Amazon River Once Flowed in Opposite Direction
Posted on 10/24/2006 9:54:37 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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 the Atlantic and westward toward the Andes. Toward the end of the Cretaceous, the Andes started growing, which sent the river back toward the Purus Arch. Eventually, sediment from the mountains, which contained mineral grains younger than 500 million years old, filled in the basin between the mountains and the arch, the river breeched it and started its current flow. Previous research has identified a reverse flow, but only in segments of the river. Mapes and Coleman traversed about 80 percent of the Amazon basin, collecting samples of zircon.
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
"Rio", by Duran Duran, circa 1980.
I saw Brazil twice in a theatre. My friends just stared at me during the movie.
LOL Duh! After reading the mention of DD here I wandered over to youtube to watch "Save a Prayer" & wondered if the the reference was about the ruins used as a backdrop for the video.
My friends just stared at me during the movie.
LOL As I said, the movie is a guilty pleasure. Another of them is a much, much older movie, "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T."
The half desk in two rooms reminds me of our budget when I worked for the state.
FOTFL If you worked for the state, a whole lotta that movie had to ring true to you.
set, game, match to you!
I imagine having a 20,000 foot mountain range thrust up in the way of a westward flow would tend to divert a river in most cases.
John R. Baumgardner has a theroy that a global flood and [the origin of] contential drift are related...
http://www.etcsa.org/GJackson/PtsOfOrigin20010306.html
"There is a research scientist named John Baumgardner, who works at the famous Los Alamos National Laboratories. His Terra computer simulation of continental drift is considered the world’s best. He is also a creationist. In a year when federal grants were scarce for geologic research, Dr. Baumgardner received 120% of his proposed budget. (Terra has implications for continental ballistic missile trajectories.).....He is allowed to spend up to 50% of his time on creation research. His model for Noah’s Flood based on Terra involves the volcanic undersea ridge erupting all around the world at once. It predicted the presence of huge "cool" spots at the boundary of the earth’s core, years before new tomagraphic imaging techniques discovered them. "
Interesting description of TERRA here (nice pics etc):
"A Brief History of TERRA Code Improvements during Round Two"
John Baumgardner, Los Alamos National Laboratory
http://www.geophysics.harvard.edu/geodyn/nasa_report/NASA_Final_Report.html
http://www.globalflood.org/platetec/about.html
http://www.globalflood.org/papers/icctectonicmodel94.html
Fossil Mantle Plume Under South America"In a challenge to a major aspect of the theory of plate tectonics, NSF-supported scientists have discovered the presence of an ancient conduit deep in the Earth's mantle beneath Brazil.
by William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers #103
Jan - Feb 1996
"The conduit appears to have remained geographically fixed with respect to the overlying continent despite thousands of kilometers of South American plate motion. This observation runs contrary to a major tenet of plate tectonic theory---that the motion of lithospheric plates is essentially independent of flow in the upper mantle beneath the plates--- and implies that the upper mantle and the overlying South American continent have remained coupled since the breakup of the Gondwanaland super-continent and opening of the South Atlantic Ocean some 120 million years ago. This result also implies that large-scale convection in the mantle may be responsible for the motion of the great continental plates, such as South America, where the driving force for plate motion has not been well understood."
(Dybas, Cheryl; NSFNEWS Digest 54, November 8, 1995. Cr. D. Swaner. NSF= National Science Foundation. The cyber-address for the NSFNEWS Digest is: nsfnews@nsf.gov
Debate Stirs On Hotspot VolcanoesThe most common theory in recent years has been that hotspots exist in the Earth where molten lava wells up from deep below, creating volcanoes such as those that formed Hawaii and Iceland and seismic zones such as Yellowstone. But Gillian Foulger of the University of Durham, England, and James Natland of the University of Miami point out in the journal Science that efforts to find evidence of hotspots using seismic waves have not produced results... In a separate paper in the same journal, Donald J. DePaolo and Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, agree that so far seismological studies searching for hotspots have not produced the expected proof. But they say they expect the evidence to be found. Theoretical and laboratory studies predict deep hot plumes, they note, and there is supporting evidence in the Hawaiian Island chain, with the rising lava building a line of islands as the overriding crust moves along, evidence of a stationary hotspot deep in the earth.
by Randolph E. Schmid
Wandering hot spots worry geologists"Hot spots" where plumes of molten magma break through the Earth's crust appear to be wandering across the planet - a discovery that undermines many of the accepted ideas about how the Earth's tectonic plates are moving... [A] new study by Robert Duncan of Oregon State University in Corvallis and his colleagues shows that the Hawaiian hot spot has probably shifted... "People suspected that hot spots were moving," says geologist Robert Butler of the University of Arizona in Tuscon. "But the one they all wanted to hang onto was the biggest, baddest hot spot of them all - the Hawaiian hot spot."
by Betsy Mason
December 18 2001
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