How Did a Chunk of India and Eurasia Just Disappear?

Half of the mass of Eurasia and India is missing, new research finds, and may have been swallowed up by the Earth's mantle. If so, that would be a surprise, as geoscientists thought that continental crust — the kind that makes up major landmasses — was too buoyant to dive down into the mantle, the pliable middle layer of the planet upon which the crust rides. "It used to be thought that the mantle and the crust interacted only in a relatively minor way," study researcher David Rowley