[Rockhounds] The monstrous 'blobs' near Earth's core may be even bigger than we thought

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Deep within Earth, where the solid mantle meets the molten outer core,
strange continent-size blobs of hot rock jut out for hundreds of miles in
every direction. These underground mountains go by many names:
"thermo-chemical piles," "large low-shear velocity provinces" (LLSVPs), or
sometimes just "*the blobs*
<https://www.livescience.com/64943-nobody-understands-the-giant-mantle-blobs.html>
."

Geologists don't know much about where these blobs came from or what they
are, but they do know that they're gargantuan. The two biggest blobs, which
sit deep below the Pacific Ocean and Africa, account for nearly 10% of the
entire mantle's mass, one *2016 study*
<https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/207/2/1122/2583772> found — and, if
they sat on Earth's surface, the duo would each extend about 100 times
higher than *Mount Everest*
<https://www.livescience.com/23359-mount-everest.html>. However, new
research suggests, even those lofty analogies may be underestimating just
how big the blobs really are.

In a study published June 12 in the journal *Science*
<https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6496/1223>, researchers
analyzed the seismic waves generated by earthquakes over nearly 30 years.
They found several massive, never before-detected features along the edges
of the Pacific blob.

"The structures we located are … thousands of kilometers across in scale,"
lead study author Doyeon Kim, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Maryland, told Live Science in an email. According to Kim, that's an order
of magnitude larger than typical features found along the blob's edge.

https://www.livescience.com/core-mantle-ulvz-blobs-enormous.html