Lecture 1:

 1915: Continental drift

o Alfred Wegener
 Suggested that the continentals themselves shifted (used to be together)
 Continents are not stationary
o Continental Drift theory was put together
 Once was a super continental; now called Pangea
 Broken up over time
 Idea was dismissed at first
 Jock Tuzo-Wilson
o Took the continental drift theory of Wegner and suggested another theory called plate tectonic
theory; continents are embedded in plates
 The plates were getting smaller and bigger
 Shifting; margins were getting bigger or smaller because they were getting
created or destroyed in some places, causing the continents to move
o Continents are just sitting into those plates
 Not-so-solid Earth
o Earth is not rigid; but earth is plastic so it can deform
 Why plate tectonics can actually work
o Different materials have different levels of stickiness (viscosity)
 How they are able to flow (easily or hardly) thru the world
 The outer core of Earth is liquid while the inner core is solid
o Due to being under different temperature and pressure conditions
o Mantle moves in long time periods
 Deformable solid
 Parts moves upwards or downwards at times
o Allows plate tectonics to shift
 Plate Tectonics map
o Divided into rigid plates
 Mid-ocean ridge; where plates are formed
o Ticks = subjection zones; where plates are destroyed
o Continents (land masses above water really) are embedded into the plates
 Don’t get destroyed; can be broken apart
 Plate tectonics diagram
o Upwelling of magma produces new crusts near mid ocean ridges (MOR)
 Those crusts get pushed outwards causing subjection zones
o Rate of plate tectonics motion is; NA is pushed 3.7 cm to the west
 Where will the continents be in 200 millions years time?
o Looking at plate velocity; their vectors can be analysed for the speed of motion
o Another supercontinent; Pangea Proxima
 In 200 million years
 Somewhere in China
 Reconstructing Earth’s history
o Pangea happened 200 mya
  Used the supercontinent cycle to predict the past and see Earth in the past
o Cobalt and coals are from compressed fossilized plants and form near the swamp area (warm,
humid and lots of vegetation)
 Now found in northernly latitudes
o Minerals are also found in tectonic plates
 Hazards
o Image
 Primed to go off any second
 See steam because groundwater is seeping into and heating up
o Coming back up as steam and loosening up the rock as it does
 Sulfur deposits
 Water is being contaminated by the sulfur in the rocks
 Volcanos
o Image
 Once all the rocks falls down the fault line, it causses the release of magma
 The magma will come up and cause eruptions
o Different magma types
 Running/effusive magma
 Have time to know if its coming
o Predictable, less ash production and not explosive
o Run long distances
 Earthquakes
o Moment magnitude scale rather than the Richter scale
o Type of earthquake waves
 Surface waves
 Shake on the surface
o Can track earthquake wave; as they move across the entire surface of the Earth
 Can measure from Canada if it happens in Japan due to the shockwave traveling
across the world
 Can know what is happening on the centre of the Earth (structure of the
Earth)
o Building is the best form of mitigation
 Earthquake-proof buildings in earthquake-prone areas
 Tsunamis
o Have to do with tectonics when faults slip
 When a subduction zone moves, it cause subsidence in some places and uplift in
other places
 Depending on the geology, it can be damaging or not
 Law of superposition
o If rocks are being formed, it can’t go under something that already exists
 It goes on top of it
 Law of original horizontality
o Layers weren’t not created in this orientation (originally flat when laid down by lakes and
rivers)
 But deformed and squished by plates (distorted)
 Stratigraphy
o Surface rocks are layered into strata (layers)
 Some layers are older or younger than others (relatively)
 Geochronology
o Absolute dating; may use crystals embedded for the actual date
 Geologic time scale
o Everything put into components and scaffolds (in time)
 Names to describe time periods
o Cambrian
 When multicellular life evolved
 When we got rocks with fossils in them
 Easy to date
o Precambrian (anything b4 Cambrian)
 Most of Earth’s history
 Phanerozoic
 Visible life (major classification)
 Paleozoic (earlier life)
 Maybe used interchangeable
 Geology of Canada
o Uniformitarianism
 The present is the key to the past
 Gravity and plates have always worked the same
 Earth spins the same way
o Can explain the future as well
o Map
 Brown
 Appalachian mountains
 Ontario map
o Toronto was once covered in kms of ice
 14,000-15,000 years ago, were glaciated
 Big icesheets
 Glacial sediments
o Left over sediments
 Glacials are like bulldozers; push sediments very far
 Make accumulations of boulders
 Scarborough
o Farmland itself is already changing the landscape
 B4, it was forests; trees have roots with sediments embedded in
 They take them out, change how water flows on land and put concrete to
make the surface impermeable (water shed hardening)
o Changed how sediment get around

Lecture 2:

 Image
o Break the world into plates
  Like the surface of an egg
 Continents are embedded into the eggshells themselves (not the pieces itself)
 Tectonic map of the world
 Key steps to plate tectonic theory
o Pelligrini
 First to draw the past world; Pangea
o Wegener couldn’t explain the mechanism for the continental drift (just that the continents
move)
 No physical explanation for how the continents moves
o Mantle convection currents (understanding the interior of the Earth)
 Mantle isn’t a stationary solid
 Solid rocks move over time because there are currents within the rocks
(called convection currents)
o Mantle is heated up in some parts and moves
o Mid-ocean ridges and trenches
 Mapping the sea floor (due to German submarine detection and WWII)
 First good map made by Marie Tharp
o See structures in the sea floor
o Sea floor spreading
 Sea floor is dynamic; some places sea floor is created and destroyed
 These creation and destruction of sea floors is what moves the continents
o Supercontinents cycle (based on plate tectonics)
 Continents grow and break apart (theory)
 Happened 5 times already
 First World Atlas
o Made during phase of economic development
 Discovery of land (sailing across the seas)
 Mercantilism (merchant-based society)
o Expand their power and influence of a nation by engaging in trade
 Understanding the shape of the coasts that they sailed to
 To better the trade ports and routes
o Creating the map allowed us to see the fitting of the coast of south American to the Africa
coasts
 Sparked the question if the world has changed or not
o Globalization
 Reaching out to expand your influence onto the world
 Delocalizing parts of the economy
o Atlases
 Collection of maps
 Sir Francis Bacon
o He thought scientific observations/research helped find the evidence for God (should be for
search for God)
 Developed the scientific method
o Quote
 “Knowledge is power”
 o Naturalist
 Studies the natural world around them
 Old profession (general scientist)
o Inductive reasoning
 Taking his small observations to create larger theories
 Not the other way around like deductive reasoning
o Catastrophism
 A lot of the world’s events are catastrophes within fossil record
 Scientific proposal
o Joined the continents in a drawing
o Saw the similar fossils in NA and Europe
 It doesn’t make sense for organisms to migrate across the sea and being identical
species
 First believed as a product of erosion
o Valley between the 2 continents; the widening of the canyon
occurred between the continents
 Growing outwards
 Permanentism
o Continents are fixed in positions
