What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”

You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.

What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.

This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.

The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.

Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!

The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.

Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.

So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.

People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.

And we have had enough of this.

They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.

This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.

And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.

And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.

He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the RINOs stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Martin Luther King

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice

President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).

[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]

….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.

He was one hundred percent correct on that.

Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.

But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.

That is as it should be.

I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.

I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)

How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $3,288.30/3290.30
Silver $32.96/33.08
Platinum $1052.00/1062.00
Palladium $957.00/997.00
Rhodium $5,300.00/5,750.00
FRNSI* 159.168+
Gold:Silver 99.465-

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $3,307.67/3,311.67
Silver $35.85/36.04
Platinum $1,170.00/$1,180.00
Palladium $1,046.00/1,066.00
Rhodium $5,600.00/6,050.00
FRNSI* 159.202-
Gold:Silver 91.889-

Gold got very close to $3,400 earlier this week but has been declining ever since. It ended up not having moved all that much.

But SILVER is doing very well, very well indeed; it’s finally over $36. Consider that the price of gold in terms of silver has dropped over seven ounces of silver in just one week! Apparently the Chinese are buying it up like crazy right now, and we’ve long been in the situation where there really isn’t enough silver being mined to meet demand. Platinum, too has gone up over ten percent this last week–it’s doing even better than silver!

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Use the (Strong Nuclear) Force

Spacecraft Reentry

I have explained in other posts that we use the atmosphere to slow down manned spacecraft when they return to Earth…rather than firing a rocket to do all of it. This seems almost suicidal, the heat generated during the process would kill instantly if something went wrong. In fact we lost the space shuttle Columbia this way.

But this is necessary; if we had to carry the fuel necessary to kill our orbital velocity, that would be the reverse of launching into orbit, and so we’d need a rocket big enough to carry the rocket we do launch, into orbit fully fueled. No way.

However the mechanics of the process turn out to be very interesting indeed; it’s not just “send the thing through the atmosphere in just such a way it doesn’t burn up.” This video is actually a debunk of someone who can do math (surprise) but doesn’t understand the process, and so the conspiracy theorist claims that we couldn’t possibly have slowed the Apollo command modules down fast enough without turning the astronauts into red goo. McKeegan explains why he’s got it wrong and it’s enormously informative about how atmospheric re-entry.

Hot Spots and Plate Tectonics

Some Go-Backs

Why Live Near Volcanoes?

From last week: I spent a fair amount of time stressing how bad it can be to hang out around volcanoes. Yet people still do it. Why? As it turns out volcanic soil is very fertile, which should be no surprise; all those mineral nutrients washed out into the ocean, then concentrated in the melt below the subduction zone, into nice fresh undepleted soil. Sicily most famously has Mount Etna on it, a stratovolcano that is the tallest volcano in Europe. Etna is pretty much constantly active; there’s always smoke coming out of it and it periodically spits up some lava. This is very mild activity though, and it’s just part of the weather to the people who live there, particularly to those in Catania, the port city at the foot of the mountain. There is (or was until recently?) plenty of US military presence there, and Americans stationed there often have to field calls from relatives worried because they saw on the news that Etna was acting up. Sicily is a volcanic island, and for a while served as the granary of the Roman republic and the early empire. In a time when 90 percent of all people were farmers, they lived where the soil was good.

And as it so happens Etna just acted up again a couple of days ago.

Volcanic Glass

Also from last week: I didn’t say nearly enough about volcanic glass. “Glass” is a generic term; it doesn’t imply a specific composition. It’s the result of a liquid freezing so quickly that it cannot form crystals; the completely disordered structure of the solid is described as amorphous. We’ve seen how granite has large crystals in it because it cooled slowly well below the Earth’s surface, affording crystals a lot of time to grow, whereas basalt is formed by lava flows and has a very fine grained structure because it cools so fast. A volcanic glass has no grain at all. It often forms when small blobs of lava are flung through the air and solidify almost instantly. There are many types of volcanic glass; the iconic one is obsidian, which is has a high silica content (it’s basically amorphous rhyolite).

