Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
Lava around the world may come from the same magma ancestor deep in Earth's middle layer, new research finds.
Structures observed inside the deep mantle may thus not be signs of different types of rocks, but rather temperature differences in the same kind of rocks, Smit said. There's no way to peer into the lower mantle directly, but hotspot lavas do have chemical signatures that give hints of their history. Smit and his colleagues looked at lava concentrations of three elements—nickel, niobium and chromium. These elements behave differently as the melts rise and change on their way to the surface: Nickel tends to become incorporated into crystals, so liquid portions of the melt have lower and lower concentrations of nickel as the melt goes through more changes.
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