Slashdot Mirror
Gravitational Anomalies Beneath Mountains Point To Isostasy of Earth's Crust
StartsWithABang writes: Imagine you wanted to know what your acceleration was anywhere on Earth; imagine that simply saying "9.81 m/s^2" wasn't good enough. What would you need to account for? Sure, there are the obvious things: the Earth's rotation and its various altitudes and different points. Surely, the farther away you are from Earth's center, the less your acceleration's going to be. But what might come as a surprise is that if you went up to the peak of the highest mountains, not only would the acceleration due to gravity be its lowest, but there'd also be less mass beneath your feet than at any other location.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I had to read TFA to figure out what isostatic is.
"Bizarrely enough, if we wanted to reach the Earth’s mantle, our best bet would be to dive down to the ocean floor and dig there; we’d “only” have to go through maybe 3 km of crust, as opposed to upwards of 25 km atop the Himalayas. This concept is known as isostatic compensation, and was actually uncovered by the famed British astronomer George Airy."
Less mass beneath my feet? That depends very much on how you measure "beneath", right? I'd argue that if your load is being distributed into something, it's beneath you. If I'm standing on a mountain which is sufficiently sharply pointed, then almost the entire mountain might be engaged in supporting my weight — cue fat jokes. But anything it's standing on is going to be the same thing, so wouldn't that make it more mass "beneath" my feet?
Anyway, I RTFA (my geek card is in the mail, it should be back at the processing facility shortly) and the article is all gushily excited that "thereâ(TM)s far more crust underneath the mountains than there is in the oceans!" Wait, was this a surprise to anyone? Mountains happen when earth gets shoved up into the air. They're not pimples.
So in short, the article comes to completely the opposite conclusion of the truth: they say that "if you wanted the least amount of mass beneath your feet, youâ(TM)d climb up to the peak of the highest mountain" when in fact, there is more mass beneath your feet if you stand on a mountain than if you stand on the seabed or in a valley, because of all the mass that by definition can't be beneath your feet if you're standing at a lower altitude.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mass has a relationship with density. The crust is less dense that the mantle, so more crust=less mass. The mountains float on the mantle in a similar way to icebergs on water, ie they displace mantle beneath them, resulting in a 1-you-wide segment down to the core of the earth that contains more crust and less mantle, therefore containing less mass.
It's interesting the implications of this: we think of mountains as these giant, immovable things, culturally and linguistically used as a reference point of something solid and immutable. And yet, the reality is that they are comparably the soft fluffy marshmallows floating on top of a dense, thick liquid. I don't think it detracts from their majestic nature any, but I won't look at mountains the same, knowing they are in fact the "lighter" parts of the Earth - and the reminder that they float!
Science is fun, especially when it comes up with things that to the casual, uninformed observer are so counter-intuitive. This paints a beautiful picture.
Also, it goes to show that mountain-climbing is a great way to lose weight!
Measure. It.
I spent a very, very long week with developers and network architects arguing about the subtle disrepencies of their layouts and software and how their software works. And eventually, I took actual measurements and showed that for far less money, using the simplest tools provided the faster solution at a tiny fraction of the complexity and cost when you _actually measured things_.
This has been a consistent lesson throughout my career. People theorize and postulate endlessly with complex analysys and essentially fraudulent testcases, and don't examine it in the real world.
Just. Measure. It.
All of the earth crust floats. Mountains are higher because the rock beneath them is lighter, hotter, or thicker than elsewhere. Continental crust does not subduct because it is the result of island arc subduction related magmatism which produces metal poor rocks due to fractional melting, producing a rock that is lighter than mantle. Oceanic crust is mafic and contains more metals, is more dense, and has similar composition to the mantle, so it tends to subduct easily. Good we are covering basic geology 101 for the benefit of all here.
I think you're missing the point
Actually he has a very good point. The article is wrong: there is just as much mass "beneath your feet" since technically the entire planet is beneath your feet. The point is that the mass is, on average, located further from your feet near a mountain because of the thick crust which floats on, and displaces, the far denser mantle. The gravitational field depends not just on the mass but on the distance as well.
What I don't understand is how this counts as 'news'. The effect was discovered by the British Trigonometric Survey of India where they noticed a discrepancy in their measurements caused by the fact that the 'vertical' was not the same near the Himalayas. This was well over 100 years ago...hardly news.
Really? You'd prefer to literally fly off on a tangent?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think is was discovered that mountains 'float' when they did the survey of India back in the 1700 and 1800's. The summary makes it sound like it is news. It is not. I learned about it as a geophysics undergraduate.
Astonishingly, not everyone was ever a geophysics undergraduate.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No.
The mountains are not simply floating on the mantle. The mountains are attached to, and forced into position by, the entirety of the crustal plate. The mantle displaced is not entirely local.