Stories by Enrico Bonatti

Finding a piece of the elusive cosmic body that devastated a Siberian forest a century ago could help save Earth in the centuries to come

Finding a piece of the elusive cosmic body that devastated a Siberian forest a century ago could help save the earth in the centuries to come

Samples collected from the ocean floor reveal how the mantle's convective forces shape Earth's surface, create its crust and perhaps even affect its rotation

Samples collected from the ocean floor reveal how the mantle's convective forces shape the earth's surface, create its crust and perhaps even affect its rotation

It begins above a hot zone in the mantle. Upwelling molten rock underplates and weakens the continental crust, piercing it at discrete points and finally "rifting" it in two: an ocean is born

They complicate the pattern discerned in the theory of plate tectonics by dissecting the edges of the plates that compose the ocean floor. Some of them are the width of an ocean basin

The geochemical processes that give rise to metal-rich minerals are largely localized in mid-ocean ridges: "spreading centers" where new material is added to the plates of the earth's crust