Sentences with phrase «beneath oceanic crust»

Dygert said that the new results suggest that circulation of water beneath mid-ocean ridges is effectively limited to the crustal section, and that enormous sections of the mantle could be available beneath the oceanic crust to efficiently trap CO2.

These islands are so - called «hot - spots» with lava formed from hot mantle plumes that up - well beneath the oceanic crust.

Not exact matches

The relatively low - density continental crust of the North Island, which sits on the Australian plate, is forcing the dense oceanic crust on the Pacific plate beneath it in a process called subduction.

«When crust from an oceanic tectonic plate plunges beneath a continental tectonic plate, as it does beneath the Andean Plateau, it brings water with it and partially melts the mantle, the layer below Earth's crust,» said Rice University's Jonathan Delph, co-author of the new study published online this week in Scientific Reports.

Its strength resulted from the abrupt release of plate tectonic forces, a process known as subduction, centered on an area beneath Honshu where it slides over the top of oceanic crust.

It's the first time this tectonic process has been discovered beneath land; all other known subduction zones occur underwater where oceanic crusts meet.

When the Pacific plate lunged beneath the islands in the first of those quakes, it left the oceanic crust under tension.

If the melt erupts quickly, it forms basalt, which makes up the crust beneath the oceans on Earth; but there are still questions about how continental crust, which is more buoyant than oceanic crust, is formed.

It marks the plate boundary between the subducting Nazca plate and the South America plate, where the oceanic crust and lithosphere of the Nazca plate begin their descent into the mantle beneath South America.

Although a few of Earth's largest islands, such as Greenland, are composed of the same continental crust as the mainland, most islands are made of a denser, chemically distinct oceanic crust, created midocean by magma welling up beneath separating tectonic plates.

A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet.

Water migrates upwards and causes the top of the subducted oceanic crust to melt, producing magma beneath the Cascade volcanoes.