Geological mystery lies deep below state



       Deep, very deep, in the heart of South Georgia, miles beneath the
  tiny crossroads town of Surrency, lies a mysterious, newly discovered
  geologic formation never detected anywhere else in the world.

       Geologists say the "Surrency Bright Spot," nine miles beneath South
  Georgia's piney woods, may be an ancient reservoir of water or other
  fluid formed more than 200 million years ago by the collision of North
  Africa and North America.

       "It's big, and we've never seen anything like it before," says Dr.
  Larry Brown, an associate professor of geological sciences at Cornell
  University, who was part of a scientific team that discovered the
  formation.

       Brown, a director of the Cornell-based Consortium for Continental
  Reflective Profiling (COCORP), which is developing a detailed picture of
  the Earth's mantle, says the formation - "bright" only in terms of the
  way it reflects sound waves - is about two miles in diameter and appears
  to be shaped like a contact lens.

       If it is a subterranean pool of water or other fluid, it could force
  physicists to revise models of the Earth's crust. Until now many of them
  felt the heat and pressure at those depths were too great for fluids to
  exist.

       Nine miles down, temperatures are nearly 500 degrees Fahrenheit and
  pressures are great enough to flatten the sturdiest truck like a pancake.

       "We really don't have a good idea what the object the formation is
  composed of," says Brown. "If it is water, it would upset a lot of
  scientific theories, and it would cause us to rethink our ideas about the
  role of water in forming the Earth's mantle."

       Brown says it might be a liquefied gas, such as carbon dioxide or
  methane, or something more exotic, such as liquid helium. But he says
  because of the tremendous pressure and temperature, it is probably not
  oil. Even if it were, it would be impossible to recover from such a
  depth, miles deeper than the deepest oil well.

       Surrency Mayor Stanford Tillman, first informed of the unique
  geologic feature last week, has his own theory.

       "It might have something to do with Surrency's ghost," he says. "If
  this town is known for anything, it's for the ghost that supposedly
  haunted the old Surrency house owned by the family for whom the town is
  named during the 1870s and 1880s."

       Tillman says inhabitants of the house reported dishes flying off
  shelves, logs jumping off the fire and bricks coming through the walls.
  The "ghost" became so famous that people rode the train from Atlanta just
  to see the "haunted" house, which burned down at the turn of the century.

       "A lot of us also suspect that the goings-on had something to with
  unusual magnetic activities in our area," says Tillman. "The discovery of
  this object formation is very exciting to me."

       Brown's interest in the discovery is of a more scientific nature.
  The geologists were looking for the long-sought "suture" between the
  North African and North American continents when they got the first hint
  of the existence of a massive formation in 1985.

       Recent tests confirmed the existence of the "bright spot," and Brown
  says details will be published soon in a scientific journal.

       "Finding the suture between the continents was exciting, but the
  fact that we found this bright spot is even more exciting," says Brown.

       The discovery is part of an ongoing effort to develop a detailed
  picture of the Earth's crust, which extends 20 miles below the planet's
  surface.

       The scientists beam sound waves deep underground. When they are
  reflected back to the surface, they are recorded on a graph, giving
  scientists an idea of the formations far below. The system helped to
  determine that the suture between North Africa and North America runs in
  a broad, gentle arc from Brunswick through Americus and on to the Alabama
  border.

       About 500 million years ago, the two continents collided, forming
  the Appalachian Mountains. When they pulled apart 180 million years ago,
  a piece of North Africa remained lodged against North America, a
  continental fragment that now is beneath Florida and South Georgia.

       Sometime during that collision, geologists say, water or some other
  fluid may have trickled deep into the zone between the continents,
  forming the Surrency Bright Spot.


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