The amazing world that scientists are uncovering beneath the Earths crust

There are continents to explore right below our feet — including two giant blobs 100 times as tall as Everest. Here’s how seismologist and geophysicist Ed Garnero is studying this unseen and largely uncharted territory.

For most people, everything they know about the composition of the Earth is what they were taught in elementary school: that our planet is made up of an eggshell-like crust over a thick mantle surrounding a super-hot core. In the last decade, scientists have made some super-interesting — and even strange or profound — discoveries that can add detail to that picture. Among their recent subterranean findings are a river of liquid metal that moves more swiftly than the tectonic plates, “bubbles” at the crust-mantle boundary, a new species of mineral that is somehow capable of holding water hundreds of miles within the mantle, chambers of magma where rocks are heating up like popcorn and expelled.

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