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Researchers at Caltech and the University of Miami in Florida found that the volcano pictures, such as those that are forming the Hawaiian Islands, illustrate that it erupts when magma gushes out as narrow jets from deep inside Earth but those pictures are wrong. Don Anderson, the Eleanor and John R. McMillian Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, at Caltech said that new seismology data are now confirming that such narrow jets don't actually exist. He further explained that, in fact, basic physics doesn't support the presence of these jets, called mantle plumes, and the new results corroborated those fundamental ideas. It...

New Haven, Conn. — The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth’s surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth’s landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth’s evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly...

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...

Assumed to be caused by random fluctuations in the circulation of the molten iron core, the flips may actually be tied to what's going on at Earth's surface. At times in the geologic past when landmasses have bunched together on one side of the equator, the Earth's magnetic field has begun flipping soon thereafter... "What we see clearly is that the surface positions of the continents are linked with the frequency of the reversals," says group member François Pétrélis, a geophysicist at the French research agency CNRS in Paris... Computer simulations have shown how molten iron in the spinning core...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

Third World countries like Haiti stand to suffer the most economically. The strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers. Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the Associated Press that an estimated 3 million people may have been affected by the quake and that...

The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...

A Monash geoscientist and a team of international researchers have discovered the existence of an ocean floor was destroyed 50 to 20 million years ago, proving that New Caledonia and New Zealand are geographically connected. Using new computer modelling programs Wouter Schellart and the team reconstructed the prehistoric cataclysm that took place when a tectonic plate between Australia and New Zealand was subducted 1100 kilometres into the Earth's interior and at the same time formed a long chain of volcanic islands at the surface. Mr Schellart conducted the research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, in collaboration...

Scientists are to sail to the mid-Atlantic to examine a massive "open wound" on the Earth's surface. Dr Chris MacLeod, from Cardiff University, said the Earth's crust appeared to be missing across an area of several thousand square kilometres. The hole in the crust is midway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The team will survey the area, up to 5km (3 miles) under the surface, from ocean research vessel RRS James Cook. The ship is on its inaugural voyage after being named in February. Dr MacLeod said the hole in the Earth's crust...

Ancient Cataclysm Rearranged Pacific Map, Study Says Julian Ryall for National Geographic NewsOctober 24, 2007 A cataclysm 50 million years ago changed the face of the planet from the Hawaiian Islands to Antarctica, according to new research. The collapse of an underwater mountain range in the Pacific Ocean turned Australia into a warm and sunny continent instead of a snowbound wasteland and created some of the islands that dot the South Pacific today. "We have found that the destruction of an entire mid-ocean ridge, known as the Izanagi Ridge, initiated a chain reaction of geological events," said Joanne Whittaker, a...

The Red Sea is parting again, but this time Moses doesn’t have a hand in it. Satellite images show that the Arabian tectonic plate and the African plate are moving away from each other, stretching the Earth's crust and widening the southern end of the Red Sea, scientists reported in this week's issue of journal Nature. Last September, a series of earthquakes started splitting the planet's surface along a 37-mile section of the East African Rift in Afar, Ethiopia. Using the images gathered by the European Space Agency's Envisat radar satellite, researchers looked at satellite data before and after these...

Strong Earthquake Hits Japan; No InjuriesTOKYO - A strong earthquake rocked eastern Japan late Wednesday, shaking buildings in Tokyo and nearby areas, but there was no immediate report of injuries or damage. The earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.5, was centered 24 miles below the sea off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Japan's meteorological agency earlier put the magnitude at 6.2 from the quake, which hit at 8:50 p.m. (7:50 a.m. EDT). There was no danger of tsunami, it added. Runways at Tokyo's Narita airport closed temporarily but later reopened, Kyodo News agency said....

© Copyright 2005 Institute for Creation Research. All Rights Reserved An ongoing enigma for the standard geological community is why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. In terms of this time scale, these mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since the beginning of the Pliocene about five million years ago. This presents a profound difficulty for uniformitarian thinking because the driving...

[snip] In all, slippage occurred along about 1,200 km of the interface between the tectonic plates—a distance that would span California from north to south with about 100 km to spare. At some spots along the interface, one plate may have slid as much as 20 meters past the other, says Ji. In the most-affected region, a broad expanse of seafloor—and thus the sea above it—was abruptly thrust upward as much as 5 m. The waves spilling away from that sudden bump raced across the Indian Ocean at jetliner speeds, says Ji. The first tsunami may have been 15 m...

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada author Clive Douglas Campbell and Phoenix, Arizona, USA publisher Selah Publishing Group are pleased to announce the release of Messiah: 2030. Nobody knows the day and hour of the Second Coming, but the following years are on the front cover: Messiah: 2030 Cluny: 1030 Jesus: 30 David: 970 Abraham: 1970 Noah: 2970 Adam: 3970 Messiah: 2030 claims the Bible prophesies a sixth Arab-Israeli war will be over in 2003 and include the following: --the Palestinians will be deported to Jordan --Israel will go to war with Jordan, possess Jordanian land east of the Jordan River and King...