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What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.
I don't think the recent glaciation got as far south at Utah, anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having recently gotten into watching documentaries or youtube videos of accounts of mountaineering expeditions it's amazing how lazy content creators, film makers and journalists can be when choosing what images or videos to show. You'll get something about climbing a mountain in the Andes and keep getting shown completely misleading pictures of Himalayan mountains, etc.
The content you create is only as good as the stock footage you have available to you. It's not like these people are trekking to the locations to acquire their own content. If you search in stock libraries for mountaineering in the Andes, and it only brings you footage from the Himalayas you're just going to use it.
Although, this larger structure did create one of my favorite internet algorithm outcomes: There is obviously intense hunger for authentic mountain videos narrated in a generic minecraft youtuber voice, and the resulting incentive gradient physically yeeted a minecraft youtuber to the top of mount everest (https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMitchellYT)
Fascinating to think of entire mountain ranges moving up and down like the skin on a wobbly pudding.
And the speed at which it happens: > a cold, round anomaly about 200 km below the surface. > By estimating how far the drip had fallen and calculating the speed of its descent, the researchers estimate that the drip broke off between 2 and 5 million years ago. A few megayears later, the bit that broke off is still falling. 200km in 2m years, I make that in the ballpark of 0.1m per year - a bit less if it's > 2m years…
What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.
That wouldn't cause the "bullseye" pattern the article describes, would it? I don't think the recent glaciation got as far south at Utah, anyway.
What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.
It seems very likely to me that they would have said something about this theory if it were relevant.
A time lapse video would have been great.
For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).
I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.
It's interesting to think about the fact that on a long enough timeline, all the matter that we consider to be solid actually behaves more like liquid; bobbing up and down like a rough ocean. The continents shifting apart like two opposing currents with the plagues sliding one above another like what happens when two great currents meet... All the solid objects we interact with are like liquids frozen in time and we're actually moving through time extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we are able to temporarily shape the 'liquids' before they eventually disintegrate and melt into a puddle; as also happens to us.
Thinking about the world in this way makes everything we do seem much more complex, but at the same time, more futile, than it initially appears.