Month: October 2016

Mystery Solved Behind Birth Of Saturn’s Rings

A team of researchers has presented a new model for the origin of Saturn’s rings based on results of computer simulations. The results of the simulations are also applicable to rings of other giant planets and explain the compositional differences between the rings of Saturn and Uranus. The findings were published on October 6 in the online version of Icarus.

saturn

The lead author of the paper is HYODO Ryuki (Kobe University, Graduate School of Science), and co-authors are Professor Sébastien Charnoz (Institute de Physique du Globe/Université Paris Diderot), Professor OHTSUKI Keiji (Kobe University, Graduate School of Science), and Project Associate Professor GENDA Hidenori (Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology).

The giant planets in our solar system have very diverse rings. Observations show that Saturn’s rings are made of more than 95% icy particles, while the rings of Uranus and Neptune are darker and may have higher rock content. Since the rings of Saturn were first observed in the 17th century, investigation of the rings has expanded from earth-based telescopes to spacecraft such as Voyagers and Cassini. However, the origin of the rings was still unclear and the mechanisms that lead to the diverse ring systems were unknown.

The present study focused on the period called the Late Heavy Bombardment that is believed to have occurred 4 billion years ago in our solar system, when the giant planets underwent orbital migration. It is thought that several thousand Pluto-sized (one fifth of Earth’s size) objects from the Kuiper belt existed in the outer solar system beyond Neptune. First the researchers calculated the probability that these large objects passed close enough to the giant planets to be destroyed by their tidal force during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Results showed that Saturn, Uranus and Neptune experienced close encounters with these large celestial objects multiple times.

Next the group used computer simulations to investigate disruption of these Kuiper belt objects by tidal force when they passed the vicinity of the giant planets. The results of the simulations varied depending on the initial conditions, such as the rotation of the passing objects and their minimum approach distance to the planet. However they discovered that in many cases fragments comprising 0.1-10% of the initial mass of the passing objects were captured into orbits around the planet. The combined mass of these captured fragments was found to be sufficient to explain the mass of the current rings around Saturn and Uranus. In other words, these planetary rings were formed when sufficiently large objects passed very close to giants and were destroyed.

The researchers also simulated the long-term evolution of the captured fragments using supercomputers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. From these simulations they found that captured fragments with an initial size of several kilometers are expected to undergo high-speed collisions repeatedly and are gradually shattered into small pieces. Such collisions between fragments are also expected to circularize their orbits and lead to the formation of the rings observed today.

This model can also explain the compositional difference between the rings of Saturn and Uranus. Compared to Saturn, Uranus (and also Neptune) has higher density (the mean density of Uranus is 1.27g cm-3, and 1.64g cm-3 for Neptune, while that of Saturn is 0.69g cm-3). This means that in the cases of Uranus (and Neptune), objects can pass within close vicinity of the planet, where they experience extremely strong tidal forces. (Saturn has a lower density and a large diameter-to-mass ratio, so if objects pass very close they will collide with the planet itself). As a result, if Kuiper belt objects have layered structures such as a rocky core with an icy mantle and pass within close vicinity of Uranus or Neptune, in addition to the icy mantle, even the rocky core will be destroyed and captured, forming rings that include rocky composition. However if they pass by Saturn, only the icy mantle will be destroyed, forming icy rings. This explains the different ring compositions.

These findings illustrate that the rings of giant planets are natural by-products of the formation process of the planets in our solar system. This implies that giant planets discovered around other stars likely have rings formed by a similar process. Discovery of a ring system around an exoplanet has been recently reported, and further discoveries of rings and satellites around exoplanets will advance our understanding of their origin.

NASA Missions Harvest A Passel Of ‘Pumpkin’ Stars

Astronomers using observations from NASA’s Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the sun. The stars, which spin so fast they’ve been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes, are thought to be the result of close binary systems where two sun-like stars merge.