o The explanations of the 2 fossils in different places (all permanentism theories)
 (1) The connection between the 2 places is not there anymore
 River valley or continental crust (land bridges) that have sunk down and
appeared somewhere else
 (2) Shape or size of earth was changing
 Earth was expanding
o Might explain why some places was closer
 (3) Earth was cooling
 Rocks are bended and contorted into itself
o Earth is contracting and shrinking to wrinkle into itself
o All these explanations are permanentism in nature because nothing is moving in relative to
each other
 Was widely taught and learned
o Historical geology (TB) by Carl Schuchert
 Only explained the Earth’s changing climates in the past by having the whole Earth
climate change instead of certain parts of the continents moving and changing
 Now if we see a tropical rock in Antarctica, we say that Antarctica used to be
positioned in tropical latitude but isn’t anymore (shifted down)
 The Earth’s Interior
o Geophysics
 Using seismic waves to investigate the interior of the earth
o Mohorovivic
 Discovered the boundary between the crust (very thin, rigid rind) and mantle (thick
layer; half diameter of earth)
 Mobilism
o Frank Taylor
  Idea that the continents are shifting away from the poles and towards the equators
 Looking at continuous chains of mountains belts thru Europe, thru the
Himalayas
o Mountains are described as being a lateral motion and crumpling
together to create topography rather than vertical motion
 No exact and probable mechanism
o Main objection was the understanding of the mantle
 Geophysicists agreed that the mantle was solid rock that were under immense
pressure and thus were dense (can’t move)
 For Mobilism to work, the mantle had to move
 Image
o Raised shorelines (Canada); evidence that mantle is actually a little bit soft (some viscosity to
it)
 Product of big glacial lake that cut shorelines
 Shorelines are not flat but tilt because of property of crust and mantle called
isostasy
o Crust is rebounding, pushing itself back up
 In the past, the big glacial on top of NA pushed the crust
down into the mantle because the mantle is soft
 Now with the ice melted, the crust springs back up
o All the shorelines that were created when
the crust was depressed spring back up too
 Sort of get tiled; evidence that
mantle isn’t completely rigid
 Wegener
o “The Origin of Continents and Oceans” (book)
 Figures and picture
 Pangea was drawn
o Described all evidence of what made it true
o No one read the writing of the German in the climate of the WWI
 Image
o Looked at climate belts
 Described different fossils of being originating in different climate belts
o If you put all the continents back together, can convincingly reconstruct the belts of latitudes
 Dry belts, wet belts, and subtropics
 Image (fossil)
o Some fossils that don’t swim (very well) can be found across the ocean
o No direct support
 Little reviews only
 The response to “Continental drift” was extremely negative
o Geologist were held in lower regard because they weren’t quantitative science at that times
 Instead, geophysicists were because they were doing the math
 Mantle convection
o Arthur Holmes
 Studied the decay of atoms (radiometric decay of atoms over long time periods)
  Argued that we didn’t know how hot the mantle was actually
 Accounting for the breakdown of atoms; produces heat that make the mantle
hotter than expected
o Changing its physical properties
o Meaning the mantle is more warm than predicted
 Therefore, the mantle’s properties are different
 Release energy when decaying
o Produce heat
o Map model
 Mantle convex
 Material in the mantle moves from hot to cold
o Creating convection cells that distribute the heat over time
 Model showed the splitting up of mantle in convection cells at one point
o How a new ocean is produced
o NA didn’t support the standard of research from the British
 1960’s: Ocean floor gets mapped
o Vessels carry out swath bathymetry and echo sounding (sending impulses of sound and
finding out at what depth does the sound bounce back up)
o Develop subsurface geophysical methods
 Able to detect the layers underneath the ground
 Can see layers in the crust (for instance)
 Magnetometer
o Detecting steel vessels below you, in the ocean (important for submarine detection)
 Anomalies in the magnetic field of the ocean floor
 The ocean floor revealed
o Bathymetry (shape of stuff below the water)
o See ridges
 Areas where the deep ocean comes up in a broad rise and gets shallower
o Ridges run in regular pattern thru the center of the ocean basins
 Continuous ridges
o At the center of the broad rises, there is a big gap or hole
 Called rift valleys
o There are big fracture systems that go perpendicularly away from the ridges
o Deepest parts of the ocean called the Mariana’s trenches
 Not only one trench
 Trenches tend to be parallel
 Arches; curved shape
 Anywhere there is a big line of volcanoes, there exists a big trench
 Comic (woman)
o Produced a great map that was used but didn’t get credit for it
 Magma = molten fluid rock
o Doesn’t melt totally
 Mix of melted rock and crystals
 Some of the crystals are highly magnetic
o The magnetic crystals that cool after flowing magma, align with the magnetic north pole
  Compass points the north (can track the North pole at all times)
 Lines up the magnetic field
 Late 1950’s
o Looking at magma that flows one top of the other, you can trace the shifting of the pole
according to the magnetic crystals
 Noticed that in old lava flows, it doesn’t point towards the north by some degree
away from it (in different directions)
 Used it to map what they called the apparent polar wander curves
o If you were to reconstruct the apparent polar wander curve on one continent and compare it to
another continent
 They wouldn’t line up
 Don’t follow the same curve
o Meaning the continents are moving with respect to each other
 They aren’t following the same path (not lockstep)
 They are shifting apart and the magnetic flow on
each continents are recording the apparent wander in
the curve
o But the pole itself isn’t moving, its
stationary
o Can use the dip in magnetic grains to give indication of paleo latitudes
 Magnetic field goes out the south pole and comes in the North pole
 If you are in the equator, the magnetic field is parallel
 If you are at the pole, the magnetic field is actually pointing inwards
o Can then use that dip to know if you are closer to the poles or closer
to the equator
o Over time, the continents are moving at different rates with respect to each other and different
latitudes overtime as well
 Evidence in support of continental drift
 1960’s - Computers in universities
o Continental drift became more convincing
 Mid Atlantic ridge exposed in Iceland
o Where one of the deep sea ridge exists
 Which is usually under 2-3 km of water, but it comes up to surface water
 Can actually walk on as it rises to the surface
 Harold Hess
o Naval commander
o He first described the specific landform on the sea floor called guyots or sea mounts
 If you look downwards, see a circle with a flat top
 Postulated that it was once volcanic islands that were flattened by being
submerged by waves of water
o Discovering sea mounts (famous for)
 Geopoetry
o Ridges have parallel fractures to it and perpendicular fractures
 Ridges are matched with trenches
  Suggested that ridges are where sea floor is created, and trenches are where
its destroyed
o Called Geopoetry
o 2 types of boundaries
 Place where its created and places where its destroyed
 Implies continents are moving
o Sea floor spreading concept
 Ridges are chains of volcanoes where mantle is coming up and is emitted onto the sea
floor
 How do we test (Hess’s claims)?
