Posts Tagged ‘Mantle plumes’

mantle plumes with volcanic hotspots

University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland. Essentially a computed tomography, or CT scan, of Earth’s interior, the picture emerged […]

Mantle plumes crack continents

In some parts of the Earth, material rises upwards like a column from the boundary layer of Earth’s core and the lower mantle to just below Earth’s crust hundreds of kilometres above. Halted by the resistance of the hard crust and lithospheric mantle, the flow of material becomes wider, taking on a mushroom-like shape. Specialists […]