I just can't get over a brand new 150 mile long by 50 mile wide fissure in the ocean floor that wasn't there yesterday. The thought of it blows my mind.
Someone at AceOfSpades was using the state of New Jersey as a scale to illustrate the area in square miles. New Jersey is a little bigger than the rift. This sort of thing happens all of the time, geologically speaking. Which means every so many hundred or thousand years. Someone on the FNC mentioned that there is one off of the coast of Washington/Oregon which is getting very close to being due. Good chance of it snapping in the next fifty to one hundred years.
This is all about plate tectonics, a relatively new area of geology, the theories largely thrown together and having become accepted science within our lifetimes. Here is a
quote from wikipedia:[blockquote]The lithosphere is broken up into what are called "tectonic plates". In the case of the Earth, there are currently seven to eight major (depending on how they are defined) and many minor plates. The lithospheric plates ride on the asthenosphere. These plates move in relation to one another at one of three types of plate boundaries: convergent, or collisional boundaries; divergent boundaries, also called spreading centers; and conservative transform boundaries. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation occur along these plate boundaries. The lateral relative movement of the plates varies, though it is typically 0–100 mm annually.
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Yesterday's quake and tsunami are the result of the Pacific plate pushing against the North American plate (note the two red arrows in the upper left corner of the above illustration). The tension builds and builds until one plate snaps up and away from the other with zillions of tons of explosive energy released in the form of an earthquake. The displaced earth (in this case on the sea floor) is what causes the immediate formation of a killer wave. People and property that are inconveniently in the way are scrubbed from the earth's surface in an extremely efficient way. Only a major asteroid or comet strike is worse (see the Yucatan Penninsula) and have been referred to as "dinosaur killers." In addition to the tsunami created by an asteroid strike you have the weeks/months/years of global overcast (extreme cold/ice age) and Noah's ark-style flooding from all of the water vapor that is generated by the kinetic energy of the impact. Plant life dies first followed by animal life shortly thereafter.
Events such as these underscore the concept that life is fleeting.
