Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route
phys.org154 points by defrost 20 hours ago
154 points by defrost 20 hours ago
For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).
References to his books should carry a warning - something to the effect of:
"may inspire circuitous road trips involving many stops dangerously examining road-cuts on busy interstate highways"
I would pay good money for a field guide/itinerary to accompany "Assembling California".
More directly related to the Green River, I found Wayne Ranney's "Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery" an accessible/engaging intro to deep geological mysteries.
I just finished Annals of the Former World. It's essentially a 700 page-long ode to geology, using scientific terms for their prosody as much as their meaning. I once saw someone else remark that "Rising from the Plains" was the greatest western ever written.
I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.
Why does this article have a picture of the Maroon Bells? As opposed to something along Green River or, ideally, the 700m deep canyon being described?
Having recently gotten into watching documentaries or youtube videos of accounts of mountaineering expeditions it's amazing how lazy content creators, film makers and journalists can be when choosing what images or videos to show. You'll get something about climbing a mountain in the Andes and keep getting shown completely misleading pictures of Himalayan mountains, etc.
The content you create is only as good as the stock footage you have available to you. It's not like these people are trekking to the locations to acquire their own content. If you search in stock libraries for mountaineering in the Andes, and it only brings you footage from the Himalayas you're just going to use it.
plenty of them are traveling, and the extent to which you see videos of people putting together stock footage indicates failure of the algorithm. although at this point, the algorithm has failed hard enough that I am down to subscriptions and chronological feed.
Although, this larger structure did create one of my favorite internet algorithm outcomes: There is obviously intense hunger for authentic mountain videos narrated in a generic minecraft youtuber voice, and the resulting incentive gradient physically yeeted a minecraft youtuber to the top of mount everest (https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMitchellYT)
Simple, lazy stuff like that always drives me up the wall.
The HGTV show House Hunters used to be wildly inaccurate with their map location pins. On more than one occasion they'd say a couple is from the Bay Area but when they show the map the location pin would be in LA County. Like, come on. That's not even close.
There's a lot of duplicated geographic names in Northern and Southern California. If the production house isn't in the area, it's hard, close enough.
I lived in Burbank, but I was in the unincorporated area of Santa Clara County, not the incorporated city in LA County. Incidentally, I was living in the South Bay, but not the South Bay in LA County, or the South Bay in San Diego County.
Anyway, perhaps the couple is from the Bay Area, but their house is in LA County right now. :P
A specific one that I'll never forget was actually a House Hunters International episode. It was years ago but the pin being off by about 400 miles burned it into my memory lol
I think they were moving from Market Street to Amsterdam.
Maybe the pin was closer and they were lying about it being in the Bay Area???
Also, no need for exact location for these pins. The new home owners probably are fine with it not being exact
I think it's largely because they are "content creators" instead of trying to tell a story or share information.
I'll notice this with TV documentaries and segments on news channels quite frequently as well. I have the "GeoGuessr gene" as well as being decently well travelled so I spot this stuff all the time. One particular pet peeve of mine is movies or shows mean to be shot in medieval Europe but the "forest" they use is actually a tree plantation of North American native trees such as Sitka Spruce.
I was confused by the image too:
A few images: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=4e98a81333b88c42&udm=2...
Map with elevation: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gates+of+Lodore/@40.585090...
> Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Using what they can from free, public domain sources.
Darn AI agents, I guess they are still cheaper than interns.
Sadly, they "learned" it from us. People have been doing this sort of shoddy fill work since the dawn of television (and even earlier if you count wildly misplaced / inaccurate textual descriptions).
Judging by the performance of AI agents at Geoguessr I suspect such errors are almost 100% humans:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-geniu...
The actual paper (open access): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Fascinating to think of entire mountain ranges moving up and down like the skin on a wobbly pudding.
And the speed at which it happens:
> a cold, round anomaly about 200 km below the surface.
> By estimating how far the drip had fallen and calculating the speed of its descent, the researchers estimate that the drip broke off between 2 and 5 million years ago.
A few megayears later, the bit that broke off is still falling.
200km in 2m years, I make that in the ballpark of 0.1m per year - a bit less if it's > 2m years, and started below the surface.
As a geologist with 2 degrees and a lot of passion in the subject, I’ve never heard of lithospheric drip related to orogenic dips until now, but I love it and kick myself for not questioning the over simplicity of typical thought around lower crust processes enough.
As an exploration geophyicist who 1/ posted this, and 2/ can bang rocks together, I wonder if you've heard of Continental Drip, Ormonde de Kay, 1973.
It introduces an entire other level of simplistic thought.
The Südpolarfluchtkraft is out there.
The invisible hand of the lithospheric drip
I would like to offer a digression on silver, but as it turns out the area was occupied initially for the fur trade:
What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.
It's a detailed paper by five highly qualified researchers, with over 100 citations, and thanks six different reviewers.
It seems very likely to me that they would have said something about this theory if it were relevant.
That wouldn't cause the "bullseye" pattern the article describes, would it?
I don't think the recent glaciation got as far south at Utah, anyway.
You may be referring to the ice sheet, but there have been many periods of alpine glaciation in Utah. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773... and https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/utahs-glacial-...
A time lapse video would have been great.
Unfortunately the camera was lost to flooding about 2.5m years ago, so the only visual records are some rock art.
The relevant photons are still flying through space. And with a time lapse video of this scale, clouds are not a problem.
Can we take a moment to appreciate that Dr. Adam Smith works at the University of Glasgow?
Geology is fascinating. When geologists describe effects over long periods of time, it's like they're describing liquids, not solid matter.
It's interesting to think about the fact that on a long enough timeline, all the matter that we consider to be solid actually behaves more like liquid; bobbing up and down like a rough ocean. The continents shifting apart like two opposing currents with the plagues sliding one above another like what happens when two great currents meet... All the solid objects we interact with are like liquids frozen in time and we're actually moving through time extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we are able to temporarily shape the 'liquids' before they eventually disintegrate and melt into a puddle; as also happens to us.
Thinking about the world in this way makes everything we do seem much more complex, but at the same time, more futile, than it initially appears.