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Scientists have detected a completely new type of magnetic wave that surges through Earth's outer core every seven years, warping the strength of our planet's magnetic field in the process. The waves — dubbed "Magneto-Coriolis" waves because they move along the Earth’s axis of rotation, per the Coriolis effect — creep from East to West in tall columns that can travel up to 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) per year, the researchers wrote in a March 21 paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a fleet of European Space Agency (ESA) satellites, the team pinpointed the...

A geological secret passage beneath Panama may explain why rocks from Earth's mantle are found more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from where they originated.This opening, located some 62 miles (100 km) below Earth's surface, may allow a flow of mantle materials to travel all the way from beneath the Galápagos Islands to beneath Panama.This never-before-discovered form of transport may also help explain why Panama has very few active volcanoes. On the west coast of Central America, the Cocos tectonic plate is diving down and pushes oceanic crust under the continental crust of the North American, Caribbean and Panama tectonic...

Researchers say they've recovered a mineral from deep inside the Earth — one they thought would never see the light of day. Scientists at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, named the mineral "davemaoite," after Ho-kwang "Dave" Mao, a retired experimental geophysicist whose influence on the field is still felt today. "It's an opportunity to give him credit for his big contributions," said Oliver Tschauner, a mineralogist who led a study of the rare mineral, in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. No one ever expected to see the mineral on the Earth's surface. That's because deep-Earth minerals like davemaoite...

A series of filmed home run contests between two sluggers of the late 1950s/early 1960s, one National Leaguer, one American Leaguer. The batters had to swing at every pitch in the strike zone. Any called strike or batted ball that did not go for a home run was an out. (Three outs per inning.) The batter with the most runs at the end of nine innings won $2000. The loser got $1000. As an added incentive, any batter who hit three home runs in a row got a $500 bonus. Each consecutive home run after the first three in a...

Research reveals that plate tectonics started on Earth 600 million years before what was believed earlier... Where it was previously thought that plate tectonics started about 2.7 billion years ago, a team of international scientists used the microscopic leftovers of a drop of water that was transported into the Earth's deep mantle - through plate tectonics - to show that this process started 600 million years before that. An article on their research that proves plate tectonics started on Earth 3.3 billion years ago was published in the high impact academic journal, Nature, on 16 July... For their research, the...

Lambart and her colleagues from Wales and the Netherlands, sought to discover what the mantle looks like before it rises as lava at a mid-ocean ridge. They examined cores, drilled through the ocean crust, to look at cumulate minerals: the first minerals to crystallize when the magmas enter the crust. They analyzed the samples centimeter by centimeter to look at variations in isotopes of neodymium and strontium, which can indicate different chemistries of mantle material that come from different types of rock. The amount of isotope variability in the cumulates was seven times greater than that in the mid-ocean ridge...

Massive 1994 Bolivian earthquake reveals mountains 660 kilometers below our feet Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications Feb. 14, 2019 2 p.m. Most schoolchildren learn that the Earth has three (or four) layers: a crust, mantle and core, which is sometimes subdivided into an inner and outer core. That’s not wrong, but it does leave out several other layers that scientists have identified within the Earth, including the transition zone within the mantle. Princeton seismologist Jessica Irving worked with then-graduate student Wenbo Wu and another collaborator to determine the roughness at the top and bottom of the transition zone, a layer within...

You know jet streams as fast-flowing air currents in the atmosphere that can help predict temperature and help planes fly faster. According to data sent back by a trio of ESA satellites called Swarm, though, there's also a jet stream deep beneath our planet's surface, and it's made of molten iron. A team of European scientists have discovered the jet stream in the Earth's outer core that's located 1,900 miles underneath its crust. It moves at 25 miles per year, three times faster than the speed of the other layers in the outer core and a thousand times faster than...

A mantle plume producing almost as much heat as Yellowstone supervolcano appears to be melting part of West Antarctica from beneath. Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago.

Recovered minerals that originated in the deep mantle can give scientists a rare glimpse into the dynamic processes occurring deep inside of Earth and into the history of the planet's mantle layer. A team led by Yingwei Fei, a Carnegie experimental petrologist, and Cheng Xu, a field geologist from Peking University, has discovered that a rare sample of the mineral majorite originated at least 235 miles below Earth's surface. Their findings are published by Science Advances. Majorite is a type of garnet formed only at depths greater than 100 miles. Fascinatingly, the majorite sample Fei's team found in Northern China...