o Clever test
 Utilizes the magnetism in lava flows to get a record of paleo magnetism in grains of
lava flows happening in mid ocean ridges
 However, there is also another property of magnetism used
 Every so often, the poles actually reverse completely (switch)
o South pole becomes the magnetic north pole and north pole becomes
the magnetic south pole
 Thus, if we can see the constant switching of poles in
magma emitted from mid ocean ridges, we can test where
sea floor is being created
 Therefore, as the magma underneath forces its way up thru the crack, the
magma flow emits onto the surface and cools
o As it cools, it locks in the orientation of the magnetic grain (locks in
the polarity of the magnetic grain)
 Every 100,000 years, it switches (recording a reverse
polarity)
 Magnetic signature
o Vine-Mathews-Morely hypothesis
 Magnetic signatures; see new magma comes up and pushes the sea floor outwards
 With magnetometer, in the middle, the newest magma has a normal polarity
 Symmetrically going outwards from the Mid Ocean Ridge, see symmetric
reversals between normal and reverse (same width on either side of ridge)
o Indicating creation of new sea floor
 Sea floor spreading
 Image
o Mountains can be tracked as well
 There are reversals also in the polarity
 Bottom is normal, followed by a reversal and repeat
o Each bands are a lava flow that piles on top of each other
o Since reversals aren’t regular patterned
 We can sample rocks and date using radiometric techniques, the data of the reversals
 Figure out how much time has taken for the crust to form and then be pushed
away
 Can date reversals
o Magnetic epochs
  Time scale
 Current magnetic epoch is Brunhes
 Fred vine (hypothesis)
o Another explanation
 Currently, magma is coming out of the ridge with a positive polarity which it
displaces, pushing aside the crust
 New magma comes in the middle
 Overtime, as the magnetic polarity shifts, we get a new band with different magnetic
polarity
o Rate of change = 1 cm per year
 Within that range
 Iceland
o Along the ridge have young rocks and away from the ridge have older rocks
 Confirms sea floor spreading
 Direct measurement of plate movement by GPS
o Can detect with GPS since its 1 cm per year
o Image
 Fissure and rift; where crust moves away from each other
 Divergent plate boundaries
 Types of earthquakes based on depths of focus
o Monitor earthquakes around the world
o Discover that earthquakes aren’t uniformly distributed around the world
 Actually, in highly concentrated belts and can map the depths of those earthquakes
 Have shallower earthquakes (few km)
 There are descending bands of depths
 Have shallow, slightly deeper and really deep earthquakes
o Evident of deep sea trench along the band
 All the bands are associated with trenches
 Subduction zones
o Ocean floor is destroyed by essentially being pushed down and driven into the mantle at an
angle called a subduction
 Creating Benioff Zone where there is regular pattern of deepening earthquakes
o Subduction zones are where big earthquakes occur
 Get dangerous, explosive and powerful volcanoes
 Hot spot tracks
o Wilson
 Brings together the bits of pieces of evidence for plate tectonic theory
o The chain of underwater mountains that Hess called the guyots, don’t occur randomly but
occur in chains
 Sometimes, that chain bends
 Wilson 1963
o Argued that those chain of islands prove plate movement
 Attributes them to mantle plume
 Upwelling region of mantle
 o Sometimes, the mantle gets really hot in the core at one spot and
shoots up thru the mantle (sitting under the crust)
 Crust is like a blanket, it tends to trap heat
 And so, when it shoots upwards, a volcano comes up
o Call it volcano hotspot
 Hotspot; above a heat source of
solid mantle rock
o Mantle is stationary with respect to the earth, but the crust moves (on
a plate)
 Mantle plume stays straight but the crust moves over it
 Overtime, have chains of volcanoes that get stick
onto that overriding plate that slides across
o Explains the chains of islands like Hawaii as
being guyots that are resulted from plate
movements over a mantle plume
 Hawaii (image)
o Part above the water is subjected to erosion and overtime, it will be flattened
o Hotspots lift up the crust a bit because there is a heat source bubbling underneath
 As that crust moves over the hot spot, its going to slide off the hotspot and subside
underwater
 Thus, why they are underwater
o Also, why Hawaii is big with hotspots currently underneath (mantle
plume exists) but islands get smaller because they are away from the
mantle plume
 Continues on underwater for a long time but bends suddenly
o The bend is due to the fact that plate changes direction at some point in its history
 Sometimes around volcanic islands, in the middle of the oceans, there are growing
reefs
 As the volcano moves off the hotspot, the volcano subsides but the reefs keep
growing up
o Get Atolls
 Circle of islands
 At one point there was an underwater volcano in the
centre
o But is no longer active since it isn’t under a
heat source
 Fractures
o Tries to explain why the fractures radiate perpendicularly away from where the volcanic
activity are along the ridges
 There is no volcanic activity on the fracture itself
 Transform faults
o Suggests that its consistent with sea floor spreading
 You can’t have spreading happening on a sphere as you can’t create equal amount of
lava right in the centre of the ridge without the fracture zones
 These fracture zones accommodate the fact that we are spreading the sea
floor which is apparently flat along the surface of the globe
 Wilson’s next big contribution
o He explained already 2 types of boundaries
 Divergent boundaries where plates are moving away from each other
 Convergent boundaries where plates are moving towards each other
 Get subduction zones
o Third type of boundary
 Plate boundary where plates are just moving past each other
 Creating nor destroying anything
o Called it the transform boundary
 Wilson 1968
o Took the map of earthquake foci and made the United Plates of Planet Earth
 Indicating where the plate boundaries are
 Divergent boundaries in ridges
 Convergent boundaries in trenches
 Transform boundaries where they sort of slide past each other
o This is no longer continental drift
 Continent aren’t doing anything
 The plate boundaries aren’t coincidence with continental boundaries
o Plate tectonics
 Movement of continents and plates by creation and
destruction at plate boundaries
 The NA plates
o Continents are rocks that is thick but not very dense
o Map
 Red line is divergent boundaries
 Plates created along center of Atlantic
 Blue line is destruction boundary (subductions)
 Plates are destroyed in the west
o Subduction to the west (pushed to the west)
 Rate of 3.7 cm per year
 Interestingly, its due to new crust creation and also, plate constantly moving
around
o Mid ocean ridges aren’t necessarily stationary
 Gorundtruthing plate tectonics by drilling the ocean floor (need to experiment to prove it)
o Deep sea drilling (drill into the ocean floor)
 Sample directly and date it
 Age of the ocean floor is confirmed to be consistent with the plate tectonic
 Drilling up to 7 km of water
 Not the Mariana’s trench tho
 Age of the ocean floors
o At MOR, the rocks are younger (few million years)
 As they are further away, they become older and older
 At the very end (away from the ridge), have the oldest rocks
o Exists western side of pacific or either side of Atlantic
 o The 150 million years old crust was the first ocean floor that came up when Pangea was first
cracking open (first part of the ocean)
 Therefore, there is no ocean floor older than 150 million years old
 Ocean floor has a shelf life
o If ocean floor is too old, it gets too dense and heavy (unstable)
 Sinks into the mantle and starts to subduct
o Continents are significantly older than sea floor (continental rocks are 3 billions years old)
 Continental crust once created is harder to destroy because it doesn’t subduct
 Too buoyant (floats)
 Pangea
o How do we break up the continents
 By making new ocean
 Oceans separate the continents
o Image
 See rifting = breaking up of continents and forming oceans
 Creating the Atlantic ocean
 As the continents are pushed apart, sometimes are collided with each other
 Evidence are mountain belts (creating mountains) happening
o The chain of mountain belts across Europe and southern Asia is
because Africa is pushed into Asia and India is pushed into Asia
when Indian Ocean is opened up
o When continents move, because they are not capable of being subducted, it means that they
go over other ocean floors
 That ocean floor inevitably has to be subducted
 A cycle
o At some point if we open enough oceans, we push everything back together again
 Forming a new supercontinents
Lecture 3:

 Image
o Earth is not exactly a sphere, it is a spheroid
 Bobbly in places and little bit squished
 Not perfect sphere
 3 compositional layers
 Crust
o Rigid and tough
 Poked hard enough = raptures
o Really, really thin layer
 Mantle
o Much softer layer
 If poked a little = becomes deformed
o About half of the radius of Earth
 Core
o Half of the radius of Earth
 Lithosphere or lithospheric plate is not actually the same thing as the crust
  Tectonic plates are made of the lithosphere
 Lithosphere includes the crust and a thin layer of mantle
 A laminated structure
o The uppermost part of mantle is glued onto the bottom of the
crust
 That’s what makes the tectonic plates
o Most of earth is inaccessible
 Can only walk on tiny bits of continental crust
 Oceanic crusts like Hawaii, Iceland and etc.
