Giant blob found deep beneath Nevada

Giant blob found deep beneath Nevada

www.msnbc.msn.com

Hidden beneath the U.S. West's Great Basin, scientists have spied a giant blob of rocky material dripping like honey.

John West of Arizona State University said the blob is between about 30 miles and 60 miles in diameter (between 50 km and 100 km) and extends from a depth of about 47 miles to at least 310 miles (75 km to 500 km) beneath Earth's surface.

The team thinks this drip started some 15 million to 20 million years ago and probably detached from the overlying plate only recently.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.nsf.gov
www.nature.com

At first I thought this was some kind of living entity cruising around in the earth's mantle. Apparently, it is a piece of detached crust that is heavier than the mantle it is sinking into and is drawing material down after it. An area on the surface of the Great Basin above is contracting behind it. This happens to be the only part of the Great Basin that is contracting, the rest is expanding.

Interesting to see the crust and mantle of the earth behaving under these circumstances like liquids of differing viscosity.

www.msnbc.msn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

ahhh BOO

I was hoping for some monster action.



Great eye catching headline.

Then my second idea was a giant blob of oil.

For a second there I thought we were gonna see people running in fear. Then I find out its just the Earth...

Interesting find.

dripping? hahah what if it's the heart of the Earth?

Nice find. I thought about the same fore a moment. A+ on the headline.

In Nevada? I wonder if anything stays liquefied there...

So funny, I wonder if this will cause a large depression to form in earth or a sinkhole. How cool would that be a huge 20 mile wide sinkhole.

reply to post by Icarus Rising



Ahhh... I was having a sudden Cthulhu mythos thought. Didn't Lovecraft write a story about a giant blob under the US?

Yeah that headline made me chuckle.

Hehehe...giant blob.

"The team thinks this drip started some 15 million to 20 million years ago"

Wow, this drip started 20 million years ago? That's.. a long time to drip.

So they found alien life in the earth?

Last week they found alien life on another planet didn't they? Geeze, it's really starting to show up everywhere now.

Originally posted by Illuminatus I
So they found alien life in the earth?

Last week they found alien life on another planet didn't they? Geeze, it's really starting to show up everywhere now.

It's...rocky material. No alien life here.

Originally posted by Kaytagg
"The team thinks this drip started some 15 million to 20 million years ago"

Wow, this drip started 20 million years ago? That's.. a long time to drip.

What ever or whomever was living on earth before us left the tap running. I dont wanna see that bill

Reminds me of the old horror flick - the little girl finds a rock in the desert - takes it home - it grows into a really scary huge alien monster cool looking thing that kills millions....

Oh wait. Wow to think I got all psyched it was something like that. :O

Great find! S&F

All alien-blob tongue-in-cheek comments aside, this is really a very interesting geological anomaly. The NSF article states:

"Many in the scientific community thought it couldn't be a drip because there wasn't any elevation change or surface manifestation, and a drip has historically always been connected with major surface changes," says West.

"But those features aren't required to have the drip. Under certain conditions, like in the Great Basin, drips can form with little or no corresponding changes in surface topography or volcanic activity."

Maybe the surface changes just haven't manifested yet? It seems to me that when a big chunk of the lithosphere breaks off like this and sinks into the mantle, it will eventually start to melt, and the lighter materials will rise straight back up the "neck" of the drip and back out onto the surface at the point of contraction in the form of volcanic activity.

Maybe what we are witnessing here is the gestation stages of a volcano or caldera.

Dean Koontz(I think) wrote a book about a giant blob that dripped.

It turned out to be a living entity, millions of years old,caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and the dissappearance at Roanoke. It absourbed information we have in our brains and convinced itself that it was the devil.

Maybe Koontz was just writing a documentary about this blob?

I guess from reading the articles on this, the actually did tomography on the feature, but no pics that I have seen to support the dripping blob. Just wondering how they know it dripping?? I was kind hoping for a huge magma chamber and a huge sink hole.

www.globalsecurity.org...

That "giant blob" is a mess of molten lava left from the nuclear testing facilities nearby. Amazing that they didn't pick up on this one.

reply to post by MoonChild02


That's an interesting corelation. Tonopah Test Range is a little further south and west than I would expect for a lithospheric drip located in central Nevada. There was a lot of underground nuclear testing throughout the Great Basin area in the 50's and 60's. The Nature article linked in my OP states:

The drip tilts to the northeast—opposite to the motion of the North American plate in the hotspot reference frame—and thereby indicates northeast-directed regional mantle flow.

I wonder why some features sink in, while others explode out?

I would love to hear from someone who knows the answer to that one, It seems contradictory. I would expect there to be equal pressurization in a sphere. Does it have something to do with the earth not being truly spherical, or some difference in pressurization due to the rotation around the axis?