Geophysics - Discussion & Research

reply to post by PuterMan


I can't make up my mind whether or the core is solid or liquid. So, I've try not to hold an opinion either way. When I try to envision our internal earth our magnetic field, my mind always turns to fluid dynamics and bubbles. Don't ask me to explain that one. Maybe next year. If I find a copy of "my bubbleman" on Johnny Carson, I'll post that and maybe an explaination will come to me. One that makes sense in english that is.

I found the Bubbleman. When I saw that you could make a cube out of spheres my universe changed.

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by PuterMan

Plasma cosmology. Interesting theory. Guess it's the same as the "Electric Universe" theory, based on the idea that as 99.9% of the Universe is made up of plasma - electrically charged gas?

reply to post by PuterMan

Maybe I should have said Outer Core?
The outer core is the layer beneath the mantle. It is supposed to be made of liquid iron and nickel. Complex convection currents give rise to a dynamo effect which is responsible for the Earth's magnetic field, and then we have the inner core which is supposed to be made of solid iron and nickel. Temperatures in the core are thought to be in the region of 5000-6000°c and it's solid due to the massive pressure.
Now all of this is theory.

I'm not really into this and have asked me the same question as you. Why do we have magnetic fields on the sun?

What I do know is that In most materials the magnetic moments are all opposed and cancel out, but in some an electron in each atom can be made to align predominately in one direction.

When it comes to the Sun, then I know two theories regarding the magnetic fields there.
One is that the Sun is made of positively charged ions. An atom that has become electrically charged by the gain or loss of one or more electrons. and negatively charged electrons. A negatively charged elementary particle that normally resides outside (but is bound to) the nucleus of an atom. In a state of matter called plasma. Plasma consists of a gas heated to sufficiently high temperatures that the atoms ionize. The properties of the gas are controlled by electromagnetic forces among constituent ions and electrons, which results in a different type of behavior. Plasma is often considered the fourth state of matter (besides solid, liquid, and gas). Most of the matter in the Universe is in the plasma state.., so, since the Sun is made of charged particles, magnetic fields are created by the movement of the particles.

Then we have Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry who believes that iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. In a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Fusion Energy, Manuel asserts that the "standard solar model" - which assumes that the sun's core is made of hydrogen - has led to misunderstandings of how such solar flares occur, as well as inaccurate views on the nature of global climate change.

reply to post by PuterMan


Not "liquid metal" ? than what? what explains the diffraction of primary waves and the absence of shear waves...
The current belief of the core being composed mainly of Fe+Ni is not just tied to the electromagnetism field of the planet but also to the fact that these metallic elements are the dominating elements found in the solar system (I'm guessing mostly asteroids/meteors here). I agree that this is a flimsy idea due to the fact that these space rocks are probably not from any planet's core; but there are also the hot spot volcanic activity's witch, from what we've been taught, have they're magma source very deep in the planet: we're talking about mantle - outer core limit.. and the analysis of the chemical compozition of these magma's might also point to the high % of iron in the deep earth.

What I want to find an explanation for now is why would the planet cool down from the inside out... the whole inner core being a process of cooling over billions of years thing... I mean that doesn't seem to make sense to me now... why wouldn't it just cool from the outer core to the inner. I'm on the hunt for an explanation now.

I have to admit I don't know much about plasma cosmology, but I'll try to read up on it and see how you say it would explain the magnetism of a planet.

reply to post by Odyssian


I may be wrong possibly about the metal - I have been researching further - it just seemed nonsensical to me BUt have a read of this PDF file. An Integrated Alternative Conceptual Framework to Heat Engine Earth, Plate Tectonics, and Elastic Rebound

Obviously who ever that was that said I might possibly be wrong was not me

That PDF is a good read (so far). Just getting in to it.

reply to post by Roald


Hi Roald, yes the theories are on and the same. What I have found so far seems to make sense to me. See the PDF in the post above.

