Latest Structure of the Earth Stories

Rifting is one of the fundamental geological forces that have shaped our planet. Were it not for the stretching of continents and the oceans that filled those newly created basins, Earth would be a far different place. Yet because rifting involves areas deep below the Earth's surface, scientists have been unable to understand fully how it occurs. What is known is that with rifting, the center of the action lies in the lithosphere, which makes up the tectonic plates and includes the crust...

  By studying the chemistry of an unorthodox set of Brazilian diamonds, a team of researchers have discovered startling new information about the carbon cycle and the theory of plate tectonics. Researchers from the University of Bristol, Universidade de Brasilia, and the Carnegie Institution for Science studied what are known as "superdeep" diamonds, some of which originated from depths of 435 miles (700km) or more before erupting to the surface as volcanic rocks. Most diamonds...

  Siberian traps and their relation to the mass extinction 250 million years ago The eruption of giant masses of magma in Siberia 250 million years ago led to the Permo-Triassic mass extinction when more than 90 % of all species became extinct. An international team including geodynamic modelers from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences together with geochemists from the J. Fourier University of Grenoble, the Max Plank Institute in Mainz, and Vernadsky-, Schmidt- and...

  Precious metals such as gold, platinum and tungsten were brought to Earth by a massive meteorite shower that occurred approximately 650 million years after the planet formed, scientists from the University of Bristol revealed on Wednesday. According to a university press release, researchers Dr. Matthias Willbold and Professor Tim Elliott of the university's School of Earth Sciences, studied nearly four billion year old rock samples recovered from Greenland. The samples, which had...

  Scientists hope findings bring them closer to earthquake forecasting "What do I remember about an earthquake? I was in the 7th grade. All of a sudden the floor just started shaking. Desks were falling over. Kids were falling on the ground. It was so scary. It happened so quickly!" For people like Tony Zurnick, part of growing up in California was getting caught off guard by the sudden rumbles of earthquakes. Anyone who has lived through a major earthquake will tell you they'd...

Sunken oceanic crust resurfaces from Earth's mantle after only 500 million yearsThe recycling of the Earth's crust in volcanoes happens much faster than scientists have previously assumed. Rock of the oceanic crust, which sinks deep into the earth due to the movement of tectonic plates, reemerges through volcanic eruptions after around 500 million years. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz obtained this result using volcanic rock samples. Previously, geologists...

Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. New research from Matthew Jackson and Richard Carlson proposes that the remnants of six of the largest volcanic events of the past 250 million years contain traces of the ancient Earth's primitive mantle"”which existed before the largely differentiated mantle of today"”offering clues to the geochemical...

'Hot spots' of plume from deep Earth could propel plate motions around globeBringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates.Scientists who study tectonic motions have known for decades that the ongoing "pull" and "push" movements of...

Heavy Metal Meets Hard Rock: Battling through the Ocean Crust's Hardest Rocks to Capture the Boundary Between Magma and WaterScientists and drillers recovered a remarkable suite of heat-tempered basalts that provide a detailed picture of the rarely seen boundary between magma and seawater. These samples were collected during a return to ODP Hole 1256D, one of the deepest "hard rock" penetration sites of scientific ocean drilling. ODP Hole 1256D has been stabilized, cleared to its full depth,...

The inner core of the Earth is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research from the University of Leeds, UC San Diego and the Indian Institute of Technology.The findings, published tomorrow in Nature, could help us understand how the inner core formed and how the outer core acts as a 'geodynamo', which generates the planet's magnetic field."The origins of Earth's magnetic field remain a mystery to...