The planet's interior is covered in Earth's crust.
This has been happening for millions of years and has produced telltale wrinkling and other features on the surface that scientists have seen through modeling and experimentation.
We might be able to identify geological activity on other planets that don't have plate tectonics.
It has only been recently identified on Earth.
As the rocky crust is warmed up, it begins to sink into the mantle The formation and release of crustal drops have an effect on the surrounding surface.
The basin is created by the pull of the drop below. The effects of which spread widely are what happens when the drop breaks off.
Julia Andersen, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, was the lead author of the study.
It dripped like cold syrup or honey deeper into the planetary interior and is likely responsible for two major tectonic events in the Central Andes.
There is a geological map of the area. Julia Andersen and DeCelles are associated with the same company.
The surface response to the process isn't well understood because scientists have only just begun to understand it.
There are some features that are difficult to describe.
A subduction zone is where the edge of one plate slides beneath the edge of another plate. This causes the crust to be pushed up and creates mountains.
There is evidence to suggest that the formation of the Central Andes was not a long process but a series of small earthquakes.
The timing of uplift isn't consistent across the entire region. There are volcanic centers and isolated basins in the Puna plateau, which is higher than the Altiplano plateau.
Russell Pysklywec of the University of Toronto said that various studies invoke removal of the lithoosphere to account for the surface changes.
The basin is not covered by known plate boundaries, but it is covered by folding and local thrust fault.
The researchers wanted more concrete evidence that it was the case.
They designed a laboratory experiment in which they built models of the Earth's crust and upper mantle to see what happens when the crust starts to fall.
There was a tank and materials in the model. The lower mantle was formed by asiloxane. The upper mantle was made of polydimethylsiloxane. There was a layer of sand-like spheres of ceramic.
Andersen said that it was like creating and destroying tectonic mountain belts, floating on a simulation pool of magma.
The seed was put into the upper mantle. It took hours to pull this down by gravity. A camera took high-resolution images of the process every minute or so.
The images were compared against geological features in the area.
The changes in elevation of the crust caused by the drips in our models track very well with the changes in elevation of the Arizaro Basin.
We're confident that the cause of the observed deformations in the Andes is a drip, because we observed crustal shortening with folds in the model and basin- like depressions on the surface.
Other ways in which Earth's crust may be damaged were shown in the Experiments. There may be other regions of the world in which different types of dripping may be observed, if we can identify them.
This suggests that non-subduction processes may be more important than we realized.
The research was published in a journal.
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