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

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (8612)	1/8/2008 7:54:46 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12247

Dennis, ironically, although they think they are joking, they are correct. As ranted by Mq for decades now [since 1983] subduction, plate tectonics, oil formation, volcanoes are produced and lubricated by oil. With the huge oil and gas extraction industry and the burning of all that carbon, the process has been accelerated. Of course the acceleration of the continents hasn't been sufficient to cause bow waves [as they said], but that doesn't mean there is none. To explain. Let's start with plants in the ocean, such as algae. They are the bottom of the food chain [feeding on CO2 produced by the dead on land]. They are eaten by micro-organisms which are eaten by bigger and bigger beasties until killer whales and blue whales, great white sharks and others do their thing. They all die when they have done their dash. Umpty mega billion tons of these dead things fall to the bottom. Radiolarian ooze by the kilometre piles up. Hagfish, L M Ericsson, Nokia, Broadcom and other bottom feeders slime their way around, eating what's available, leaving the rest to accumulate in kilometres of marine sediment loaded with organic material. The ocean conveyor belt due to plate tectonics sends the oceanic crust trundling along towards continental crust and subduction zones. When it gets there, the lighter continental crust rides up over the ocean plate. There is a flysch wedge of sedimentary layer built up and the rest of the sedimentary layer acts like a vast lubrication layer so the crust can slide smoothly into the depths of the mantle. en.wikipedia.org "Smoothly" includes earthquakes as things stick and release and get pushed around by the enormity of the process. As the sedimentary organic layers are subducted, they get hot. Very very hot. It's like Hell's kitchen, except that from this Hell there is escape in the form of buoyancy of the organic materials along with magma into volcanic chambers and through cracks and permeability places into the sedimentary layers where the organics can get caught in traps, waiting for people to come and dig it out again. In the huge pressures and high temperature of that cooker, the chemistry produces hydrocarbons as methane, ethane, propane, butane, etc down to very heavy oils. As those light organics are stripped out of the subducting crust to fuel volcanoes and fill sedimentary layers, the remainder sinks for recycling. Elsewhere under the ocean, there is upwelling of mantle into the mid oceanic ridges as the subducted remaining hydrocarbons push their way to the surface again, pushing the existing crust out of the way. By taking the oil, gas and coal out of the ground and putting it back into the air as CO2 and thence into the oceans as the CO2 dissolves, humans have accelerated the process. Vast stores of carbon have been stored for umpty eons, only to be dug up in a century and put back into the process, which is accelerating continental drift. When the resultant oceanic organic material makes it back to the volcanic regions, there will be a huge increase in volcano activity. It's true that the main effects won't be noticed for a very long time, but we are building a very serious problem for the future. Already, deposits near subduction zones have increased and when those deposits reach Hell's Kitchen, the results will be clear! The tsunami in Indonesia was an example of what will happen and that event could well have been triggered by the process. 1930s drivers in the USA have caused a tsunami in the 21st century in a process which is not immediately obvious. I will not mention the San Andreas fault which of course is also propelled by the process. When bridges in California fall down on cars during earthquakes, the drivers will not realize that it was their ancestors who caused it. Mqurice