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“These 18 stars rotate in just a few days on average, while the sun takes nearly a month,” said Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and leader of the team. “The rapid rotation amplifies the same kind of activity we see on the sun, such as sunspots and solar flares, and essentially sends it into overdrive.”

The most extreme member of the group, a K-type orange giant dubbed KSw 71, is more than 10 times larger than the sun, rotates in just 5.5 days, and produces X-ray emission 4,000 times greater than the sun does at solar maximum.

These rare stars were found as part of an X-ray survey of the original Kepler field of view, a patch of the sky comprising parts of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. From May 2009 to May 2013, Kepler measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars in this region to detect the regular dimming from planets passing in front of their host stars. The mission was immensely successful, netting more than 2,300 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 5,000 candidates to date. An ongoing extended mission, called K2, continues this work in areas of the sky located along the ecliptic, the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun.

“A side benefit of the Kepler mission is that its initial field of view is now one of the best-studied parts of the sky,” said team member Padi Boyd, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who designed the Swift survey. For example, the entire area was observed in infrared light by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer observed many parts of it in the ultraviolet. “Our group was looking for variable X-ray sources with optical counterparts seen by Kepler, especially active galaxies, where a central black hole drives the emissions,” she explained.

Using the X-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes aboard Swift, the researchers conducted the Kepler-Swift Active Galaxies and Stars Survey (KSwAGS), imaging about six square degrees, or 12 times the apparent size of a full moon, in the Kepler field.

“With KSwAGS we found 93 new X-ray sources, about evenly split between active galaxies and various types of X-ray stars,” said team member Krista Lynne Smith, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park who led the analysis of Swift data. “Many of these sources have never been observed before in X-rays or ultraviolet light.”

For the brightest sources, the team obtained spectra using the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. These spectra provide detailed chemical portraits of the stars and show clear evidence of enhanced stellar activity, particularly strong diagnostic lines of calcium and hydrogen.

The researchers used Kepler measurements to determine the rotation periods and sizes for 10 of the stars, which range from 2.9 to 10.5 times larger than the sun. Their surface temperatures range from somewhat hotter to slightly cooler than the sun, mostly spanning spectral types F through K. Astronomers classify the stars as subgiants and giants, which are more advanced evolutionary phases than the sun’s caused by greater depletion of their primary fuel source, hydrogen. All of them eventually will become much larger red giant stars.

Forty years ago, Ronald Webbink at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign noted that close binary systems cannot survive once the fuel supply of one star dwindles and it starts to enlarge. The stars coalesce to form a single rapidly spinning star initially residing in a so-called “excretion” disk formed by gas thrown out during the merger. The disk dissipates over the next 100 million years, leaving behind a very active, rapidly spinning star.

Howell and his colleagues suggest that their 18 KSwAGS stars formed by this scenario and have only recently dissipated their disks. To identify so many stars passing through such a cosmically brief phase of development is a real boon to stellar astronomers.

“Webbink’s model suggests we should find about 160 of these stars in the entire Kepler field,” said co-author Elena Mason, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics Astronomical Observatory of Trieste. “What we have found is in line with theoretical expectations when we account for the small portion of the field we observed with Swift.”

The team has already extended their Swift observations to additional fields mapped by the K2 mission.

Insights Into Giant Impacts On Moon, Earth And Mars

New results from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission are providing insights into the huge impacts that dominated the early history of Earth’s moon and other solid worlds, like Earth, Mars, and the satellites of the outer solar system.

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In two papers, published this week in the journal Science, researchers examine the origins of the moon’s giant Orientale impact basin. The research helps clarify how the formation of Orientale, approximately 3.8 billion years ago, affected the moon’s geology.

Located along the moon’s southwestern limb — the left-hand edge as seen from Earth — Orientale is the largest and best-preserved example of what’s known as a “multi-ring basin.” Impact craters larger than about 180 miles (300 kilometers) in diameter are referred to as basins. With increasing size, craters tend to have increasingly complex structures, often with multiple concentric, raised rings. Orientale is about 580 miles (930 kilometers) wide and has three distinct rings, which form a bullseye-like pattern.