The southeastern United States has been hit by a series of strange unexplained quakes - most recently, the 2011 magnitude-5.8 earthquake near Mineral, Virginia that shook the nation's capital. Researchers have been baffled, believing the areas should be relatively quiet in terms of seismic activity, as it is located in the interior of the North American Plate, far away from plate boundaries where earthquakes usually occur. Now, they believe the quakes could be caused by pieces of the Earth's mantle breaking off and sinking into the planet.

New research led by Dr Hauke Marquardt of the University of Bayreuth, Germany, suggests the existence of a previously unknown superviscous layer inside our planet: part of the lower mantle where the rock gets 3 times stiffer. Such a layer may explain why tectonic plate slabs seem to pool at 930 miles (1,500 km) under Indonesia and South America’s Pacific coast. “The Earth has many layers, like an onion. Most layers are defined by the minerals that are present. Essentially, we have discovered a new layer in the Earth. This layer isn’t defined by the minerals present, but by the...

UC Santa Barbara geologist Jim Boles has found evidence of helium leakage from the Earth’s mantle along a 30-mile stretch of the Newport-Inglewood Fault Zone in the Los Angeles Basin. Using samples of casing gas from two dozen oil wells ranging from LA’s Westside to Newport Beach in Orange County, Boles discovered that more than one-third of the sites — some of the deepest ones — show evidence of high levels of helium-3 (3He).Considered primordial, 3He is a vestige of the Big Bang. Its only terrestrial source is the mantle. Leakage of 3He suggests that the Newport-Inglewood fault is deeper...

The date Jan. 9 is significant insofar as baseball is concerned because the objectively wonderful TV show "Home Run Derby" first took to (s)wing. In commemoration of this important day, let us take a look back at the first episode, which featured Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, who, as it turns out, were both good at baseball-related tasks and duties. Come with us, won't you?

The Tech Report crew seems to think that SteamOS and Mantle could ruin PC gaming. I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion but I'm sure you guys will have plenty to say on the topic. Now, all of a sudden, next year's gaming landscape looks to be shaping up very differently. Instead of three major platforms based on a common hardware architecture, game developers will face two monolithic platforms and a fragmented one—the PC—that will have two starkly different operating systems and three different APIs—Direct3D, OpenGL, and Mantle.

Hot Mantle Initiated Ocean and Flood Beginnings by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D. * A new discovery may shed light on how the great Flood began. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, German scientists found evidence suggesting the earth’s mantle was up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit hotter during the initial, formative stages of the Atlantic Ocean—when the continents began to violently pull apart to create it—compared to today.1 Over time, the mantle cooled to current levels. The scientists studied the composition of oceanic crust using deep-sea drilling core samples and found a systematic change in chemistry from the shoreline—the edge...

Try using the entire Earth to hunt for a new fundamental force of nature. So say Larry Hunter of Amherst College in Massachusetts, and colleagues. They have created a map of the spins of electrons deep within the Earth's mantle, which could be used to reveal the as-yet-unseen force as well as the strange particles – known as "unparticles" – that might carry it. We currently know of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The hypothetical fifth force can be thought of as a version of magnetism that does not weaken as quickly with...

Sixty years ago in an exhibition game against USC, a young Mickey Mantle hit a home run that became baseball legend and spawned a mystery: Just how far did it go? It was the first inning, one runner aboard, the count at two balls and two strikes, and Tom Lovrich stared down the 19-year-old rookie batter. USC's junior ace didn't know much about him, except that he more than filled out his gray New York Yankees uniform. "He was a strong, country kid from Oklahoma," Lovrich said, recalling the legendary at-bat that took place 60 years ago Saturday. "Very strong."...

Wardrobe malfunction? no velcro? :-} A gust of wind blows Pope Benedict XVI's mantle as he leads the weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican June 16, 2010.REUTERS/TMax Rossi

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking to get his reform mojo back. Buoyed by the passage of a redistricting overhaul he had sought for years, the governor who famously promised to "blow up the boxes" of state government is expected to press ahead next year with a broader government reform agenda ... . The goal: reverse the dysfunction of the Legislature, ... With many of his other policy ambitions stifled by the tanking state budget, reclaiming the reform mantle may be an opportunity for Schwarzenegger to burnish his legacy ... The narrow passage of Proposition 11, ... , gives...