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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."
Did anyone else read the headline and think, "Great, another ridiculous claim about the damage being wreaked by wireless network signals"?
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Is that why the oil wells keep catching fire?
The author seems to imply that the Columbia River Basalts were generated by the mantle plume, a supposition that isn't in the paper's abstract. Far as I know the jury's still out there. Here's a pdf of a 2007 paper covering the same topic; or, if that won't open for you like it isn't for me at the moment, here's the Google Quick View version.
Perhaps you could fix the Wikipedia article adding that information. Remember, citations are always needed.
The East will rise again!
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I was hoping for a quiet weekend at home, and now it looks like I'll have to deal with an apocalyptic volcano that's going around breaking plates, wearing an ultra hot mantle.
Great.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
A lot of people don't realize the gulf of mexico was formed by a giant hot spot like yellowstone.
Unless it wasn't(pdf).
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If you look at the illustration in the article (and I assume in the original paper, I have access but have to login to a vpn and so on, I will see later since I'm interested), it's quite clear what happened and it's really not what you might think when you hear it "shredded" a tectonic plate. I think what's being implied is that it shredded the plate at the surface, but it happened far underground, in the mantle.
As the subducting plate subducts, it goes down into the mantle and in this case the mantle plume weakened it (by getting into fractures or whatever) and broke it off. So the slab disappears down into the mantle eventually (though these can stick around for years, detached). It's very interesting, but the same thing often happens without being cut off by a mantle plume. It's more or less a guaranteed result in a subduction zone, because the subducting slab isn't strong enough to support its own weight pulling on it after a certain point. Makes absolute sense if you look at a diagram of how subduction works.
Subducting slabs can also be cut off by things like strike-slip faults, which IIRC happened in northern California as a result of the San Andreas (don't quote me on that though). You can see the slabs in the mantle by various imaging techniques.
IAAGGS
Considering that they are talking there about ~20 millon years, could be as dramatic as the slow, gradual, taking millon years appearence of a new ocean in the middle of africa. Could eventually lead to a different world? probably. But could lead to catastrophic events per se, in the next i.e. 10000 years ? Don't think so... well, unless the supervolcano there decides to explode pretty soon, and that have any chance to make things even worse.
One problem with tapping Yellowstone is that the geothermal fields are almost entirely within Park boundaries. Do keep in mind that the reason for Yellowstone becoming the world's first national park was to preserve it by preventing development.
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