[Rockhounds] Gargantuan waves in Earth's mantle may make continents rise

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

High plateaus rise in the interior of continents thanks to churning deep
inside Earth hundreds of miles from where they eventually spring up, new
research suggests.

As continents break up, massive cliff walls may rise near the boundaries
where the crust is pulling apart. That breakup sets off a wave in *Earth's
middle layer*
<https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/whats-inside-earth>, the
mantle, that slowly rolls inward over tens of millions of years, fueling
the rise of plateaus, the new study found.

Scientists have long known that continental rifts triggered the rise of
massive escarpments, like the cliff walls that separate the *East African
Rift Valley*
<https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/is-africa-splitting-into-two-continents>
from
the Ethiopian plateau, said lead author *Thomas Gernon*
<https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x7llb/professor-thomas-gernon>, a
geoscientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. And these steep
cliffs sometimes fringe inland plateaus that rise from the strong, stable
cores of continents, known as cratons.

But because these two landscape features usually form tens of millions to
up to 100 million years apart, many scientists thought the different
formations were driven by different processes, Gernon told Live Science in
an email.

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/scientists-finally-understand-how-the-hearts-of-continents-rise