Cratons are fascinating yet enigmatic geological formations. Known to be relatively stable portions of the Earth's ...

An unexpected find in tiny crystals hints that the Earth's mantle may not quite behave as has been believed for nearly a century.

One of the most puzzling phenomena lies beneath the Indian Ocean, south of Sri Lanka, where a massive gravity anomaly known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL) has confounded researchers for decades, ...

The more widely understood and most commonly used theory is convection - at the Earth's core temperatures reach around 6,000 °C which causes the hot magma (molten rock) to rise in the mantle. This ...

How plate tectonics works The driving force behind plate tectonics is convection in the mantle. Hot material near Earth's core rises, and colder mantle rock sinks. "It's kind of like a pot boiling ...

The idea that the Earth's crust and mantle might move together like a "conveyor belt" as a result of convection currents in the latter was first proposed in 1919 by the British geologist Sir ...

Text and pictures by PRIYAN DE SILVA   The Institute for Development of Community Strength (INDECOS) which is based in Matara ...