Two hidden mountains 100 times taller than Everest discovered by scientists — but you won’t be able to visit them

They make Mount Everest look like an anthill.

Scientists in the Netherlands have shed new light on two mountains that are taller than Mount Everest by hundreds of miles, suggesting that they’re potentially much older than once thought. The literal groundbreaking research was published recently in the journal Nature.

“Nobody knows what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years,” said head researcher Dr. Arwen Deuss, a seismologist and professor of Structure and composition of Earth’s deep interior at Utrecht University.

At around 620 miles high, these subsurface “islands of rock” stand more than 100 times higher than Mount Everest’s summit of around 5.5 miles, and pretty much dwarf everything else on the planet as well.

But don’t think of trying trying to climb them.

The two “supercontinents” are located some 1,200 miles beneath the surface of the Earth at the intersection of the planet’s core and the mantle, the semi-solid area beneath the crust. One is situated under Africa while the other lies beneath the Pacific Ocean.

They’re also surrounded by a massive “graveyard of tectonic plates which have been transported there by a process called ‘subduction,’ where one tectonic plate dives below another plate and sinks all the way from the Earth’s surface down to a depth of almost three thousand kilometers (1,200 miles),” said Deuss.

Despite being part of the literal underground, researchers have known about the formations since the turn of last century thanks to seismic shockwaves rippling through the Earth’s interior.

Large earthquakes cause the planet to ring like a bell, and it will sound “out of tune” when it hits anomalous objects such as the supercontinents.

By listening to these tectonic sour notes, earth scientists can map these structures, much like doctors taking an X-ray.

“We see that seismic waves slow down there,” said Dr. Deuss while discussing how they happened across the underground mountains, which are referred to as “Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces” or LLSVPs for this reason.

The new research found that the new structures are not only hotter than their neighboring tectonic plates — which is why the waves slowed down in the first place — but also possibly half a billion years older.

Scientists were thrown for a loop when studying the so-called damping of seismic waves, which is the “amount of energy that waves lose when they travel through the Earth,” explained Duess’ colleague Sujania Talavera-Soza.

“Against our expectations, we found little damping in the LLSVPs, which made the tones sound very loud there,” she added. “But we did find a lot of damping in the cold slab graveyard, where the tones sounded very soft.”

This was unlike the upper mantle, which was expectedly “hot” with damped waves.

Talavera-Soza analogized the phenomenon to going for a run in hot weather, explaining, “you don’t only slow down, but you also get more tired than when it is cold outside.”

Ultimately, the study contradicted the idea that the mantle is well-mixed and fast-flowing with researchers observing that there “is less flow” in the area than is “commonly thought.”