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Lost tectonic history recovered from Earth’s deep mantle

Tectonic plates lost to the deep mantle carry a record of ancient surface tectonic processes. A method for retrieving such records has been developed that could clarify the links between tectonics and mountain building.
  1. Dietmar Müller

    1. Dietmar Müller is at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.

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The Andes are the longest continental mountain chain on Earth and the highest outside Asia. They formed when an oceanic tectonic plate — the Nazca plate beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean — was driven against and under the South American continent (Fig. 1), a process called subduction. The resulting steady squeeze gradually compressed and thickened the continental crust, causing the Andes to rise. Andean uplift has driven climate change, landscape evolution and biodiversity1, yet our understanding of what triggered its rise is still incomplete. Writing in Nature, Chen et al.2 propose a new answer to this question.

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Nature 565, 432-433 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00160-7

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