Multi-ring basins are observed on many of the rocky and icy worlds in our solar system, but until now scientists had not been able to agree on how their rings form. What they needed was more information about the crater’s structure beneath the surface, which is precisely the sort of information contained in gravity science data collected during the GRAIL mission.

The powerful impacts that created basins like Orientale played an important role in the early geologic history of our moon. They were extremely disruptive, world-altering events that caused substantial fracturing, melting and shaking of the young moon’s crust. They also blasted out material that fell back to the surface, coating older features that were already there; scientists use this layering of ejected material to help determine the age of lunar features as they work to unravel the moon’s complex history.

The Importance of Orientale

Because scientists realized that Orientale could be quite useful in understanding giant impacts, they gave special importance to observing its structure near the end of the GRAIL mission. The orbit of the mission’s two probes was lowered so they passed less than 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) above the crater’s mountainous rings.

“No other planetary exploration mission has made gravity science observations this close to the moon. You could have waved to the twin spacecraft as they flew overhead if you stood at the ring’s edge,” said Sami Asmar, GRAIL project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Of particular interest to researchers has been the size of the initial crater that formed during the Orientale impact. With smaller impacts, the initial crater is left behind, and many characteristics of the event can be inferred from the crater’s size. Various past studies have suggested each of Orientale’s three rings might be the remnant of the initial crater.

In the first of the two new studies, scientists teased out the size of the transient crater from GRAIL’s gravity field data. Their analysis shows that the initial crater was somewhere between the size of the basin’s two innermost rings.

“We’ve been able to show that none of the rings in Orientale basin represent the initial, transient crater,” said GRAIL Principal Investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, lead author of the first paper. “Instead, it appears that, in large impacts like the one that formed Orientale, the surface violently rebounds, obliterating signs of the initial impact.”

The analysis also shows that the impact excavated at least 816,000 cubic miles (3.4 million cubic kilometers) of material — 153 times the combined volume of the Great Lakes.

“Orientale has been an enigma since the first gravity observations of the moon, decades ago,” said Greg Neumann, a co-author of the paper at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We are now able to resolve the individual crustal components of the bullseye gravity signature and correlate them with computer simulations of the formation of Orientale.”

Reproducing the Rings

The second study describes how scientists successfully simulated the formation of Orientale to reproduce the crater’s structure as observed by GRAIL. These simulations show, for the first time, how the rings of Orientale formed, which is likely similar for multi-ring basins in general.

“Because our models show how the subsurface structure is formed, matching what GRAIL has observed, we’re confident we’ve gained understanding of the formation of the basin close to 4 billion years ago,” said Brandon Johnson of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, lead author of the second paper.

The results also shed light on another moon mystery: Giant impacts like Orientale should have dredged up deep material from the moon’s mantle, but instead, the composition of the crater’s surface is the same as that of the lunar crust. So, scientists have wondered, where did the mantle material go?

The simulation shows that the deep, initial crater quickly collapses, causing material around the outside to flow inward, and covering up the exposed mantle rock.

The new GRAIL insights about Orientale suggest that other ringed basins, invisible in images, could be discovered by their gravity signature. This may include ringed basins hidden beneath lunar maria — the large, dark areas of solidified lava that include the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Serenity.

“The data set we obtained with GRAIL is incredibly rich,” said Zuber. “There are many hidden wonders on the moon that we’ll be uncovering for years to come.”

The twin GRAIL probes were launched in 2011. The mission concluded in 2012.

