“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
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.
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.
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.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes?
Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
Evading Reality
Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.
And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.
As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.
And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.
So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.
I confess that the novelty has not worn off.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.
But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.
This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.
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.
I’m making a minor change here. Before, I quoted “ask” prices; i.e., the spot price corresponding to what you would pay a precious metal seller (if they actually paid attention to the spot price). The other price is “bid,” what they nominally pay you. The “bid” prices are what usually show up in the news. So from here on out it will be bid/ask, with the part after the slash corresponding to what I used to post. I’ll still use the ask prices to compute gold:silver and FRNSI.
Gold stayed above 3300 this week, but finally took a hit on Friday. Similar with the other metals. On the plus side for silver people, silver gained half an ounce (of silver) against gold.
*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.
Volcanoes
I’ve talked about streams. I’ve talked about glaciers (and judging from reactions, that was a better effort than the one on streams). Now it’s time–and we have the background–to talk about volcanoes.
Isaac Asimov was famous as a science fiction writer (most famous works being the Foundation Trilogy and the Robot stories and novels–he popularized the putative three laws of robotics) but he also was a biochemist and science popularizer. (In other words, when I read his work I realize how bad a job I am doing at this.) For decades he wrote a column for the monthly magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction. The editors gave him free rein. He usually wrote about some scientific topic. These got collected into books which I read, and oftentimes remember.
One of the essays I remember to this day is one he wrote in 1959. Asimov considered some of the most vital elements for living things (chlorine, sodium, potassium, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, zinc, cvopper, molybdenum, cobalt and iodine). That list isn’t complete, obviously, but he was focused on soil and land life. He then compared the abundance of each in the soil to the abundance in living things. For instance, soil he lists as being five percent iron, but living things are 0.0027 percent iron (this is presumably before the IRS bleeds you dry and gets all your hemoglobin). The idea being that land life will never run out of iron, because it’s actually more strongly concentrated in dirt than it is in living things. But work it the other way around: sulfur is 0.052 percent of all dirt, but 0.104 percent of living things–it’s twice as concentrated in living things as it is in the soil. Conceivably, life could be fruitful and multiply…until it weighed half as much as the upper layers of earth and there was no more sulfur left. OK, that wouldn’t happen, would it? We’d never have that much living stuff on Earth. The king though was phosphorus, which is concentrated 5.9 times in living things, versus the soil. Given how little of the Earth’s upper layers is living things, there should be no issue with running out of phosphorus, though, right?
Well, no. If it’s locked up in solid rocks, it’s useless; plants can’t use it and therefore, we animal types won’t be able to either. Add to that the fact that these elements aren’t distributed uniformly, and well, after a lot of discussion he states that phosphorus is “life’s bottleneck.” (And that is the name he gave the essay.) Then he pointed out that phosphorus tended to wash out into the oceans (3 and a half million tons per year), and there was no way for it to come back other than in waterfowl poop, which recovers maybe 3 percent and in any case (let’s face it) won’t help Kansas out. Furthermore, the ocean water was already saturated in phosphorus, so it’s carrying as much life as it can, and so what phosphorus washed out of the land would settle to the bottom of the ocean in sediment.
(There, I just used the “S” word so now you might be thinking there’s actually geology coming up sometime.)
He actually suggested trying to capture some of that phosphorus so it wouldn’t be lost forever; given enough time the Earth’s land would be nearly lifeless simply for lack of usable phosphorus.
Actually, it’s not a bad argument. He sounded more worried about that than about running out of oil and coal (but then, he liked nuclear power). As he said at the end, “We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat [ick!]…but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.”
But there was one factor he didn’t take into account, and that’s no surprise whatsoever, because as I said before he wrote the article in 1959. No one could have taken that factor into account because we were only beginning to get a glimmer of it.
And the factor is (drumroll): Volcanoes…fed by plate tectonics.
Volcanoes can be thought of as Earth-scale zits popping, and thus regarded as a big negative, especially since they can be hazardous, but in fact they play a vital role, as they bring back to land what gets washed into the ocean. It’s by no means a fast process, since ocean crust can last up to two hundred million years, but it’s there.
Most volcanoes (I say most) appear either over subduction zones, or at divergent zones. The latter of these is the more intuitive, and the signature example is Iceland. As the plates move further apart, magma wells up to fill the gap and becomes ocean floor, literally hot off the conveyor belt. Magma welling up to the surface will of course make one think of volcanoes.
The first diagram shows the mid-Atlantic ridge from above, and also a profile, showing that the ridge comes comparatively close the surface, then slopes away to the more level bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
If that mid-ocean ridge should happen to break the surface of the ocean, it will form a volcanic island, and indeed we see this happen at Iceland, but also Jan Mayen, Pico island in the Azores, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough Island and Bouvet Island in the Atlantic ocean. In other oceans, the Galapagos islands are on a divergent boundary in the Pacific, and Rodriguez, St. Paul, Amsterdam, MacDonald, Heard, and Kerguelen islands in the Indian ocean.
(St. Paul and Amsterdam islands, by the way, are antipodal to Colorado; directly on the opposite side of the Earth from here. Kerguelen–a much larger but still-small island–is antipodal to the Montana/Alberta/Saskatchewan border. The rest of the Lower 48 is opposite of water.)
Why are there islands at these particular locations and not other places on the ridges? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.
But most volcanoes are on convergent boundaries, in particular subduction zones, which pretty much ring the entire Pacific ocean. To refresh memories, here’s a picture:
Why would there be volcanoes there? New crust isn’t forming, it’s disappearing. The ocean floor is basically being pushed down deep below the surface of the earth, presumably never to be seen again.
What’s happening is that the lighter continental rock sediments on the ocean floor are being heated, melt, and force their way upward through the denser rock until they reach the surface…and there they form volcanoes, usually not right on the subduction zone (which generally forms a deep oceanic trench like the Marianas trench) but a ways “downstream” from it; the sedimentary rocks need time to heat up and melt.
So this is how we get our continental crust (including phosphorus) back after it washes into the oceans! Asimov had no idea in 1959.
These account for almost every volcano out there, but of course there are two famous exceptions, Hawaii and Yellowstone. What accounts for them? Hotspots. Which I’ll get there later.
