News Earth

Mantle waves buoy continents upward and bedeck them with diamonds

The waves may explain the origin of dramatic plateaus far from tectonic plate boundaries

Brown mountains stand in the background, with golden grass covered foothills in the foreground.

Certain high landforms such as southern Africa’s Drakensberg escarpment (shown) may form when waves in Earth’s mantle gradually excoriate a continent’s keel, buoying up the surface.

Jean Braun/GFZ Potsdam

By Nikk Ogasa

For billions of years, the continents have cruised across Earth’s surface like tectonic vessels, but they have not survived unscathed. Waves in the underlying layer known as the mantle can scour off the keels of continents, buoying their surfaces upward to form prominent landforms far from any active plate boundaries, researchers propose in the Aug.