Related topics: tectonic plates · earth

Fate of sinking tectonic plates revealed

Our world's surface is a jumble of jostling tectonic plates, with new ones emerging as others are pulled under. The ongoing cycle keeps our continents in motion and drives life on Earth. But what happens when a plate disappears ...

Support for a 'jelly sandwich' model of the Tibetan Plateau

With an area of 2.5 million square kilometers and an altitude that can exceed 4,500 meters, the Tibetan Plateau is the largest and highest plateau on Earth. Although its formation over the past 65 million years is broadly ...

Challenging the big bang puzzle of heavy elements

It has long been theorized that hydrogen, helium, and lithium were the only chemical elements in existence during the Big Bang when the universe formed, and that supernova explosions, stars exploding at the end of their lifetime, ...

Dwarf planet Vesta serves as a window to the early solar system

The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from meteorites ...

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 ...

Geological cold case may reveal critical minerals

Researchers on the hunt for why cold eclogites mysteriously disappeared from geological records during the early stages of the Earth's development may have found the answer, and with it clues that could help locate critical ...

Nature recycles trash to create diamonds

The Earth's deepest diamonds are commonly made up of former living organisms that have effectively been recycled more than 400 kilometers below the surface, new Curtin research has discovered.

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