Stanford University researchers have pulled back a curtain on a hidden part of Earth that rarely makes headlines. Their new work maps a strange kind of earthquake that starts deep below the crust, inside the continental mantle. The team says the map could help you understand how earthquakes begin, even the ones that shake your neighborhood. The study, published in Science, comes from Shiqi (Axel) Wang and geophysics professor Simon Klemperer at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. They built what they call the first global map of these rare “continental mantle earthquakes,” events that happen beneath the crust but away from major subduction zones. “Until this study, we haven’t had a clear global perspective on how many continental mantle earthquakes are really happening and where,” said Wang, a former PhD student in Klemperer’s lab. “With this new dataset, we can start to probe at the various ways these rare mantle earthquakes initiate.” These quakes are usually too deep to do much at the surface. Still, their odd birthplace may give scientists a cleaner view …