Power of Geologic Forces


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More pictures here.

  • random_eddie

    Is this the new Devo album cover?

  • That's what they want you to think...

  • HenryBowman419

    Most people have no concept whatsoever of the time taken to deform rocks. It is literally beyond most people's imaginations.

  • slocum

    I dunno -- it seems to me there are pretty easy ways to conceptualize large numbers. Take pixels on a computer screen. You can see one with you naked eye (a 'stuck pixel' on a defective screen is easily visible). There are a little less than 2000 pixels in a row on an HD screen and a little over a 1000 rows. Still easy to grasp. OK -- that's about 2 million pixels. Consider an office building with 50 computer screens in it. That's 100 million pixels -- which is how many years you have to go back to get to the middle of the Cretaceous period.

  • FelineCannonball

    Nice pictures!

    Here in California it just takes a million years or so to turn mountains on their side. The transverse range is being chopped, pushed up, rotated, and tilted like an onion on a butcher's block. As a geologist the weird stuff is the flat lying Archean rocks in Australia.

    If you want to see impressive -- this collision takes the cake in terms of preserved events: http://news.agu.org/press-release/scientists-reconstruct-ancient-impact-that-dwarfs-dinosaur-extinction-blast/

    It dropped a foot of ejecta debris around the globe, incinerated any life not buried meters deep, boiled oceans. . . .