The anomaly was discovered by Earthscope, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project to monitor the geology of North America to better understand the processes behind earthquakes and volcanoes.
Geologists and seismologists were baffled when Earthscope told them that huge amounts of magma were churning 124 miles beneath the surface of New England. While such phenomena are common enough along tectonic plates, Lovecraft Country isn't exactly known for its volcanoes.
"The upwelling we detected is like a hot air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England," says geophysicist Vadim Levin from Rutgers University, New Brunswick to Science Alert.
"It is a very large and relatively stable region, but we found an irregular pattern with rather abrupt changes in it."
The bad news is, it's going to erupt! The good news is, it's going to erupt a few million years from now. You'll still be able buy overpriced clam chowder for the foreseeable future without fears of New England turning into an igneous wasteland. "Come back in 50 million years, and we'll see what happens," Levin joked.
Although not urgent, the team is still trying to understand where all this magma is coming from. The "blob" is thought to be a geologically recent phenomenon, but "geologically recent" could refer to anything that's occurred since the death of the dinosaurs (that was 65 million years ago, for all you non-nerds out there).
"The next step is to try to understand how exactly it's happening," said Levin.
Massive is also relative: by the standards of a volcanic region like the West Coast, the mighty New England Blob would just be an itty bitty baby blob. "It is not Yellowstone [National Park]-like, but it's a distant relative in the sense that something relatively small — no more than a couple hundred miles across — is happening," Levin said.
Nevertheless, the formation may challenge existing theory on the geological structure of New England, generally thought to be a stable and predictable formation. "[W]e did not expect to find abrupt changes in physical properties beneath this region," says Levin, "and the likely explanation points to a much more dynamic regime underneath this old, geologically quiet area."
Reports of a Balrog escaping the Mines of Moria as a result of the overly greedy delving of dwarves have gone unconfirmed.
