The year was 2007. You might have had the first iPhone in your hands, or you could have been listening to ‘The Black Parade’ – or indeed seeing it performed live across the globe.

Perhaps you were there to see the Burj Khalifa completed, or maybe you were stuffing popcorn into your mouth while watching Spiderman 3.

But what you almost certainly weren’t doing at the time, was taking detailed measurements of the Earth’s mantle. Why would you have been?

Fortunately for science though, two NASA satellites – designed to monitor our planet’s sea levels – was observing this data. And this is why we know, eighteen years down the line, that while you were singing along with Gerard Way, something unusual was going on deep underground.

We know this now thanks to geophysicists from Paris City University, whose recent paper – which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters – unpicked data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

And what they discovered was that between 2006 and 2008, there were minute shifts in the Earth’s gravitational field.

This showed as a ‘geomagnetic jerk’ off the Atlantic coast of Africa in 2007.

This might not seem like much on the surface (literally) but what it points to is some quite significant movement deep underground, between the core and the mantle.

This ‘jerk’ was not something that could be explained by the GRACE data, which led the researchers to hypothesise the cause.

Their theory? That a mineral known as perovskite, which lies toward the bottom the the Earth’s mantle, could have undergone some sort of structural change, which would have led to changes to nearby rocks too.

While they might be deep, these shifts would have undoubtedly have had repercussions on the Earth’s surface, as well as potentially affecting the flow of liquid rock in the Earth’s core, thus having perceptible effects on the GRACE data.

As for the team, their investigations to prove their theory go on, with more NASA data informing their progress.

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.