o Geophysics
 Investigating the deep parts of the Earth
 Module 2
o Left image
 Can talk about the layers of earth in terms of mechanics and composition
 Earthquakes
o Preparation for Earthquakes is important
 The resulting damage can be minimized by building earthquake buildings
 Not made with rigid materials or built on soft sediment
o Seismic waves are the transfer of energy during earthquakes
 Wave of energy
 Some terminology
o Block model of fault
 Faults are plane of breakage where rocks slide past each other
 Most times, faults are smooth but sometimes, there’s rough patches on it
which when broken causes a lot of energy release all at once
o Doesn’t happen at the surface
 Usually most of the time happening down at depth of 1
km to few km
o The area where the earthquake actually happens (sticky spot) is called the focus
 Directly above that point is where the energy that hits the surface is the highest
because energy is radiating out from that earthquake in all directions
 Called the epicentre
o When there is motion on the faults, we create something called a fault scarp
 Scarp is a cliff or hill that records in the landscape that this motion occurred
o Fault trace
 A line across the land that shows where that fault comes to surface
 Image
o Earthquakes happen within certain depth zones
 The ones we feel at the surface isn’t happening much further than a few 10s of
km deep because as you go deeper into the crust, you are getting crust that are
warmer
 As you go deeper into the crust there is rocks with a geothermal gradient
(a gradient in temperature in the Earth)
o It makes the rocks more soft and ductile
  So as you go deeper, instead of breaking along a fault
line, we start to get ductile deformation
 Call it a ductile shear zone
o In there, you have less chance of
causing earthquakes
o The locked up layer closer to the surface is the layer that generate earthquakes we feel
o Seismogenic layer
 Layer prone to release seismic energy
o Most movements are aseismic
 Most faulting happens aseimosically, meaning no measurable release of seismic
energy
 Preliminary Determination of Epicentres
o We wanted to know how many nuclear tests where being performed
 By all the countries (cold war)
 So, we put in this system to monitor earthquakes around the world
o Turns out there is a lot of earthquakes that happen every day around the world
 Usually, small ones that we don’t feel
 They happen in certain bounds or belts
o Center of the Atlantic, eastern side of pacific and along western
edge of North and South America
o This obvious distribution helped delineate out united plates that helped create the map
showing all the plate boundaries
 United plates of Planet Earth
o Shows…
 Major tectonic plates
 Types of boundaries between each plates
 Divergent boundaries
o Marked as double parallel lines (white)
 Where we create new crust and have mid ocean ridges
 Convergent boundaries
o Marked as heavy black lines with ticks
 Ticks indicate the overriding plate (on top)
 Anytime plates meet, one plate has to be under
the other plate
 Image (Earthquake map)
o Earthquake recordings
 Depths of earthquake foci identify types of plate boundaries
o Foci is not the surface expression of the earthquake but its how deep an earthquake is
happening
 Foci describes the depth of earthquake underground
o Map
 Divergent boundaries have shallow foci earthquakes within top 10 km or so
 In subductions zones, have earthquakes going deep underground
 Some subduction zones, have earthquakes that go up to maximum of
about 800 km
 o Most less than 400 km
 At subduction zones, Earthquakes happen in the descending slab until it gest too warm to rapture
o Map
 Ramp of seismicity can be called a Benioff zone
 As a plate is being pushed underneath another plate, its cold and cold things are
brittle
 If you bend a cold plate, it releases seismic energy
 But as it goes deeper into the mantle, it starts to warm up and starts to be
able to flex without producing so much seismic energy
 Therefore, most subduction zone earthquakes are top 5000 km or so
 Subduction zones are associated with deep sea trenches and those trenches are
because of that bending down of a plate
 Also, subduction zones are associated with volcanics
 As ocean crust is bended downwards and driven into the mantle, it heats
up
o This is the crust has been in contact with the ocean water for
millions of years, so it drives out whole bunch of warm water
 Starts to dehydrate as it pushes an oceanic plate into the
mantle
 All that water gets released and end up
producing volcanoes
 Image
o Map
 Shows all vectors of plate motions of very specific stations on Earth
 Some plates are moving very fast, and some plates are moving very
slowly (like NA plates)
o Most funding came from the US as there are more vectors there
 There are rotations on all plates
 At convergent plate boundaries
 What happens depends on what the 2 plates converging are
 Transform plate boundaries
 Link up the 2 types of boundaries
o Can’t have geometrically have 2 plates being convergent or
divergent
 Have to have linking segments between them
 For example; ridges are straight lines but have
offsets which are small transform plate
boundaries
 How many plates do we see here?
o Every convergent or divergent zone is a plate boundary
 Convergent plate boundary (far left + middle right)
 Divergent plate boundary (middle (slightly to the right) + far right)
 Transform plate boundary (middle upwards)
o Lithosphere
 Tectonic rigid plates that are moving
 Sitting upon a weak zone called the asthenosphere
 o Asthenosphere
 Plates are able to slide because they are sitting on top of a soft, gooey layer that
allows them to move across the mantle
 The crust
o Crust is rich in silica rocks compared to mantle
o 2 types of crust
 Continental curst
 What we walk on
o Because it is far more buoyant (less dense) and thick than
oceanic crust
 Therefore, anytime, there is convergence between
oceanic and continental crust
 Oceanic being more dense makes it more prone
to sinking into the mantle while the continental
curst will always override that oceanic crust
 Fundamentally formed at subduction zones at volcanoes
o Tends to be of composition rich in minerals called feldspar and
silica (quartz)
 That composition gives it its generally light colored
appearance and relatively low density
 We say it is felsic (light colored rocks)
 Tend to approximate the composition of this crust is being granite but its
also made up of sandstone, carbonate rocks and reefs and various types
of volcanics
 Oceanic crust
 Ocean basins
 Mafic; rich in magnesium and iron
 Tends to be dark in color and more dense
o Rock (passed around)
 Green bits are from the mantle rock called ultra mafic because they are even
more enriched in magnesium and iron (than oceanic crust)
 Mostly made of basalt (and its equivalence)
 Isostasy
o Another way to describe the force of buoyancy of the crust
o When you have a lot of crust, there is thickening of crust that doesn’t build upwards but
also builds downwards into the mantle
 Therefore, most of continental crust is sort of floating in the mantle
 As erosion takes place, the crust will pop back up and rise
o To compensate for erosional loss of mass
 If weight is put onto, it starts to sink down
o Continental crust is thus maintaining a hydrodynamic equilibrium within the mantle
 Continental crust does not necessarily end at today’s coastline
o The waters today are less higher than in the past
 But continental crust extends past the current coastline underneath all sort of
shelves
  These continental shelves are important; where there is oil, gas, and lots
of fish
 Continental crust acts like a blanket preventing heat from the mantle getting to surface
o Because it is so thick, it traps heat from escaping the interior of the earth
 Within the mantle, there is a lot of heat (being brought up from the core; really
hot as its generated by radioactive decay)
 Continents act like blankets holding heat in because its hard for heat to
transmit thru 100s of km of continental crust
o However, heat is able to transmit easily along mid ocean ridges
where crust is thin
 Continental crust has a lot of radiogenic elements that generate heat, particularly where there is
old crust, and where there is thick crust
o At the same time, continental crust itself contains more higher enrichment of radiogenic
elements than the mantle (but less volume of content than the mantle)
 Therefore, have to consider heat in the crust that’s generated by radioactive decay
in continental crust
 Get a lot of heat released in places where there is great thickness of
continental crust
o Under the mountain belts like Andes, Himalayas, etc.