However, pumice is also technically a glass. Pumice doesn’t look “glassy” in any way at all. It has so many gas bubbles in it that it’s often less dense than water; this example from the Canary Islands is 1/4 as dense as water.

There are Pele’s hair, Pele’s tears, and even Pele’s Seaweed, all volcanic glasses from Hawai’i; these tend to be more basaltic in composition.

Back to obsidian:

Obsidian is of special interest because it flakes very well with extremely sharp edges. This made it of use during the stone age, for knives, arrowheads, and the like and it was used by the Aztecs for swords. They’d embed obsidian blades into sticks, essentially, this was called a macuahuitl. So just barely over 500 years ago obsidian was still used for weaponry.

Trading networks thousands of miles long developed in prehistoric times to carry obsidian to users.

Obsidian is sometimes used today where a very sharp edge is needed, yes even preferred over our most modern steels.

Geologic Time Scale to Scale

Five weeks ago I posted a couple of diagrams showing the geologic time scale. Wolf complained that they weren’t to scale. It’s not surprising they aren’t. We know a lot more about more recent times and can subdivide it more finely; putting together a full scale diagram that could show the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) large enough to be labeled, to the same scale as the Hadean, would give you a chart with acres of nearly-blank spaces in it.

But there is a partial solution. This diagram:

Is a log spiral, and it is to scale…so long as your scale is in angular measure! One turn of the spiral is 3,045 million years (or so), meaning 8.46 million years per degree. Since the inside of the spiral is thinner than the outside, and the actual linear length subtended by an angle is also less there, this makes the older stuff smaller while still giving you a sense of scale provided you think in angles. Note that Epochs cannot be labeled, and Ages often are so narrow they look almost like smooth color gradients (so you can kiss being able to see the Holocene goodbye). Around the outside are arcs delineating how long ago certain key events in the history of life happened (the formation of prokaryotes–i.e., the first cells, eukaryotes, multicellular life, kingdom Animalia, land plants, dinosaurs, mammals, and humans and our closest relatives).

Hot Spots

This one is a bit difficult to write, because this is still an area where geologists themselves are still trying to work it out. I’m seeing conflicting statements in the same Wikipedia article.

Hot spots (or “hotspots,” one word) are volcanic locales thought to be fed by underlying mantle that is, itself, hotter than the surrounding mantle. (The mantle is the thick layer of Earth below the crust.) Hawaii, Yellowstone, and Iceland are all hot spots; Iceland is also on a divergent (rift) plate boundary.

I can’t quite nail this down and get someone who really knows about such things to confirm it, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There are a lot of hot spots on plate boundaries, generally divergent boundaries (i.e., rift zones including oceanic ridges).

What causes a hot spot? There are two hypotheses (not theories). One is that the hot spot is over a mantle plume, a hot mass rising from the boundary between the mantle and the core. The other hypothesis is that the hot spot itself isn’t inherently hotter than the rest of the mantle, but rather that the crust is so thin there that it’s just more exposed to the surface and thus looks hotter than the surrounding area.

It’s hard to tell which one is right largely because the mere concept of a mantle plume is controversial. At least, according to that paragraph; nearly every other bit of Wikipedia I have read on this topic assumes the plumes are real.

The concept can be attributed to J. Tuzo Wilson, who suggested (in 1963, midway through the plate tectonic revolution) that the Hawaiian Islands were the result of a tectonic plate moving over a hot region beneath the surface. He was thinking in terms of what we’d now call mantle plumes.

In a way this is a continuation of volcanoes, because hot spots seem to explain any volcano that isn’t on a diverging plate boundary (like the mid-Atlantic ridge) or a converging plate boundary (like the trench right of the South American and Alaskan coasts–both part of the “Ring of Fire”). The two most famous examples of such non-plate-margin volcanoes are of course Hawai’i and Yellowstone.

The map below shows suspected hot spots (red dots) in relation to plate boundaries.

Some authorities distinguish between “primary” hot spots (where the plume [if it is a plume] originates from the boundary between the mantle and the core (thousands of miles down), and “secondary” ones which originate between the upper and lower mantle. “Confirmed” primary hotspots are Easter Island, Iceland, Hawai’i, Afar, Lousivile, Reunion, and Tristan, with Galpagos, Kerguelen, and Marquesas as “likely” primary hot spots. Secondary hot spots seem to be more likely to create island chains, like Samoa, Tahiti, Cook, Pitcairn, Caroline, MacDonald and perhaps 20 more possibilities.

