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The Melanesian Boundary Plateau was built in four different volcanic phases ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientists have unraveled the mystery behind how a volcanic superstructure the size of Idaho formed beneath the Pacific Ocean. Called the Melanesian Border Plateau, a team of international researchers determined the more than 85,00-square-mile structure was created when dinosaurs ruled the Earth 145 to 66 million years ago and is still growing to this day. Researchers used seismic data, rock samples and computer models to identify four periods of volcanic eruptions deep beneath the surface that started 100 million years ago. The submerged structure was also found to...

A very brief video because I want to tell you about this story I learned from William Jason Morgan's obituary. It's a lovely story about how the process of scientific discovery sometimes takes unexpected turns.He looked for gravitational waves, but discovered something entirely different | 3:39Sabine Hossenfelder | 1.03M subscribers | 232,486 views | October 19, 2023her YouTube channel

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) During a recent expedition to the largely unexplored depths of the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, marine researchers stumbled upon something odd: tiny holes excavated in the sediment, all arranged in dozens of relatively straight lines. Holes on the sea floor wouldn't usually be too perplexing, but these were dotted in an incredibly neat and evenly spaced pattern. If not for the fact they're located roughly 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of nowhere, they could have been engineered by human hands. Researchers on board the US National Oceanic...

"Our new model for tectonic plates better explains the spatial distribution of 90 per cent of earthquakes and 80 per cent of volcanoes from the past two million years whereas existing models only capture 65 percent of earthquakes...." Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide.

New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes. "We looked at the current knowledge of the configuration of plate boundary zones and the past construction of the continental crust," said Dr Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide who led the team that produced the new models. "The continents were assembled a few pieces at a time, a bit like a jigsaw, but each time the puzzle was finished it was cut...

In the 1960-70s, every geology textbook was rewritten, as the previous verities were DESTROYED! Alfred Wegner (1880-1930) was, posthumously, proven correct, in the face of the academia that scoffed at him. What was needed, was the mechanism, that the technology of WW2 provided.

Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace. It's a mystery that goes back a long way. John Wesley Powell, the namesake of today's Lake Powell, first...

A group of University of Wyoming professors and students has identified an unusual belt of igneous rocks that stretches for over 2,000 miles from British Columbia, Canada, through Idaho, Montana, Nevada, southeast California and Arizona to Sonora, Mexico. “Geoscientists usually associate long belts of igneous rocks with chains of volcanoes at subduction zones, like Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer,” says Jay Chapman, an assistant professor in UW’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. “What makes this finding so interesting and mysterious is that this belt of igneous rocks is located much farther inland, away from the...

An intense temblor in Mexico was just the latest example of an enigmatic type of earthquake with highly destructive potential On September 7, 2017, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck southern Mexico, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. While earthquakes are common enough in the region, this powerful event wasn’t any run-of-the-mill tremor. That’s because part of the roughly 37-mile-thick tectonic plate responsible for the quake completely split apart, as revealed by a new study in Nature Geoscience. This event took place in a matter of tens of seconds, and it coincided with a gargantuan release of energy. “If you think of...

It's long been held that North America's rugged and mountainous west was formed by the movement of the undersea Farallon plate, and that the process was roughly similar to the way groceries pile up at the end of a supermarket conveyor belt. Now however, a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature argues that the process involved not just one but several plates that remain hidden deep within in the Earth's mantle. Scientists at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and the British Columbia Geological Survey used earthquake shockwaves, or seismic tomography, to create a three-dimensional map of these massive plate...

Present-day nautilus shells almost invariably show thirty daily growth lines (give or take a couple) between the major partitions, or septa, in their shells. Paleontologists find fewer and fewer growth lines between septa in progressively older fossils. 420 million years ago, when the moon circled the earth once every nine days, the very first nautiloids show only nine growth lines between septa. The moon was closer to the earth and revolved about it faster, and the earth itself was rotating faster on its axis than it is now. The day had only twenty-one hours, and the moon loomed enormous in...

A team of geologists at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics believes they have found the lost plate in northern Canada by using existing mantle tomography images—similar to a CT scan of the earth's interior. The findings, published in Geological Society of America Bulletin, could help geologists better predict volcanic hazards as well as mineral and hydrocarbon deposits. "Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more volcanoes you have," said Jonny Wu, assistant professor of geology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Volcanoes also affect climate change. So, when...

Geologists in Canada have found that an ancient continent was 10% larger than previously estimated after analyzing rock samples dug up during diamond exploration work. Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) made the chance discovery while studying diamond samples from Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada. They identified a new part of an ancient fragment of the earth's crust known as the North Atlantic Craton, which ran from Scotland to North America and broke up 150 million years ago. The scientists said the samples they analyzed had a "mineral signature" displayed in other parts of this particular...

Research reveals that plate tectonics started on Earth 600 million years before what was believed earlier... Where it was previously thought that plate tectonics started about 2.7 billion years ago, a team of international scientists used the microscopic leftovers of a drop of water that was transported into the Earth's deep mantle - through plate tectonics - to show that this process started 600 million years before that. An article on their research that proves plate tectonics started on Earth 3.3 billion years ago was published in the high impact academic journal, Nature, on 16 July... For their research, the...

Somebody alert Jeff Bezos: the Moon is shrinking. According to a new research study, the Moon may be shrinking as it experiences lunar quakes, known as "moonquakes." Researchers analyzed 28 moonquakes from 1969 to 1977 and came up with the startling observation that eight of the quakes came from "true tectonic activity — the movement of crustal plates," as opposed to impacts from asteroids or rumblings inside the celestial satellite. “We found that a number of the quakes recorded in the Apollo data happened very close to the faults seen in the [NASA’s Apollo and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions] LRO...

In their research, the scientists point to an earthquake that occurred off the coast of Portugal in 1755, which destroyed the city of Lisbon, and a 7.9-magnitude quake that struck the Portuguese capital in 1969. Duarte describes the newly-found “structure” in the tectonic plate as “a very good candidate” for the source of these events. “The 20 upper kilometers [12.4 miles] of the plate is made of soft rocks that are light and the bottom is dense and heavy (because the plate is very old, more than 100 million years),” Duarte told Fox News. “This causes this lower part to...

More than 3.8 billion years ago, in a time period called the Hadean eon, our planet Earth was constantly bombarded by asteroids, which caused the large-scale melting of its surface rocks. Most of these surface rocks were basalts, and the asteroid impacts produced large pools of superheated impact melt of such composition. These basaltic pools were tens of kilometres thick, and thousands of kilometres in diameter. “If you want to get an idea of what the surface of Earth looked like at that time, you can just look at the surface of the Moon which is covered by a vast...

'Hot spots' of plume from deep Earth could propel plate motions around globeBringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates. Scientists who study tectonic motions have known for decades that the ongoing "pull" and "push" movements of the plates are responsible for sculpting continental features around the planet. Volcanoes, for example, are generally located at areas where plates are moving apart or coming together. Scripps scientists Steve Cande...

IT'S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth's oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust's deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still. On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer...

Russell Mapes, a graduate student from Grass Valley, Calif., ...explains that these sediments of eastern origin were washed down from a highland area that formed in the Cretaceous Period, between 65 million and 145 million years ago, when the South American and African tectonic plates separated and passed each other. That highland tilted the river's flow westward, sending sediment as old as 2 billion years toward the center of the continent. A relatively low ridge, called the Purus Arch, which still exists, rose in the middle of the continent, running north and south, dividing the Amazon's flow - eastward toward...