Volcanic lava tends to determine how explosive a volcano is. The more basaltic, the better; basaltic magma is very fluid and doesn’t have a lot of water trapped in it, so mid-ocean ridge volcanoes tend not to go “kablooey!” when they erupt. Near subduction zones, the magma is less basaltic (it has all that melted continental sediment in it after all) and has water trapped in it, so it tends to be explosive. As soon as that magma gets close to the surface the water in it flashes to steam and…well…(cued to 13:02):
Mount St. Helens was likely the largest landslide in recorded history. Worldwide. But it was by no means a superlatively large eruption as eruptions go. Big, but not humongous.
(The remainder of the video covers four other eruptions around the world, caught on camera.)
Also worth watching, the Smithsonian making itself useful (though you will want to stop it before it plays the next video):
Lava Types
There are two major types of lava flow, readily identifiable when they solidify. Logically enough they have Hawaiian names; the Hawaiians deal with lava like Inuit deal with snow.
The first is ‘a’a, roughly pronounced “ah, ah”. It tends to look chunky and jagged; the lava is a bit viscous. Then there’s pahoehoe (“pa hoy hoy”) which is much more smooth; it can look ropy because the top layer will get compressed and “scrunch up” as the still-liquid lava below it continues to flow. Here’s a picture of a new ‘a’a flow making its way across an older pahoehoe surface. The blocky chunks it is solidifying into are called clinkers.
Because lava tends to solidify at the top of the flow while the lower layers remain liquid, lava tubes can form, essentially caves through which lava once flowed. Here’s one in Hawaii:
you can see “step” lines in the walls, as later lava flows that didn’t fill the tube, used it as well.
Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho is probably one of the best places to see these sorts of things. It has cinder cones, lava fields that stretch to the horizon (it’s eerie to see almost no signs of life as far as you can see), pahoehoe and ‘a’a lava all over the place, and lava tubes. (And those are extremely unforgiving; I managed to bang my knee up pretty well tripping over something when I walked through one of the tubes–which was not nearly as smooth as the one in Hawaii; it was ‘a’a lava.)
Other Volcanic Stuff
Volcanic ash is the dusty stuff that gets ejected high into the atmosphere. It may not travel very far. When it comes down in thick layers it can consolidate into fairly soft rocks called tuff. (Tuff is sometimes erroneously called tufa, which is actually the name of a kind of marble.) Ash particles are 2mm or smaller, larger stuff gets labeled lapilli, at least until it reaches a diameter of 64mm.
Blobs of lava sent flying through the air are called volcanic bombs or lava bombs when they are more than 64 mm in diameter. They can fly many kilometers if they’re that small, but ones five to six meters across have been recorded, flying a few hundred meters. Here is an example from Kilauea:
If the eruption sends an already-solid rock through the air that would otherwise be a bomb, it’s a volcanic block. This example is from Cotopaxi in Ecuador.
Types of Volcanoes
There are quite a number of different types of volcanoes, including a number of types for volcanoes in the ocean–and I mean in the ocean, not above it–but the major ones are:
Cinder Cones. These are basically piles of small cinders, ash, clinkers that have spewed up vertically and fallen back to earth in a fairly neat, conical pile. They can range from tens to hundreds of meters tall. Mount Capulin in northeastern New Mexico is an example, they are also present in Craters of the Moon national monument in Idaho. (What’s a volcanic field doing in Idaho, nowhere near a plate boundary? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.)
Quite possibly the most famous cinder cone is Paricutin, in Michoacan State in Mexico. Picture this, a farmer in 1943 minding his own business when a vent in the ground opens up and starts spewing cinders. His name was Dionisio Pulido, and his account is:
At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened . . . and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter. I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself 2 or 2.5 meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen . . . Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.
He–along with two whole towns–was SOL, his farm is now under a 424 meter tall cindercone (which did spew some lava). This happened over the span of nine years, and it has been dormant since then. Luckily only three people were killed.
Next we have the shield volcano. These will form when a volcano consistently erupts highly fluid, low viscosity lava, and have very gentle slopes. They’re named shield volcanoes because they reminded someone of one of those round hoplite shields (like Leonidas had), laying flat on the ground…just a low mound.
Hawaii is an example of a shield volcano. Here’s another in Iceland, named Skjaldbreidur…
…which is considerably easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajökull, a troublemaker underneath a glacier. (Iceland Air, by the way, names its airplanes after Icelandic volcanoes.)
Mauna Kea/Hawai’i is the largest shield volcano on Earth, but Olympus Mons on Mars beats it handily. The total area within the escarpment is roughly the same as the country of Poland, and it is 21,900 meters tall (compare to Everest which is less than 9000, and to Hawai’i which measured from its base on the ocean floor, is 9330 meters tall.
And we can do combinations. Here’s a cinder cone that is in the San Francisco volcanic field near Flagstaff in Arizona…a nice symmetrical one, but the big black blotch upwards from it in the photograph is a basaltic lava flow from before the cindercone formed. (This field contains volcanoes anywhere between 1000 and 4 million years old. Mt. Humphreys (12,600 ft) is part of this field. The field is considered active, but likely not due for an eruption for a couple of thousand years.)
But probably the one you form a mental image of when you hear the word “volcano” is the stratovolcano…the type Mount St. Helens, and Ranier, and Shasta, and Hood, are.
Here is Mount Ranier:
It’s very prominent, when I first laid eyes on it on a road trip I immediately thought of “Fist of God” from Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels.
The internal structure will look something like this (vertically exaggerated):
Key to the diagram: 1) Large magma chamber 2) Bedrock 3) Conduit (pipe), 4) Base 5) Sill 6) Dike 7) Layers of ash emitted by the volcano 8) Flank 9) Layers of lava emitted by the volcano 10) Throat 11) Parasitic cone 12) Lava flow 13) Vent 14) Crater 15) Ash cloud.
These volcanoes tend to have a layered structure and in fact this is Broken Top, an eroded volcano in Oregon:
The crater at the top is often also known as a caldera, particularly if it’s big.
Another famous eruption in the Pacific Northwest is that of Mount Mazama. If you’ve never heard of that one, that’s because it is much more famous as Crater Lake. The 12,000 foot mountain erupted 7700 years ago–and it erupted so much that the magma chamber under the mountain was now empty. The peak of the mountain collapsed into the magma chamber, forming a caldera six miles across. The highest point on the rim of the crater is now 8,157 feet above sea level.
