4 ms·
Good article. I was hoping that he would talk about the effect on tectonic plate stability with these massive bodies of weight shifting around a spinning spher
by codecamper 6y ago
Good article. I was hoping that he would talk about the effect on tectonic plate stability with these massive bodies of weight shifting around a spinning sphere.
- Super_Jambo 6y agoDoes the North America plate losing Greenland's ice increase earthquake risk on the west coast then? Intuitively seems like it should... But then this is an article about how bad intuition is for complex problems.
- rshnotsecure 6y agoThis is actually very concerning. We have significant evidence now to suggest that asteroids in the past have caused large earthquakes. Sometimes on the other side of the impact zone (the antipode). More scary though is what comets can do. They have a highly elliptical orbit, so they are much harder to spot than asteroids as they come out of nowhere. The elliptical orbit gives them much greater speed to. Comets tends to generate enormous levels of heat too, they explode shorty before impact as one did in Tunguska in Russia in 1908. Anyway it now seems that these "bursts" have happened during ice ages, vaporizing massive ice sheets. We are talking perhaps the entire northern hemisphere in some cases like the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The crust floats like water and is as gooey as pudding when suddenly trillions of tons of weight just "disappears" above it. We have no idea how this unfolds currently except to say it is destructive and chaotic at the least.
- arethuza 6y agoWe do have some idea what happens - post-glacial rebound is very noticeable in some parts of the world that were heavily glaciated in the last ice age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
- rshnotsecure 6y agoJust saw this. Fascinating.