Unexpected Giant Glowing Halos Discovered Around Distant Quasars

An international collaboration of astronomers, led by a group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, has used the unrivalled observing power of M– USE on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory to study gas around distant active galaxies, less than two billion years after the Big Bang. These active galaxies, called quasars, contain supermassive black holes in their centres, which consume stars, gas, and other material at an extremely high rate. This, in turn, causes the galaxy centre to emit huge amounts of radiation, making quasars the most luminous and active objects in the Universe.

muse

The study involved 19 quasars, selected from among the brightest that are observable with M– USE. Previous studies have shown that around 10% of all quasars examined were surrounded by halos, made from gas known as the intergalactic medium. These halos extend up to 300,000 light-years away from the centres of the quasars. This new study, however, has thrown up a surprise, with the detection of large halos around all 19 quasars observed — far more than the two halos that were expected statistically. The team suspects this is due to the vast increase in the observing power of M– USE over previous similar instruments, but further observations are needed to determine whether this is the case.

“It is still too early to say if this is due to our new observational technique or if there is something peculiar about the quasars in our sample. So there is still a lot to learn; we are just at the beginning of a new era of discoveries,” says lead author Elena Borisova, from the ETH Zurich.

The original goal of the study was to analyse the gaseous components of the Universe on the largest scales; a structure sometimes referred to as the cosmic web, in which quasars form bright nodes [1]. The gaseous components of this web are normally extremely difficult to detect, so the illuminated halos of gas surrounding the quasars deliver an almost unique opportunity to study the gas within this large-scale cosmic structure.

The 19 newly-detected halos also revealed another surprise: they consist of relatively cold intergalactic gas — approximately 10,000 degrees Celsius. This revelation is in strong disagreement with currently accepted models of the structure and formation of galaxies, which suggest that gas in such close proximity to galaxies should have temperatures upwards of a million degrees.

The discovery shows the potential of M– USE for observing this type of object [2]. Co-author Sebastiano Cantalupo is very excited about the new instrument and the opportunities it provides: “We have exploited the unique capabilities of M– USE in this study, which will pave the way for future surveys. Combined with a new generation of theoretical and numerical models, this approach will continue to provide a new window on cosmic structure formation and galaxy evolution.”

Entire Himalayan Arc Can Produce Large Earthquakes

The main fault at the foot of the Himalayan mountains can likely generate destructive, major earthquakes along its entire 2,400-kilometer (1,500-mile) length, a new study finds. Combining historical documents with new geologic data, the study shows the previously unstudied portion of the fault in the country Bhutan is capable of producing a large earthquake and did so in 1714.

himalayas

“We are able for the first time to say, yes, Bhutan is really seismogenic, and not a quiet place in the Himalayas,” said György Hetényi, a geophysicist at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and lead author of the new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The Himalayas have produced some of the world’s largest earthquakes, like the April 2015 Gorkha earthquake that devastated Nepal. But scientists had not been able to prove whether every region along the 2,400-kilometer arc was seismogenic, or capable of producing quakes. Bhutan was one of the last open gaps along the mountain chain: the country had no records of recent major earthquakes and no major seismological work had been done there.

Confining a major earthquake to Bhutan in 1714, like the new study does, means the entire Himalayan arc has experienced a major earthquake in the past 500 years, according to the study’s authors. By filling this gap, the new study helps the millions of residents in the region understand its potential for natural hazards, according to Hetényi.

“We provide a longer and therefore more representative record of seismicity in Bhutan, and this makes better hazard estimates,” he said.

A nation apart

The highest mountain range on Earth, the Himalayas are the product of the Indian tectonic plate subducting under the Eurasian Plate. The mountains span a northwest to southeast arc roughly 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) long, nearly the distance between the U.S. East and West coasts.

Throughout the 20th century, Bhutan, a small nation east of Nepal sandwiched between India and China, had been relatively isolated from the outside world and scientists were rarely allowed inside its borders. Until recently, researchers thought Bhutan could be the only major segment of the Himalayas not to have experienced a major earthquake in the last 500 years, according to Hetényi.

But, after a magnitude 6 earthquake struck the country in 2009, the government opened the door for scientists to perform geophysical research, Hetényi said.

