Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface | Quanta Magazine
www.quantamagazine.org
Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved.
  • Krudler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    403·
    3 months ago

    So geology.

    I fucking hate that website with a passion.

    They post nothing but horseshit for dummies.

    edit: I informally petition the moderator(s) to ban that domain

    • SmoothOperator@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      This “is kind of crazy,” said Harriet Lau, a geodynamicist at Brown University who was not involved with either study. If material is effusing from the core into the mantle, is the boundary between them “as distinct as we think?”

      Sounds like there’s some interesting new science happening.

      I quite like Quanta Magazine, they at least manage to write some pretty good articles on quantum mechanics which are both approachable by layman and accurate.

    • leadore@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      3 months ago

      No, the stuff that comes out of a volcano is magma (which is then called lava when it reaches the surface). It comes from the mantle which is just below the crust.

      The core is at the center of the earth and has a composition that is very different from magma. There’s an inner and outer core and I assume they’re talking about the outer core here since the inner core is thought to be solid.

      • P00ptart@lemmy.worldEnglish
        82·
        3 months ago

        Yes, but it gets to the surface, and how does it get to the surface? Through volcanoes. Not all volcanoes are material from the outer core, but that is the only way it reaches the surface.

        • leadore@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          3 months ago

          I was trying to answer OP’s question “isn’t that what volcanoes are” by clarifying that volcanoes are formed by the release to the surface of magma from the mantle. If they are now discovering there is also some core material mixed in with the lava in some volcanoes, that’s interesting and we might mention that as a minor component in those cases. But to say regarding material from the core, “that’s what volcanoes are” would be inaccurate. That would be some weird metallic-ass volcano if it was made from outer core material.

          • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            23 days ago

            Precisely: the core is primarily iron, in mass, with nickel probably being the 2nd by-mass component. I’ve read that hydrogen is about 10% of the core’s mass ( metallic, obviously ), & that is why the seismic-refraction-index is as low as it is. Platinum, iridium, osmium, uranium, etc, all the heavy stuff, is in there, too.

            ( that is why the iridium-rich layer covering the entire planet right when the dinosaurs got extincted is significant:

            it had to come either from a nickel-iron type impactor, XOR it had to come from volcanoes which somehow got core-metals in them: there’s no other source for that much iridium, locally to this planet.

            The fact that the impactor has been tested to be carbonate rock, & NOT a nickel-iron body, to me, proves that the impact produced that burst of volcanoes on the opposite side of the planet

            ( those volcanoes exist: some have claimed that the impact didn’t cause dino-extinction … that it was ONLY those volcanoes ),

            …and to me proves that the total input of both impact and burst-volcanoes’ energy-expressions is what killed-off the dinosaurs.

            Lava isn’t heavy-metals-rich normally: we’re talking thousands-of-km distance between the bottom-of-the-crust & the outer-liquid-core ( the inner-solid-core is inside the outer-liquid-core ), magma is a HUGELY thick layer.

            _ /\ _

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      3 months ago

      What’s newly discovered is material from the core coming out, as opposed to just magma.

  • fartographer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    3 months ago

    The research concludes that this abyssal wall has doorways.

    Anyone have “Kaiju” on their 2025/26 bingo card?

    • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      23 days ago

      I believe that the metals in the crust are primarily

      1. because the crust froze, before the heavier stuff could all sink down to the bottom, the core, through convection & settling…
      2. from nickel-iron meteorites, like in Sudbury ( a mining-region of Ontario Canada, which is a roughly-200-km wide crater/impact-site rich in metals )
      3. because the subducted-crust tends to come back up, through plate-tectonics
      4. only waaay-down on the list, because the dino-killing impact apparently burst a batch of volcanoes on the opposite-side of the planet, & THEY carried some of the core’s metals out onto the surface ( the iridium-rich layer that coats the planet right when the dinosaurs got extinguished couldn’t have come from carbonate-meteorite, & that’s what testing has declared the dino-killing meteorite to be, therefore the burst of volcanoes which suddenly appeared on the opposite side of the planet must have been the source for all that iridium )

      _ /\ _