探索新英格兰地下动向 Hi , I ' m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky . And here ' s a short piece from the April issue of the magazine , in the section we call Advances : Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science , Technology and Medicine :
Hot Rocks by Shannon Hall For the past 200 million years New England has been a place without intense geologic change .
With few exceptions , there have been no rumbling volcanoes or major earthquakes . But it might be on the verge of awakening .
Findings published this January in the journal Geology show a bubble of hot rock rising underneath the northern Appalachian Mountains . The feature was first detected in 2016 by EarthScope , a collection of thousands of seismic instruments sprinkled throughout the U . S .
Vadim Levin , a geophysicist at Rutgers University , says this wealth of sensors lets earth scientists peer under the North American continent , just as the Hubble Space Telescope has enabled astronomers to gaze deep into the night sky .
Should the broiling rock breach the surface - which could happen , though not until tens of millions of years from now - it would transform New England into a burbling volcanic landscape .
The finding has sparked many questions , given that New England is not located along an active plate margin ( where one tectonic plate rubs against another )
but sits squarely in the middle of the North American plate . The exact source of the hot rock bubble , for example , is unclear .
Because the edge of the North American continent is colder than a plate near an active margin , Levin suspects this edge is cooling the mantle - the layer just below the crust that extends toward the earth ' s core .
As cold chunks of mantle sink , they may displace hotter segments , which would rise toward the surface . Scientists believe they have now imaged such an ascending piece .
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