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	Go to 2nd article on Double Solar Maximum The Earth houses a "four-piston heat engine" that is responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, the movement of continents and even climate change, according to a new model developed by Canadian researchers. The comprehensive model, reported by Alessandro Forte of the University of Western Ontario and Jerry Mitrovica of the University of Toronto in the current issue of Nature, drew from many disciplines in the earth sciences. "In effect we found that the solid Earth is being churned by a four-piston heat engine with two immense sinking cold slabs and two equally large rising hot plumes," says Forte. According to Professor Sue O'Reilly of Macquarie University's Key Centre for Geochemical Evolution and Metallogeny of Continents, the work is another step in the "really exciting discovery" of how the deep Earth circulates. She said below the relatively cool and brittle crust of the Earth, lies a 2,800 kilometre thick mantle which continually circulates and mixes due to the heat of the planet's molten core. Professor O'Reilly said a "big breakthrough" in understanding mantle convection came in 1999 when researchers suggested that circulating within the mantle were blobs of primitive Earth material. "Like a lava lamp, these blobs within a viscous liquid rise as they heat up, expand and become less dense. As they cool, they fall to the bottom again," Professor O'Reilly says that Forte and Mitrovica have added a lot of weight to and refined this earlier idea by showing that these are blobs with a different composition to the rest of the mantle. The Canadian model is "extremely important", according to Professor O'Reilly, because it combines both geophysics and geochemistry. The research also uses seismic tomography - a process similar to medical CAT-scans but using seismic waves from earthquake zones. "They show a snapshot of the Earth's convection today which takes a lot of notice of the composition of deep Earth," she said. "It is not just physical modeling without dealing with the geological realities." "This internal heat engine determines everything that happens on the surface of Earth," she adds. "Without it we'd have no uplifting, no mountains, no erosion, no volcanoes and no earthquakes. The planet would be flat and covered in water." Go to 2nd article on solar double maximum