by D. Middleton, Feb 5, 2021 in WUWT
An upwelling of rock beneath the Atlantic may drive continents apart
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge may play a more active role in plate tectonics than thought
By Maria Temming
FEBRUARY 4, 2021
An upsurge of hot rock from deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean may be driving the continents on either side apart.
The Americas are moving away from Europe and Africa by a few centimeters each year, as the tectonic plates underlying those continents drift apart. Researchers typically think tectonic plates separate as the distant edges of those plates sink down into Earth’s mantle, creating a gap (SN: 1/13/21). Material from the upper mantle then seeps up through the rift between the plates to fill in the seafloor.
But new seismic data from the Atlantic Ocean floor show that hot rock is welling up beneath a seafloor rift called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from hundreds of kilometers deep in Earth’s mantle. This suggests that material rising up under the ridge is not just a passive response to tectonic plates sliding apart. Rather, deep rock pushing toward Earth’s surface may be driving a wedge between the plates that helps separate them, researchers report online January 27 in Nature.
A better understanding of plate tectonics — which causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions — could help people better prepare for these natural disasters (SN: 9/3/17).
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by P. Gosselin, Feb 5, 2021 in NoTricksZone
This is an outstanding reference. Using the table of contents the reader can conveniently look up the topic that’s of interest. The ebook has been downloaded over 10,000 times so far.
The 449-page book contains 120 figures and 177 equations and concludes that climate change is mostly about politically-fanned fear, and based very little on hard science.
Predictions of gloom haven’t come true
According to Poyet, a geologist, the worse climate predictions have been made for 50 years and none of them has ever become true. For example, despite the unsupported claims that the Maldives islands would be submerged by 2050, 97% of them have grown so far, for various reasons having nothing to do with “climate change”.
Also 50 years ago, the first Earth Day promoted ice age fears, and environmentalist Nigel Calder (later a prominent AGW skeptic) warned: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
IPCC ignores vast majority of the science
While IPCC-affiliated scientists claim man to been behind the climate change of the past decades, Poyet’s book shows that this can only be concluded if one ignores all other factors. Fig 12, of his book, for example, depicts the natural fluctuations witnessed during the Holocene.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
