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Now, scientists led by Qian Yuan, a postdoctoral scholar in geophysics at the California Institute of Technology, present new evidence that remnants of Theia may have also become lodged deep in the Earth’s mantle, where they have survived to the present day. This hypothesis could explain the curious presence of two massive “blobs” inside Earth known as large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs), which appear denser than the surrounding mantle in seismic observations of our planet’s interior, since seismic waves travel through them at a significantly lower velocity than in surrounding material. Yuan and his colleagues “show that LLVPs may represent buried relics of Theia mantle material (TMM) that was preserved in proto-Earth’s mantle after the Moon-forming giant impact” and note that “similar mantle heterogeneities caused by impacts may also exist in the interiors of other planetary bodies,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.“The initial condition of Earth may play a crucial role in Earth's evolution and many uniquenesses,” Yuan told Motherboard in an email. “And that initial condition is widely believed to be set by the Moon-forming impact.”Yuan first started pondering whether the LLVPs might be remnants of Theia years ago while he was pursuing his PhD at Arizona State University. He developed the concept with his colleagues using geodynamical models, and formally presented it at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in 2021.
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