Geodynamics articles from across Nature Portfolio

The Ninetyeast Ridge is the world’s longest linear volcanic feature. 40Ar/39Ar ages show that the > 5000 km-long ridge was generated by a moving hotspot and reveal the hotspot’s interaction with a spreading ridge during the opening of the Indian Ocean.

The Valencia Trough and the Algerian Sea Basin in the Western Mediterranean formed simultaneously due to the rotational rollback of the Gibraltar slab, a study using numerical geodynamic models reveals.

Geochemical data and geodynamic modelling suggest that the rapid increase of convergence rate between India and Eurasia about 65 million years ago can be explained by changes in sediment subduction.

Ceres’s surface is ice-rich and warm, so we expect craters to viscously flow. Yet most of Ceres’s craters are not shallow. A new model that includes a stronger, progressively dirtier icy crust, frozen from an ancient ocean, may reconcile this discrepancy.

The processes that control the deformation and eventual destruction of Earth’s oldest continental crust are unclear. Mantle flow models suggest subduction played a role in the deformation of the North China Craton.

This study investigates the history of graphitic carbon in two ancient North American mountain belts related to Nuna supercontinent assembly. Using rhenium–osmium and uranium–lead dating, the research reveals that biogenic graphite was hydrothermally remobilized in shear zones during late orogenesis, indicating periodic carbon cycling over 200 million years.

Computational simulations of Venus’s geodynamics show the formation of large tessera plateaus. Matching of the models with spacecraft orbiter data constrains the mechanism that may have formed the topography of Ishtar Terra and other plateaus on Venus, suggesting that these features might have formed by a mechanism similar to that of the early continents on Earth.

High-resolution numerical simulations show that subduction of the Indian plate peeled off the mantle lithosphere from the Tibetan Plateau. This process successfully explains first-order observations of the stepwise growth of the plateau, the migration of magmatism in the region and its seismic properties.

Recent seismological studies challenge the traditional view that the interface between the core and mantle is a straightforward discontinuity. As seismology is pushed to its observational limits, a complex - potentially compositionally layered - region between the core and mantle is emerging.