Beneath

A collaborative study by Chinese and Japanese scientists has uncovered evidence of ancient lower mantle flow fields beneath the Philippine Sea Plate, offering new insights into the Earth’s deep interior dynamics and the widespread presence of seismic anisotropy in the lower mantle.Scientists from China and Japan have identified unique features of the flow field in the lower mantle. Through their study of seismic anisotropy in the upper section of the lower mantle beneath the Philippine Sea Plate, they discovered that the…

2007 – 2020Critical infrastructure is threatened as sinking land amplifies global sea level rise.In many parts of the U.S. East Coast, rising seas driven by melting ice and the thermal expansion of warming water is only part of what threatens coastal areas. The land is also sinking. This geologic two-step is happening rapidly enough to threaten infrastructure, farmland, and wetlands that tens of millions of people along the coast rely upon, according to a NASA-funded team of scientists at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation…

Our world may seem fragile, but Earth has been around for a very long time. If we ventured far back into the past, would we reach a time when it looked fundamentally different? The answer lies in some of the earliest extensive relics of Earth's surface, found in a remote corner of southern Africa's highveld—a region known to geologists as the Barberton Greenstone Belt. The geological formations in this region have proved difficult…

Nine kilometres beneath the sea off the coast of Japan, there are fields of yellow flowers that stretch for hundreds of miles. They are not real flowers – not even plants at all but animals called crinoids, related to sea urchins and starfish, which anchor themselves to the deep seabed and feed off plankton filtered by their delicate frond-like arms.The cliche that we know more about the surface of the moon than about our own oceans is given vivid new currency in this blend of natural history, popular science, travelogue…

As Africa and Eurasia slowly collide, Earth's rumblings paint a seismographic picture of what once was a piece of our planet's surface now lying upside down deep beneath the Mediterranean.Spain's unusually prone to rare, deep earthquakes, and a new study suggests this capsized tectonic slab might have something to do with it."Since 1954, there have been five closely located large deep‐focus earthquakes with depths greater than 600 kilometers beneath Granada," explain geologists Daoyuan Sun from the University of Science…

An artistic illustration about Theia impacting the proto-Earth. Credit: Hernan Canellas/image courtesy of ASURecent research indicates that Earth’s mantle contains two large blobs, remnants of Theia, the ancient planet whose collision with Earth led to the moon’s creation. This discovery offers fresh insights into the moon’s formation and Earth’s early history.In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: Two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the…

Mimas is the smallest and innermost of Saturn’s major moons. Its newly discovered young ocean opens new avenues for exploring life’s potential beyond Earth. Credit: Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio | Observatoire de Paris – PSL, IMCCEResearchers have discovered a global ocean of liquid water beneath the surface of Mimas, one of Saturn’s smallest moons. This discovery, made possible by data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, highlights Mimas as a crucial site for studying the origins of life, providing insights into ocean…

The latest fissure to break open and spew lava in southwestern Iceland. A river of magma flowed underneath an Icelandic fishing village late last year at a rate never before recorded, scientists said Thursday, as the region suffered yet another dramatic eruption. Authorities in Iceland declared a state of emergency on Thursday as lava burst a key…

An odd little moon that orbits closely to Saturn just revealed its biggest mystery: a hidden ocean that lies beneath its heavily cratered surface. 'More People Need to Know About This History': A Black Astronaut Speaks About Race and SpaceMimas is less than 123 miles (198 kilometers) wide, too small to be perfectly round, and its icy shell is covered with deep scarring from objects slamming into it. Its most prominent impact crater, Herschel, stretches across a third of its face, giving it the nickname Death Star in…

This vertical cliff consists of soft mud deposited on the Japan Trench bottom and was uplifted ~60 m by the 2011 megaquake. This was the first time that the fault scarp of a trench-type earthquake was observed and visually recorded. Credit: Niigata UniversityOn September 4, 2022, Hayato Ueda, a geologist from Niigata University, embarked on a submarine journey alongside pilot Chris May into the heart of the Japan Trench, the epicenter of the catastrophic 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake and tsunami. Descending to the trench’s…