What a fabulous lecture, I was just blown away glued to my computer hanging onto every word. Indeed a national treasure to have as a Professor. YOu gotta love him.
So now, after 40 years, thanks to the internet & utube and nick, i finally find out the answer to the big mystery of my life! I was approx the same age as young nick when i went on a backpacking adventure in arizona in a deep canyon with beautiful waterfalls and sharply etched narrow deep little canyons with perfectly vertical walls. I was mystified to find SEA SHELLS! (fossils? i now assume) embedded in the walls! In arizona?!!! If the expression wtf had been coined yet i would have used it. I just got to the part in your lecture about the belt series, so when you mentioned that it went down into mexico, the light bulb went off! Cant wait to hear the rest of the lecture :D .....⏰.... Fascinating! I had been among those who believed pangea was the first & only supercontinent and there wouldnt really be anything much to say on the topic, and had been procrastinating watching this episode for half a year. Im glad i ran out of all the other ones and had no choice. Thank you nick! You make learning fun :)
One of these continental drift videos hereabouts continues on into the future, showing the expected remodeling of the current continents. Gondwanaland will indeed reunite!!
I’m missing something here, I was referring to the large public meeting ‘during’ the pandemic. I realise there is a lot of paranoia/conspiracy stuff in the U.S.
Yeah I saw your blast ..... comment, I'm not 'tuned' into your Don't ...... comment, my 1st impression was the big crowd .... Shock ... Horror , then I realised it was an old talk.
I have learned more in the last year about geology then I have in the first 68 years of my life.. Nick you have a real gift ole son! I truly appreciate you.. Especially when you take time out of your day to do lectures from home! Have a happy holidays and a long and healthy life.. Carry on!
So it looks like my parents were "destined" to meet: her from Melbourne and him from Spokane. They just waited over 1,000 million years to do it in 1942.
Greetings from the Blue Mountains Liz, that's a nice pussy you've got there, my Ginger Tom died from a Taipan bight. Well at least we are heading their way again, I've been waiting 15 months to visit my girlfriend in Seattle, the way our government are handling the Covid19 vaccine rollout, I might as well wait a billion years and walk it.
@@krashdown5814 Sorry to hear about your cat's death. Ginger is my fourth ginger cat: two females and two toms over about 48 years with a number of other colours interspersed. The COVID-19 vaccine rollout is slow as molasses in January here in Victoria (or, I should say, July for the southern hemisphere). I have an appointment to receive my first shot on 11 May, then the second one will happen sometime in August. Re your idea of waiting for the continents to meet up again: Just how long would it take since the U.S. is moving southwest about 1" per year and Australia is moving north almost 3" per year? ;-) A billion years might be right.
Thanks, Nick. Nice to see you back in front of a packed house sharing your knowledge. After your “A to Z” lectures, it is easier to visualize and interpret all that you presented that night in Ellensburg. Many thanks...
Fascinating, Truth is this makes so much sense and explains a heck of a lot. You would think things get rough when they get together again but it happens so slowly.
Thanks for these presentations Nick, until now (as a native Californian) my geological interests have never much gone outside of the state. So much more to learn!
Addictively fascinating! In CC at Portland (OR) for law enforcement (77/78), I returned to the bookstore to purchase the two geology books I’d really wanted.. Did not professionally pursue it, but eventually relocated to the Blue Ridge (VA) because of it…
Nick Zenter's presentations and lectures always put a smile on my face. Not only does he impart a great, macro level view of what's going on he brings a real passion and wonder for the subject that shines through and animates these geological stories.
It might be the Mandela effect or I'm just fuzzybrained because I'm old as dirt, but I could swear that I heard about the earlier supercontinents no later than sometime in the '70s.
So has the amount of dry land been consistently increasing? Rodinia and Columbia seem smaller than the amount of land we have now. Also, there are geologic records going back that far, does that mean once material gets deposited as part of a continental plate, it's more likely to remain there? Oceanic plates seem to get subducted, is there something that could sink a continent?
As a non-geologist who finds this stuff interesting but doesn’t have expertise: Is it possible that with the Atlantic Ocean widening and pulling apart from the Eurasia plate (and other plates that I can’t think of at the moment), there being a Mid-Atlantic Ridge forming in the middle of the ocean, and the Icelandic hotspot and continuing eruptions there, could the Mid-Atlantic Ridge/Iceland actually be the start of a new supercontinent or just a new continent?