I am assembling a page on this here

reply to post by Odyssian

Everything else, including things such as the Earth having an iron core, is really only speculation. Even the seismology-derived data may not be especially accurate -- seismology predicted that the Kola drillhole would yield sedimentary rock to 4.7 km, then 2.3 km of granite, and basalt below 7.0 km. In actual fact the bore yielded sedimentary rocks to more than 7.0 km, and granite after that to the 12.3 km maximum reached, with no basalt found.

Source

And more stuff:

EXCESS MASS STRESS TECTONICS. (EMST) - PDF File

How many hot spots move west? That's Puterman's question.
I don't know the answer, but is that a trick question? I thought the hot spots stayed still and the plates moved over the top of them? The Australian plate is supposedly moving north and several volcanos have formed over millenia because of this hot spot which is now reportedly south of the continent. But I can't help but wonder if hot spots can also change position, and that the ones which previously affected the eastern Australian region are now the Kermadecs/New Zealand region. Therefore the hotspots would have had to have moved east, or the Australian plate would have to have had moved west at some point. And who's to say that the movement of a plate has always been in the same direction?

I have to tell you this. I was rolling a table tennis ball in my son's sandpit. Well more like rotating it as I moved it through the sand. And the pattern it made was so similar to the google earth pic of the mid atlantic ridge that I had this vision of some huge heavenly body rolling over the earth. I know - way out there isn't it? Added thought: isn't the moon moving away from the Earth? So how close has it been? Question everything.

reply to post by zenius

How many hot spots move west? That's Puterman's question.
I don't know the answer, but is that a trick question?

Sort of!

I thought the hot spots stayed still and the plates moved over the top of them?

Not meaning to be rude but no, you have accepted that the hot spots stay still and the plates move over them as that is the gospel view, but is it right? You have not actually thought about it (not being rude) because there was not reason for you to do so.

I may be wrong but I believe that generally hot spots are under plates that move west. i.e. the track of the hot spot is east, except that I find the following view much more acceptable and logical.

The Earth has a core that rotates. This is known because we are on it I am going to keep this simple for the moment. As the core rotates it drags round the rest of the mantle etc with it. That introduces the word 'drag'. The outer layers of the Earth would be rotating fractionally slower because of drag. This seems reasonable. By the same token that atmosphere also rotates with us, but again with drag.

A very small amount of drag would mean that the core, and inner areas, were actually rotating very slightly faster than the outer layers. A plume, hot spot or whatever you want to call it, being attached to the inner layer would move with the core, but again with some drag but let's leave out the ascending drag for the moment.

To cut a long story short for a moment, the net effect is that the hot spot is actually moving relatively under the crust, or plates if you wish, and not the other way round. How in the hell does the crust mange to move against the rotation of the Earth? It does not. In fact I would go as far as to suggest that it cannot.

This is why hot spots appear to all travel east as the land is slower to do a complete revolution than the centre. It is small, but it is real.

Added thought: isn't the moon moving away from the Earth? So how close has it been?

The figure that sticks in my head is around 30,000km.

Question everything.

Question everything always!

reply to post by PuterMan


Ok, I think I understand what you are saying. You have a perfectly logical argument. So it IS possible that the Kermadec/NZ line could have once existed along eastern Australia according you what you are saying. That always seemed to make more sense than one hot spot affecting the whole lot over time.

Do you believe the moon has never been closer than 30,000km? I personally believe it has been so close that it had major influences on earth's geography. But I'm sure that would be laughable to many people.

My way of thinking is that the crust is the crust. There are no 'plates'. Over time, the crust has been put under pressures of heating/cooling and impacts from asteroids, comets or larger bodies. This has created stresses and weaknesses in the crust as well as as the differences in general land height compared to ocean depths. These areas are where fault lines exist and hot spots have been created.
Then put in your idea of drag and we can see how the hot spots have moved over time and how the faults are put under continual pressure which causes vertical and horizontal land movement.

reply to post by zenius


You are thinking along the right lines.

