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Whose fault is it? (Geophysics)
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Still trying to get the hang of Applied Epistemology, but as a disbeliever in the 'official' explanations for UFOs, the 'official' version of 9/11, and the 'official' version of ancient history, and now a bit suspicious of the 'official' version of the origins of English (still working on that one), I'm hanging in there.

(What is epistemology anyway? I know the dictionary definition, but I think I need to do some more research. Anyway ...)

Mick wrote,

Now we know what tiddly forces can create earthquakes, the official explanation -- that it is titanic plates rubbing against one another -- is out of court simply as a matter of scale.

If Francis Lee diving can cause a judder then it follows that earth-shattering tectonic events should be occurring everywhere and everywhen. If there are moving plates of course....

Before coming to the London area six years ago, I spent most of my life in New Zealand, where large earthquakes are a relatively common occurrence as compared with here. The recent one in Christchurch (on a 'previously unknown fault') is a case in point.

Most of the time I lived in Wellington and the neighbouring Hutt Valley, where there is a complex system of active faults making a series of long, narrow, parallel valleys that cut from south to north through the hills and mountains. In general, the land to the west is moving northwards relative to the land to the east, but also tilting upwards on the east side and down on the west. There are numerous places where you can see the effects of this through the valleys on both sides of the Wellington Harbour and northwards to either side of the Hutt Valley.

A good example is the West Wairarapa Fault, if only because it's the only one that's actually let loose in historical times. In 1855, in a magnitude 8.2 quake, the whole of the western half of the Wellington region suddenly moved northwards by about 12 metres, relative to the eastern half (about 40 feet, for the old-fashioned). Can you grasp that? A massive chunk of planetary crust moved 40 feet northwards in about one and a half minutes!

At the same time, the eastern side of the western half rose by about 6 metres (almost 20 feet), turning the artificial shipping basin in Central Wellington (not completed) into a park and providing the flat land now occupied by Wellington Airport, formerly at the bottom of the harbour.

I don't want to go into details here, but it's absolutely clear to me that there is a huge block of New Zealand--most of the western half of the North Island, and a westernmost sliver of the South Island--that is moving northwards relative to the rest, and has been doing so for an awfully long time. You don't need a scientist to explain anything to you; with your own eyes, you can see how features on the west side of faults line up with features forty or fifty feet south on the east side. With a good map, or an enthusiasm for tramping in rugged terrain, you can see how west-side features can be lined up with east-side features miles to the south.

In New Zealand, it seems to me, the case for 'tectonic platelets' at least, if not tectonic plates, is absolutely proved. And Alexis Madrigal's 'Top 5 Ways to Cause a Man-Made Earthquake' (to emphasise the part that Rocky inadvertently missed) have nothing to do with it.

And by the way, there are occasional earthquake swarms at various places in New Zealand, and they're a long way from any mining activity or (mostly) from any dams, oil wells (none in NZ), or World's Tallest Buildings. There's a lot of faults, though, and a few of the volcanoes that go with them.

'Epistemology' is about the value of knowledge. First you gotta have the knowledge.
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"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Donmillion wrote:
'Epistemology' is about the value of knowledge. First you gotta have the knowledge.


Knowledge is the enemy of thought.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Ishmael (out to harpoon a whale) wrote,

Knowledge is the enemy of thought.


An attempted wind-up, I hope. With no knowledge, there can be nothing to think about. Even thinking about nothing requires knowledge of nothing.

And I know I know nothing about quite a lot of things. Which makes it difficult indeed to think anything about them.
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and origin of knowledge. Epistemology asks the question

'How do we know what we know?'

Knowledge is the enemy of thought.


No, belief is the enemy of thought.

It is when belief is substituted for knowledge and is accepted as conventional wisdom that we run into problems.

The modern term for this is Common Knowledge.

How many times have you hear the phrase 'it's common knowledge that global warming is happening and we are to blame'. Common Knowledge has become a belief.

It is only when some of us ask the question 'how do we know that' and take the trouble to find out exactly what we do know that we find out that the underlying principles are based on misinterpretations, biases and in some cases fraud. They are based on something that we actually do not know or do not know enough about to make a judgment on.

Common knowledge is almost always wrong. Scientific knowledge doubly so.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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The more you know, the less you think.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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The more knowledge you acquire the more your brain wants to keep that knowledge the way it is because re-arranging a whole bunch of stuff will cause it to meltdown (it thinks). So it just says "Shan't! Shan't!" whenever it is faced with paradigm errors (that is basic problems potentially requiring large restructurings to a given subject).

Thus children can cope with learning there is no Santa Claus in their stride but academics are impossible to reach because they have invested so much in their acquired knowledge, their brain simply won't permit them even to consider paradigm matters, just on the offchance (careful ignoral). That is why so many academics still believe in the Father Christmases of their subject; why so many people believe in organised religions; why so many people are either conservative or liberal etc etc.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Donmillion (to whom, welcome): Take care when speaking of land moving. It is true that small amounts of land can move short distances via volcanic action (this is observable) but it is untrue (according to believers in SLOT) that large areas of land move large distances via plate tectonics.

