Fifteen years ago, Richard Davies of Newcastle University got hold of 3D images of the underwater sedimentary strata in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Mauritania. “I’m a geologist, so it’s my equivalent of the medic’s CAT scan,” Davies says. “I had this data set, and I’ve had many, many students work on it. I’ve pored all over it for years.”
But for most of that time, something in the scans eluded the researchers. It wasn’t until the bountiful free time provided by the Covid lockdown that Davies dusted off the images and noticed something peculiar: pockmarks on the seafloor. There were 23 of them, each a kilometer wide
→ Continue reading at Wired - Science