How does cooling affect a spherical solid body?

I hope i posted this in the right place, if not could someone move it plz

A powerful earthquake struck Friday off the coast of Chile, throwing a scare into residents nearly a year after a massive tremor and tsunami wreaked death and destruction in the same region. There was no initial reports of casualties or damage, but media reports said the quake was felt in a wide area of central Chile, where some residents evacuated coastal areas as a precaution.

The US Geological Survey and Chile's National Emergency Office (ONEMI) said the quake occurred in the Pacific some 70 kilometers (45 kilometers) from the city of Concepcion.

The USGS initially reported a major 7.0 magnitude, and later revised that to 6.8, which can still cause devastation.

Source Yahoo News

reply to post by orinoco4

I hope i posted this in the right place, if not could someone move it plz

Hi orinoco4. Not really but never mind. The best thread would have been QuakeWatch 2011

You will find that we pick up on these things very quickly.

Large quakes will often get their own thread, otherwise you will find them in the above.

reply to post by PuterMan re: crustal movement and hot spots


Interesting POV, I like it, although I wonder how you negate the rock record of eastward moving oceanic plates? It's a pretty solid mass of data to get around. But your logic is grounded, and the idea of plates pressing eastward seems at first blush to be problematic. You'd probably have to consult a tectonic geophysist on the understood forces at work with the earth's rotation. We're fresh out of them at ISU
If there were forces acting against eastward moving plates to some degree, We should see midocean ridges offset towards the corresponding west coasts.

The idea that the plume locations are gradually moving makes perfect sense though. Pretty intuitive really.

I wonder if hotspots aren't correlated to concentrations of radioisotopes in the lithosphere. The only issue in my mind is that of weight. We see salt domes rise and displace strata that seems impossible, but lighter materials rise. So something heavy, in relative concentration, would fall over the eons. Still need to work that one out. It might be in the depostion of U though, veiny, not lithic...

Gah, now you have my brain working, and it's the weekend! (I do love closing my eyes and building 3D models in my head though!)

reply to post by PuterMan


I don't know how cooling affects a solid spherical body. Thoughts at the time were that sudden cooling causes cracking in some materiels eg glass. Thermal shock in pottery is another example. So I was thinking of cracking of the crust causing weaknesses and what 'appears' to be plates.

reply to post by blamethegreys

So something heavy, in relative concentration, would fall over the eons

Yup, keep thinking.

By the way the dating of the rocks in the mid Atlantic etc is fiddled it would seem. One example - amongst many - a 635 million year old rock sample was simply discounted because it should have been in a 10 million year layer.

Data was taken that provided the best fit to what they wished to achieve.

Always question. Do not believe anything.

I have to say that I cannot take credit for the theory even though I arrived there myself. David Pratt also arrived there long before me. With regard to the dating above take a look at this.

From that page:

For instance, Reynolds and Clay (1977), reporting on a Proterozoic date (635 million years) near the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, wrote that the age must be wrong because the theoretical age of the site was only about 10 million years.

Now some of his stuff is way out of my comfort zone when it comes to the origins of man, but I am very comfortable with his tectonics theories.

I am sort of jumping the gun a bit here because I have not put this all together yet. I only found his site yesterday and was a bit gobsmacked when I found we were going along the same lines. I have always considered subduction to be suspect.

BTW @Zenius. Spheroidal shrinking causes lensed cracking (according to Pratt) which may well explain the 45 degree angle of the Benioff zones (again according to Pratt) which always was an curious enigma. Why 45 deg. This 45 deg thing is one of the items I was trying to resolve before presenting the idea.

