One of my favourite geology facts is this: These diagrams are a lie.
The mantle isn’t yellow. Nor is it orange, or red, or brown, or gray, or black.
The earth’s mantle is made up largely of peridotite.
The earth’s mantle is lime green.
Here’s where it gets even more counterintuitive. It’s not molten!
Just going based on temperature, the mantle SHOULD by rights be molten. It’s hot enough to melt the rock. But because it’s so deep, there’s enough pressure to push it down into a solid!
Water is strange in that its solid form takes up more space than its liquid form. You know this, even if you don’t think you do – it’s why ice floats. This also means that when you put pressure on ice, it turns into water to try and become smaller. That’s why ice is slippery.
Pretty much every other material is the opposite of that – the solid form takes up less space than the liquid. So, even at a temperature where it should be a liquid, enough pressure can make it become as small as possible – and that requires it becoming a solid.
It still “wants” to melt, though. In areas where tectonic plates are moving apart, the mantle is exposed, which decreases the pressure on it dramatically. As it comes to the surface it actually cools slightly, but despite this, the drop in pressure is enough to make it turn into a liquid!
So, no, there isn’t magma under you (unless you happen to live on a volcano). There is liquid, though, but way deeper down – the outer core of the earth is made of liquid iron.
This beautiful gif was prepared using data from the long-lived Landsat series of earth orbiting satellites, You are looking at the course of the Padma River in Bangladesh and how its course has varied over the last 30 years. This is a textbook example of river erosion processes. When rivers begin to meander, they evolve by growing their meanders wider, until the meander finally gets too sinuous and the river finds another path. Pick a point where the river bends and watch what happens – the outer bank of the river erodes and sediment deposits on the inner side of the curve, making the river arc farther outwards. The outer side of the river that is eroding is called a cut bank, and sediment is deposited on the inside of the river building a point bar.
among the youngest of her family’s lineage, it’s their tradition to use their lava-based magic for benevolent uses like agriculture rather weaponize it as expected. this girl here specializes in growing tea, and she’s pretty comfortable with her farm girl life, rather than jumping to fight crime or save the world. she doesn’t see how her powers and personal philosophy would fit that lifestyle, but sometimes she’s convinced to lend a hand
One of the prompts I was excited to get my hands on from the jump! Definitely partially inspired by that one scene in The Incredibles where Mirage explains how fertile volcanic soil is and how misunderstood volcanos are. The lighting was tricky but I also really want to draw that lava hair again so I’ll figure it out eventually.
DarkestElemental616 