From the outside it’s an unassuming line of tree-covered peaks (they look like hills to me, honestly, since they don’t bust the tree line). From the inside, on the other hand:
I can attest that that is what the water actually looks like. This image has not been enhanced to exaggerate the color. The rim is hundreds of feet high or more. In the center is Wizard island, the result of a much smaller eruption a few thousand years ago.
Add it to your bucket list. I’m not joking, add it to your bucket list.
Volcanic Eruptions Ranked
Scientists will measure absolutely anything on a scale, and for volcanic eruptions they have the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, largely based on how much stuff the eruption spewed into the atmosphere.
Each step in the scale is ten times as much ejecta. Ten thousand cubic meters is a 1, a hundred thousand cubic meters a 2, and so on; at this rate when you get to a 5, that’s a cubic kilometer. The scale runs up to 8, 1000 cubic kilometers. When you realize that’s a cube six miles on a side, you realize that’s a LOT of crap spewing into the atmosphere.
So how do some famous eruptions stack up? Mt. St. Helens was a 5 (one cubic kilometer). Vesuvius in 79 CE was also a five. Pelee in 1902 was “only” a 4…but that volcano, on Martinque, destroyed the town of St. Pierre, killing 29,000-30,000 people almost without warning, the worst loss of life to a volcano of the 20th century. There were, by the way, three survivors. (That is not a typo. 3. Out of 30,000.)
Krakatoa, 1883, and Pinatubo, 1991, were VEI 6s, 10 cubic kilometers. Remember when the Phillipines kicked us out of the bases we had there? Well one of those bases got destroyed by that eruption.
Mazama was a 7, roughly 100 cubic kilometers of spew. Santorini in 1600 BCE was also a 7, and it was suggested it may have destroyed the Minoan civilization, but the timing isn’t quite right. There are Minoan ruins on what is left of that island, formerly Thera, now Santorini. And then there is Tambora, 1815. Tambora is on Sumbawa island, east of Java and Bali. Tambora’s eruption was heard 2600 kilometers away in Sumatra. In the northeastern US the next year, there was a persistent “dry fog” in the atmosphere from sulfur kicked up by this volcano, it dimmed the sun enough that people could see sunspots with their naked eyes. And that was the year without a summer; so much dust was in the upper atmosphere that massive crop failures were the result…world wide. It snowed June 6, 1816 in Albany, New York.
That was the biggest eruption in recorded history, but it is by no means the biggest eruption ever.
At a VEI of 8 we have Toba, on Sumatra, 74 thousand years ago, Taupo in New Zealand 26.5 thousand years ago, and, America is not to be outdone! Yellowstone, 2.1 Ma, and 640,000 years ago. (We’re due, folks…and the only safe place is Mars.)
Volcanic Plugs
One more thing I’ll cover, and that’s the subject of volcanic plugs. This is where lava hardens in the conduit of a volcano, and then the rest of the mountain erodes away.
By far the most famous of these is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
Aliens not included. [The wikipedia article on volcanic plugs hedges a bit and says many geologists believe that Devil’s Tower is a volcanic plug. Which means at least some do not.]
The striated look is because basalt likes to shrink and fracture into hexagonal columns, like this (the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland):
Wrapping Up
I said I’d talk about hot spots. And that’s true. I thought I’d do it today but I realized that subject is closely tied to a slightly deeper look at plate tectonics that I wanted to take. So I will (hopefully) do both next time. In the meantime I’ve given you quite a bit to digest already.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
I will hereafter refer to this as the “black box post” – because it basically describes the “core” of AI as a kind of “black box” that people don’t fully understand, but which I would describe as “emergent intelligence that seems like us, and therefore impresses us”. Childers does a great job in describing what we know and don’t know about it, in easy-to-understand language.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?
I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.
On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.
You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.
It stays.
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.
Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the Q Tree Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political 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.
I’m making a minor change here. Before, I quoted “ask” prices; i.e., the spot price corresponding to what you would pay a precious metal seller (if they actually paid attention to the spot price). The other price is “bid,” what they nominally pay you. The “bid” prices are what usually show up in the news. So from here on out it will be bid/ask, with the part after the slash corresponding to what I used to post. I’ll still use the ask prices to compute gold:silver and FRNSI.
Gold is still jumping around a lot but on the whole it had a good week and so did silver (though not as good as gold, the ratio has again slipped to over 100). Even platinum had a good week! (I guess zombies do exist!) Palladium is up for the week (but went down on Friday), rhodium is down, down, down. Those last two are almost purely industrial metals so that may not be good news for the economy.
*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.
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is intended to honor those American servicemen and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It has an incredibly complicated history (which I had to skim for lack of time), but it appears that at one key point it was commemorated by placing flags on the graves of those interred in military cemeteries for those who had died in the Civil War. Later on it expanded (at least informally–the purpose I stated above is still the nominal purpose of the holidy) to include any deceased military veteran whether or not they had died while serving–likely because many of them are now interred in military cemeteries as well.
Regardless of that, I think we can all agree it’s not just a day to fire up the barbecue. Unfortunately it became such a day in the minds of many when it became one of those holidays observed on a Monday, instead of being observed on May 30 regardless what day of the week it fell on. Moving it to the “Last Monday in May” turned it into a convenient three day weekend (most businesses observe it because of that) marking the unofficial beginning of summer, a time to go on a camping trip and/or fire up the barbecue.
When the change was made in 1968 (taking effect in 1971) many complained and as recently as 2002 the VFW stated: “Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed a lot to the general public’s nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.”
I can’t disagree.
No Science Post
Sorry had no time. I imagine many will be relieved not to be reading about volcanoes, which is what I had planned to do now that we’re at a point in the narrative where it becomes possible to talk about them intelligently.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
incompossible
adjective
incapable of coexisting
not capable of joint existence
incompatible
inconsistent
not mutually possible
mutually exclusive in logic
Used in a sentence
Leibniz’s well-known thesis that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds relies on the claim that some possibles are incompossible, meaning that they cannot belong to the same world.
Question: Is mRNA vaccine technology incompossible with “gold standard” treatment, if it is not part of the “Generation Gold Standard” universal vaccine platform for “pandemic” viruses?