How many? Estimates have ranged from 20 to several thousand, but most today think it’s a few tens.

Most hot spot volcanoes are basaltic like Hawai’i and Tahiti; this leads to relatively gentle volcanism especially as compared to subduction zone volcanoes (like Mazama, Mt. Saint Helens, Tambora, Krakatoa). But there is at least one exception–ONE GIGANTIC EXCEPTION–to that rule: Yellowstone. I’ll talk mostly about Hawai’i-like cases first then cover Yellowstone.

Hotspot volcanoes shouldn’t be confused with island arc volcanoes like the Aleutians; the Aleutians formed near a subduction zone where the Pacific plate is subducting under the North American Plate. Similarly with the Kurile Islands from Kamchatka to Japan, and Japan itself. (Even the Kamchatka peninsula is really a volcanic arc writ large.) Sometimes the subduction can happen with two ocean plates, in which case you’ll see arcs like the Windward isles.

The hot spots are considered by many (including my geologist friend) to be stationary. If they appear to be moving, like the one in Hawai’i or the one under Yellowstone, it’s the crustal plate that’s moving over the hot spot. For example, here’s what’s going on with Hawai’i. [However, at least some geologists believe the hot spots themselves can move.]

I can say this, but what’s the evidence? Start by considering the fact that the largest island in the chain is the last island in the chain (or the first, depending on which way you look at it). It’s the only island with active volcanoes, in fact Kilauea is the most active shield volcano in the world; it erupted continuously from 1983-2018.

Dribbling away from the “big island” of Hawai’i, the islands trend smaller and smaller and all are extinct volcanoes. The Hawai’ians themselves could see obvious signs that the further an island was from the “big island”, the older it was.

Eventually you get to Wake and Midway islands, very tiny (but by no means unimportant), then, nothing.

Nothing, that is until you look under the water’s surface.

When you do you will see a chain of seamounts thousands of miles long stretching to near where the Aleutians meet Kamchatka. That end is some 85 million years old. Anything older than that has been subducted below Kamchatka. You will also have noticed there’s a bend in the line, indicating (possibly) that something caused the Pacific plate to change its direction of motion. The other possibility (apparently more likely) is that the hot spot may have been in motion as well as the Pacific plate, with the two motions resulting in a nearly north-south trail of volcanoes, then the hot spot stopped moving and the net result was the west-north-west trail. Right now the velocity seems to be about 5-10 centimeters per year.

Analysis of seismic waves makes it sound like the plume is a near certainty here; it’s apparently 500-600 km wide and as much as 2000 km deep, with its base at the core-mantle boundary.

The other signature far-away-from-plate-boundaries volcano is Yellowstone. Yellowstone’s hot spot reaches the underside of the continental crust (not sea floor crust), and the heat melts that crust, resulting in a rising body of rhyolitic granite–sticky and full of water; this causes some of the most violent volcanic eruptions ever. (Note that once the rhyolite magma gets blasted out, some basaltic magma may follow it using the same fissures, now that that pesky rhyolite is out of the way.)

The eruptions happen at intervals of about 600-800 thousand years (but it’s quite variable), and we’re basically due; but there is at present no reason to panic. (And this would be worth panicking over.)

When a volcano like Yellowstone goes, it doesn’t just blow up a mountain, it wipes out a mountain range.

Let me show you a relief map of Idaho.

Remember that Yellowstone is right off the top of the right hand side of the “wide” part of the state, in the northwest corner of Wyoming.

See that big flat area running down and left from Yellowstone? That is the track of the Yellowstone hot spot. That entire valley that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 miles wide has been blown out of the middle of the Rocky Mountains, bit by bit, as North America has moved southwest over the Yellowstone hot spot, and Yellowstone has periodically laid waste to the mountains above it. (I mentioned Craters of the Moon national monument last week as a place to see lava landscapes and lava tubes and a few cinder cones. It’s here, in this valley.)