Hetényi and his colleagues made several trips to the country from 2010 to 2015 to catalog small earthquakes in the area and study how the structure of the Indian Plate changes as it subducts below the crushing belt of mountains. One question they were hoping to answer was whether Bhutan had historically experienced any major destructive earthquakes.

Historical records of earthquakes in Bhutan are rare, but by luck Hetényi stumbled upon a biography of famous 18th century Buddhist monk and temple builder Tenzin Lekpai Dondup. The biography described a quake in early May of 1714 that destroyed the Gangteng monastery Dondup helped build.

The biography and other historical records indicated there were many aftershocks, meaning it could have been a major quake, according to Hetényi.

However, this description alone did not pinpoint where the quake occurred.

“When you only have very local devastation descriptions, you never know whether this devastation is due to an intermediate earthquake that occurred locally, nearby the chronicler, or whether it’s the result of a bigger earthquake that occurred over greater distances,” said Laurent Bollinger, a geologist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission who was not involved in the new study.

While in Bhutan, several of Hetényi’s colleagues dug trenches around the fault line to see if one side of it had moved vertically with respect to the other side — which would be considered evidence of a major earthquake. That study, led by Romain Le Roux-Mallouf, a geologist at the University of Montpellier, France, found evidence of rock uplift on one side of the fault had taken place between 1642 and 1836. Hetényi combined the results from that study with historical records of the 1714 earthquake to pinpoint where the 1714 quake happened and how large it was.

Hetényi’s analysis revealed the 1714 quake likely caused the rock uplift his colleagues observed around the fault. The earthquake likely occurred in west central Bhutan, where most of the population lives, and had a magnitude of at least 7.5 to 8.5, Hetényi said. By comparison, the April 2015 Gorkha earthquake had a magnitude of 7.8.

“It’s a really significant event that happened 300 years ago,” he said.

The results suggest the 1714 quake was significant enough to unzip a large segment of the thrust — possibly between 100 to 300 kilometers (60 to 200 miles) of the fault. The new study closes the seismic gap in the Himalayan arc and could help scientists better understand the earthquake potential in the densely populated Himalaya region, according to Hetényi.

Young Stellar System Caught In Act Of Forming Close Multiples

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the process in action.

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“This new work directly supports the conclusion that there are two mechanisms that produce multiple star systems — fragmentation of circumstellar disks, such as we see here, and fragmentation of the larger cloud of gas and dust from which young stars are formed,” said John Tobin, of the University of Oklahoma and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.

Stars form in giant clouds of gas and dust, when the tenuous material in the clouds collapses gravitationally into denser cores that begin to draw additional material inward. The infalling material forms a rotating disk around the young star. Eventually, the young star gathers enough mass to create the temperatures and pressures at its center that will trigger thermonuclear reactions.

Previous studies had indicated that multiple star systems tend to have companion stars either relatively close, within about 500 times the Earth-Sun distance, or significantly farther apart, more than 1,000 times that distance. Astronomers concluded that the differences in distance result from different formation mechanisms. The more widely-separated systems, they said, are formed when the larger cloud fragments through turbulence, and recent observations have supported that idea.

The closer systems were thought to result from fragmentation of the smaller disk surrounding a young protostar, but that conclusion was based principally on the relative proximity of the companion stars.

“Now, we’ve seen this disk fragmentation at work,” Tobin said.

Tobin, Kaitlin Kratter of the University of Arizona, and their colleagues used ALMA and the VLA to study a young triple-star system called L1448 IRS3B, located in a cloud of gas in the constellation Perseus, some 750 light-years from Earth. The most central of the young stars is separated from the other two by 61 and 183 times the Earth-Sun distance. All three are surrounded by a disk of material that ALMA revealed to have spiral structure, a feature that, the astronomers said, indicates instability in the disk.

“This whole system probably is less than 150,000 years old.” Kratter said. “Our analysis indicates that the disk is unstable, and the most widely separated of the three protostars may have formed only in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years,” she added.

