By For billions of years, the continents have cruised across Earth’s surface like tectonic vessels, but they have not survived unscathed. Waves in the underlying layer known as the mantle can scour off the keels of continents, buoying their surfaces upward to form prominent landforms far from any active plate boundaries, researchers propose in the Aug. 8 Nature. The study provides a plausible origin story for enigmatic plateaus that protrude from otherwise geologically sedate landscapes.
The researchers have “been able to extend out and link together processes that we’ve speculated about for a long period of time,” says geologist David Foster of the University of Florida in Gainesville. The study builds on research published last year, which suggested that mantle waves also triggered eruptions of diamond-bearing magmas called kimberlites.