I remain surprised that nobody in public is talking about mRNA technology being EXCLUDED from the new vaccine platform being promoted by HHS and NIH.
Is this due to the fact that, if nobody ever talks about the elephant in the room, then nobody will talk about it when it leaves the room? If so, then strategic opportunities abound!
Next Question…..
Is autoimmune disease in COVID-vaccinated kids the end of the shots for kids? First, what’s happening…..
BREAKING: HHS to END COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations for Kids & Pregnant Women
With over 600,000 estimated COVID shot deaths in the U.S., HHS moves to roll back CDC guidance—amid mounting criminal referrals, legislative efforts, and growing calls for a complete moratorium.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration—under the leadership of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—is preparing to end routine CDC recommendations that pregnant women, teenagers, and children receive COVID-19 vaccines. This decision, expected to be announced in the coming days, represents a long-overdue departure from current ill-advised CDC guidance, which still urges vaccination for everyone aged six months and older, including during pregnancy.
Well, take a look at this. Is this why?
TL;DR / BLUF – COVID vaccines, not COVID, cause autoimmune problems in kids, and they do it about 9 months later, on average, thus escaping scrutiny.
NEW STUDY: COVID-19 Vaccines Increase Risk of Long-Term Autoimmune Disease in Children — Not the Virus
A massive study of 493,705 children found a 23% increased risk of developing autoimmune disease after COVID-19 vaccination, with symptoms emerging about 9 months after injection.
During the COVID-19 pandemic there were reports of an increased association between COVID 19 and various autoimmune diseases (AID) in adults. This study aims to investigate the incidence of AIDs in children before and during the pandemic and explores potential links to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.
Methods
We analyzed 493,705 anonymized medical records from Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel’s second-largest healthcare provider, to study AID incidence during 2014–2022. The study period was divided into three phases: two pre-pandemic phases of equal duration (A and B) and a pandemic phase (C).
Results
Of 4,596 (0.9%) patients diagnosed with an AID in the cohort, incidence rates were 0.9% for Group A (2014–2016), 1.0% for Group B (2017–2019), and 0.9% for Group C (2020–2022) (p = 0.13). Logistic regression showed no significant differences in overall autoimmune disease incidence between the pre-COVID and COVID periods. Notably, specific conditions like celiac disease showed reduced incidence in Group A (OR 0.8309, p = 0.0071) while arthritis was significantly more common in Groups A and B. Additionally, COVID-19 diagnosis was not significantly associated with increased autoimmune disease risk (HR 1.092, p = 0.491); however, receiving at least one COVID vaccine was linked to higher risk (HR 1.2323, p = 0.0033).
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that the overall incidence of new-onset autoimmune diseases in children remained relatively stable during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study indicates a potential association between COVID-19 vaccination and an increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases, necessitating further research to elucidate long-term effects in the pediatric population.
Suddenly the multiple cases of “sudden new autoimmune problems” among my vax-friendly liberal friends and neighbors make a lot of sense.
Is photonic quantum computing the way? Maybe so!
Don’t feel bad if this sounds complicated. Even the following 2021 explanation is not easy stuff.
Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.
And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.
Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.
[WOLF EDIT – for whatever reason this YouTube video no longer embeds, even as the shortened URL (below), so I have converted both URLs to links which open up in a new tab.]
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.
Gold spent the last two days below $3200 before managing to claw its way just over that line at the very end of the day Friday. The current lower prices are attributed to less economic fears with respect to ChinaIsAsshoe.
Silver is now worth more than one percent of gold. I saw an interesting quip about it; it gets the worst of both its worlds. When the equity markets are panicking, silver is seen as an industrial metal…so it goes down. When the equity markets are booming, silver is seen as a precious metal so people want to sell off and put their money in stocks, so it goes down.
I remember back when Canada helped us out with three embassy people in Iran (1979) a Canadian comedian being featured on Nightline; he said that our two dollars were tied together. “When your dollar goes down, our dollar goes down. When your dollar goes up, our dollar goes down” said the Canadian.
Similarly it seems that gold and silver are tied together; when gold goes down, silver goes down, when gold goes up, silver goes down.
Buying opportunity for the white metal?
*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.
It Didn’t Start With Wegener
And now for the one at least some people have been waiting for.
It really started with Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) a cartographer from what was, back then, the Spanish Netherlands–which is to say he was a Dutchman who had a Spaniard for a king. He was the publisher of the first modern atlas in 1570 so he knew what the continents looked like as much as anyone did then. Here is a map from that atlas:
He published a book on ancient geography in 1587, the Thesaurus Geographicus, then revised it in 1596. Apparently, in that 1596 edition he described America (regarded as one continent back then, not two) as “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods.” Furthermore: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”
This is the first known mention of the continents possibly having rifted apart. And it was totally forgotten until the late 20th century.
However, other people had the same thought, among them Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others.
We have an illustration by Pellegrini:
There were arguments among geologists over just how much the Earth had changed culminating in the mid 1800s. I can’t write this better than wikipedia did, so I’ll just paste it in:
In 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarked, “It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth’s surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had, again and again, changed places with each other.” He quotes Charles Lyell as saying, “Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.” and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James Dwight Dana in 1849.
In his Manual of Geology (1863), Dana wrote, “The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. This has been proved with regard to North America from the position and distribution of the first beds of the Lower Silurian, – those of the Potsdam epoch. The facts indicate that the continent of North America had its surface near tide-level, part above and part below it (p.196); and this will probably be proved to be the condition in Primordial time of the other continents also. And, if the outlines of the continents were marked out, it follows that the outlines of the oceans were no less so”. Dana was enormously influential in America—his Manual of Mineralogy is still in print in revised form—and the theory became known as the Permanence theory.
The Challenger expedition, 1872-1876, showed that rivers dumped their silt–eroded from continents–onto continental shelves, not the deep ocean, which made it appear that oceans were permanent features, not something that could “change places” with the continents.
