Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Juan de Fuca's goin' on?!? ;^) Probably couldn't bear the idea of being that close to the Californicators.
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Posted on 08/07/2019 3:47:30 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A gaping hole in a dying tectonic plate beneath the ocean along the West Coast of the United States may be wreaking havoc at Earth's surface, but not in a way most people might expect.
The researchers in the new study aren't the first to suggest that the Michigan-size Juan de Fuca (pronounced "wahn de fyoo-kuh") plate has a tear. But thanks to a new, detailed dataset, they're the first to say so with certainty.
The Juan de Fuca plate is long, stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) along the Pacific Northwest coast, from Vancouver Island, Canada, to Cape Mendocino, California. "No part of it is above the water. It's a total oceanic plate" that's subducting, or diving beneath another plate, in this case the North American plate (a continental plate), Hawley said.
From 2011 to 2015, scientists boated out over different parts of the Juan de Fuca plate, dropped ocean-bottom seismometers underwater and let these sensors collect seismic data from earthquakes all over the world for a year.
The research is a "thought-provoking idea paper," said Ray Wells, a research geologist emeritus with the U.S. Geological Survey in Portland, Oregon, who was not involved with the study.
"I'm happy to see more data indicating a hole in the Juan de Fuca plate," Wells told Live Science in an email. "The coincidence of the hole with the location of a subducted zone of weakness in the Juan de Fuca plate is interesting and could help to produce a tear."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.google.com ...
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Juan de Fuca's goin' on?!? ;^) Probably couldn't bear the idea of being that close to the Californicators.
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That’ll be the day I go back to Annandale.
You forgot to ban the hamburgers.
If this is happening I can’t quite see this huge land mass going under the North American plate quietly. Just a thought as the San Andreas fault likes to go north and will have room to move?
I had a college level geology class in high school back in 1972 and I didn’t read the article so it is safe to ignore my opinion. ;-)
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