668150 external_news 1687276194 1689791191 Ten years ago, Samer Naif made an unexpected discovery in Earth’s mantle: a narrow pocket, proposed to be filled with magma, hidden some 60 kilometers beneath the seafloor of the Cocos Plate. The observation provided an explanation for how tectonic plates can gradually slide, lubricated by partial melting. The study also “raised several questions about why magma is stored in a thin channel — and where the magma originated from,” says Naif, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. Fellow researchers went on to share competing interpretations for the cause of the channel. Naif went looking for clues of mantle magmas that he first observed in his 2013 Nature study. The results of that search are detailed in a new Science Advances article, “Episodic intraplate magmatism fed by a long-lived melt channel of distal plume origin”, co-authored by Naif.  (Coverage of this study also appeared at Phys.org and Interesting Engineering.)

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