New research suggests Earth may be heating unevenly from the inside possibly upending geology as we know it

Scientists hunting invisible “ghost particles” more than a mile underground have found surprising clues that could torch everything experts thought they knew about the depths of our planet.The tiny particles, which are let off during the process that keeps the planet’s insides hot and moving, were captured at a lab buried over a mile deep inside a mine in Canada, and suggest the Earth may be heating unevenly from the inside, according to Quanta Magazine. If confirmed, this would mean that more of the planet’s radioactive matter is packed into some spots than others — a finding that could shatter one of geology’s most basic assumptions that the rock deep inside the Earth, which make up the mantle, is evenly mixed. “It could be that that’s the first hint that the mantle is not uniform,” Mark Chen, a particle astrophysicist at Queen’s University told the science outlet. “There may be deep Earth structures in the mantle that are not understood — it could be that [they] concentrate some kinds of elements,” Chen said. For decades, most scientists agreed that the radioactive elements heating the planet were spread evenly throughout the mantle, since the slowly flowing rock should stir everything together like a giant pot of soup.The mantle is the thick layer of hot, slowly churning rock between the Earth’s crust and its core.The earth’s misunderstood “structures” that Chen mentions are two mysterious, continent-size blobs buried deep near the core, one under Africa and the other under the Pacific.The heat from that radioactive fuel makes the rock deep underground churn, keeping the planet alive and powering everything from earthquakes and volcanoes to the magnetic field that shields Earth from space radiation.Ghost particles, known to scientists as neutrinos, are so tiny they zip through entire planets without slowing down as trillions pass through your body every second.

The rare Earth-made particle is so hard to catch that only a fe...