VOLCANO MADNESS: Re: [Geology2] New Mexico Is Stretching, Slowly (but Surely?)

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Re: [Geology2] New Mexico Is Stretching, Slowly (but Surely?)

So sorry, Allison. I didn't mean to just leave this thread dangling for so long. I finally got my hands on a copy of the actual paper and today I will read it and interpret the facts therein. I always like to read the source before I form a major opinion. I do think that the remark at the end of the article re: controlling this event is lousy journalism and not part of the paper itself. But, I will make sure and report back.

For the moment, let's assume that this stretching of the crust is scientifically sound. What does it imply? For one, the stretching doesn't necessarily imply that a new rift is forming in the area. Look at the Basin and Range area of the Western US; that area has been going through the same process for millenia without forming a new rift and no one believes that such a thing is occurring. Death Valley is the result of such stretching of the crust, with plutonic blocks constantly shifting upwards at the edges.

Another example is the Gulf of California. Look at the graben and horst formation of the Colorado Desert beginning at Banning Pass. The land southward has dropped considerably due to the stretching of the crust from the East Pacific Rise far away to the south. At one point in the future, Yuma, AZ and Palm Springs, CA will boast of seaside real estate. In Death Valley and in the Salton Sink, you literally stand below sea level and the crust is at its thinnest within the entire US. There the crust is only a few miles deep, which has given rise to volcanoes in the recent past (geologically speaking). It would be a foolish venture to say that these places will never provide more volcanoes, but who is to say when that will occur?

The Salton Sea boasts of 5 such volcanic events and Death Valley contains the Long Valley volcano field, which recently made the news re: Ubehebe. Such news is a flash in the pan for the uninformed public, and news agencies pounce on any info that smacks of a major disaster. It is 2012 after all- lol. For the geological community, our disasters form over millions of years and we/they do not become overly excited at such info. In fact, the media, in this case, has taken this newly published paper and prognosticated a terrible outcome.

In a sense, I think I've answered your question here, but I'll report back when I've read the paper. I'm interested in two aspects of that paper: 1) the validity of their research and 2) their own predictions, if any, re: the future of the area of said research.

Stay tuned,
Lin

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Allison Loukanis <allison.m.loukanis@att.net> wrote:

Well I wondered. Is there any basis for the facts here? Allison

From: Lin Kerns <linkerns@gmail.com>
To: Geology2 <geology2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 7:20 AM
Subject: [Geology2] New Mexico Is Stretching, Slowly (but Surely?)

(This is in the running for worst geology-related (and perhaps all science) news article of 2012, according to my geologist sources.)

New Mexico Is Stretching, Slowly but Surely
By NICK CARBONE | Time.com – Mon, Jan 23, 2012

The driving distance between Phoenix and Dallas is getting farther. It's a minuscule difference -- not even a millimeter a year -- but it's a tangible phenomenon, and you can blame on the middleman: New Mexico. The Rio Grande Rift, fault line that bisects the state, is bursting at the seams, pushing apart New Mexico's borders and stretching the land around it.

But don't expect to straddle the fault line and have your legs ripped out from under you, unless you have centuries to wait: the state is getting just one inch wider every 40 years. Scientists calculate the Rio Grande Rift's pace of expansion as approximately 1.2 nanostrains per year. So it's less an expanding waistline than a stretchmark. Still, it's having an effect on hundreds of miles of surrounding terrain. According to the group of seven scientists from New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, who studied the Rio Grande Rift for more than four years before releasing their findings in the January 2012 issue of Geology Magazine, the pull of the canyon isn't a localized problem.

"We didn't expect it to be so spread out," University of Colorado geophysicist Anne Sheehan told the Albuquerque Journal. Indeed, the rift's movement hasn't been absorbed into the land directly around it, leading to a widespread stretching and rucking that has affected terrain in a radius of hundreds of miles -- and maybe even more, stretching not just New Mexico but Texas and Arizona as well.

The research team calls it a "distributed deformation," but we prefer to think of it as an America-shaped piece of taffy stretching endlessly, slowly but surely. And that should give you an idea of what will happen if this rifting phenomenon keeps occurring. It's hardly a visible effect, but it's an unexpected feature of the ever-changing landscape. The scientists plan to continue monitoring the 25 GPS units they've set up in the region to see if the pace keeps up. They're not yet sure if the rifting puts the geology of the region in peril. The stretching of the Earth's surface is easier to see at the edges of tectonic plates, where there are typically volcanoes or mountains, but movement on an continental rift is more mysterious. Fortunately, at the paltry rate it's happening, scientists will have centuries, if not millennia, to come up with a game plan for controlling it.

source

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