Access

News and Views

Nature Geoscience 1, 154–155 (1 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/ngeo142

Seismology: A giant subducting sausage

Linda M. Warren

From the heights of Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana trench, vertical extremes in the Earth's topography are characteristic of convergent plate margins. The Earth's structure beneath these margins, where two tectonic plates are moving towards one another, is also remarkable: the locations of earthquakes and seismic imaging reveal how the Earth's uppermost layers — its lithosphere — twist, bend and break as one plate subducts, sliding under the other.