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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:Younger dryas

    (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 07 2021, @09:02PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 07 2021, @09:02PM (#1121161)

    Just how do you suppose *any* of it winds up beneath the north sea without being catastrophically flooded at some point?

    By it being flooded slowly.

    Did they know how to make canoes? Probably, there's a surviving example from the area that's old enough, it's a pine dugout.

    And that's pretty much that.

    Except that's not really so slow, when you realize that's a global average and local values behave very differently. Some spots would see very quick rises and falls. Also just a 5cm change is enough to turn a beach paradise complete with numerous easily caught sources of food into a salt marsh full of mosquitos and crocodiles.

    I doubt there would be any such local effects unless a basin like the Black Sea were being filled in. Past that you're getting into effects like ocean currents and land subsidence/rebound which would be on the order of millimeters per year (or less!), similar to today.

    How close does the water come before people of the time would have known to start running?

    Well, how close would it need to come before they say "Hey! That's a lot of water!"

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