Geologists 'resurrect' missing tectonic plate

[Jim__]

From phys.org:

The existence of a tectonic plate called Resurrection has long been a topic of debate among geologists, with some arguing it was never real. Others say it subducted—moved sideways and downward—into the earth's mantle somewhere in the Pacific Margin between 40 and 60 million years ago.

A team of geologists at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics believes they have found the lost plate in northern Canada by using existing mantle tomography images—similar to a CT scan of the earth's interior. The findings, published in Geological Society of America Bulletin, could help geologists better predict volcanic hazards as well as mineral and hydrocarbon deposits.

"Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more volcanoes you have," said Jonny Wu, assistant professor of geology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Volcanoes also affect climate change. So, when you are trying to model the earth and understand how climate has changed since time, you really want to know how many volcanoes there have been on earth."

Wu and Spencer Fuston, a third-year geology doctoral student, applied a technique developed by the UH Center for Tectonics and Tomography called slab unfolding to reconstruct what tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean looked like during the early Cenozoic Era. The rigid outermost shell of Earth, or lithosphere, is broken into tectonic plates and geologists have always known there were two plates in the Pacific Ocean at that time called Kula and Farallon. But there has been discussion about a potential third plate, Resurrection, having formed a special type of volcanic belt along Alaska and Washington State.

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[SWBTATTReg]

1. I knew something was missing! Ha ha. In truth, very interesting. Isn't it amazing, that with...

all of the gee whiz technology and such, the laser measurements and such being performed by satellites and such, that something like this is overlooked or originally considered part of something else?

[Sneederbunk]

2. Not far from tectonic cup and saucer.

[csziggy]

3. Plate tectonics have come a long way

In my early college years I took a lot of geology courses. One of the professors was into plate tectonics, which at that point - about 1972-73 - was not fully accepted. For a project I took an old globe, traced the shapes of the continents as we know them now and tried placing them on the globe in the positions theorized for some point in the past. It's been too long, I don't remember the exact period I was using.

I ran into difficulties because the area around the Bering Strait simply would not work the the current era shapes. The professor and I messed with it then he realized that Alaska was made up of accreted terranes - chunks of continent that accumulated over time - and would not have been the shape we know millions of years ago. In fact, there was likely no solid land there then.

He got all excited and kept my globe to show his colleagues. Unfortunately I was just three hours short of a geology minor and could only go further by taking more chemistry, a subject I avoided since I hated the stinks that were produced. Being highly scent sensitive cut my geology interests short.

So I never found out what conclusions my professors and his fellows came up with based on my poor crude globe model.