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Is Earth’s core leaking? Volcanic rocks provide strongest evidence yet

Samples from Hawaii seem to contain material that passed across the boundary between the planet’s core and its mantle, nearly 3,000 kilometres below the surface.
By
  1. Davide Castelvecchi

Researchers have been challenging the textbook picture of Earth’s structure, which says that what happens in the planet’s dense metallic core stays there. An analysis of rocks from Hawaii’s volcanic islands has found what could be the strongest evidence yet that material is in fact leaking out of the core — and has been pushed all the way to the surface by plumes of hot magma. It was published on 21 May in Nature1.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01612-z

References

  1. Messling, N. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09003-0 (2025).

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  2. Horton, F. et al. Nature 623, 90–94 (2023).

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  3. Dottin, J. W. et al. Sci. Adv. 11, eadr2917 (2025).

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