Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean 69
jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews:
"If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."
Re:Funny typo (Score:5, Funny)
Words which start with "I" are the property of Apple Corp.
Re:Gulf of Mexico (Score:4, Funny)
Is that why the oil wells keep catching fire?
Fix Wikipedia, please (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you could fix the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] adding that information. Remember, citations are always needed.
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All he'd have to do is just link here [slashdot.org] and he's cited it, right?
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Re:Fix Wikipedia, please (Score:4, Interesting)
In general, what Wikipedia considers to be a reliable source [wikipedia.org] is a publication that has some sort of editorial control, such as a traditional newspaper or periodical, book published by a traditional publishing company, or a company's official website.
Like the Geocities page in the references for the UVB-76 article?
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Then get your change removed because you aren't a good enough authority on the topic.
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Internet people don't want to fix errors anymore. They want to point and laugh at the idiot who added them, and maybe caption them EPIC FAIL all the while.
The Information Age is dead. Long live the Age of Lulz.
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Speaking of confirmation bias...
You seem convinced I have a grudge against Wikipedia or that I believe it won't work just because I pointed out one example that contradicts your belief. But it's exactly what you say it is, "an insignificant problem in some obscure article", so why does it have you worked up? You automatically assumed that because I pointed out an error in one article I not only didn't have an account, but that I've also never attempted to improve the quality of the content.
Of course Wik
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When I see somebody complaining about Wikipedia because of either poorly written articles or something else that has to do with a content issue, my automatic response is: Fix the bloody thing and shut up about it. Content issues are something that is incredibly easy to deal with.
What makes Wikipedia frustrating to work with are the people issues, where some obsessive-compulsive editor who "owns" some article to the point they won't let you contribute any reasonable edit and thin-skinned administrators who
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Well said. I'm still perplexed why some people think that connecting everyone else together will lead to collective enlightenment.
I mean look all around, we already have probably most of the world meeting together in big rooms regularly to discuss things, and they're not blazing any new trails. So bigger rooms will help us? You'll have the people from little room A standing over in that corner while the people from little room B stand over in another one in the grand room C.
We have pretty good public edu
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I look around to various internet forums and not only do I see "new trails" being blazed, but some incredible things that simply wouldn't have happened years ago without the internet and connections via teleconferencing of a great many projects. Perhaps the most prominent as a broad group is the "open source" movement with the plethora of projects associated with that concept including a major operating system (Linux) although that is hardly the only major thing accomplish.
As far as scams are concerned...
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If you find a citation to a source that is unreliable, remove it. I'm sure Wikipedia has typos, too. It's the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Fix it, don't just complain about it.
I've reread my comment and don't see where I complained about Wikipedia, I just made an observation that contradicted your statement. If that offended you, you might want to take a break.
As for editing Wikipedia, I have an account and have corrected several obvious typos (e.g. "teh" instead of "the") in several articles, but it seems some of the editors are more interested in scoring points by reverting changes others make than actually verifying whether those changes are correct. I still try fixing the o
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Wait. They consider traditional newspapers a reliable source? I haven't had a chance to laugh today, but that was great.
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I think mangu's point is that the parent's assertion that the gulf was created by a hotspot is incorrect, if you believe what's in the well-cited Wikipedia article.
(I'm a geologist, and while I don't know much specifically about the gulf, I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is right here).
Re:Fix Wikipedia, please (Score:4, Informative)
http://aapgbull.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/3/311
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A lot of people don't realize the gulf of mexico was formed by a giant hot spot like yellowstone.
Unless it wasn't [aapg.org](pdf).
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I am not an expert. I am just a person.
Yet, it seems that an obvious explanation for at lease some of the Gulf's formation would be due to hurricanes. I would imagine that an immense amount of erosion has occurred due to storms hitting the shoreline over millions of years.
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This theory never really made since, How many other impacts cause this kinda of geomorpholgy?
Plus this idea was put forth before the discovery of the hotspot off the Yucatan. [geoscienceworld.org]
While I'm not discounting that the asteroid in question most likely cause an extinction event, I doubt it could rip a plate in two.
Also Just about every Tectonic model puts the formation of the Gulf starting to tear apart around Early Jurassic , Whereas the impact in question was
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Also Just about every Tectonic model puts the formation of the Gulf starting to tear apart around Early Jurassic , Whereas the impact in question was around the Late Permian.
