The seismometers, which detect vibrations due to seismic waves, will be deployed in an array across a region encompassing the Canary Islands and the archipelagos of Azores and Madeira. They will continuously record Earth’s ground motions over the course of a year.
The project particularly aims to gain more knowledge about massive “upwellings” of material pushing up from Earth’s mantle, which are poorly understood because they can occur far from the boundaries of continental plates and are therefore not covered by plate tectonic theories.
Professor Ana Ferreira of UCL Earth Sciences said: “This is a first of a kind seismic experiment. It is the first time we have covered such a large region of the North Atlantic Ocean with these highly sensitive instruments. By analysing their data, we hope to better understand the massive motions occurring hundreds of kilometres deep in the Earth’s mantle – in particular, upward flows of material that we still do not...