Produced by: Manoj Kumar
Beneath our feet, slabs of Earth’s crust are quietly vanishing. Known as subduction, this geological sleight of hand sees crust sink into the mantle and disappear—like Earth eating itself alive.
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Despite museum displays and textbook images, the mantle isn’t a bubbling sea of lava. It’s a hot, solid, greenish crystal that flows slowly—about as fast as your fingernails grow.
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The mantle behaves like a paradox: rock that flows like liquid, yet stays solid. Imagine molten glass under extreme pressure—dense, glowing, and always in motion, but never melting.
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Forget fiery reds—Earth’s inner mantle would look more like emerald than magma. It’s composed of peridotite, a green crystalline rock that shimmers under the planet’s crushing pressure.
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Most people assume the Earth is molten below the crust. It’s not. Only the outer core is liquid. The mantle? Solid. And that’s the biggest myth Earth scientists are still fighting.
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Old oceanic crust doesn’t just age—it sinks. As it cools and grows denser, it slides beneath continents and vanishes into the mantle, reshaping Earth’s face over millions of years.
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Think tectonic plates just shift? Think again. Some are on a one-way trip downwards, plunging into the abyss of Earth’s mantle in a slow-motion geological burial.
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The mantle is hot enough to glow—but not enough to melt. This “glassy” furnace acts like a conveyor belt for continents, recycling Earth’s surface from within.
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Even the deepest parts of Earth—besides the molten outer core—are solid under extreme pressure. What looks like fire from the surface is, in truth, a crystallized, seething giant.
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