Scientists discover California is 'peeling apart' deep below the Earth's surface
Scientists discover California is 'peeling apart' deep below the Earth's surface
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Scientists have discovered evidence that California is 'peeling apart' beneath Earth's surface. They found dense rocks under the Sierra Nevada mountain range are detaching and sinking deeper into the mantle. While the process, known as foundering, sparks terror that California's landscape could be separating, researchers from the University of Boulder said their discovery sheds light on how our planet's continental crust formed.
![[Scientists have long thought foundering might explain how the Earth's relatively light continental crust forms from the denser basaltic rocks of the upper mantle. But evidence to support this theory has been difficult to find]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/28/21/94612389-14334621-image-a-12_1738098679097.jpg)
Scientists have long speculated that foundering was behind the geological changes about four billion years ago, but the discovery in California proved it to be true. They used imagery techniques to map the lower crust and uppermost mantle of the Sierra Nevada,allowing them to see changes in how seismic waves as they moved beneath the surface.
The new study not only determined that areas of the Sierra Nevada separated several million years ago, but found it is currently taking place in the central part of the mountain range and has yet to occur in the northern part. 'We have therefore captured snapshots of a fundamental continent-building process,' the researchers wrote in their report.
Using nearly four decades of seismic data collected from stations around the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which spans California's eastern border, geologists uncovered an ongoing separation between the Earth's crust and the underlying mantle. Geologists Vera Schulte-Pelkum and Debora Klib used 'receiver function analysis' to image the lower crust and uppermost mantle beneath the Sierra Nevada.
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