Physics – Geophysics
Scientific paper
Sep 2004
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004eostr..85..338v&link_type=abstract
EOS Transactions, AGU, Volume 85, Issue 36, p. 338-338
Physics
Geophysics
1
Marine Geology And Geophysics: Plate Tectonics (8150, 8155, 8157, 8158), History Of Geophysics: Tectonophysics, Marine Geology And Geophysics: Midocean Ridge Processes
Scientific paper
Nature often replicates her processes at different scales of space and time in differing media. Here a tree-trunk cross section I am preparing for a dendrochronological display at the Battle Creek Cypress Swamp Nature Sanctuary (Calvert County, Maryland) dried and cracked in a way that replicates practically all the planform features found along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge (see Figure 1). The left-lateral offset of saw marks, contrasting with the right-lateral ``rift'' offset, even illustrates the distinction between transcurrent (strike-slip) and transform faults, the latter only recognized as a geologic feature, by J. Tuzo Wilson, in 1965. However, wood cracking is but one of many examples of natural processes that replicate one or several elements of lithospheric plate tectonics. Many of these examples occur in everyday venues and thus make great teaching aids, ``teachable'' from primary school to university levels. Plate tectonics, the dominant process of Earth geology, also occurs in miniature on the surface of some lava lakes, and as ``ice plate tectonics'' on our frozen seas and lakes. Ice tectonics also happens at larger spatial and temporal scales on the Jovian moons Europa and perhaps Ganymede. Tabletop plate tectonics, in which a molten-paraffin ``asthenosphere'' is surfaced by a skin of congealing wax ``plates,'' first replicated Mid-Oceanic Ridge type seafloor spreading more than three decades ago. A seismologist (J. Brune, personal communication, 2004) discovered wax plate tectonics by casually and serendipitously pulling a stick across a container of molten wax his wife and daughters had used in making candles. Brune and his student D. Oldenburg followed up and mirabile dictu published the results in Science (178, 301-304).
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