Chapter 143: Penetrate The Crust!
Accompanied by this leading expert’s narration, some images naturally emerged in Jiang Yang’s mind.
He seemed to see a steel plate, being firmly held up from below by countless jacks. But the steel plate itself was fixed in place, unable to move.
Those jacks exerted force together, and finally, this tough steel plate was suddenly pierced through.
The structure that had originally maintained its integrity suddenly shattered into millions of pieces, and in the process of shattering, it unleashed powerful vibrational power.
Thus, the geologically stable zone, which according to existing theories should not experience earthquakes at all, suddenly began to shake violently.
A severe earthquake spreading across the globe, completely different in nature from conventional earthquakes, occurred.
He involuntarily looked down at the land beneath his feet.
There was a smooth floor laid there. He knew that beneath the floor was concrete, further down was soil and rock layers, and even further was the scorching mantle, where endless changes that humanity had yet to understand were taking place.
He seemed to feel that enormous energy was gathering beneath the seemingly stable land under his feet, continuously brewing and accumulating, waiting for the final eruption.
Jiang Yang clearly knew that regarding Earth’s interior, what human civilization understood at this moment was actually no more than what it knew about the starry sky of the universe.
The expert continued narrating in a low voice: “According to existing geology research, we believe this kind of super mantle plume eruption has occurred on Earth before.
About 250 million years ago, the supervolcano cluster eruption that caused the Permian mass extinction might have been due to a super mantle plume.
But if this apocalypse is also due to a super mantle plume, then the scale and power of this eruption will be more than a thousand times that of the Permian mass extinction.”
More than a thousand times…
This number made Jiang Yang’s heart feel even heavier.
“The second possibility: abnormal changes in the inner core of the Earth’s core.”
The expert continued: “The Earth’s core is divided into the inner core and outer core; the inner core is solid, and the outer core is liquid. Research shows that the Earth’s inner core is slowly growing by crystallizing iron from the outer core.
But some existing research information indicates that the growth of the Earth’s inner core may be accelerating.
Imagine this scenario: if for some unknown reason the Earth’s inner core suddenly grows uncontrollably and asymmetrically at a rapid rate, then the distribution of substances inside Earth would undergo drastic changes in a short time, thereby affecting Earth’s rotation.
According to the principle of conservation of angular momentum, this change would inevitably accumulate a large amount of stress and transmit it through the mantle layer to the crust.
If this change is sufficiently rapid and intense, then the final stress release process would instantly cause violent shaking of the entire crust, thereby forming severe earthquakes across the globe.
Of course, this is merely our speculation and cannot be verified at the present stage.
The third possibility is the simultaneous movement of multiple giant continental plates.
When subducting plates plunge into the mantle layer, they are affected by mineral phase transitions, causing plate material to accumulate here, creating a ‘mantle transition zone’.
So assume this situation: if the energy accumulated from the subduction of all plates on Earth reaches a critical value and suddenly erupts at a certain moment, with all plates breaking through the resistance of the mantle transition zone at the same time and rapidly subducting into the mantle, this too could cause an instantaneous violent energy burst, leading to severe earthquakes across the globe.
The above three possibilities are speculations based on existing research data, with a certain scientific foundation.
The fourth speculation is beyond science. Perhaps some mechanism heated the Earth’s core, or some movement whose principles we have not grasped…
The factors that could be involved here are too numerous, and we cannot make a relatively clear judgment on this.”
The leading expert finished his narration.
And Jiang Yang knew that this was already the highest wisdom’s judgment from experts across the globe and all of humanity in related disciplines such as geophysics and geology.
No matter how fanciful or unreasonable it sounded, it was the judgment with the highest possibility among those that could be made with current human technology at this stage.
The Reaper Civilization very likely triggered severe earthquakes encompassing the globe through one of these possibilities, thereby completing another harvest of human civilization.
As for why each harvest insisted on killing the vast majority of people in a short time, Jiang Yang temporarily could not judge this, and at this moment it was temporarily irrelevant and could be set aside for now.
“So… how do we confirm which of these four—no, we can ignore the fourth possibility for now—how do we confirm which of the first three possibilities it is?”
Jiang Yang asked this crucial question.
The leading geophysics expert clearly had preparations for this.
“First, satellites.
We need to quickly launch a large number of Earth exploration satellites into space to comprehensively map and monitor minute surface deformations, precisely measure plate movements, crustal deformations, changes in Earth’s gravity field, changes in Earth’s magnetic field, etc., using these changes to indirectly probe changes inside Earth and search for related clues.
Second, establish a global comprehensive helium isotope monitoring system.
Specifically, in global volcanoes, rift valleys, major fault zones, and other geologically active areas, establish a large number of automatic sampling analysis observation stations to automatically analyze the content of helium-3 and helium-4 in samples.
Among these, helium-3 mainly comes from the mantle, and helium-4 mainly from radioactive decay in the crust. Monitoring changes in these two isotopes can reveal some changes deep inside Earth.
Comprehensive evaluation shows that the number of monitoring stations we need is at least over a million.
Third, install detectors in a large number of deep wells worldwide to detect minute strains in underground rocks, fluid activities, heat flow, stress, etc., while conducting underground deep-layer seismic wave analysis.
According to preliminary statistics, at the current stage globally, the number of wells over 6000 meters deep that meet detection needs is around 3000.
High-performance detectors must be placed in all these wells for detection.
Fourth, artificially create a large number of seismic sources to comprehensively detect underground substance flows through seismic waves.
All four of the above need to be networked, with a supercomputer uniformly collecting, computing, monitoring, and simulating deep Earth substance movements to find minute clues.”
Jiang Yang knew that the detection projects mentioned by this expert implied enormous engineering efforts.
Over a thousand satellites, over a million gas monitoring stations, fully utilizing deep well detection, mass production of seismic sources—each one meant massive resource and manpower investment.
It was only because the World Government had been established now, able to uniformly allocate global resources, that these projects had the possibility of being uniformly advanced in a short time.
But…
The leading expert took a light breath: “Although the scale of the above projects is huge, they only belong to conventional detection methods.
They can at most serve as auxiliaries and cannot play a decisive role in verifying those three unprecedented speculations.
To truly detect decisive data to help us accurately judge what is happening inside Earth, we must accomplish one thing.
We must dig an unprecedented deep well before the apocalypse arrives, penetrating the crust to directly probe the mantle!
And one is not enough; globally, at least four are needed.”
A wry smile appeared on his face as he slowly shook his head: “But, but…”