Eduard Seuss (1831-1914) proposed a supercontinent “Gondwana” (1885) consisting of pretty much all of today’s southern continents, plus India. In fact it was named after the Sanskrit name for a location in India. He also noted that the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas, and Indian Ocean may once have been connected; that he named the Tethys Ocean (1893) (it’s often called the Tethys Sea). But Seuss was not a proponent of continental drift. He believed that South America and Africa (and the other present day pieces of Gondwana) had been separated by the land subsiding and being flooded to form oceans. Presumably the dry areas that used to be the Tethys are the result of land that rose at some time in the past.
He brought evidence: Glossopteris (Gk: Tongue fern) was a widely distributed genus of plant across all of the present day southern continents, New Zealand, and India. It lived in the Permian Period (298.8 – 251.902 Ma). [Yowza, thousand year precision for the end of the Permian and Paleozoic!] They appeared to have died out during the Great Dying, the biggest mass extinction event since multicellular life began. (Compared to this, the end of the dinosaurs pales.)
Otto Ampferer (1875-1947) was a geologist who believed that mountains were uplifted by convection in the asthenosphere.
In fact, Ampferer is the real founder of what is called the “modern” view of continental drift, since a lot of his work was done in the 1900s (i.e., the 0s of the 20th century). He even largely won the argument about convection and mountains by 1906–and those concepts would eventually play heavily in modern plate tectonics theory.
Roberto Mantovani between 1889-1909 proposed that the continents had rifted because the Earth had expanded. In other words the Atlantic was basically a stretch mark. (This has long since been recognized to be…well, frankly, ridiculous though Wikipoo just says “now discredited.”)
Frank Bursey Taylor in 1910 proposed “continental creep” caused by tidal forces. He was among the first to realize that continents’ motions could have a lot to do with raising mountains, such as the Himalayas being formed as India and Asia came together. [We now know that India is still moving into Asia; the Himalayas continue to grow as a consequence.]
Then Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) came along, and published in 1912, January 6th of that year to be precise, in a presentation to the German Geological Society. He proposed that all continents, not just the southern ones, had once formed one supercontinent which he called “Pangaea” which had broken up into pieces that had since drifted to their current locations.
Wegener brought a lot of evidence, rock formations from the Permian or Triassic that matched up but were now on separate continents, for instance.
Wegener considered Taylor’s ideas the most similar to his own, and in the mid 20th century for a time you’d hear the term “Taylor-Wegener hypothesis.”
Wegener actually invented the term “continental drift.”
However, despite the evidence which might seem compelling, there was one gigantic fly in the ointment.
Wegener couldn’t explain how this could have happened. What force could possibly plow the continents through oceanic crust? No one had any idea. And unfortunately, this idea was deemed more ridiculous than having to find some other explanation for Wegener’s evidence. (And to be honest, given what they knew, geologists were right to reject it. Continents plowing through ocean floor crust was absurd, and it still is.) Another issue is that he estimated the speed at 2.5 meters per year. This was (and still would be) considered implausibly high, and is about a hundred times faster than what we actually measure today.
Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) in 1931 championed continental drift, when it was profoundly unfashionable. We have him to thank for radiometric dating, but also for suggesting mantle convection as a mechanism. This was the first hint of sea floor spreading.
In 1947, a team led by Maurice Ewing showed that there was a rise in the central Atlantic ocean, based on soundings laboriously collected up to then. They were also the first to note that ocean beds were essentially basaltic rock, unlike continents which were mostly granites. Over the next years, an entire system of mid-oceanic ridges all over the world was found.
Meanwhile, we had noticed magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor, using devices originally designed in World War II to detect submarines. As more and more data was collected, we began to realize that these weren’t “anomalies” at all, but rather formed a pattern. Here’s Wikipedia again:
In a series of papers published between 1959 and 1963, Heezen, Dietz, Hess, Mason, Vine, Matthews, and Morley collectively realized that the magnetization of the ocean floor formed extensive, zebra-like patterns: one stripe would exhibit normal polarity and the adjoining stripes reversed polarity.[58][59][60] The best explanation was the “conveyor belt” or Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis. New magma from deep within the Earth rises easily through these weak zones and eventually erupts along the crest of the ridges to create new oceanic crust. The new crust is magnetized by the Earth’s magnetic field, which undergoes occasional reversals. Formation of new crust then displaces the magnetized crust apart, akin to a conveyor belt – hence the name.[61]
Without workable alternatives to explain the stripes, geophysicists were forced to conclude that Holmes had been right: ocean rifts were sites of perpetual orogeny at the boundaries of convection cells.[62][63] By 1967, barely two decades after discovery of the mid-oceanic rifts, and a decade after discovery of the striping, plate tectonics had become axiomatic to modern geophysics.
The plate tectonics revolution is regarded as having occurred between 1957 and 1967.
We now had our mechanism. The continents don’t plow through the ocean floor. Rather, the ocean floor behaves like a conveyor belt; the oceans spread and push the continents ahead of them.
[Technically that’s not quite right–it’s more accurate to say that the ocean floors are pulled along behind the continents–but I’ll have to defer that explanation a bit. Suffice it to say continents don’t plow through ocean floors.]
And it’s not called “continental drift” any more, it’s called “plate tectonics.” Because we have come to realize that the crust of the Earth consists of distinct plates which move around, sometimes spreading from each other at mid-ocean ridges, in other places one plate is being submerged under another.
What does this word “tectonics” actually mean? It’s ultimately from Greek tektonikos, “pertaining to building.” [As an aside, in the original Greek, Jesus is described as a “tekton”, someone who made things with his hands. Not necessarily a carpenter in particular.] As for plates, here are the sixteen principal plates:
Note that most boundaries are in the ocean. Boundaries are drawn in different colors for a reason. Deep red are “spreading centers”–i.e., places with a ridge where magma is surfacing to make ocean crust. The slightly lighter red (e.g., through east Africa) is an “extension zone” though unless the distinction has something to do with mid-ocean ridges, I can’t figure out what the difference is. In both cases spreading is happening. Here’s what they look like in general (this diagram seems to be represending one on a continent, like the rift running through East Africa).
Blue is a subduction zone, where one plate is an ocean floor, and the other is a continent; the ocean floor is subducting under the continent. Notice these on the edges of South America, between the northern pacific and the North American plate at Alaska and the Aleutians; also between the Juan de Fuca plate and the US’s Pacific Northwest, and running through Indonesia and Polynesia. And right through the Mediterranean, too.
