March 18, 2013

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The Isabella anomaly--the seismic signal of a large mass of cool, dehydrated material about 100 kilometers beneath central California--is in fact a surviving slab of the Farallon oceanic plate, according to research led by Brown University geophysicists. Most of the Farallon plate was driven deep into the Earth's mantle as the Pacific and North American plates began converging around 100 million years, eventually coming together to form the San Andreas fault.Full Story

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Brown University

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