Upper Mantle's Effects on Volcanoes, Plate Tectonics (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Upper Mantle's Effects on Volcanoes, Plate Tectonics

Caption

The asthenosphere (yellow) is a layer that lays below the cold mobile plates (blue) and the upper mantle (green). Beneath spreading plates mantle material upwells over a broad region and is well mixed (heavy stippling) while beneath large ocean plates there is significant shearing but less efficient mixing (light stippling). Oceanic hotspots are concentrated beneath slow-wavespeed regions (red) that may be associated with the asthenosphere. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Dec. 5 2014 issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by D.L. Anderson at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA, and colleagues was titled, "Driving the Earth machine?"

Credit

[Credit: Scott King]

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