The mantle, a zone between our planet’s thin crust and the molten core, features 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) of mostly solid rock, with a consistency like thickened caramel that scientists ...

This is a 3D view of the top 1,000 kilometers of the earth's mantle beneath the central Pacific showing the relationship between seismically-slow "plumes" and channels imaged in the study.

Potential patches of Earth's ancient crust, sometimes called "sunken worlds," may have just been discovered deep within the mantle, thanks to a new way of mapping the inside of our planet.