Scientists discover the Earth's crust is dripping under the US - should we be worried?

Just when things couldn't get any crazier in the US, scientists have discovered that the underside of the Earth's crust is dripping molten lava inside the planet.

The hot lava is thought to be penetrating through the upper mantle of the Earth beneath the Midwest, slowly dripping to even deeper depths, shown through seismic monitoring of the lithosphere (the solid, outer part of Earth, including the brittle upper portion of the mantle and the crust) thinning, caused by the Earth's crust being heated to a certain temperature.

As the droplets build and become heavier, they eventually snap off and fall into deeper parts of the earth.

Sounds ominous, right?

Pexels

Well, not all is bad. Scientists actually think it could be helping us understand more about our planet's geological processes. Plus, the Midwest of America isn't the only place that similar discoveries have been made.

"This sort of thing is important if we want to understand how a planet has evolved over a long time," explains geophysicist Thorsten Becker of the University of Texas at Austin. "It helps us understand how do you make continents, how do you break them, and how do you recycle them."

"Because of the use of this full-waveform method, we have a better representation of that important zone between the deep mantle and the shallower lithosphere where we would expect to get clues on what's happening with the lithosphere."

What's more, this is definitely not something that happened overnight, and rather took millions of years to form, so if you're living around the US, you shouldn't be concerned - and neither should the generations after us.

Why not read...

Massive ocean discovered beneath the Earth's crust containing more water than on the surface

Scientists discover Earth's earliest oceans weren't blue

Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.