What do these places all have in common? Volcanoes!! As it happens, volcanoes are almost always caused by subduction zones. Notable exceptions are Hawaii and Yellowstone. There are also some volcanic islands on mid oceanic ridges, like Iceland, St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha in the Atlantic Ocean. Volcanoes form along subduction zones as the ocean plate melts and basaltic magma rises, eventually forcing its way to the surface.
[Please note, Pat, it’s “subduction” not “seduction,” no matter how volcanic those seductions can be when handled correctly.]
The Pacific “Ring of Fire” is now explained; the Pacific ocean is shrinking as continents encroach on it. My childhood book on volcanoes was out of date just a couple of years before I read it.
Subduction zones tend to have the worst earthquakes, e.g., Chile 1960, Alaska 1964, Sumatra 2004, Tohoku 2011 (Fukushima), Kamchatka 1952. These are the five strongest earthquakes in recorded history and all were at least a Richter 9. [Three more earthquakes estimated to be over 9.0 happened in Chile before we had good instruments to measure them; and two more in Kamchatka. A few more with estimated ranges straddling 9.0 happened in those locations, plus one more in Sumatra. Plus, one more, in 1700 in the Pacific Northwest. (This should worry people who live there. A similar quake there now would be the worst natural disaster in US history.)]
One more thing to note about subduction zones. The ocean floor almost always subducts below the continent. Why? Because the ocean floor is mafic or basaltic, and that makes it denser than the continents (I told you the greater density of mafic rocks would turn out to be important). Another detail related to density is the fact that the slope up to a mid-oceanic ridge tends to be fairly gradual, which is to say the ocean drops away from the ridge at a shallow slope. That too is an effect of density; the inside of the ocean floor “slab” is hotter nearer the ridge; that makes the rock take up more volume (solids expand when hot), which makes it less dense; it rides higher on the mantle than does the cooler ocean floor farther away from the ridges (near the continents).
Purple boundaries (note the one along the northern edge of India) are where two continents are colliding; this forces mountains upwards. That diagram above is technically of this case rather than an ocean floor subducting, but the idea is the same. (I don’t know why they don’t show sea floor diagrams in the Wikipoo article, unless they think the “big picture” diagram further down the page covers it. That diagram, alas has other stuff in it I want to cover later, so I didn’t use it; I found a different diagram below
Orange and green boundaries are “dextral” and “sinistral” transverse faults, respectively. These are places where the plates move sideways at the boundary, no encroaching. “Dextral” means if you are standing on one of the two plates looking at the other, it appears to be moving to the right. Sinistral, means the apparent motion is to the left. The San Andreas fault is the most famous of these, and is dextral.
Putting convergent and divergent boundaries together you get something like this: You can think of the ocean as the Pacific, up near Seattle. The plate at the far left is the Pacific plate, the one in the middle, that is subducting, is the Juan de Fuca, and the continent is North America.
Not shown is North America’s eastern edge, where it continues down into an ocean floor; the floor of the Atlantic is attached to the continents surrounding it. Yes, the ocean floor between the mid-Atlantic ridge and the US is part of the North American plate. I found a much smaller diagram of the Atlantic between South America and Africa, which is essentially the same:
Iceland sits directly on the Atlantic ridge, which means part of the island is on the North American plate, and part is on the European plate.
Iceland has a national park, Þingvellir Park (As near as I can tell that’s pronounced “Thing-vet-leer”), and there is actually a rift through the park; in some places it’s filled with water and you can scuba dive in it and put one hand on each side, touching Europe and America.
If you think about it, there are a couple of predictions this theory makes that can be checked.
First, we should be able to measure the motion, and indeed we can. The following is a collection of measurements (that seem to line up along great circles), the longer the arrow the faster the motion.
Second: Ocean floor should be younger than continental rock, because ocean floor is of recent manufacture. And indeed this turns out to be the case; the oldest ocean floor rock we have ever tested (other than the occasional bits of ocean crustal rocks that end up on top of continents) is about 200 million years old, age established by radiometric dating and absolutely no surprise to anyone in the field. Even the pacific floor is new; there are “midocean” ridges making fresh ocean floor in the Pacific, too. (They’re closer to the Americas than to Asia but they are there.)
OK, so the next few times I cover this in more detail.
But here’s a couple of parting shots.
Other worlds have “tectonics” that rework the surface, but not necessarily plate tectonics. Io, for instance just has a lot of volcanic activity and no plates. Venus probably has great episodes of volcanism every few hundred million years (based on counting how many craters it has unit area; a way of dating planetary and moon surfaces). Even ice moons like Europa and Enceladus can have tectonics of some sort or another.
I mentioned that the Atlantic is spreading at about 2.5 centimeters a year–this is based on GPS measurements. It’s commonly compared to how fast your fingernails grow.
How long has this been going on? 2.5 centimeters is an inch; so the Atlantic widens by a foot every 12 years, or a mile every 60,000 years (I’m rounding here because the original yearly number is itself not very precise). The Atlantic is very roughly 3,000 miles wide, so that should be…180,000,000 years to have attained its current width. And wouldn’t you know, that’s the early Jurassic, about when the rocks indicate the split happened between South America and Africa based on dating those rocks. So we have two totally different lines of evidence pointing to roughly the same time for that event.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
placeholder
noun
a dummy post on The Q Tree
other definitions we don’t care about
still more definitions we don’t care about
Used in a sentence
A placeholder is not the same as the command to place Holder under arrest.
Shown in a picture
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
Placeholder!
THE STUFF
Well, it looks like we have a placeholder for a nuclear clock!
Thorium. Useful stuff.
Just sayin’!
And remember…….
Until victory, have faith!
And trust the big plan, too!
And as always….
ENJOY THE SHOW
W
NOTE:
What you see above is essentially the “Monday Placeholder”. If you see nothing more, and no different, then you are seeing the placeholder.
If I have time and the inclination, I may swap in a new Word of the Week, some new videos, and possibly even an added topic.
Today, I will leave the placeholder alone, for reference, but I will add a topic. Thanks!
W
The Strategy I See Behind the New “Universal Vaccine Platform”
Some of you have to be asking yourselves why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to have gone from being an opponent of vaccines, to being a proponent of them. I will try to explain.
