News tagged with lithosphere

Scientists reveal Southern California's tectonic plates in detail

Rifting is one of the fundamental geological forces that have shaped our planet. Were it not for the stretching of continents and the oceans that filled those newly created basins, Earth would be a far different ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Oct 06, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Geologists solve mystery of the Colorado Plateau

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists led by Rice University has figured out why the Colorado Plateau – a 130,000-square-mile region that straddles Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico -- is rising ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Apr 27, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (10) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Geophysicists claim conventional understanding of Earth's deep water cycle needs revision

A popular view among geophysicists is that large amounts of water are carried from the oceans to the deep mantle in "subduction zones," which are boundaries where the Earth's crustal plates converge, with ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Oct 18, 2010 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (17) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

North American continent is a layer cake, scientists discover

(PhysOrg.com) -- The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3 billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Aug 25, 2010 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (7) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Banded rocks reveal early Earth conditions, changes

(PhysOrg.com) -- The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Oct 11, 2009 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (17) | comments 1

A Hidden Drip, Drip, Drip Beneath Earth's Surface

(PhysOrg.com) -- There are very few places in the world where dynamic activity taking place beneath Earth's surface goes undetected.

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created May 26, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (13) | comments 4

New understanding of Earth's lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary beneath the Pacific Ocean

Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth's crust: the lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere. ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 22, 2012 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Why East Coast earthquakes travel so far

A rare 5.8 earthquake that rattled the eastern United States on Tuesday was felt over a wide area from Toronto, Canada down to Georgia due to the hard, brittle quality of the ground, experts said.

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Aug 23, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (8) | comments 3

Earth's largest environmental catastrophe 250 million years ago studied

The eruption of giant masses of magma in Siberia 250 million years ago led to the Permo-Triassic mass extinction when more than 90 % of all species became extinct. An international team including geodynamic ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Sep 14, 2011 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (12) | comments 9 | with audio podcast

First complete image created of Himalayan fault, subduction zone

An international team of researchers has created the most complete seismic image of the Earth's crust and upper mantle beneath the rugged Himalaya Mountains, in the process discovering some unusual geologic ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Sep 11, 2009 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (8) | comments 1

The biggest crash on Earth: India slides under Tibet, but how?

During the collision of India with the Eurasian continent, the Indian plate is pushed about 500 kilometers under Tibet, reaching a depth of 250 kilometers. The result of this largest collision in the world is the world's ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Sep 16, 2010 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (3) | comments 0

Why did the Southern Gulf of California rupture so rapidly?

The November GSA Today science article, "Why did the Southern Gulf of California rupture so rapidly? -- Oblique divergence across hot, weak lithosphere along a tectonically active margin," is now online.

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Nov 03, 2011 | popularity 3.5 / 5 (2) | comments 0

Lithosphere

The lithosphere ( /ˈlɪθəsfɪər/; Greek: λίθος [lithos] for "rocky" + σφαῖρα [sphaira] for "sphere") is the rigid outermost shell of a rocky planet. On Earth, it comprises the crust and the portion of the upper mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of thousands of years or greater.

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