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Journal by khallow
I just drove through what is presently the largest known terrestrial landslide, the Heart Mountain slide. It happened a vast 48-50 million years ago, but you can still see some traces of it today in dark colored mountain peaks in the area.
Geologists found the landslide when they discovered this mountain with a peak that was almost 300 million years older than the rest of the mountain. It happens to be a short distance from the far better known Yellowstone hot spot, which generated (in addition to over a hundred other major eruptions) one of the largest known volcanic eruptions of the past 26 million years.
Apparently, the volume of the landslide was about 2000 cubic km which is similar in volume to that eruption. It's interesting to see how many categories of disasters have prehistorical evidence for disasters far bigger than anything we've seen in human history.
Geologists found the landslide when they discovered this mountain with a peak that was almost 300 million years older than the rest of the mountain. It happens to be a short distance from the far better known Yellowstone hot spot, which generated (in addition to over a hundred other major eruptions) one of the largest known volcanic eruptions of the past 26 million years.
Apparently, the volume of the landslide was about 2000 cubic km which is similar in volume to that eruption. It's interesting to see how many categories of disasters have prehistorical evidence for disasters far bigger than anything we've seen in human history.
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Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 07 2021, @08:01AM
Way back when, I first became enamored of Yellowstone, because geysers were cool. But it turns out to have so many other crazy things in or near it (some related to those geysers, but many not), such as: this huge landslide; the underlying hotspot that powers those geysers with a number of huge eruptions over the past couple million years; largest collections of petrified forests in the US (several million years worth from when the Rockies were first forming); one of the more diverse collections of wildlife in the US (large relatively rare (at least in the lower 48) mammals such as bison, wolves, grizzly bears, and wolverines) and part of the massive bird migration that extends from the Gulf Coast and Mexico all the way into northern Canada and Alaska; the source for a number of scientific discoveries (proof that at least locally there was an ice age, and the discovery of an enzyme that lead to polymerase chain reactions - rapid DNA fingerprinting); some of the higher mountain to base relief in the lower 48 (the Grand Teton, south of Yellowstone National Park, rises about 2000 meters from its base) and high earthquake activity (the Yellowstone region is the most active outside of the San Andreas fault region in California).