Most of the geysers on Earth are in Yellowstone (not Iceland). It’s a geothermal paradise. It’s unique in all the world; even the BBC did a miniseries on it. Surprisingly I never got around to visiting it until 2021; I was probably unusual in being more interested in the volcano-type stuff than the bison.

Make no mistake: It’s a sleeping fire breathing dragon.

Push, Suck or Pull?

(That ought to get Pat Frederick’s attention!)

What makes the plates move? We know they move–we can measure the motion–but why?

There are four forces that seem to be in play: Slab suction, slab pull, ridge push, and mantle convection.

Ridge push seems intuitively to be a great candidate. All of that magma welling up in the mid ocean ridges surely is pushing the two halves of the ocean apart, right? Not so fast, perhaps the magma is welling up because it can–because something is pulling the two halves of the ocean apart!

In the Atlantic, the eastern and western halves of the ocean floor are actually part of the continental plates on either side (African, North American, South American, Eurasian). So if it’s some kind of pull, it’s actually operating on the continents, which in turn are pulling on their associated ocean floor.

Looking at the Pacific with its mid ocean ridges, there’s the “Nazca plate” which is all ocean floor, starting at the East Pacific rise (running up and down the left half of the diagram below) and subducting under South America. South America is moving west, and the Nazca plate is moving east. The diagram shows the direction and amount of motion with arrows (the longer the arrow, the faster) in millimeters per year.

By looking at the arrows, note the Cocos plate is moving north, with the boundary between it and the Nazca plate running east west (and being a rift). Note the Galapagos island located on a very tine plate wedged in where three oceanic plates meet. (Remember it’s a likely hot spot.)

The Nazca plate is being subducted under South America, and as it is pushed underneath, the cold, dense rock actually wants to sink even more. In doing so, it pulls on the rest of the plate, pulling it away from the East Pacific Rise. This is slab pull.

Another thing you’ll notice is red lines running in one direction, and green lines at 90 degree angles to the red lines. Oddly enough a ridge isn’t usually one continuous line (which would be red), it gets broken into segments, and the segments move relative to each other. The “breaks” become places where the two plates slide past each other.

But one more force is being exerted. Not only does the subducting Nazca plate pull on the parts of the plate to the west, but the sinking generates a suction force that acts on South America, pulling it west. This is similar to the way someone in the water near a sinking ship will be pulled toward it as it slides beneath the surface. You can also demonstrate the effect with two pieces of cardboard floating on the water in a sink. Set them next to each other, then grab the far edge of one of them and tip the side closest to the other down into the water; the other piece of cardboard will be sucked towards your hand. This is slab suction.

Which of these is the most powerful? What’s the main impetus? The strongest of these is slab pull, followed closely by slab suction. Ridge push comes in a very distant third, maybe 10 percent of the total. (I was able to find actual numbers: apparently total slab pull force worldwide is 1.9 x 10²¹ newtons, while slab suction is 1.6 x 10²¹ newtons.)

OK with that in mind perhaps we can explain why so many hot spots appear in ridges. (I have tried to bounce this off my geologist friend, but I think he believes I’m advocating for ridge push being the main driver…I will have to try to look him up when he has more than 5 minutes to spare.)

I’m going to lay out a scenario, and remember I am going out on a speculative limb here.

Imagine a large continent on a world just like Earth…but which has no plate boundaries; it’s all one big “plate” or “shell.” Rivers will flow from the interior and dump their sediments into the ocean. Miles thick layers of sediment. The sediment piles up, and piles up, and pushes down on the ocean floor. Eventually the weight of all that sediment cracks the ocean floor, and it sinks. That’s the start of both slab pull and slab suction. So now, if this is happening all around the margins of the continent, there is a lot of force pulling outwards on the continent on all sides. That’s going to eventually stretch the continent…until it cracks, and the two sides go their separate ways. The birth of an ocean much like our Atlantic ocean.

Where is the big continent most likely to crack? How about the places it’s under stress…like say any hot spot that might be under the continent? So, if I am right, the rift has to form somewhere, and it ends up forming where it does because of the hot spots, because that’s where the continent will “tear” when the now-subducting ocean floor pulls on it (slab suction), not because the hot spots are somehow forcing the two halves of the continent apart (which would be ridge push). There is some ridge push, but that’s only a factor after the continent rips apart.