The Gulf of Mexico did not exist until the end of the Permian. Afterwards, there is a Gulf-sized hole in Pangaea, and, later, in Gondwanaland, as well.
I hope I'm not the only one. (Score:5, Funny)
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I know I sure didn't.
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This lucky journalist was able bring you the latest comment from the Hot Spot regarding to this revelation. The Spot commented: "I'm in your mantles, halving your plates!" This deep, involved comment was brought to You by Your very favorite journalist, signing off from deep beneath Earth's surface.
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Re:I hope I'm not the only one. (Score:4, Funny)
I wish. First I misread the title and thought yogi bear was skateboarding in the pacific and "shredding some wicked air." Then I though "WE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" Then I thought about eating some more pringles. Forgot to take my medication today. What were we talking about?
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Flood basalts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flood basalts (Score:5, Interesting)
The author seems to imply that the Columbia River Basalts were generated by the mantle plume
That seems very reasonable given that at one point the two nearly coincide in position and time (cospatial and contempory) about 16-17 million years ago. Given this new information, I think we have a variety of reasonable guesses for how a hotspot can generate both a sequence of massive basalt floods and the lesser, but still substantial volcanic activity since. First, it is possible that most of the Columbia River basalts don't come from the hotspot itself, but instead come from melting of the fragment of plate that broke off, the lighter part of the melt may well have returned to the surface along the path cut by the hotspot's plume. Or the plate may have held back a significant amount of the plume, releasing a large bubble of magma at once.
Sure, the jury is still out, but we have an interesting model that may explain a number of mysteries of the western US such as the origin of the Columbia Plateau basalt floods, the basin and range development of the Nevada area, and the anomalous acceleration of the North American plate during this time.
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It's a reasonable hypothesis. There is a track of age-progressive volcanism from the Columbia River Basalts to the Snake River Plain, leading up to Yellowstone today. I know there are legitimate questions about it, but it's certainly a coincidence in timing and location if the Columbia River Basalts *don't* have something to do with the hotspot that is now thought to be beneath Yellowstone. Geologists would have to come up with some other explanation for the large amount of melt generated in the mantle t
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I hope they fixed the paper; the map in the quickview version has the Great Salt Lake in Colorado, and Utah just south of Oregon. The text talks about Nevada, but someone messed up the map.
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So... (Score:3, Funny)
Great, just great. (Score:5, Funny)
I was hoping for a quiet weekend at home, and now it looks like I'll have to deal with an apocalyptic volcano that's going around breaking plates, wearing an ultra hot mantle.
Great.
Re:Great, just great. (Score:5, Funny)
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Posting to remove a screwed up moderation.
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Good one!
Very cool, but article exaggerates to sound cooler (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the illustration in the article (and I assume in the original paper, I have access but have to login to a vpn and so on, I will see later since I'm interested), it's quite clear what happened and it's really not what you might think when you hear it "shredded" a tectonic plate. I think what's being implied is that it shredded the plate at the surface, but it happened far underground, in the mantle.
As the subducting plate subducts, it goes down into the mantle and in this case the mantle plume weakened it (by getting into fractures or whatever) and broke it off. So the slab disappears down into the mantle eventually (though these can stick around for years, detached). It's very interesting, but the same thing often happens without being cut off by a mantle plume. It's more or less a guaranteed result in a subduction zone, because the subducting slab isn't strong enough to support its own weight pulling on it after a certain point. Makes absolute sense if you look at a diagram of how subduction works.
Subducting slabs can also be cut off by things like strike-slip faults, which IIRC happened in northern California as a result of the San Andreas (don't quote me on that though). You can see the slabs in the mantle by various imaging techniques.
IAAGGS
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I think what's being implied is that it shredded the plate at the surface...
Why do you think that? That sounds like the opposite of what the article says. Sounds more like you misread what it said...
Whats the worst that could happen? (Score:3, Insightful)
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You make light of this. This is seriously problematic for us immortals.
Yellowstone Geothermal Energy (Score:1)
How come places like Iceland are able to tap into this type of energy and Americans barely seem to recognize it? Yellowstone should be tapped.
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Yellowstone National Park (Score:3, Informative)