Scientists find seismic imaging is blind to water

When an earthquake strikes, nearby seismometers pick up its vibrations in the form of seismic waves. In addition to revealing the epicenter of a quake, seismic waves can give scientists a way to map the interior structures ...

The role of magma in the birth of the Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Ocean was born roughly 200 million years ago when the supercontinent Pangea began to break apart. As continental crust stretched and fractured, oceanic crust took its place. To investigate this rifting process, ...

Probing iron chemistry in the deep mantle

Carbonates are a group of minerals that contain the carbonate ion (CO32-) and a metal, such as iron or magnesium. Carbonates are important constituents of marine sediments and are heavily involved in the planet's deep carbon ...

Earth's 'solid' inner core may contain both mushy and hard iron

3,200 miles beneath Earth's surface lies the inner core, a ball-shaped mass of mostly iron that is responsible for Earth's magnetic field. In the 1950's, researchers suggested the inner core was solid, in contrast to the ...

Geologic history written in garnet sand

On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that ...

Volcanoes deliver two flavors of water

Seawater circulation pumps hydrogen and boron into the oceanic plates that make up the seafloor, and some of this seawater remains trapped as the plates descend into the mantle at areas called subduction zones. By analyzing ...

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