Slow start of plate tectonics despite a hot early Earth

Writing in PNAS, scientists from Cologne university present important new constraints showing that plate tectonics started relatively slow, although the early Earth's interior was much hotter than today.

Researchers discover 'missing' piece of Hawaii's formation

An oceanic plateau has been observed for the first time in the Earth's lower mantle, 800 kilometers deep underneath Eastern Siberia, pushing Hawaii's birthplace back to 100 million years, says a Michigan State University ...

Distinct slab interfaces found within mantle transition zone

The oceanic lithosphere descends into Earth's mantle as subducting slabs. Boundaries between the subducting slab and the surrounding mantle are defined as slab interfaces, whose seismic imaging is the key to understanding ...

Geologists 'resurrect' missing tectonic plate

The existence of a tectonic plate called Resurrection has long been a topic of debate among geologists, with some arguing it was never real. Others say it subducted—moved sideways and downward—into the earth's mantle ...

Probing the origin of the mantle's chemically distinct 'scars'

The composition of Earth's mantle was more shaped by interactions with the oceanic crust than previously thought, according to work from Carnegie's Jonathan Tucker and Peter van Keken along with colleagues from Oxford that ...

Is the Earth's transition zone deforming like the upper mantle?

In a recently published paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers from the Geodynamics Research Center, Ehime University and the University of Lille combine numerical modeling of dislocation glide and results ...

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