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04/15/13 - The Science of Middle Earth

Science is learning all sorts of new things about the earth, particularly about hot plumes rising from the mantle and creating islands in the Pacific and splitting continents. For the latest, we checked out the April 5th, 2013 issue of Science Magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

"Plumes of all sizes seem to rise from two huge piles of who-knows-what sitting 2900 kilometers down at the bottom of Earth's mantle embedded in a mystery layer hundreds of kilometers thick. The outline of an operating manual is coming into view, but some pieces of the Earth engine are yet to be labeled."

We are definitely on the frontier here. Let's face it: no one knows what; it is a mystery layer. That's real science.

The plumes are under the redder areas. The mystery layer is inside somewhere. No, we don't know what.

Keywords: science