What roils beneath the Earth’s surface may feel a world away, but the activity can help forge land masses that dictate ocean circulation, climate patterns, and even animal activity and evolution. In fact, scientists believe that a plume of hot rocks that burst from the Earth’s mantle millions of years ago could be an important… Continue Reading How Activity in Earth’s Mantle Led the Ancient Ancestors of Elephants, Giraffes, and Humans into Asia and Africa
North America is Dripping from Below, Geoscientists Discover
Researchers have discovered that the underside of the North American continent is dripping away in blobs of rock — and that the remnants of a tectonic plate sinking in the Earth’s mantle may be the reason why. A paper published in Nature Geoscience describes the phenomenon, which was discovered at The University of Texas at… Continue Reading North America is Dripping from Below, Geoscientists Discover
Field Blog: Studying the Blake Plateau
An ocean research cruise led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics is off the coast of Florida surveying the tectonics and movement of the crust hundreds of feet beneath the ocean floor. Follow the expedition’s blog as they look for clues to the break-up of Earth’s last supercontinent Pangea, and how that massive event shaped the magmatic activity below the crust today… Continue Reading Field Blog: Studying the Blake Plateau
Study Explores How Tectonic Forces Shape The Andes
Based on their shared geologic history, one would expect the topography of the Andes mountains to be relatively consistent from one end to the other. But reality defies expectation: the 8,000-kilometer long mountain belt spectacularly widens and narrows (varying from 300 to 900 km in width) as it winds from north to south along the… Continue Reading Study Explores How Tectonic Forces Shape The Andes
New Study Reveals Layers of Textured Mantle ‘Frozen’ into North American Plate
The North American plate is a medley of geological parts that protrude into Earth’s mantle like tree branches frozen into the surface of an iced-over lake. Research from The University of Texas at Austin has proposed a new method to map these ‘frozen-in’ layers of the tectonic plate and reveal how it interacts with the… Continue Reading New Study Reveals Layers of Textured Mantle ‘Frozen’ into North American Plate