity provinces’ (LLVPs), are actually chunks of Earth’s crust that have sunk into the mantle over the past billion years.