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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.
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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 07 2021, @07:11AM (4 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday March 07 2021, @07:11AM (#1120990) Homepage

    Huh. Next time I go down there, I'll have to pay more attention! Thanks for bringing this up.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 07 2021, @08:01AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 07 2021, @08:01AM (#1121004) Journal
    I recommend looking into some sort of road trip-oriented geology book for your trips. The trope-maker is the "Roadside Geology" [goodreads.com] series of books (Wyoming [amazon.com] and Yellowstone [mountain-press.com], for example). Anything worth reading will have something about the landslide as well as many of the other peculiarities of this remarkable region.

    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).

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

      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.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday March 07 2021, @03:35PM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 07 2021, @03:35PM (#1121058) Journal
        Wikipedia has an excellent article [wikipedia.org] on the matter.

        The heat-resistant enzymes that are a key component in polymerase chain reaction were discovered in the 1960s as a product of a microbial life form that lived in the superheated waters of Yellowstone’s Mushroom Spring.[75]

        A 1971 paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology by Kjell Kleppe and co-workers in the laboratory of H. Gobind Khorana first described a method of using an enzymatic assay to replicate a short DNA template with primers in vitro.[76] However, this early manifestation of the basic PCR principle did not receive much attention at the time and the invention of the polymerase chain reaction in 1983 is generally credited to Kary Mullis.[77]

        When Mullis developed the PCR in 1983, he was working in Emeryville, California for Cetus Corporation, one of the first biotechnology companies, where he was responsible for synthesizing short chains of DNA. Mullis has written that he conceived the idea for PCR while cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway one night in his car.[78] He was playing in his mind with a new way of analyzing changes (mutations) in DNA when he realized that he had instead invented a method of amplifying any DNA region through repeated cycles of duplication driven by DNA polymerase. In Scientific American, Mullis summarized the procedure: "Beginning with a single molecule of the genetic material DNA, the PCR can generate 100 billion similar molecules in an afternoon. The reaction is easy to execute. It requires no more than a test tube, a few simple reagents, and a source of heat."[79] DNA fingerprinting was first used for paternity testing in 1988.[80]

        Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his invention, seven years after he and his colleagues at Cetus first put his proposal to practice.[81] Mullis's 1985 paper with R. K. Saiki and H. A. Erlich, "Enzymatic Amplification of β-globin Genomic Sequences and Restriction Site Analysis for Diagnosis of Sickle Cell Anemia"—the polymerase chain reaction invention (PCR) – was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 2017.[82][1]

        At the core of the PCR method is the use of a suitable DNA polymerase able to withstand the high temperatures of >90 °C (194 °F) required for separation of the two DNA strands in the DNA double helix after each replication cycle. The DNA polymerases initially employed for in vitro experiments presaging PCR were unable to withstand these high temperatures.[1] So the early procedures for DNA replication were very inefficient and time-consuming, and required large amounts of DNA polymerase and continuous handling throughout the process.

        They've since found a microbe [wikipedia.org] (from under Mediterranean Sea sediment near Sicily) that can survive at 100 C and yields a more stable enzyme for the same role.