To begin with, it helps to read the following document (H/T to PAVACA for producing these images). You can use this link, or the images below it.
HHS, NIH Launch Next-Generation Universal Vaccine Platform for Pandemic-Prone Viruses
It is hard for me to put into words, how much of a change this really is. But let me give you a quick “TL;DR” list of the big-ticket items.
Big Pharma is completely cut out of this platform – it’s US government owned and driven.
The vaccines are designed to be resistant to evolution of the pathogens they protect against. The vaxxes themselves are immune to “scariants”.
The vaccines completely abandon mRNA, cDNA, recombinant antigen, spike protein, lipid nanoparticle, and all genetic and related technologies.
The vaccines abandon Fauci’s always-failing strategy of targeting current variants, and instead seek to handle both current and future variants.
The result is fewer and less frequent shots. The better the shot, the more this is true.
The vaccines must pass rigorous safety standards, or otherwise fail to be approved.
The vaccines change direction and focus, from smaller subunits to whole-virus immunity.
The vaccines are potentially capable of inhibiting transmission.
IMO this is not just about changing the vaccines – it’s about changing minds in government science.
Most scientists, sadly, are sheep. They have neither the courage nor the inclination to challenge anything in the current scientific narrative – particularly as reported by our toxic media. If the media says “most scientists believe X”, then most scientists think this is true, and won’t bother to check, much less actively disagree.
The evil media has trained us all to believe certain myths.
There will be more and more exotic diseases coming at us from nature
There will need to be more and more vaccines, and more and more injections of them
Vaccines get better by using newer technology, not by working better for people
Vaccine hesitancy is a bad thing, and must be prevented at all costs
Vaccines are all safe, and rumors that any are bad, are dangerous
Apparently, despite the iron fist of Faucism, somebody in NIAID was thinking in ways that lead in the opposite direction from where Pfizer was taking us. I suspect that these forces sat tight, waited for “reinforcements to arrive” (Trump, RFKJ, and Dr. Jay), and had their proposal working up the chain of command as soon as Trump won.
Will this vaccine approach work? IMO it will work better than mRNA. Whether it works well enough to pass Kennedy’s new standard, based on comparison to placebos and true controls, is another question.
For the sake of those who still want vaccines, I hope so.
I suspect that these vaccines will be safer than mRNA, but not completely safe – particularly with a pathogen like COVID. As long as these vaccines are not mandated, I’m OK with their existence. In any case, the vaccines will have to prove themselves safe and effective.
We should all remember Deplorable Patriot and Wheatie as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.
Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted the “Vax” shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.
“Don’t Tread On Me,” it says. You failed to pay attention to this advice. You went out of your way to do the opposite. You chose to rub our faces in it, imprison those who dared complain, and even to kill our people. Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.
That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.
January 6 Tapes Reminder
OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.
Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior 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. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
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.)
Paper Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold managed to push up into the 3430s (at least) on Monday/Tuesday night/morning. Apparently the Chinese markets were closed May 1-5. The Chinese markets tend to boost gold while the European and US markets push it down.
That said gold was back down to the low 3300s by Thursday evening, and seems to have settled into that range once again.
*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.
Leading Up To The Big Revolution In Geology
As of the late 1950s geology had made tremendous strides in about two and a half centuries. Geologists had come to understand a lot about rocks, how they were made, how they endured (or didn’t), and had used this understanding not just to reconstruct a lot of Earth’s past, but also life‘s past.
But a lot was missing, too. We knew, for instance, that land rose and fell; we had obvious ancient sea floor in what is today nosebleed-high mountain ranges. And we knew that it wasn’t because the water had risen, but rather that the land had risen afterwards.
What we didn’t know was why. Why was terrain being uplifted from time to time?
Geologists had won their argument with the astronomers over how old the Earth had to be, but that win left them with another aspect of this problem. If the Earth were indeed hundreds of millions of years old (as, by about 1900 at the latest they figured must be the case), then why did we have continents at all? They should have eroded away long ago!
Another mystery was volcanoes. They happened a lot in some places, and not in others. Why? No idea. I had access to an outdated book on volcanoes (probably written in the late 1950s) as a kid in the early 1970s. It asked this question and gave no answer beyond, essentially, “we don’t know.”
Today we know the answers to all of this. And indeed looking back on it, the geologists who lived through what can only be described as an Awakening (and yes, some of them are still alive), realize that geology made no sense without the answer. Oh, the little stuff made sense; mountains erode, volcanoes erupt, streams silt up, until you dug a bit deeper and realized there was no rhyme or reason to it when you tried to put together a big picture. Why were the mountains there to erode? Why weren’t volcanoes in New York State?
There really wasn’t a big picture.
And then, in not much more time than it takes for a Trump attorney general to be confirmed, there was a big picture!
What a glorious time it was to be a geologist!
I’m not guessing at this; I’ve heard many of them talk.
Plate tectonics brings order and sense to geology. Much like the periodic table brings order and sense to chemistry, gravitation brings sense to astronomy, and evolution brings sense to biology.
(You might want to argue with that last one. You’d be wrong. I’ve heard biologists talk too. Biology literally would make no sense–it would be a jumble of miscellaneous facts–without evolution to tie it together.)
So this is going to be the story of how we came to recognize that plate tectonics exists, and how it works. And it will probably take several posts to cover.
But first…some background. (You should have seen that coming.)
Igneous Rocks
There are three broad classes of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. (I hope this is a refresher to you, as I’ve covered this before.) Igneous rocks were certainly the first kind to exist, since those are the kind of rock you get when lava or magma cool and solidify. Then there is sedimentary rock, formed from bits of other rocks (of any of these types), that erode, are transported downhill, and (usually) end up at the bottom of a body of water where they become sandstone, or limestone, and things like that. Metamorphic rock results when any rock is subjected to high temperatures and pressures and undergoes chemical and structural changes without going all the way to melting and re-solidifying. Marble and flint are examples of metamorphic rock.
We’re going to concentrate on igneous rocks.
Magma and lava are typically mixtures of different chemicals, and as they cool the chemicals crystalize (and become minerals). You can tell how quickly an igneous rock cooled; if it cooled very slowly you get large crystals; if it cooled quickly you may have very small crystals, perhaps small enough you need a microscope to study them. In extreme cases there may be no crystals at all and the rock is considered a volcanic glass, like obsidian.