 Thus, important to know that heating continental crust too much, makes it ductile
 Able to move and squeeze the contents outwards along faults (generating
earthquakes)
 Continents vs plates
o Crust sits upon a layer of hard lithosphere mantle
 Sort of bipartite distribution that creates the tectonic plate
 Thus, can have parts be continental crust and parts be oceanic crust
o Active vs passive margins of continents
 Some continents have edges that align with the plate boundary whereas maybe
the other side is a transition from continental to oceanic crust (in the oceans) but
isn’t a plate boundary
 Called passive margins
o No big faults
 In active margins, there’s faults and things are moving
 Passive Margins are where there is a transition from continental to oceanic crust, but NOT a plate
boundary
o Map
 Light blue water = edge of the continental crust (shallow and buoyant area)
 Dark blue water = oceanic crust
 Continental lithosphere
o Where there’s continental crust, there is great thickness of lithosphere
o Oceanic curst tends to be quite thin
 But still sits on top of 100 km of mantle lithosphere
o Both layers still sit on top of asthenosphere (weak layer) and below that, generally solid
mantle that still convex (moves)
 Upper mantle
 o Small partial melting causes the asthenosphere to be weak
 Generally, under pressure, all molecules are closer together, and becomes solid
but as you release pressure, you have a little melting
 Looking at thickness of mantle, pressure is caused by the weight of rock
above
o Therefore, the bottom of the mantle is under a lot of weight due
to all that thickness of mantle above
o At the surface, it is only under weight of small crust (less
pressure at the surface)
 Thus, although, the mantle is compositionally uniform,
the difference in pressure results in difference in density
of rock
 Also results in very small melting at the top
o Get tiny weaknesses between crystals
that makes them mushy (not fluid) but a
little bit soft
o The mantle is that partially melted bit underneath the lithosphere
 Again, lithosphere is relatively rigid
 How can we prove that plates move
o Can show movement via plates that moved over geological time scales
 By looking at locations of island chains in middle of oceans
 Remember, there are stationary volcanoes that are stable hotspots, but the
plates still slide across them
o Able to then show rate at which tectonic plates move over time
 Image (hotspot tracks)
o Can confirm stationary nature of volcanoes because they haven’t moved from one spot
over time
 With chain of islands moving off from the volcanos
o Hotspots are where volcanoes happen because there is additional heat peaking underneath
them
 This heat is generated at the core mantle boundary and shoots up thru the whole
mantle
 Causes a little melting in the top uppermost oceanic crust and creates
volcanism (flood basalts)
o Get islands like Hawaii
 Overtime, plates move across the hotspots (in low
velocity)
o This tells us about movement of crust and that mantle itself isn’t completely
homogeneous in terms of its temperature profile
 Some parts are more hot and mobile than other parts
 Hot spots: tracking plate movement
o Can date little island chains as they go across the hotspots
 Image
o Hard to sample the mantle
 (1) Because the drill bit starts to melt (steel becomes ductile) as it reaches hot
temperatures and messes up
  (2) In water, have to deal with immense pressure of water on the hole being
poked
 Hard for it to be intact
 (3) Can’t drill far
 Nobi earthquakes 1891
o Japan where science of seismicity was born
 At intersection of 4 different tectonic plates
 Pacific plate is subducted at all trenches
o Very old so ready to subduct
 Philippine sea plate (with oceanic crust)
o Much younger
 Subducted the Eurasian plate but overriding the pacific
plate
 There is also a boundary between Eurasian plate and NA plate
o Not sure were exactly tho
 Nobi earthquake of 1891
o Japanese copied the style of British architecture = brick and mortar structures
 Not designed to withstand the earthquake
 Crumbled the structures and neighbourhoods were flattened
o Scientists made the connection between release of seismic energy and actual motion that
was observed along a fault line
 It was the birth for field of tectonic geomorphology
 Looking at the shapes of landscape to figure out what tectonic activity
has gone on (what faults have moved and how far)
o Observing faulting in action that was going to generate an
earthquake
o To monitor the release of energy, created networks to detect the earthquakes
 For future prediction
 Falt scarp from the 1891 Nobi Earthquakes in Japan
o Big networks of seismographs
o Image (before vs after)
 After big earthquakes = chunk of land went up several meters relative to the other
side
 Big fault scarp
o Now more or less healed
 Fault scarp seen in excavation to expose the fault trace
o Can look at fault in the subsurface to see how much movement actually occurred
o Image
 Can trace the surface between black and lighter brown
 It jumps up several meters
o Measure the amount of offset along that fault (the displacement
of either side of the fault)
 Measuring the size of Earthquakes
o Richter scale (not actual scale)
o When earthquake happens, there are machines called seismographs
  It’s a pen on a weight on a spring that magnifies the shaking and there’s a rotating
cylinder of paper
 It shakes, the pen goes up and down
o The bigger the displacement or amplitude of wave is, the bigger
the Richter scale is measuring
 Its actually measuring the amplitude of deflection of the
pen
 Logarithmic scale
 Not effective because doesn’t tell how much energy is released during an
earthquake
 Depends on the ground its on, the different substrates that magnify or
deafens the earthquake
o Not accurate readings
o Actual reading used is moment magnitude scale
 Based on how much seismic energy is released along the fault line
 Increment produces 32x more energy than the previous M
o Seismogram is the figure that’s produced by the seismograph (readings)
 Number of earthquakes per year
o Number of earthquakes produced every year generally decrease on magnitude
 Don’t get large magnitude earthquakes
 Instead get millions of small magnitude earthquake
o Don’t feel them
 Magnitudes up to 4 is when we actually start to feel it
 Magnitudes upwards of 4 and 5; small property damage
 Same energy released by average tornado
 6-7 = start to get damage
 9+ = rare; happen where there are subduction zones
 Called large mega thrust earthquakes
 Different types of seismic waves
o Types
 Body waves
 Transmitted thru a material
o Don’t feel
 Geophysical informative
 Surface waves
 Actually, shaking us on the surface
o Side to side shaking
 Love wave
o Up and down shaking
 Rayleigh wave
o First wave to be generated in any earthquakes is called a primary wave (P wave)
 Its direction of propagation tends to cause vibration in the same direction as the
propagation (like slinky)
o Slightly slower than P waves, are the secondary waves (S waves or shear waves)
  Waves are more of a vibration in a direction perpendicular to the direction of
propagation
 Investigating the interior
o P waves
 Compressional = able to travel thru liquids and solids
o S waves
 Perpendicular = not able to travel thru fluids
o Both types of waves refract when moving from one media to another
 Can reflect off things
 Change their velocity depending on what its moving thru
 The velocity changes can be used to figure out properties of the material
 Image
o Seismograph; records P wave that happens first and seconds later, S wave
 After that, the surface waves arrive (slower relatively to body waves)
 Image
o Waves tend to dilate (become wider) the further away they go from the focus
 Can use the distance between the detection of P wave and S wave to say how far
away you are from the focus
 If distance is fairly close (P and S wave come in fast) = close to the
earthquake
 Image (distance from epicenter)
o However, that only reveals the radius (don’t know where exactly the earthquake
happened)
 Therefore, use many other seismograph stations to perform triangulations
 Triangulate the epicentre of the earthquake
o Now computers do it more efficiently
 Exploring the Earth’s crust with Seismic waves
o Use property of reflection to know what’s going on the crust
 Instead of waiting for earthquake; can generate our own seismic energy and look
at how its transmitted thru the crust
 How homogenous is the crust?
o Property called seismic reflection
 Some of the energy every time, one of the wave hits the interface, is bounced
back to the surface (since we know how long it takes for a P wave to transmit
thru average crustal material)
 Can tell how deep that surface is
o 2 way travel time
 Lithoprobe (making our own earthquakes)
o Trucks that have hydraulic plates on the bottom which is lowered onto ground and is
shaken to create the energy to measure the 2 way travel time
 Image
o Come up with maps that show deep structures in the crust
 Wave refraction
o Different parts of earth have different densities
 Not homogenous at all
 Simple ‘onion skin’ model of Earth’s interior
o There are shadow zones; where u can’t get any P waves at certain locations of stations
 Donut shape on the opposite side of the earth where earthquake occurred
o There were also shadow zones for S waves
 Half of the planet
o Outer core of the earth had to be a liquid
 Because the S wave couldn’t travel thru it
o The P wave shadow zones showed refraction because of change in density (from outer
core to inner core)
 How can we sample the mantle to understand it’s composition?
o Can’t sample (cant drill)
 But can find chunks of mantle that come up to surface in volcanoes (in hotspots)
 In mantle plumes, mantle chucks caught in volcanoes are shot up to the
surface (get xenoliths)
o Xenoliths
 Enriched in iron and magnesium than ocean crust itself
 Ultramafic (green part)
 How can we sample the core of the Earth?
