News & Views

Kamchatka Megathrust Earthquake: What lies in the Pacific Ring of Fire

Kleoniki Lydia Theodoridou October 1, 2025

‘Continents in Relief, Bound by Shifting Plates’. Map of the World made out of chocolate. Source: (Unsplash, 2025).

From the very early years on this Planet, earthquakes have always captivated people’s attention. The feeling of admiration and fear always lies within us, especially drawing on the most recent megathrust earthquake that hit the south coast of Kamchatka’s Peninsula, in Russia, twice this year. Therefore, in this week’s blog, we aim to explore how this phenomenon evolved and why this specific region ...[Read More]

Phase transitions control plume layering during Earth’s secular cooling

Ranpeng Li and edited by Arijit Chakraborty August 20, 2025

Figure 1: A schematic summary. Time evolving in a clockwise direction. The dashed line marks a depth of 500 km, and the dotted shading indicates the pressure–temperature range where the wadsleyite ⇔ garnet (majorite) + ferropericlase phase transformation occurs. Purple shading marks areas of partial melting. The timeline calculation assumes a mantle potential temperature of 1900 K at ~3 Ga, cooling by about 100 K per Gyr.

Earth’s structure and dynamics have evolved quite a lot since its formation, and so has mantle dynamics and convection patterns changed along with it. It turns out that phase transition in certain mantle minerals can be an important driver of this change. Today, Ranpeng Li from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany explains how coupling geodynamic models with thermodynami ...[Read More]

Reflecting on the 2025 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) – Interior of the Earth

Heidi Krauss and edited by Prachi Kar July 30, 2025

This week in News & Views, Heidi Krauss, a PhD student at Michigan State University, shares her experience co-chairing the 2025 Interior of the Earth Gordon Research Seminar, held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to help co-chair the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on the Interior of the Earth, held just before the main Gordon Rese ...[Read More]

Simulating the Deep Earth with MAGEMin: A Toolkit for Thermodynamic Modeling in Geodynamics

Nicolas Riel and edited by Nuno Rodrigues July 23, 2025

Understanding how rocks melt, deform, and evolve within Earth’s interior is a central challenge in geoscience. These processes span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are governed by complex interactions between temperature, pressure, composition, and phase stability. Capturing this complexity in numerical models requires integrating mineral thermodynamics directly into geodynamic mod ...[Read More]