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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Drew Williams who wrote (2251)	10/6/2000 9:42:02 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12247

OT*Tectonic Plates* Drew, There was never a supercontinent Pangea. That's a "Just So" story. Here's my version: The landmasses float around propelled by convection currents which upwell, cool, freeze and spread, sinking under the landmasses [the land being made of lower density minerals than the ocean floor]. For all continents to be in one place at one time, there would have had to have been a super-vast downcurrent under the middle of that mass with oceanic crust being fed into subduction zones all around the periphery of the mass. That's not how convection currents in a free-floating sphere work. They don't herd landmasses into one place. A sinking ocean crust can't 'pull' 1000s of kilometres of fractured rock into a subduction zone. The ocean crust sinks by way of density into subduction and is replenished by upwelling 1000s of kilometres away at the other end of the 'conveyor belt'. The idea of a single supercontinent derives from the fact that all continents have been in contact from time to time as shown by geological and biological effects. But that doesn't mean they were all there simultaneously. That's my theory anyway. Pangea Ultima might nevertheless be a good name for SpinCo. Of course the continents are floating. They have been for a billion years [and more]. Floating around and bumping into each other. They have NOT gone under other than in the case of Ophiolites, which are ocean crust which contrived to get up on top of land masses in some parts of the earth around the edge of subduction zones. Ophiolites correlate well with oil fields. If anyone is looking for an easy way to identify oil prospectivity - it's more reliable than gas leaks Coots - in the early 1980s I thought I'd hit on a cunning way to find oil, but decided it was not discriminating enough, but it's a handy rule of thumb. As a free bonus, here's my "Just So" story for how oil forms. Fishes and other beasties fall to the ocean floor. Hagfish might eat them, but they too die! They get buried. The ocean floor gradually gets subducted [at about 10cm a year in lots of places so it isn't all that slow]. 100km [or so] under the earth in the subduction zone, there is very high pressure and lots of heat too. The organic compounds and water float up through the crust leaving the minerals to keep sinking. They react and form crude oil, methane and other hydocarbons. Some ends up stuck in sedimentary layers. Some escapes to the surface [and your new company finds it Coots]. Some ends up sitting in the magma chamber under volcanoes, waiting for the day that the pressure up exceeds the pressure down at which time volcanoes erupt with a big bang fueled by that gas. Oil breaks up into gas at high temperatures unless confined by enormous pressure. Lake Taupo is a very, very BIG volcano and one day it is going to go off in a monstrous phreatomagmatic eruption which will be in your newspapers and the ash from which will be in your tea and coffee, hair and computer. That will happen in the next 100 years, with a 1:5 probability. It will happen when the moon and sun are aligned and ground water levels are low! Not because of astrology, but because of tides in the earth's crust. Volcanoes go bang because the liquids in the column coming up from deep down convert to gas when the pressure is off, which provides the huge expansion in an eruption. Especially in one such as Taupo where pumice is formed. Pumice is a very light rock, full of gas. You can lift a piece of pumice almost as big as yourself. It's about 70% the density of water. Mqurice