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My dad attended college in the 1950s. I liked reading his old textbooks. The geology texts that predate plate tectonics are . . . interesting. They really didn't know where volcanoes and mountains came from.
My dad attended college in the 1950s. I liked reading his old textbooks. The geology texts that predate plate tectonics are . . . interesting. They really didn't know where volcanoes and mountains came from.
What were the prevailing theories at the time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I mean 3 million Olympic size swimming pools, you "do anything to avoid metric system" person
No, you mean 3 billion Olympic sized swimming pools.
>In geology, unlike business, nothing is too big to fail. Nothing is too big to fail in the business world either. Or at least nothing should be. If a business is that important to the economy but it can't keep itself afloat, something has gone horribly wrong on the business side, the government side, or both. Bailing out the business will probably not fix the underlying issues.
My dad attended college in the 1950s. I liked reading his old textbooks. The geology texts that predate plate tectonics are . . . interesting. They really didn't know where volcanoes and mountains came from.
What were the prevailing theories at the time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orogeny#History_of_the_concept
For comparison, this is between 4 and 5 times larger than the Osceola Mudflow ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola_Mudflow ) that formed the 550km² of fertile plains around the south end of Puget Sound (near Seattle) and knocked a huge chunk out of Mount Rainier. If you drive from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, notice how flat the land is and think about how that was hilly Cascade foothills and glaciated drumlin…
> According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Ear…
I learned recently (can't remember where, or how reliable) that plate tectonics did not create mountain ranges till carbon life had been around for awhile, because the carbon layers left behind are slippery (graphite) and allow one plate to slide over another plate. Prior to that, the plates simply pulverized each other.
anybody know if this is true?
I wonder if this is related (in a very large scale sense) to the sand pile model and self organized criticality... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality The sand pile model: if one builds a pile of sand, dropping onto it a small number of grains at a time, individual grains will slide down the slope - but there's a critical angle at which any additional grains can trigger a catastrophic avalanche.…
A wet pile of sand has a different angle of repose. Between the lubrication and the rather substantial weight of the water, that's how most mudslides happen.
> As the rubble crashed down, the energy released would have been equivalent to around six times that of the Tsar Bomba Interesting, wonder if this Approx 1190 event had a global impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period Seems that ended in 1250, coincidence ??
The earth receives about 1.74x10^17 watts from the sun, continuously. On Tsar Bomba released a little over 200PJ, setting off one per day would be around 2.3x10^12 watts.
In other words to equal the energy from the sun you would need to detonate on the order of 1 MILLION Tsar Bombas per day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would mostly stop because now the Earth is nicely round. Most of the original bumpiness created during Earth's creation has been smoothed out. That's probably what he meant.
I've heard that the earth, if scaled down to the size of a pool/billiards ball, would be smoother than the ball. I often use that to explain how spinning cue balls can manage to change the angle of the shot, given the same impact point as a non-spinning cue ball, in an effect pool players call "throw." [1] The peaks and valleys of the pool ball will reliably grip like gears. Sometimes the balls even stick together mo…
https://ourplnt.com/earth-smooth-billiard-ball/
A comment on the article, though, says "I’d like to point out that Earth is about 3400 times flatter than a regulation pool table...I love saying it – The Earth is flatter than a pool table!"