{"id":535212,"date":"2026-06-14T19:23:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/535212\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T19:23:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:23:25","slug":"scientists-investigate-strange-rumbling-beneath-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/535212\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Investigate Strange Rumbling Beneath Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mysterious earthquake deep below northern Utah had scientists scratching their heads back in 1979. The rumble seemingly occurred far lower beneath the Earth\u2019s crust than scientists had believed was possible.<\/p>\n

The tremor may not have been particularly strong, at a magnitude of 3.8, but the recorded seismic data threw experts for a loop nonetheless. The data suggested the rumbling had occurred over 55 miles below sea level, a depth that made no sense in conventional geology.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did some other analysis that convinced me of the reality of the deep depth but it was hard to convince others of the highly anomalous mantle earthquake occurring in a region where none should exist,\u201d said George Zandt, who was a University of Utah seismology researcher at the time and helped record the unusual quake, in a new statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, as detailed in a study<\/a> published earlier this year in the journal The Seismic Record, University of Utah geology professor Keith Koper and Zandt \u2014 who came out of retirement for the new investigation \u2014 analyzed eight subsequent \u201cdeep earthquakes\u201d in the region, confirming they occurred in the Earth\u2019s upper mantle, dozens of miles below the boundary of the crust.<\/p>\n

Koper and his colleagues say they\u2019ve determined that the quakes are an \u201carchetypal continental mantle event,\u201d meaning they\u2019re related to movements in the Earth\u2019s mantle that take place over extremely long time scales.<\/p>\n

The research highlights how much there\u2019s still to learn about these forceful tectonic dynamics deep inside the planet, and how surprisingly different they are from more shallow, crust-based seismic events.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a mystery in terms of fundamental physics,\u201d Koper said in a statement. \u201cHow in the world can these things happen?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother reason why it\u2019s a big deal is that we have no idea how big they can be,\u201d he added. \u201cWith crustal earthquakes, we can measure what we think their maximum size is going to be. We measure the faults that we can map out near the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike earthquakes that occur in the Earth\u2019s curst, deep earthquakes don\u2019t announce themselves through foreshocks and aftershocks. The team determined they occur at the western edge of the Wyoming Craton \u2014 a leftover block of our planet\u2019s lithosphere, the rigid outermost shell of the Earth, which stretches across northern Utah and southwest Wyoming \u2014 where temperatures can exceed 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

The team suspects these new \u201cdeep quakes\u201d could be caused by the mantle slowly squeezing by the Wyoming Craton.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the scale of millions of years, the mantle is hitting the craton and then flowing around it,\u201d Koper explained. \u201cIt\u2019s that interaction where that mantle flow is being diverted around this hard cratonic root that\u2019s causing the increased strain rate, the increased deformation and it\u2019s also creating extra stresses.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think it\u2019s that interaction between the keel of the iceberg and the medium around it that\u2019s leading to these earthquakes,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

More on earthquakes:<\/strong> California Primed for Apocalyptic Earthquake, Geological Research Finds<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mysterious earthquake deep below northern Utah had scientists scratching their heads back in 1979. The rumble seemingly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[24178,18,230211,19,17,230210,133,83780,17704,230212],"class_list":["post-535212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-earthquakes","tag-eire","tag-george-zandt","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-northern-utah","tag-science","tag-seismic-data","tag-university-of-utah","tag-wyoming-craton"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116750097433100599","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}