Surge Tectonics: A New Hypothesis of Global Geodynamics

This monograph presents an integrated view of the origin of continents, ocean basins, mountain belts and other tectonic features. It is shown that all tectonic belts originate through a single mechanism and that this mechanism can be described in terms of the laws of physics, especially Newton's three laws of motion, and their derivatives - Pascal's law, Stokes's law, the Peach-Köhler force (a derivative of the law of gravity), Poiseuille's law, the Navier-Stokes equations and the Navier-Coulomb maximum stress theory.
This book will be of interest to scientists and researchers in many disciplines, not just geology and geophysics, but also fluid mechanics and related fields. The targeted audience includes advanced geology and geophysics majors, graduate students at all levels and all persons involved in structural geology, tectonics, igneous geochemistry and mineral exploration.

139,95 € (B******S)

This book supposedly explains this part of the tectonics document.

An alternative view of Benioff zones is that they are very ancient contraction fractures produced by the cooling of the earth (Meyerhoff et al., 1992b, 1996a). The fact that the upper part of the Benioff zones usually dips at less than 45° and the lower part at more than 45° suggests that the lithosphere is under compression and the lower mantle under tension. Furthermore, since a contracting sphere fractures along great circles (Bucher, 1956), this would account for the fact that both the circum-Pacific seismotectonic belt and the Alpine-Himalayan (Tethyan) belt lie on approximate circles. Finally, instead of oceanic crust being absorbed beneath the continents along ocean trenches, continents may actually be overriding adjacent oceanic areas to a limited extent, as is indicated by the historical geology of China, Indonesia, and the western Americas (Storetvedt, 1997; Pratsch, 1986; Krebs, 1975).

I hate these people that charge for documentation. The research is paid for, yet these so called 'scientific publications' ride on the back of it.


Edit: Good news. This may be a part of it.

A New Global Theory of the Earth's Dynamics

This one links in my feelings about the weight of atmosphere. This surge channel hypothesis is getting extremely interesting.

Surge tectonics is based on the concept that the lithosphere (the outer 150-200 km) of the Earth contains a worldwide network of deformable magna channels called surge channels, in which partial melt is in motion. A surge channel is a conduit for magma rise from the asthenosphere, the partially molten layer under the lithosphere. In summary, the Earth above the strictosphere, the hard mantle below the asthenosphere, resembles a giant hydraulic press comprising a containment vessel (the surge channel system), the fluid (magma) and a trigger mechanism (global lithosphere collapse into the asthenosphere when the latter becomes too weak to support it dynamically).

Source

The more I am reading the more I am getting the feeling that the current model is VERY wrong.



This seems to have some corroborative value, especially since it is IEEE.

El Nino tectonic modulation in the Pacific Basin

Interesting source: Geophys. Div., Naval Oceanogr. Office, Stennis Space Center, MS


Got to give you this one: Earth Geodynamic Hypotheses Updated (PDF)

A paper by Christian Smoot who is well into these alternative theories. A good read as far as I can see in the first few pages. Going back to it now.

From the Smoot article referenced above:

Hailed by the ocean floor community as the universal panacea, the plate-tectonic hypothesis was adopted in toto. This hypothesis has been proposed to be one of the five greatest scientific paradigms ever brought forward, being listed on an equal footing with the periodic tables in chemistry, the Big Bang theory in astronomy, evolution in biology, and Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics

Why is it that the 5 greatest scientific paradigms ever brought forward are all dubious at best?

End of page 22, start of page 23. Um, panic - rethink in order - even hotspots and mantle plumes in doubt (I was aware of this)

@blamethegreys - this document could seriously damage your geological health!

I am feeling very sombre in a way. Here is yet another example of the suppression of data by the Church Of Geology.

I have seriously considered in the past week taking a BSc in Geology and even gone as far as getting details from the Open University.

I think I shall reconsider that in the light of the complete travesty outlined in the PDF document below.

Ocean Survey Program (OSP) Bathymetry History : Jousting with Tectonic windmills

It is patently obvious that the leaders of the Church are coaching the new comers (who I do not blame for their views) and suppressing the means for the world to move forward in understanding. It is also obvious that the PTB (i.e Government institutions such as the Navy) are instrumental in this suppression.

In my opinion Geologists appear to have sunk to the same depths as Climatologists, or are the publications solely to blame?