Deep-mantle earthquakes are mapped for the first time by scientist revealing seismic activity beneath Earth’s crust, and this discovery enables us to investigate the mechanisms behind significant earthquake activity deep within Earth’s mantle, an area once considered incapable of producing tremors. Scientists from Stanford University published their findings in the journal Science on February 5, 2026. Through their study, researchers produced a new global map showing where continental mantle earthquakes occur and how often they occur.

A Global Picture of Rare Mantle Quakes

Rare mantle earthquakes aren’t scattered evenly around the world; they tend to cluster in certain places. You see a lot of them under the Himalayas in southern Asia, and there’s another hotspot near the Bering Strait, where Asia and North America almost meet.

This new study, led by Shiqi (Axel) Wang, who did his PhD at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and geophysics professor Simon Klemperer, is the first to pull together a global dataset on these deep quakes. Before this, scientists just didn’t have the big-picture view. That made it difficult to determine where these rare earthquakes originate or why they occur where they do.

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A Breakthrough Seismic Detection Method

The Stanford research team developed a new approach to tackle this challenge, comparing two types of seismic waves: Sn waves that travel through the upper mantle and Lg waves that travel readily through the Earth’s crust. The difference between these waves indicates whether the event is a mantle or a crustal quake.

By adopting this method, the researchers have used data from over 46,000 earthquakes reported since 1990 and found 459 confirmed cases of continental earthquakes coming from the mantle.

The researchers believe this number is conservative; as seismic monitoring expands into remote areas worldwide, including the Tibetan Plateau, more of these earthquakes will be detected.

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Meaning of Research for Understanding the Earth’s Interior

Although mantle earthquakes are located too deeply in the earth to create damaging vibrations at the surface, they provide very valuable information about the internal behavior of the earth. Klemperer states that these mantle earthquakes offer a new way to investigate earthquake mechanics (beyond the traditional understanding of the workflow from crustal earthquakes).

In future studies, it will be determined whether mantle earthquakes are caused by stress transferred from crustal earthquakes or by heat-driven phenomena occurring in the mantle. By revealing how Earth’s layers interact, the new findings underscore why deep-mantle earthquakes are mapped for the first time, marking a landmark moment in understanding the planet as a connected system.

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