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 ...

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 ...

Subduction may recycle less water than thought

When one tectonic plate dives beneath another at a subduction zone, it recycles huge amounts of water and other chemicals into Earth's mantle. The sinking plate carries seawater trapped in sediments and crust or chemically ...

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 ...

A new way of looking at the Earth's interior

Current understanding is that the chemical composition of the Earth's mantle is relatively homogeneous. But experiments conducted by ETH researchers now show that this view is too simplistic. Their results solve a key problem ...

Formation of a huge underwater volcano offshore the Comoros

A new submarine volcano was formed off the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean in 2018. This was shown by an oceanographic campaign in May 2019. Now, an international team led by the scientist Simone Cesca from the German ...

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