Posted on 10/20/2020 9:33:20 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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 you are trying to model the earth and understand how climate has changed since time, you really want to know how many volcanoes there have been on earth."
Wu and Spencer Fuston, a third-year geology doctoral student, applied a technique developed by the UH Center for Tectonics and Tomography called slab unfolding to reconstruct what tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean looked like during the early Cenozoic Era. The rigid outermost shell of Earth, or lithosphere, is broken into tectonic plates and geologists have always known there were two plates in the Pacific Ocean at that time called Kula and Farallon. But there has been discussion about a potential third plate, Resurrection, having formed a special type of volcanic belt along Alaska and Washington State.
Using 3-D mapping technology, Fuston applied the slab unfolding technique to the mantle tomography images to pull out the subducted plates before unfolding and stretching them to their original shapes.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
That looks vaguely familiar.
I have stood on a rock that was smashed between two other places and was, therefore, hanging in space. But not one with such an awesome vista.
How’s tricks, Moose?
Even U.S. tea? I have heard tell otherwise, but I couldn't tell if that was general snobbishness that had to pretend only Brits could make a proper cuppatea.
Nagdabbit! I could have sworn I closed my tag. </i>
Not too bad thanks ArGee.
Things are slowly returning to normal in these parts.
Hope you’re all okay with the world.
That rock is in Norway. I pinched it from ‘Face.
It looks just like an Egit trap I could imagine Darks laying.
As for Tea....The only place I’ve been in the US is Houston. And o’boy did we have a problem. But arrive at an acceptable result we did.
The water has to be boiling as it hits the leafs.
“General Snobbishness” ...Household Cavalry would be a good place to start looking.
XE XE XE....I got your tag here...Tis mine now. :D
The tea and garlic cleared up my headache. I can go to bed early, and I’ll be back to normal by tomorrow.
Hurray yay!
Did you check out Tods Works shop? YouTube.
His experiments are most interesting.
I don’t believe I have.
Oh, that one. No, I was vacuuming. Or “hoovering,” as they say in British novels, except my vac is a made-in-America Riccar.
[original cheeky comment redacted ]
Amazing how a company name came to be used thusly.
We Xerox things, we throw Frisbees, etc.
I didn’t like that when I posted it and I like it even less in a larger size, so thanks, Moosie! LOL!
These are Sheldon and Amy (the yellow tabbies), Casey (in front) and Mika (the little gray one in back). I want their porch.
Yes, I want their porch, too! It would be wonderful, here!
When I’m a rich philanthropist, I’ll choose a town or two, a housing complex or two for old folks, and build them all a sunroom. After all, I think they’ve earned it.
Good morning.
I slept 10 hours, but I think I could have slept two more, had Nature not called.
This morning, I feel better but not great, but I’ll do what I have to do in order to get though the day.
For now, a trip to Walmart looms. In the dark, both ways again. In the rain.
Similar to xeroxing, I suppose. Or blowing your nose with kleenex.
‘Tis Tuesday and warming up slightly here. Happy Tuesday!
My B-i-L sent photos of his shoveled walkway in Denver. The walls at the side are taller than he is. I’m glad we missed that storm.
It is dark and raining here, too, but I’m grateful we don’t have snow. DP and the yutes were expecting to have a lie-in, but Jake went tearing around the upstairs howling and banging on doors about 6:00 a.m., after going outside and discovering it was raining. “Oh, too bad,” she said disingenuously.
I’ll go to Walmart later, when it’s light.
I got lots of photos “before” and “after” of the Denver area snows, as well as “before” and “after” of Cabot area snows and though it was raining when I got up, by the time I headed out for Walmart, it had turned to snow, and was coming down hard and fast.
I followed Utah’s contribution to the international highway system all the way to Walmart, but on the way home, it wasn’t quite so easy. I came by the back way, but the pavement and the gravel aren’t that easy to distinguish, since its not a major road.
There is a house with blue Christmas lights on it’s eaves, just before I make the turn to get back onto the main highway, and last week they weren’t on. This week, they were, and I was never so grateful to see anything in a long time!
Coming in on State Street wasn’t that easy, either, but I managed to ride the outer lines of the turn lane all the way in. I guess if I had thought about it, I could have waited until tomorrow, but I was out of Stuff.
Why? Are the yutes training for jobs in the MSM? Jake sounds like a good future fact checker.
Today’s special animal friends are the Hexactinellid sponges or “glass sponges,” a living animal made of glass. If you were paying close attention yesterday, you would have noticed that the poisonous spines on our plant friend, the Australian stinging tree, are also made of silica. Life is weird, huh? Sponges are very ancient animals belonging to the Kingdom Animalia and the Phylum Porifera (Greek for “full of holes”), but some scientists are now proposing that the silicate sponges should be in their own phylum, “Symplasma.”
Glass sponges are found in all the world’s oceans, but they are most common in the Antarctic and Northern Pacific waters. They are typically found at depths from 1,400 to 3,000 feet. These sponges are from 4 to 12 inches high. Some, however, can be over 3 feet long. Their skeletons are made up of 4-pointed or 6-pointed silicate “spicules,” which form a cup-shaped, usually symmetrical structure. Much of the body is composed of syncitial tissue, extensive regions of multinucleate cytoplasm. In particular, the epidermal cells characteristic of other sponges are absent, being replaced by a syncitial net of amoebocytes, through which the spicules penetrate. Unlike other sponges, they do not possess the ability to contract.
One species is the Venus’s Flower Basket, Euplectella aspergillum, which is found in deep Pacific waters near the Philippine Islands. Its six-pointed spicules look like jacks or caltrops. These microscopic spicules weave together in a very fine mesh in the following manner: “The body is perforated by numerous apertures, which are not true ostia but simply parietal gaps. A syconoid type of canal system is present, where ostia communicate with incurrent canals, which communicate with radial canals through prosopyles which, in turn, open into the spongocoel and to the outside through the osculum.” They can form “sponge reefs,” like coral reefs only made of glass.
Using this system of glass and cytoplasm, the sponge filters plankton from the water. Some scientists believe the glass sponge uses bioluminescence to attract plankton. Venus’s flower basket sometimes has a symbiotic relationship with a type of shrimp, Spongicolidae. A breeding pair of these shrimp will live permanently inside the sponge, from which they cannot escape because they are too large. Perhaps because of the “undying love” (weird anthropomorphism ...) of these shrimp, the Venus’s flower basket sponge is a symbol of love in Japan, and the sponges are collected as wedding gifts.
Scientists and engineers are studying the structures of glass sponges for a variety of uses. Structural engineers are interested in the complex lattices formed from the six- or eight-pointed spicules. Fiber-optics researchers are studying the ways the sponges build the silicate fibers. Some species extract silicic acid from seawater, convert it to silica, and then form the fibers and construct the skeleton. The orange puffball sponge, Tethya aurantium, produces glass biologically.
I confess that I copied several parts of this item straight from the articles, because I have no idea what it means. There are probably lectures on YouTube explaining it all with pictures, and I encourage everyone to explore these astounding creatures in greater depth.
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