If we were lucky to travel to the Earth’s centre, perhaps as part of an international crew of terranauts chosen to observe and investigate our planet’s interior… just before entering the molten core, we would insist on making a “must stop” of our journey, almost like one of those vista points you can’t resist making a stop at, cruising along some imaginary coastal highway.
Buoyant material rising in the Earth's mantle is expected to spread out when it reaches the base of a tectonic plate like pancake batter dropped into a pan.
The largest earthquakes occur at subduction zones, where one plate descends beneath another into the underlying mantle, at a convergent plate boundary. Some subduction zones seem to host more large earthquakes than others (Fig. 1), potentially reflecting the influence of large-scale geodynamic processes, which vary from one subduction zone to the next.
Integration of passive seismic images, geochemistry, and reconstruction of uplift from river profiles provide new findings on arc-continent collisional processes
Continents host the oldest building blocks of the Earth's surface and keep a record of the processes that shaped it. A careful reading and high-performance computational modelling of the early, hotter Earth reveal a coming of age story.
Earth’s tectonic plates are constantly moving. Over millions of years new plates form at oceanic ridges, while others form mountains or even sink back in the mantle and disappear from the surface. The unique geochemical signature of sunken plates can be preserved and reappear in newly formed crust.
Haibin Yang, Louis Moresi and Mark Quigley provide a scaling relationship for the fault spacing in continental strike-slip shear zones.
Kyle Manley, Tristan Salles Dietmar Müller Since roughly 1880 the Earth has warmed by 1 deg C, many times faster than any warming episode in the past 65 million years of Earth’s geological history. We will need to remove hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere by the end of the twenty-first century to keep global warming below 2°C within the constraints of the global carbon budget.
A group of researchers have traced a mighty Gondwana river back to its distant source - in the mountains of East Antarctica. They’ve been able to show that this colossal river flowed for over 200 million years, making it a candidate for one of the top ten longest-lived rivers in Earth’s history.
A new study by an international team of researchers offers new clues about where and how subduction starts on Earth, the process behind our most deadly volcanic eruptions.