o Meteorites = exploded parts of other planets (blow up in space and arrive on Earth)
 Find stony meteorites that resemble the composition of our mantle
 Tells similarity between planets in the universe based on composition
 Find nickel iron meteorites that only form at very deep parts of planets much like
earth
 See crystal patterns at the composition inside (formed under ultra high
pressure)
 Earth’s magnetic field
o Since there is iron and nickel in the inner core; it makes senses how earth has a magnetic
field
 In the inner core, there’s too much heat for them to hold a magnetic field
 It loses its magnetism
 However, given that its liquid, the liquid can convect (spin really fast)
 The spinning generates the magnetic field in the outer core
 The Moho
o Found there was a dramatic increase in velocity of seismic waves (discontinuity) from the
crust to the mantle
 Called Moho
 Marks the boundary between continental crust and mantle
o Below the lithosphere, the velocity of S and P waves decreases
 Called a low velocity zone
 Marks the asthenosphere
 Image
o Chart
 As we go deeper into the earth (density and pressure increases), there are faster
and faster seismic waves
 Velocity of S and P waves increase
  Suddenly at D’’ layer, velocity of P wave plummets and S waves go to 0
 Transition from solid mantle to liquid outer core
o This layer is at the core mantle boundary
 Graphs
o Pressure increases smoothly (controlled by depth)
o Temperature graph
 At the surface there is a steep gradient
 Caused by loss of heat to the space
 Why isn’t there a lowering gradient (if heat is lost)
 Because there’re places where subducting slabs are pushed down into the
mantle and places where heats coming up to surface
 The temperature profile of mantle shows that it convects
o Heat is moved form hot core to cool surface
 Mantle is convecting
 The real mantle: mantle plumes
o Seismic tomography
 Release of seismic energy over time in each increment of depth
 The velocity measurements are converted into heat profile
o See that there are hot and cold parts
 Movements in hot parts
 Hot rocks are coming up underneath the mid
ocean ridges
o Locations of hotspots shown as well
 How plates form and are destroyed to drive mantle convection. based on “seismic tomography”
o Ultimately, the convection of mantle is driven by subduction and heating of core mantle
boundary
o Mantle plumes = hot towers of rock going upwards
o Slab avalanching = when subducting slabs are cold and so they drive themselves
downwards into the mantle
o Ultra-low velocity zones = indicate presence of hot soft rock that’s ready to be mobile
and rise up
o Decompression melting
 As you move something from high pressure to low pressure (to surface), it
creates conditions for melting
 Making volcanoes
Lecture 4:

 When we left off last week…

o Use earthquakes to study the crust and inner layers of Earth (core and mantle)
 With crusts, can look at how the general pattern of earthquakes delineates plate
boundaries
 Crust is actively in motion being created or destroyed
o Depth of earthquakes indicate what type of plate boundary
 Shallow focus earthquakes along divergent margins
 Deep focus earthquakes along the converging margins
 o Continents are where there is continental crust, but plates often include areas with both
continental and oceanic crust on the same plate
o Hotspots and mantle plumes indicate the inner working of the mantle works
 Mantle isn’t a simple homogenous layer of hard solid rock
 It convects and moves over long geological time periods (millions of years)
o Things move up and down
 Rocks undergo convection (rises up) when heated up by the
hot core; creating mantle plume (rising hot rocks)
 When it comes to the surface, it heats up the crust
and causes volcanoes
o Those volcanoes are ocean islands chains
like Hawaii and Galapagos
o Can use earthquakes to look at the structure of inner and outer core
 P and S waves; depending on whether they migrate thru liquids or don’t
 Changes their velocity when going thru densities of different substances
o Creating our own earthquakes via a Lithoprobe
 Helps use get at structures within the crust
o Plates float based on observations at the velocity of seismic waves in the upper mantle
 Tectonic plates made of crust + layer of ridged upper mantle is together referred to as
lithosphere
 They float on the low velocity zone (name = where seismic wave velocities
decrease)
o It is due to the fact that its of a lower density and more of a fluid than
the surrounding mantle on either side
 The existence of the asthenosphere allows the plates to move
 Otherwise, the crust will be glued to the mantle;
mantle moves much more slowly than the crust does
o Diagram
 Mohorovivic discontinuity is the line between the crust and the upper mantle, but the
upper mantle is still part of the lithosphere
 Because the seismic velocity changes as it moves from continental crust
chemistry to mantle chemistry, it’s a discontinuity
 Today: How oceans form: the East African Rift
o Wilson cycle (history of oceans; during stages of ocean birth and demise)
 Wilson cycle describes how oceans open and close
o Diagram (right)
 (1) Start with a supercontinents or any big block of continental rock
 Basically, any areas with big, warm, thick areas of crust covering the interior
of the core like a blanket
o Heat doesn’t transmit up thru it very easily
 Entrapment of heat over time, starts to lift up and create a weakened part of
the interior of the supercontinent
o Called a rift; when it rifts away from the uplifted hot area
 It cracks and breaks up to slide down on either side
 (2) Once a gap is created, material has to come up to fill the gap; that material is
warm upper mantle
  Creates ocean basin because when you melt the mantle, you produce new
oceanic crust (at mid ocean ridges)
o Called embryonic ocean
 However, once that ocean crust starts to get up to surface, its
called a juvenile ocean (example = red sea)
 (3) Overtime, sea floor gets wider due to floor spreading
 Pushes the continents away from each other (resulting in broad linear oceans
like Atlantic Ocean)
o Caused by even creation of ocean floor
 (4) At some point, the ocean floor in a mature ocean basin starts to get quite cold,
thick and dense; once its really old, it starts to fall down into the asthenosphere
(subducts)
 Starts to go down into the mantle to be recycled
 (5) However, as it does subduct, it starts to pull the continental blocks back together
 Closing the ocean
 (6) If enough subduction occurs, there are many collisions leading to creation of a
new supercontinents thru the process of orogeny (mountain building)
o Analogy of accordion
 Continental blocks are coming apart; along their margins are sediments and coral
reefs (rocks are created along the margins)
 Once they are brought back together, all the ocean floor sediments get
squished up in between
o Orogeny
o Continental crust grows over time thru process of opening and closing of oceans
 Development of the “Passive Margins” of continents
o Stage 1: East African Rift
 Opening of new continental rift
o Stage 2: Red Sea
 Eventual creation of oceanic crust
o Stage 3: Atlantic Ocean
 All the uplifted margins on either side of rift undergo weathering and erosion
 That material washes into the ocean and get big continental shelves
collecting at the margins
o Tend to get really wide at passive margins
 Do get the continental shelves along active margins too but
the problem on active margins is that there are submarine
trenches on active margins
 Growing on top of big submarine trench disallows
opportunity to grow very wide because the sediment
goes down into the trench
o Pushed down into the mantle (crumpled up)
 Rocks vs. Minerals
o Most rocks are collection of minerals
o Minerals are the individual crystalline substances within rocks
 Figures
  Individual minerals are felspar (pink and white), quartz (white and gray) and
biotite (black)
o Biotite is very soft and can be peeled infinitely
 Silicate minerals
o Crust and mantle are mostly made out of silicate minerals
 Silicate name because building block of the mineral is the crystalline structure called
a silica tetrahedron
 All have the same molecular building block
o Piling the silicate together with other metals = crystal lattice
 The more silica tetrahedron bonded tighter, the higher in
silica the rock is
o Glass is example of silica
 An amorphous solid (doesn’t have a crystalline structure)
 Melted silica
o Silica itself is relatively low density compared to other building blocks in minerals
 The more silica you have, the lower the density the rock is
 Continental crust is high silica while mantle is low silica
 Rock cycle (diagram)
o Rocks are always getting formed and transformed in a cyclical manner
 Igneous rocks (rocks cooled from magma)
 igneous and metaphoric rocks get turned into sedimentary rocks thru break down
 Sedimentary and igneous rocks can both be turned into metaphoric rocks by being
heated up to high pressures
 Rock melts into magma
o Start from creation of magma and the cooling of magma into 2 categories of igneous rocks
 When a rock melts, it melts into a substance called magma (molten rocks)
