The Atlantic Ocean is getting wider, shoving the Americas to one side and Europe and Africa to the other. But it’s not known exactly how.
A new study suggests that deep beneath the Earth’s crust, in a layer called the mantle, sizzling-hot rocks are rising up and pushing on tectonic plates — those rocky jigsaw pieces that form Earth’s crust — that meet beneath the Atlantic.
Previously, scientists thought that the continents were mostly being pulled apart as the plates beneath the ocean moved in opposite directions and crashed into other plates, folding under the force of gravity. But the new study suggests that’s not the whole picture.
