Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean

jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews: "If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."

Comments

Re:Gulf of Mexico

[thomst]

Also Just about every Tectonic model puts the formation of the Gulf starting to tear apart around Early Jurassic , Whereas the impact in question was around the Late Permian.

The Gulf of Mexico did not exist until the end of the Permian. Afterwards, there is a Gulf-sized hole in Pangaea, and, later, in Gondwanaland, as well.