 Can happen by…
o Heating up (not common)
o Decompression (common) or flex-induced melting
o Decompression melting (figure)
 Analogy of ice and melting it; increases the temperature and go from solid to liquid
 However, rocks also have to deal with pressure because rocks go up and
down in the crust/mantle
 Y-axis includes depth and pressure
 As you go deeper down into the earth; there is increase in pressure
o Usually what happens is there is decrease in pressure as rocks go
from low in the crust to a point higher in the crust
 Results in decompression melting
o Flux-induced melting (figure)
 Also, can change the shape of the phase diagram by changing chemistry called flux
melting
 In geology, there is water being added into rocks
o The line between solid and liquid changes shape
 There is a lower threshold in terms of pressure and
temperature b4 a rock starts to melt
 o Basically, three methods of melting rocks (all natural)
 Increase temperature
 Decrease pressure
 Add water
 Partial melting
o Rocks don’t melt all at once (mixture of minerals)
 Each mineral has a different melting temperature
o Figure
 A
 Mixture of glass or plastic
 B
 At one temperature, some stuff melts
o Thus, if you were to move the melted rock and examine it, its
composition is not the same as in A
 Partial melting
 Happens every time when rocks melt into magma
 C
 Silica melts quickly (in lower temperature)
o Magma tends to be more silica rich than the rock that melted
 Magma is a crystal mush
o Consists of melted rock; consisting of little crystals that haven’t melted and are solid with a
bunch of gases
 Igneous rocks are cooled magma
o Sometimes, magma rocks don’t stay underground but rather comes to the surface
 It is now called lava instead of magma
o The rate at which magma cools, dictates the texture of the rock that forms
 Example; at the same composition of silica content of magma, there can be
production of at least 3 different rocks
 Granite (cools slowly)
o Coarse crystals within growing big and interlock with each other
 Solidified all underground and get big crystals forming
 Rhyolite
o Fine crystals
 If it comes to surface, melted part cools b4 crystals can grow
and get fine textured rocks
 Obsidian (cools fast)
o No crystals
 If it quenches really fast, it turns into glass
 Igneous Rocks
o Representation of magma chamber systems underground
 Batholith
 Big magma chambers
 Pluton
 Smaller magma chamber
o Opportunity for magma to cool really slowly
  2 conduit systems
 Dike
o Vertically
 Sills
o Horizontally cuts within the crust
o Once magma reaches the surface, it can cause extrusive events…
 Magma can explode
 Explosive eruption
o Contains a lot of gases
 Magma flows across long distances
 Effusive eruptions
o Doesn’t explode into the atmosphere
 Magma viscosity
o Viscosity = resistance to flows (how quickly it flows)
 Depends on how much silica it contains
o Felsic (high in silica)
 Very high viscosity
 Lighter in colour
o Mafic (less in silica)
 Low viscosity
 Can flow very long distances (runny)
 Tend to be darker in colour
 Low viscosity (low silica) and high-viscosity (high silica)
o If u release enough magma in one spot, there will be creation of landforms like volcanoes that
have topography to them
 Shape of volcanoes are dictated by the viscosity of the magma that is involved in the
flows
 High silica flows
o Little movement of magma = sits like a dome in one spot
 Intermediate silica flows
o Produce big stratiform volcanoes
 Example; Mount Fuji
 Lava of different compositions can flow and create a
steep looking shape
 Really low silica
o Less viscous
 The flow creates big shield volcanoes that have very shallow
dipping slopes
 Example; Hawaii
o Flows forever and builds low relief mounds
 Contrasting igneous rocks at different plate margins
o In divergent margins
 Have melt generated from low silica mantle
 It’s a mantle that haven’t touched the ocean b4; no water in it and so it
produces dry magma
 o The rocks generated there are basalt and gabbro
 Creating high density ocean floor
o In convergent margins
 Have production of magma that is produced thru flux melting (via addition of water)
 The water is added to the crust due to contamination from down going
subducting ocean crust that has been in contact with water for a long part of
its history
 Get wet magma
 High in silica
o Rocks; andesite (found a lot in Andes & intermediate between mafic
and felsic) and granite (felsic)
 Therefore, have low density rocks formed at subduction
zones
 Sedimentary rocks
o Now with rocks at the surface (above sea level), it is subjected to weathering from elements
(wind, rain, gravity)
 Breaks the rocks up and turns it into sediment
o Sediment is transported from where it was made down into the low parts of the basins via
rivers, wind and gravity
o Sediment is deposited and more stuff is buried on top of it
 More pressure is piled up
o General cycle for clastic rocks; just made out of fragments from preexisting rocks
 Sandstone (broken down rock), conglomerate (bigger fragments). Breccia (angular
fragments)
 Lithification of clastic sedimentary rocks
o Happens when sediment turns into sedimentary rock via confining pressure of that
overburden
 More sand put on top, puts more pressure and becomes compacted
 Fluids migrate thru all sediments all the time and leave behind pockets of
cement
o Porosity = holes in between different grains (measure of its ability to hold fluid)
 Connected pores = permeability (allows fluids to migrate thru; measure of ease of
flow of fluids thru the porous solid)
 Groundwater and oil move thru them
o Once its cement, it’s a hard solid and it’s a lithified rock
 Chemical weathering
o Minerals dissolved and altered by some fashion
 Produces dissolved ions in water
 Allows saltwater generation
o Billions of years of dissolution of minerals in continental crust
o Different rocks resulted from precipitation or changing from ions to solids of those ions
 Biochemical rocks
 Organisms take nutrients from the water and turn into skeletons (when dead)
that are collected into rocks
 Chemical rocks
 No biology involved
 o Salty water
 All water evaporates off and leaves behind only salt
 Evaporite
o Forms in areas with high evaporation and a
basin to trap the water
o Very mobile
 Salts are very mobile in the crust
(low density); can rise up and create
dome like structures
 Different sedimentary rocks
o Most sediments wash into basins overtime
 Ocean basins, continental shelves or deeper ocean basins
o Most surface is covered in sediment or sediment rocks
 Where are most sediments today?
o Continental shelves
 Big, broad, shallow place; rim of shallow water surrounding the continents
 All sediments
 Since, the area is shallow = biological productivity = production of
hydrocarbons = oil and gas + salt deposits + fisheries (nice warm water)
o Shelves also in active margins as well (small and narrow tho)
 Metamorphic rocks
o Formed from alterations at great depths and at great pressures
 When crustal, igneous and sedimentary rocks are buried, they metamorphose
 If buried too deeply, they melt
o Normally found in the crust and change over time with heat and
pressure
 Increasing metamorphic gradient from sedimentary rocks
(shale) on the surface to gneiss
 Help the crust move laterally
 “Passive margins” of continents
o Rifting sets the stage for the accumulation of a passive margin
 Breaking apart and thinning of crust
 Block faulting
o Blocks of crust are being tilted and sliding down
 Creating area right along the margin that’s already higher
than the ocean floor itself
 Has ridges to trap sediments and lots of salt is
trapped there
 How New oceans Form
o Form thru process of rifting at places called triple junctions
o Middle figure
 (1) Continents are like blankets that hold heat down; when over a heat source like
mantle plume
 Heat thermally lifts up the crust
 (2) When very hot, it expands and blows up
  Starts to crack (can’t stretch forever); breaks up into 3 arms in equal
directions
o Cracks widen as individual blocks slide away from the lifted area
and extend laterally
 With 2 triple junctions on same continents, the cracks will
run into each other
 Elongating and lengthens = forms a rift system
o Some arms don’t progress too far = called a
failed rift (aulacogens)
 (3) Once there is enough rifting, get ocean floor coming up in between
o Diagram (right)
 Mapped the weakness in the crust
 The offshoots are where there is presence of big river basins
o These failed rifts are aulacogens that never become ocean basins
 Rivers tend to exploit the old zones of weakness
 Example; Ottawa river (former aulacogens when
Pangea tried to break apart)
o Never developed into ocean basins
 Intraplate earthquakes in eastern north America: Record Pangea breakup and fracturing of continent
o Process of triple junctions, rifting and aulacogens, explains why there are earthquakes in
center of continents
o Map
 Intraplate earthquakes
 Actual plate boundary is over in the mid Atlantic (middle of plate boundary)
o Linear zones in the interior of plate boundary
 Failed rifts
 Active today because of big faults in the crust
o Why earthquakes in the artic?
