IF EARTH’S interior were to cool down, New York and Los Angeles would end up hundreds of metres under water. North America, it seems, is being kept afloat by the heat beneath the continent.
Derrick Hasterok and David Chapman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City were studying how bumps form in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. One cause for the differences in elevation is the buoyancy of rocks: the less dense the rock, the higher it rises. Until now it had been assumed that density varied only according to the type of rock.
Hasterok and Chapman…
