Peeling of continents from beneath fuels ocean volcanoes

New Delhi: Researchers have discovered that slivers of continents are slowly stripped by the mangle below, where they are swept into the oceanic mantle. The solid continents move over an ocean of liquid magma that makes up the bulk of the interior of the Earth. This mantle tears off or peels chunks from beneath the continental plates, that then move beneath remote islands in the oceans, where they can fuel volcanic activity for tens of millions of years. These continental slivers are hot and mostly solid as they move through the ocean mantle. A paper describing the research has been published in Nature Geoscience .

The research solves a long-standing mystery of why remote ocean islands at great distances from the boundaries of tectonic plates contain materials that appear to be disti