Believers in the latter theory of course use the observed first kind to claim that the second kind are therefore 'observably' true.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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A controversial 'fracking' technique to extract gas from the ground was the 'highly probable' cause of earth tremors which hit Lancashire's Fylde coast earlier this year, a report concluded today.
One tremor of magnitude 2.3 on the Richter scale hit the area on April 1 followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on May 27.

They went on to report that this only occurred, of course, because the fracking was carried out over a previously unknown "natural fault".
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Orthodoxy claims the Colorado river basin (the Grand Canyon et al) is a tectonic fault line (which the Colarado fell into, as it were.) A lot of us here say it is just the Colorado river cutting down into bedrock because its outlet (the Pacific Ocean) suddenly fell by several thousand feet. (For new readers: it's a long story so don't ask.)

Anyroad, a correspondent sent me this pic so you can make up your own minds.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_Bend,_Arizona
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Don't forget we have our own man on the spot...

What's your take on this Wile E.?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Cuadrilla forced to halt fracking after earthquake breaches limit (Guardian)

The AEL claims that earthquakes are caused by changes in hydraulic pressure (SLOP theory). The academic earth sciences claim that earthquakes are caused by earth movements (Plate Tectonic Theory). Now earthquakes are exceedingly common, thousands a day worldwide, and must be caused by something. Fracking, i.e. induced changes in hydraulic pressure, is known to have caused thousands of earthquakes. Plate tectonics is not known to have caused a single earthquake -- it is merely assumed that it 'must have'.

You choose.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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A wondrously idiotic notion from A Day in the Life of Earth (BBC-4) presented by Hannah Fry, a mathematician, though presumably reading from an academically-vetted autocue (the BBC insists on that for its serious stuff). Comparing the material brought up by volcanoes to the material removed by erosion, she declared that without the former we'd all be wading around in the sea because of the latter. Well yes, Hannah, except the former represents about a zillionth of the latter so you'll have to come up with something a bit better than that to keep us dry shod.

Of course in the good old days, geomorphologists could airily talk about tectonic uplift to save our bacon but since we can watch the erosion taking place before our very eyes at an alarming rate on a daily basis but nobody's ever spotted any tectonic uplift (apart from the volcanoes), the earth scientists have gone very reticent on the entire subject. One day they will get round to SLOP (Ishmael's new term for SLOT) but not in time for me to get my RGS medal.
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Mick Harper
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In AE we often use Plate Tectonics as an example of how, once a paradigm is established, it is self-evidently true rather than demonstrably true. The gap is filled by higher babble. Here's an excellent example that came in yesterday. To set the scene

Geologists agree that the West Coast of North America was formed by a complex interplay between multiple plates. Two of the now-subducted plates underneath this area of the United States and Canada are the Farallon and Kula plates.

The red flag here is that if it is a complex interplay between multiple things which cannot be directly observed, the experts have no business agreeing about it. They should be arguing like cats about it. The other thing to note is the sci-fi nature of the names of the plates. But they are surely going too far with this one

A third plate — dubbed Resurrection — has been controversially theorized to exist

Theoretical or not, everyone can now get down to some sci-fi. Bear in mind that none of the following actually exists in a 'demonstrable' way only in a 'let's chat about it' sort of a way.

After isolating masses that appear to belong to Kula and Farallon, the team reports there are reconstruction gaps in the record, which …correlate spatiotemporally to published NW Cordillera near-trench magmatism, even considering possible terrane translation. We attribute these gaps to thermal erosion related to ridge subduction and model mid-ocean ridges within these reconstruction gap mid-points.

Our reconstructions show two coeval ridge-trench intersections that bound an additional “Resurrection”-like plate along the NW Cordillera prior to 40 Ma. In this model, the Yukon slab represents a thermally eroded remnant of the Resurrection plate
.

It's amazing what you can read into a few squiggles on a seismograph.
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Mick Harper
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An even better example of the higher babble (not, by the way, to be confused with 'academic chat') has just arrived courtesy of my Wiki press cuttings service, one of which is for mentions of 'distribution of deserts'

THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY - JSTOR
pheric circulation and hence the distribution of deserts and of marine salinity have also adhered in general to the modern model. The global evaporite belts in each hemisphere do not seem to have migrated in any consistent direction during the Phanerozoic. Permian to Jurassic time, perhaps approximately the time of existence of Pangaea, seems also to have been the time of peak accumulation https://www.jstor.org/stable/30061075 - Rank 42 - this is relevant | irrelevant

The Journal of Geology, founded in 1893, is as high as you get when it comes to peer-review, so we can rely on this being straight from the coal face. We can skip past the assumptions about atmospheric circulation causing deserts -- geologists are obliged to accept Hadley Cells on trust. We can skip past the fact that there is no model of marine salinity. old or new. But we cannot skip past global evaporite belts not migrating consistently unless we know exactly where Pangaea was 335 million years ago and have been able to track its movement, via Continental Drift, over the next hundred and fifty million years within a margin of a few hundred miles.

Surely they can't do that? They surely can. And if they couldn't before, they can now.
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