I was in the area of Ellensburg in October. Really wish THE COVID PLANDEMIC didn't put a stop to these lectures. I would've made time and arrangements to attend one. Fortunately, The greatest professed ever, ran his A-Z live stream to keep me mostly satisfied.
Nick has been streaming from his home for months and in my humble opinion they are priceless. A gift from Nick to us and all for free. Some people don't let life's little glitches keep them down. I have viewed each and every one.
what if the circumference of the earth was smaller and all the land touched. expansion of the crust allowed magma to eject out the cracks making the oceans, the eruptions became magmatic with condensing steam as our atmosphere went from acidic to alkaline base. rising sea levels and accumulation of frost at the poles indicates there is a shrinking going on.
Great, but why no mention of meteors or asteroids? Things at rest stay at rest unless a force is acted upon them. A continent doesn't just decide one day to start moving. Continent movement requires trauma. You can find examples of those colossal impacts on Google Earth -- Guam, the entire Caribbean Sea, and the southern tip of South America just to name a few.
Continental plate movement is propelled by the convection currents in the mantel. The energy into the system you are looking for is already present in the heat of the Earth's molten core.
@@nevyen149 There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: Frictional heat, heat from radioactive decay and more importantly the heat from when the planet formed and accreted from ongoing collisions which has not yet been lost. I suspect that without those collisions, the heat in the Earth's molten core would not be sufficient for those convection currents in the mantel to occur.
@@iviewthetube Looks like you added to part of that. Embellishing to fit your narrative? From Scientific American: "There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements." Says nothing about "ongoing collisions"...hmmm. But even if we ignore what seems to be a bit of your thumb on the scale, that still doesn't equate to the impacts causing the plates to move. The heat was added billions of years ago when the solar system was full of debris, but it has long ago thinned out and that kind of bombardment no longer happens. Even things as big as Chixalub, Barringer or Wolfe Creek didn't move continents, and 'we' haven't had anything bigger in millions of years. While the dust sent into the atmosphere from some of the biggest strikes caused climate warming for hundreds of thousands of years, it didn't add that much to the mantel. Impacts space have been shown to create the hottest temperatures ever seen on the surface of the Earth, but the duration is actually quite brief. At the sites of big craters, there is evidence of minerals altered by heat and impact, but that alteration obviously does not effect the entire region. Dramatic as they are, meteorite impacts haven' been a major player in adding heat for close to an eon. Further, you've gone from "...Continent movement requires trauma...." to "...I suspect that without those collisions, the heat in the Earth's molten core would not be sufficient for those convection currents in the mantel to occur..." I don't see a legitimate geological source echoing your hypothesis, and as it ends up (only) a 'suspicion', I can understand why. If it's true...prove it. Do your research, write your paper, and when it is accepted by the world, and the text books are changed...then come back. Continents move because the plates move, and they move because the convection currents cause growth in some areas, subduction and sliding in others.
@@nevyen149 Yes, I used personal observations of the Moon, Mars and Jupiter to conclude that these bombardments are ongoing. The majority of the collisions occurred billions of years ago, but like radioactive decay, the rate of occurrences will decline, most likely, by the integral between -dN/dt. Last I checked dN is not equal to zero - so yes, it is still ongoing. But as Shoemaker pointed out, lucky for us we have Jupiter which vacuums many of the asteroids which would otherwise hit us. Without Jupiter, life on Earth may have never existed due to all of those disruptions. Of course, a lot of what I think are hunches; we are pattern seeking creatures. If you want me to prove it then get me a $40 million grant and I will spend the rest of my life working on this. Regarding Chixalubj, I agree that was not enough to initiate plate tectonics. That is why it is likely that Chixalub was just a small piece which broke of from the much larger body which I suspect formed the Caribbean Sea. There is much which could be learned from the recent collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter.
@@iviewthetube Find your own funding...you made the extraordinary claim, you have ALL the responsibility to prove it. Stop moving the goal posts...meteor impacts big enough or often enough to raise the temperature of the core of the Earth are NOT happening now...and are NOT responsible for the plate tectonic movement of the continents...period. And there was *no* "larger body", as there is no evidence for two impacts at the same time. In fact, the Caribbean Sea is geologically more than twice as old as the Chicxulub impact. FFS, Shoemaker-Levy 9 wasn't "recent"...it was almost two decades ago, but it too has *nothing* to do with continental movement. Your hypothesis doesn't work. Not for me now, and not ever, unless you convince actual geologists, and come up with actual evidence. More bluntly, your "personal observations" don't mean squat to me as verification for an otherwise scientifically unsupported hypothesis from a random RU-vid nobody.
