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The long tail of disasters

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.
 

Reply to: Re:Surprise!

    (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 07 2021, @08:44AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday March 07 2021, @08:44AM (#1121010) Homepage

    Thanks, I needed more books :P

    The mountains and geysers don't send me like that, but I love badlands and other rough country, and I'm a bit of a compulsive rock-picker. :D

    The amount of petrified wood around here is astonishing. I've dug a bunch out of my front garden... maybe the previous owners had planted it, and were trying to grow a petrified forest? :)

    So what's with the enzyme? When I was a chem student at MSU we had one of the first gas chromatographs, but I think this must have been after my time.

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