(A rock with crystals large enough to be seen by the naked eye is “phaneritic” while others are “aphaneritic.” As a side note to this side note, “phaner-” also appears in the name “Phanerozoic,” which is a hint as to where it got its name; the Phanerozoic is the eon where life was big enough to see. Though that’s a bit of a misnomer now since the Ediacaran period, right before/below the Cambrian and thus not in the Phanerozoic eon, also had life big enough to see. But that discovery post-dates the naming of the Phanerozoic.)
Lava being out on the surface cools quickly and generally has very small crystals, whereas intrusive rocks (like dikes and sills), and gigantic bodies of magma called “batholiths” are underground and cool very slowly; leading to big crystals. In fact, geologists will distinguish between extrusive (lava) and intrusive (the others) igneous rocks as the “mode of occurrence.”
There is also, independent of that, another distinction, a chemical one. Magmas in general are mostly silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron and magnesium; these all go together to form silicate minerals, which make up at least 90 percent of all igneous rocks. Silicate minerals are made up largely of silica, SiO2 (as I tried to explain the one time I dared to take up mineralogy), but not entirely. Different magma bodies have different proportions of these materials.
Felsic rocks have the most silica, and end up consisting mostly of quartz and feldspar, with other things thrown in like mica. The dividing line seems to be 63% or more silica makes it a felsic rock. And the result is either granite (intrusive, slow cooling from magma) or rhyolite (extrusive, quick-cooling from lava, fine-grained). These rocks are usually fairly light in color, and have a relatively low density compared to the other sorts of igneous rocks. (That low density has very important consequences, so don’t forget it!)
Below, some of the minerals that appear in felsic rock, plus a picture of some granite from an obscure location that I picked totally at random (right).
Quartz
Various minerals of the feldspar family
Mica
Pikes Peak granite
Intermediate rocks are 52-63% silica, and the intrusive version is diorite while the extrusive one is andesite. You might ask, “intermediate between what, and what?” Well, intermediate between felsic and…
Mafic rocks are 45% to 52% silica. The intrusive, coarse-grained type is gabbro, while the fine grained type is basalt. In general, these rocks will have a lot of pyroxenes, olivines, and calcic plagioclase in them.
diopside, a pyroxene
olivine
Basaltic lava, still cooling
Anything less than 45% silica is ultramafic. The coarse grained, intrusive example is peridotite, while the fine grained ultramafic rocks are komatiite.
If you do a deep dive there are further and further fine-grained (sorry. OK, no I’m not) ways of classifying igneous rocks.
The average adult has heard of granite. He may have heard of basalt. The other six broad kinds of igneous rock are probably foreign to him.
Most lava flows are basaltic in nature. Most rocks that form deep underground (known as plutons) inside mountain ranges are granitic. So there’s both a compositional and textural distinction between lava and plutonic rock. At least, usually. The exceptions are notable when they happen.
(Every once in a while I hear a tourist opine that Pikes Peak must surely be a volcano. No…it’s made of granite–see the picture above–much like the Appalachians. Granite doesn’t happen in volcanoes (or if it does, it’s very rare). Tour guides must be really tired of this one.)
The Earth’s Crust
(More background)
The Earth has a layered structure. The below diagram shows (lower left) to scale, and the notional “pie wedge” at upper right is not to scale. (We have some notion of these layers because we can “watch” seismic waves curving and refracting at the boundaries between the layers. The liquid outer core, in fact, blocks some kinds of seismic waves completely. I have described this before.)
The crust is on average 35 kilometers thick (out of a total of 6371 (average) or 6378 (max) kilometers to the center of the Earth). There is also the lithosphere, the top 60 or so km of the Earth (note that the crust is part of the lithosphere). The mantle lies directly underneath the crust and goes down 2900 km or so; it’s divided into an upper and lower layer about 660 km down.
Most of the mantle is solid but does flow over time; the very topmost layer of it is a lot more rigid which is why it is grouped with the crust into the lithosphere.
In fact the boundary between crust and mantle is where there is a sudden shift in the speed of seismic waves; this is the Mohorovičić discontinuity which for some reason I can’t fathom gets abbreviated to “Moho.”
In some cases upper mantle material has ended up on the Earth’s surface, and it’s generally 55% olivine, 35% pyroxene and 5-10% calcium oxide and aluminum oxide minerals such as plagioclase, spinel, and garnet. In other words, the mantle is mafic. It’s also much more dense than the Earth’s crust, which means that over time the crust is likely to stay “up there” essentially floating on the mantle.
One other thing that the diagram does is to distinguishes between “continental” and “oceanic” crust. Other than the fact that the oceanic crust is a lot thinner than the continental crust, does it really make a difference? Both are largely silicate, but it turns out the ocean floors are, underneath the sediment layer, largely made of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. In other words the ocean floors are mafic. They’re also only about 5-10 km thick.
Continental crust on the other hand is mostly felsic and can be anywhere from 25-70 km thick. (Note that the continental crust includes the continental shelves; geologically speaking they’re part of the continents, not part of the oceans.) Some really thick areas of continental crust are the Tibetan plateau and the Altiplano next to the Andes, where the crust can be as thick as 80 km.
So continental crust is lighter and thicker than oceanic crust. One would think the composition would be about the same everywhere, and likely less difference in thickness too, but no we have these pronounced differences and it turns out we now know it’s for a very good reason.
Note that the difference in thickness is greater than the distance from the top of mount Everest to the ocean floor, This implies that where there are continents the continental crust drops further into the Earth than the oceanic crust.
In fact it ought to remind you of icebergs, floating on top of a liquid medium with with a large portion beneath the surface, or sticking into the mantle layer.
I recall reading somewhere (I can’t confirm it) that if (say) ten feet were to erode off the top of Pikes Peak, then (given a lot of time) the mountain would “bob” up about nine feet for a net loss of elevation of a whole foot. Clearly to erode the entire thing away (it sticks up about 8000 feet above the surrounding terrain), 80,000 feet or sixteen miles would have to erode away–not just 8000 feet.
Below is a diagram with contour lines of the thickness of Earth’s crust.
And now, with today’s ramble plus prior ones, you have the background to understand the story of the great geological revolution.
