America's core is collapsing and we're watching it happen live

Far beneath the fields and towns of the American Midwest, the Earth's crust is doing something unexpected. It's dripping.

That’s the word scientists are using—“dripping”—to describe how blobs of rock are slowly peeling away from the base of the North American continent and sinking into the mantle below. A team from The University of Texas at Austin made the discovery while studying a hidden geological process known as cratonic thinning.

It sounds abstract, but the implications are solid. “We can’t say much about the surface expression of this yet,” said lead author Thorsten Becker. “But we have very strong evidence that this is happening, and it’s an important way that continents evolve.”

The research, published this week in Nature Geoscience, confirms the slow but active loss of the continent’s deep crust layer—something that scientists are now able to see in real time.

A hidden force beneath our feet
At the heart of the phenomenon lies the long-lost Farallon Plate. Once an oceanic plate beneath the Pacific, it began sliding under North America tens of millions of years ago. Today, what’s left of it is buried deep beneath the continent.

Though it no longer shapes coastlines, the plate is still active in subtle ways. It appears to be redirecting hot flows in the mantle and releasing chemicals that weaken the base of the North American craton—a vast, ancient slab of crust that spans much of the United States and Canada.

This weakness allows blobs of rock from the craton’s base to sink, one by one, into the Earth’s deeper layers. And crucially, simulations show that this only happens when the Farallon Plate is present. Remove it from the model, and the dripping stops.

Not the first craton to weaken
Cratons are supposed to be some of the most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust. They’ve survived for billions of years, anchoring entire continents through geological time. But that stability is not guaranteed.

Geologists have seen signs of similar thinning elsewhere. In China, for instance, the North China Craton began to lose parts of its root several hundred million years ago. That change coincided with major tectonic shifts.

Now, researchers believe North America could be going through something similar—just much slower.

Watching a continent evolve in real time
The most striking part of the discovery isn’t just that this is happening. It’s that scientists are able to observe it as it unfolds.

By using a cutting-edge imaging technique called full-waveform seismic tomography, the team mapped the crust and mantle in unprecedented detail. This was made possible through data from the EarthScope project, a long-term seismic experiment that blanketed the United States with sensors.

The result? A real-time look at how the base of the continent is changing from deep below.

“We know continents are part of this ongoing cycle,” said co-author Jonny Wu. “But actually being able to see part of that process happening now is rare.”

No immediate risk—But major scientific value
The good news for those living above this phenomenon is that it poses no danger to the surface. The process is extremely slow. We're talking millions of years, not decades.

But for earth scientists, it’s a goldmine. The chance to track how continents thin, shift, and reshape over time is both rare and revealing.

Understanding these subtle movements could help answer broader questions—like how the Earth recycles its crust, or what might trigger the next big tectonic shift.

And sometimes, it turns out, change doesn’t begin with a bang. It begins with a drip.