Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
The Quanta Podcast
Quanta Magazine
4.7 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe that boundary is a little fuzzier than we previously thought. Strange, continent sized blobs rest on the dividing line. These blobs are leaching material from the Earth’s core, extending arms out into the mantle, and sending core material up and out through magmatic plumes.
No one's completely sure how it’s happening. On this week’s episode, host Samir Patel and writer Robin George Andrews dig into the ancient isotopic signatures that are helping us better understand the material bubbling up from the depths of our planet. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
Audio coda courtesy of wildlife photographers Gudmann & Gyda
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Kilauea Volcano on Hawaii's Big Island has been active in 2025, as it has been on and off for the last several decades, sending fountains of lava shooting hundreds of feet in the air and filling the crater at the top with a lake of lava. |
| 0:17.7 | It's all part of the volcanic drama that's been going on for tens of millions of years in the Central Pacific Ocean, |
| 0:23.6 | and that created and is still creating the island chain. |
| 0:27.6 | And that's because it sits over a hot spot in the Earth's mantle below. |
| 0:31.6 | Understanding the literally deep origins of the volcanic activity we experience on the surface is a long-standing |
| 0:39.4 | and sometimes urgent question. But how are we supposed to understand phenomena taking place |
| 0:44.9 | deep below our feet at pressures and temperatures that are impossible to understand? There's drama |
| 0:50.9 | down there too. |
| 1:00.3 | Welcome to the Quantum Podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math. |
| 1:03.3 | I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine. |
| 1:09.0 | Getting a handle on the physics taking place deep below our feet, especially deep beyond the mantle and into the core of the planet, isn't |
| 1:11.4 | easy. But volcanologists and Earth scientists are always learning more. Some of the latest work |
| 1:17.2 | is suggesting that maybe Earth's core isn't quite as far away as we think. Here to talk about |
| 1:22.9 | this with us today is science journalist and Quanta contributing writer Robin George Andrews. Welcome to the show, |
| 1:29.0 | Robin. Hey, thanks having me. Pleasure to be here. We always like to ask at the top of the episode, |
| 1:35.0 | what is the big idea? What are we going to be exploring today? Well, the big idea is that if you think |
| 1:41.1 | about textbooks of the Earth's like innards, you see them as neatly layered |
| 1:45.0 | sections like a layer cake where, you know, neither the twain shall meet. They two things don't mix |
| 1:50.6 | that much, except that this new research suggests that the core is leaking, not only into the |
| 1:56.2 | mantle above it, but actually erupting out at the surface, which is wild to me. |
| 2:01.6 | So it's wild to you, and that's saying something, because you write about Earth science and planetary science and volcanoes a lot. |
| 2:07.6 | Can you tell us a little bit about your background as a science journalist? |
... |
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