Category: Earth Mantle

University of Maryland scientists have made a groundbreaking ancient seafloor discovery, revealing evidence of a seafloor that sank deep into Earth during the age of dinosaurs. This finding challenges existing theories about Earth’s interior structure and provides new insights into the planet’s geological history. The ancient seafloor was uncovered in the East Pacific Rise, a …

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A study published in Nature Geoscience has revealed that lavas from volcanic hotspots such as Hawaii, Samoa, and Iceland come from a chemically uniform reservoir in Earth’s mantle composition, challenging prior assumptions about its diversity. Led by Dr. Matthijs Smit of the University of British Columbia and co-authored by Dr. Kooijman from the Swedish Museum …

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Recent research has uncovered a fascinating mechanism behind the formation of high plateaus in the interior of continents, attributing their rise to deep, slow-moving processes within the Earth. The study, led by Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton, suggests that as continents break apart, they set off a chain reaction deep within …

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The region of the Earth with the lowest relative gravity is located just south of India in the Indian Ocean. This gravity “hole” may be the result of low-density plumes of magma disturbed by the sinking slabs of a former tectonic plate. 

More than 400 miles below us is a massive world of extreme temperatures and pressures that has been churning and evolving for longer than humans have been on the planet. A new model from Caltech researchers shows that the processes involved are actually opposite to what had been previously theorized.

Hidden inside the Earth-within several hundred kilometers below the crust-there is another ocean which is most likely the largest ocean in the world. However, this ocean is only water in the loosest sense: broken into its composite hydrogen and oxygen atoms and chemically bound to the surrounding rock. 

A new study finds the hotspots that created volcanic islands such as those of Hawaii, Iceland and the Galapagos Islands may often prove surprisingly cool.

By studying geochemical compositions beneath Panama, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists have been able to track large-scale movements in Earth’s deep interior. They were able to show that the volcanic material is sourced from the Galapagos plume, over 1500 km away.

Reunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, sits above one of Earth’s mantle plumes – a tower of superheated rock that ascends from the deep mantle. 

The Earth’s sprawling ocean ridge system is a result of overturning material in its interior, where boiling temperatures can melt and eject rocks up through the crust, splitting the sea floor and reshaping the planet’s surface over hundreds of millions of years.