Earth's crust beneath US is 'dripping' away, scientists discover

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have made a rather worrying discovery - the underside of the North American continent is 'dripping away'.

According to their study this may be something called 'cratonic thinning', which is where very old rocks called 'cratons' that make up part of the continents of our planet start to undergo changes which can lead to them being reduced or removed entirely.

Before you start worrying about the possibility that the US is going to collapse as the ground the country is based on gives way, that's not going to happen.

PhysOrg says that the 'dripping' is happening in the Midwest US and it happens very slowly as 'blobs of rock' are falling away.

As for the culprit, it may be due to the remnants of a tectonic plate that is sinking down into the Earth's mantle.

This is basically what's happening. Don't worry, it doesn't mean the ground in the US is going to collapse or anything (Hua et al., Nature Geoscience)

While the crust beneath the US may be 'dripping', scientists expect it will eventually stop as the remains of the plate that is dragging the rocks down will eventually sink further and no longer be able to take things with it.

Basically, there's this thing called the 'Farallon Plate' which has been subducting, meaning it's slid underneath the North American continent for about 200 million years.

It may be 600km away from the cratons but researchers think this plate is redirecting the flow of mantle material that weakens the base of the cratons and results in some of them breaking away, thinning out the overall layer.

Experts built a computer model of what's going on beneath the ground and found that with the Farallon Plate in the equation the rocks beneath North America were dripping away.

When the plate was removed from calculations the dripping stopped.

Deep beneath the Earth, the very ground this land stands on is 'dripping' (Getty Stock Photo)

Study co-author Professor Thorsten Becker said that this dripping discovery could help develop an understanding of the lifespan of continents and what happens to them.

He said: "This sort of thing is important if we want to understand how a planet has evolved over a long time.

"It helps us understand how do you make continents, how do you break them, and how do you recycle them."

The study's lead author, Professor Junlin Hua, explained that they 'made the observation that there could be something beneath the craton', and the researchers 'also got the new idea about what drives this thinning'.

At the end of the day there's nothing to worry about, scientists have learned something interesting and once the Farallon Plate sinks down deep enough it'll stop triggering the 'dripping' which they observed.