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1 min read Earth Sciences

The Floor of Italy Is Peeling Off and Dropping Into the Earth

Italy's mountains keep stretching and squeezing at the same time. Something far below them is coming loose.
Tectonics

Tectonics

on

Beneath the spine of Italy, the crust is coming apart at the seams. Not cracking. Not shifting. Peeling. The bottom layer is falling away into the mantle, a process researchers call delamination.

The Apennine mountain range has always been geologically baffling: the crust is pulling apart along the range even as it's being squeezed together at its outer edge. Parts of the region are rising. Others are sinking. Scientists knew something weird was going on. They just didn't know what.

A study led by Stefano Tavani at the University of Florence combined earthquake records with GPS and satellite measurements of ground movement. The pattern points to the lower crust beneath the Apennines peeling away and sinking into the mantle. That sinking crust, rather than one plate diving under another, drives most of the region's earthquakes.

Tavani says the region is in a very late stage of subduction, and that a different engine, the unzipping, now drives its tectonics.

Italy isn't the only place this could be happening. The study points to the Hellenic trench south of Greece as another candidate.

Read the full story at Live Science, September 23, 2026

Hot Take: The unzipping gets the headline, but the ending is stranger: once the bottom finishes falling off, two tectonic plates weld into one.

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