Why is the Atlantic Ocean getting bigger?

Researchers deployed 39 seismometers to examine why the ocean expands about four centimeters each year.

via MOTHERBOARD

The results reveal forceful upwellings of material from the lower mantle, a layer of Earth located hundreds of miles beneath the seafloor, which are helping push the Atlantic continents apart, thereby contributing to the widening of this ocean. Previous models of the Atlantic expansion are mostly based on subduction processes, in which continental slabs are pulled, or “downwelled” into the mantle, and hadn’t taken the opposite upwelling process into account.

Read more and check out the study in Nature.

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