Sunday, August 29, 2010

We are on a layer cake!

Article

The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3 billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according to a new study by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley.

This is an interesting article. It provides more weight to the idea that continental subduction jams nice warm stuff under us, and keeps us afloat! Otherwise, we would tend to sink as we cooled, which we are doing, but it would be a lot worse!

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