The L1448 IRS3B system, the astronomers conclude, provides direct observational evidence that fragmentation in the disk can produce young multiple-star systems very early in their development.

“We now expect to find other examples of this process and hope to learn just how much it contributes to the population of multiple stars,” Tobin said.

The scientists presented their findings in the October 27 edition of the journal Nature.

ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of South Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Enormous Dome In Central Andes Driven By Huge Magma Body Beneath It

A new analysis of the topography of the central Andes shows the uplifting of Earth’s second highest continental plateau was driven in part by a huge zone of melted rock in the crust, known as a magma body.

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The Altiplano-Puna plateau is a high, dry region in the central Andes that includes parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, with vast plains punctuated by spectacular volcanoes. In a study published October 25 in Nature Communications, researchers used remote sensing data and topographic modeling techniques to reveal an enormous dome in the plateau.

About 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) high and hundreds of miles across, the dome sits right above the largest active magma body on Earth. The uplifting of the dome is the result of the thickening of the crust due to the injection of magma from below, according to Noah Finnegan, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz and senior author of the paper.

“The dome is Earth’s response to having this huge low-density magma chamber pumped into the crust,” Finnegan said.

The uplifting of the dome accounts for about one-fifth of the height of the central Andes, said first author Jonathan Perkins, who led the study as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and is now at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif.

“It’s a large part of the evolution of the Andes that hadn’t been quantified before,” Perkins said.

The other forces uplifting the Andes are tectonic, resulting from the South American continental plate overriding the Nazca oceanic plate. The subduction zone where the Nazca plate dives beneath the western edge of South America is the source of the magma entering the crust and feeding volcanic activity in the region. Water released from the subducting slab of oceanic crust changes the melting temperature of the overlying wedge of mantle rock, causing it to melt and rise into the overriding plate.

Perkins and Finnegan worked with researchers at the University of Arizona who had used seismic imaging to reveal the remarkable size and extent of the Altiplano-Puna magma body in a paper published in 2014. That study detected a huge zone of melted material about 11 kilometers thick and 200 kilometers in diameter, much larger than previous estimates.

“People had known about the magma body, but it had not been quantified that well,” Perkins said. “In the new study, we were able to show a tight spatial coupling between that magma body and this big, kilometer-high dome.”

Based on their topographic analysis and modeling studies, the researchers calculated the amount of melted material in the magma body, yielding an estimate close to the previous calculation based seismic imaging. “This provides a direct and independent verification of the size and extent of the magma body,” Finnegan said. “It shows that you can use topography to learn about deep crustal processes that are hard to quantify, such as the rate of melt production and how much magma was pumped into the crust from below.”

The Altiplano-Puna Volcanic Complex was one of the most volcanically active places on Earth starting about 10 million years ago, with several super-volcanoes producing massive eruptions and creating a large complex of collapsed calderas in the region. Although no major eruptions have occurred in several thousand years, there are still active volcanoes and geothermal activity in the region. In addition, satellite surveys of surface deformation since the 1990s have shown that uplifting of the surface is continuing to occur at a relatively rapid rate in a few places. At Uturuncu volcano located right in the center of the dome, the uplift is about 1 centimeter (less than half an inch) per year.

“We think the ongoing uplift is from the magma body,” Perkins said. “The jury is still out on exactly what’s causing it, but we don’t think it’s related to a supervolcano.”

The growth of the crust beneath the Altiplano-Puna plateau, driven by the intrusion of magma from below, is a fundamental process in the building of continents. “This is giving us a glimpse into the factory where continents get made,” Perkins said. “These big magmatic systems form during periods called magmatic flare-ups when lots of melt gets injected into Earth’s crust. It’s analogous to the process that created the Sierra Nevada 90 million years ago, but we’re seeing it now in real time.”

In addition to Perkins and Finnegan, the coauthors of the paper include Kevin Ward, George Zandt, and Susan Beck at the University of Arizona and Shanaka de Silva at Oregon State University. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.