Continental jelly

摘要

Ever since the recognition of plate tectonics on Earth, with its jigsaw puzzle of shifting plates, geoscientists have wondered why otherwise strong and rigid continents repeatedly break up and collide along the same zones of apparent weakness. On page 353 of this issue, Lowry and Perez-Gussinye propose that the inherent weakness of these persistent deformation zones may be caused by the low strength of quartz, and its relative abundance in such zones in the continental crust -Earth's outermost layer, which is generally 30-50 kilometres thick in continental regions.