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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 05/19/2006 : 21:12:21
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Here's one from LiveScience that takes weirdness into the geological realm:quote:
Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes
By Corey Binns
Special to LiveScience
posted: 19 May 2006
09:22 am ET
A mountain near the Montana-Wyoming border once moved 62 miles in a half-hour in a catastrophic scenario that could be repeated elsewhere, scientists say.
Rock at the summit of Heart Mountain is 250 million years older than at its base. That suggests the top and the bottom have not always been together. The presumed migration to its present home has puzzled scientists for years. They have known the mountain moved, but no one has explained how it happened or how long it took.
A new explanation comes from deep underground, where lava bubbled up to the surface and sent the mountain on its way in surprisingly quick fashion.
Slip-slidin' away
A large number of vertical cracks, or dikes, in the rock sets the geology of the wandering hill apart from others. The dikes filled with lava, funneling it through a zone of limestone saturated with water.
"A unique feature that helped this strange scenario is that Heart Mountain had a deep confined fluid layer," said geophysicist Einat Aharonov at the Weizmann Institute of Science. "Into this layer many, many dikes intruded in close sequence—such dike density is also not extremely common."
With Columbia University geologist Mark Anders, Aharonov devised a computer model to describe what happened below Heart Mountain 50 million years ago. The era was one of serious mountain building with a series of volcanic eruptions that formed the now extinct volcanoes of the Absaroka Range.
Heart Mountain, seen standing out from its base rock in this satellite image, originally
formed with the Absaroka Range, to the West, about 50 million years ago. Credit: NASA
The dikes directed the lava into the water, heating both the rock and the water. The water was trapped, and as in a pressure cooker, its pressure rose as it was heated. Caught between layers of impermeable slate, the boiling water couldn't escape.
With nowhere to go but up, the tension finally lifted the rock, and the mountain began to glide.
Look out!
"We think the slide motion was catastrophic," Aharonov told LiveScience. "According to our calculation, the motion took less than 30 minutes."
. . .
I think they are saying Heart Mountain essentially levitated on a layer of steam, and slipped across 62 miles like a monstrous hovercraft. This I would have liked to have seen -- from a safe distance!
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
Edited by - HalfMooner on 05/19/2006 21:32:09
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Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 05/21/2006 : 01:43:09 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
I think they are saying Heart Mountain essentially levitated on a layer of steam, and slipped across 62 miles like a monstrous hovercraft. This I would have liked to have seen -- from a safe distance!
I think a safe distance might be over the horizon
We have one of those glass topped stoves and I have seen this happen with a pot when there is a bit of water on the stove surface. I wonder of the YECs will try to use this abrupt event to "prove" that mountain ranges could be built quickly.
This is even wilder than the Missoula Floods first hypothesized by J Harlen Bretz. My brother is a geologist - he was fascinated by this, especially by how Bretz persisted in the face of ridicule. No one recognized many of the obvious flood features because of the scale. The little current ripples that you often see in stream beds a centimeter or 2 apart are 10s of metres apart in the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington. |
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 05/21/2006 : 04:11:56 [Permalink]
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Ghost_Skeptic remarked:quote:
This is even wilder than the Missoula Floods first hypothesized by J Harlen Bretz. My brother is a geologist - he was fascinated by this, especially by how Bretz persisted in the face of ridicule. No one recognized many of the obvious flood features because of the scale. The little current ripples that you often see in stream beds a centimeter or 2 apart are 10s of metres apart in the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington.
Fascinating stuff, ineed! There were a number of Missoula-type floods at about the same time, when ice dams broke and released huge inland lakes at the end of the last Ice Age. Where I was living near Aberdeen, Washington, the Chehalis River channel was carved in a relative few moments by one of these super-floods. Much of the Columbia River channel was sculpted that way, also. These floods went east, west, and south from their lakes, carrying huge boulders, ice, and debris. And imagine, this happened when people were living in the area. There were witnesses. You can bet they had some good flood stories to pass down to their descendants!
With hovering mountains steaming across the countryside, and these real super-floods, who needs a silly recycled myth like Noah's flood to feel in awe of our planet's power and majesty?
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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GeeMack
SFN Regular
USA
1093 Posts |
Posted - 05/21/2006 : 14:56:03 [Permalink]
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Thanks HalfMooner. Very cool article.
Just another 100 km to the west of Heart Mountain is Yellowstone National Park, one of my favorite places to visit. The Absarokas make a gorgeous backdrop when looking eastward across Yellowstone Lake in the park. Hot springs and geysers abound and the entire region is extremely seismically active. And although it's been tens of thousands of years since Yellowstone has been volcanically active, many geologists believe it could come back to life in the future.
With the amount of force released in some of the ancient Yellowstone eruptions, and given the extremes in geothermal and seismic activity there, we're bound to discover other unusual past events like this moving mountain as research in the area continues.
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 05/21/2006 : 16:25:15 [Permalink]
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I'm forcefully reminded of the old saying, "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain."
According to Answers.com's article:
quote:
This expression is based on a tale that Muhammad once sought proof of his teachings by ordering a mountain to come to him. When it did not move, he maintained that God had been merciful, for if it had indeed moved they all would have been crushed by it. [Late 1500s]
[My emphasis.]
A neat little tale, though it also illustrates a typical religious leader's spin on the failure of a miracle.  If the tale were literally true, though, Muhammad should indeed have felt blessed, judging by my mental image of a steam-levitated mobile mountain. This Muhammad tale also speaks to the whole issue of possible unintended results of our wishes.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 05/21/2006 16:38:07 |
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