And the ocean floor–in this case the Pacific–gets stretched too by all that slab pull from the subducting margins, and it, too, will want to break wherever there is a hot spot, so we see the formation of midocean ridges in the Pacific.

This was an imaginary world with no plate tectonics–it somehow ends up with plate tectonics after a while anyway. Perhaps this is how it started on Earth, with a first continent billions of years ago eroding and starting subduction.

So now I’ll be a bit more concrete. Our last big supercontinent was Wegener’s Pangaea–we use his names. Pangea is shown below, with modern outlines superimposed.

This is how things looked 280 million years ago, as near as we can reconstruct it. The big superocean surrounding the continent is the “Panthalassa” and the Pacific is its remnant. The ocean immediately to the right surrounded by all the shallow areas is the Paleo-Tethys, which became the Tethys Ocean, basically the ancestor to our current Indian ocean.

The first split to happen was between North America and Africa, it divided Pangaea into Laurasia (Laurentia + Asia; Laurentia is often used by geologists to refer to ancient North America) and Gondwanaland (which became today’s southern continents). This is 190 million years ago:

But Wegener’s Pangea wasn’t the first such supercontinent; before it was Pannotia; before that, around 1260-900 million years ago Rodinia assembled and then broke up 750-633 Ma. Before Rodinia was Columbia (sometimes called Nuna or Hudsonland) from 2500 to 1500 Ma. The biggest single piece of that continent was what is now North America. And so on. The further back, of course, the more speculative.

One trend that you can see in the above diagram (which admittedly is a bit crude) is that over time there is more and more land. The lighter minerals that form continental crust seem to be getting segregated out of the mantle rocks over time. (I don’t know how much of this is going on now; perhaps the land isn’t growing any more.)

The Rocky Mountains

There’s no obvious reason for the Rocky Mountains. They’re not volcanic; they aren’t being pushed up by the collision of two continental plates (like the Himalaya today, and the Appalachians 325-260 Ma). They’re well inland. So why are they there?

The explanation will have something to do with plate tectonics–plate tectonics underlies (ahem) everything. So let’s have a look at the current configuration of tectonic plates:

Look at the west coast of North and South America. There’s the Juan de Fuca plate, the Cocos plate, and the Nazca plate. But run the movie backwards, shift North America towards Europe and Africa.

Is it possible that there was a larger plate there, connecting the Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates…and North America just ran almost completely over it, with just those two bits surviving (but not for long)?

It’s not just possible, it’s likely, and geologists have given it a name, the Farallon Plate. It also included the Nazca plate. Here’s a reconstruction of 180 Ma. Note that the present-day Pacific plate is brand new, growing as the three plates surrounding it move away from each other. Today the Phoenix and Izanagi plates are long gone, the Farallon is almost gone.

For some reason, when the Farallon plate subducted under North America, it did so at a very shallow angle, and apparently that pushed up the Rocky Mountains from below. [I’ve even seen suggestions that the ridge between the Pacific and Farallon plates is still functioning hundreds of miles below North America and the upwelling there is helping to push up the Rockies, but my geologist friend discounts that and I haven’t seen it in enough places to think it’s still a “current” idea.] This is a very different process from the head-on collision between two continental crust masses that is forming the Himalaya today. (One possible reason: especially close to the Farallon-Pacific ridge, the Farallon ocean floor was still warm and buoyant, and might not have “wanted” to sink into the mantle.)

Another thing about the Farallon plate was that it must have included some shards of continental crust, because those bits are now glued to the west coast of North America as basically foreign bits of crust called terranes. Much of the western North America is actually terranes, which as you might imagine makes the geology a bit of a jumble.

Final Thoughts

OK, so these were some “advanced” topics, some of which you won’t get in a completely introductory class in dumbed-down geology.

As such it’s a bit “bleeding edge” science and that explains some of the conflicting statements I’ve been reading. The geologists are still arguing with each other about what’s happening.

Next time…well, I’m not a hundred percent sure, other than that it will be geology.