Ocean-bottom seismometers show the mantle under the 160- to 180-million-year-old Pacific Triangle was shaped by more than plate motion. YoungHee Kim of Seoul National University and colleagues say fossil fabric and present-day flow may coexist there, so plate-motion-only models of this patch need revising.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
Rice geophysicists Richard Gordon and Daniel Woodworth report that the whole solid Earth reoriented against its spin axis 56 to 48 million years ago. The tilt reconciles two clashing records of Pacific plate motion from the years just before the Hawaiian-Emperor bend formed.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
University of Florence geologists link quakes along nearly all of the 1,200-km Apennines to a front where deep crust peels into the mantle. One moving front would account for both the stretching and the squeezing, and for where Italy's quakes are likely to strike.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence45
LSU geologists imaged the plate sinking off Vancouver Island tearing apart, with part of the slab dropped about 5 kilometres along one fault. The finding suggests subduction zones end in stages, though its bearing on future Cascadia earthquakes is stated only as a possibility.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives40
- Confidence50
Stefano Tavani's group combined Italy's earthquake record with GPS and satellite ground motion to argue that the lower crust beneath the Apennines is peeling away and sinking, a late-stage process he calls unzipping.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives25
- Confidence50
A simulation that was never tuned to the Tasman Sea, a 200-million-year plate reconstruction and a lead-isotope signature that takes over a billion years to form all point to the Lord Howe and Tasmantid seamount chains sharing one source.
Reality
- Evidence64
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives58
- Confidence56
An Adelaide-led team reports that magma feeding volcanoes in Western Australia's Pilbara Craton drew on a source that already held water, and proposes a pre-plate-tectonic process called dripduction to explain how it got down there.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
A Southampton-led study in Geology places an 800-million-year-old escarpment across ten future US states and has it removing up to 8 km of rock long before the Colorado River existed.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives62
- Confidence52