PLATE tectonics may be about to be turned on its head. Instead of being heated from below like water on a stove, the Earth’s interior could have more in common with a neat gin on the rocks.
While geologists agree that the plates of the Earth’s crust are constantly moving, nobody is quite sure why. Some believe that heat from within the Earth causes convection currents in the molten interior that drive the plates. But geophysicist Don Anderson of the California Technical Institute in Pasadena thinks the convection could be triggered by the plates themselves.
Efforts to model mantle convection…