 2 reasons…
 (1) Basin between NA and Greenland is an aulacogens
 (2) There are still remnants of post glacial rebound happening at the arctics
o The removal of ice sheets
 Diagrams
o Left diagram
 Mantle plume is sitting at the center of triple junction between red sea, gulf of Aden
and east African rift valley
 Triple junction is causing uplift in that vicinity
o With uplift, there is thinning and expansion of crust as it slides
away/down from the uplifted area
 When it happens, fractures appear (fissures)
 Magma that is generated from partial melting at top
of mantle plume (due to pressure difference), filters
into the surface and becomes lava flows
o From silica poor source = runny magma so
it floods
  Called big basalt floods
 In the three arms, see wider arms where sea water is inundating and there is narrow
arm
 African rift valley has many volcanoes (triangles), but no big water bodies
instead has deep linear lakes
o Filling in the gap that is widening
 Thermal doming causes uplift of the East African Rift
o Red = big high areas of land at the triple junctions
 Topography
o Glacial forming due to uplift of land
 East African Rift
o Its breaking into 2; Nubian plate (larger part of Africa) and Somalian plate (Somalia; its own
plate)
 Places for new ocean creation
 Also access for living conditions
o Some deep lakes’ (lake Victoria) surface height is below sea level
 Deepest lakes are in rift basins
 Super narrow, deep and long
o Because there is no outlet to the ocean, it can go below sea level
 Basically, when opening something, the middle part drops
down = deep lakes
 Horsts and grabens
o See linear fractures and almost tilted blocks running along the length of rift
 Called horsts and grabens
o Time
 As you are breaking it apart, its like a bookshelf; take book ends off
 All books tilted over
o See a pattern of zigzags if you look at the top
o Initially, b4 any ocean crust starts to form, there are horsts (high points) separated by grabens
(low points)
 Series of tilted blocks
 Great for trapping sediments
 Flood basalts
o Diagram
 LIP cover huge areas
 Importance (earth’s history)
o When releasing magma, with it comes release of gasses into the air
 See changes in earth’s atmosphere due to release of gas over
geological time scales
 Creating rocks that are fresh to the weather
o Weathering can cause changes in Earth’s
atmosphere
o LIP is related to major events in Earth’s history (mass extinctions)
o One of hottest place on earth
 Afar triangle
  Low lying and low latitude place
o Sitting at below the sea level
 Erté Ale volcano
o Alien landscape
 See big crater that is full of magma
 Magma is pushed up and flow long distances (at times)
o Fresh flows = black color of magma pathway
 Weathering overtime = lighter in colour
o Lava touching the air = cools quite fast
 Lava
o Few centimeter lava thickness
o Because they are so viscous, they follow topography
 Follow old river valleys
 Get channelized flows
 If there is enough viscosity they go over topography
 Create their own typography
o Different structures to magma flow
 Tube system
 Dam system
 Due to low viscosity of basaltic magma
o Pahoehoe lava (common in Hawaii)
o Ropey lava
 Thin lava flow that buckles up on itself
 Flows right to left or left to right
 AA lava
o Sometimes, the rind cools too fast and starts to be brecciated (fragments)
 Produces angular fragments of basalt
 Magma pushes the angular fragments until get fragmental mass of magma
and rock
o Texture called AA lava
 Stratovolcanoes produced by contaminated magma
o In east African rift, not only basaltic lava
 Not only shield volcanoes but also stratovolcanoes
 Higher slope and magma that is higher in silica
o Produce more ash when explodes
 Because dealing with continental crust
 Magma generated at top of mantle but migrates
upwards thru continental crust
o Its heating silica rich continental crust;
contaminated by the silica as it travels thru
 Multiple ash layers
o That ash (pulverized rock produced when hyper fragmented rock cools and explodes under
high pressure) washes into valleys
 Moving ash is dangerous
o Can date ash
  (1) Have minerals that are good for radiometric age dating
 (2) Makes layers when washing down the valleys
 Collects into layer and in between the layers are fossils
 Homo habilis
o Evidence of earliest hominids (handy man)
 Produced hand tools out of rocks
 Found from ash units in valleys
o Observed hand axes
 Maybe, ancient marketplace of production tools
 Thus, earliest geologist
 Have to know skill
o Find material, where to find materials and what stones to use to make
useful shapes
 Knowledge of landscapes, earth materials and economics
o Half of cranial capacity of modern humans
 Complex task = drove us to our current state
 Red Sea
o Not an embryonic ocean like east African rift valley but a juvenile ocean
 Because it has oceanic crust and little shelves (shallow water)
 Red Sea is a warm sheltered, biologically active, and full of salt deposits
o Within the dark line (where shelf drops off), find small mid ocean ridge and fracture zones
o Has coral reefs
 Biological activity
o Volcanic islands and vents
 Like death valley
 Shelves contain most of the world’s oil and gas
o Diagram
 As the former horsts and grabens move away from the center, it will cool and
subsides
 But there are still ridges and valleys that trap sediment along the margin
o Because there are a lot of biological activity, there is production of
gas and oil
o Because there are restricted basins, get salts and evaporites
accumulation
 Red sea opening pushes Arabian plate north into Europe
o East African plate will likely be a failed plate boundary
 Aulacogen
o With the new ocean crust being formed in the red sea, Saudi Arabia will be pushed
northwards
o Diagram
 There is a convergent boundary at the black line (beside the label of Arabian plate)
 Opening of the Red Sea
o Figure
 Arabian plate and African plate are moved northwards
  Because Arabian plate’s geometry, its being moved faster than the African
plate
o As a result, get a long fault that accommodates the differential rates
of plate movement
 Dead Sea fault zone
 Causing Arabian plate to be pushed into Turkey
(Anatolian plate)
o There is a collision zone called Zagros
collision zone
 See faults happening because the
Anatolian plate has to get out of the
way, undergoes escape tectonics;
pushed over top of Mediterranean
sea
o Essentially, one rift basin does a lot of damage (down the line)
 Active system
 Consequences in other plates
 Dead sea fault
o You wouldn’t know the movement speed changes if you were on it
o However, relative to each other, the African plate is moving south
 Get small basins opening along the faults due to jumps in the fault
 Opening up holes called pull apart basin
o Dead sea is a classic example
o There is a transform plate boundary between the 2 plates (nothing is created or destroyed)
o Map
 Earthquakes happening as a result of movements (stars)
 Map
o Vectors
 Differential vectors; larger vectors in Arabian plate vs smaller vectors in African plate
o Collions zones
 Create mountains
 Petra, Jordan
o Made of sandstones (temples)
o Had a big earthquake
 Partially destroyed that building called treasury in 16th century
 Effects of the 363 AD Earthquakes at Petra
o Carving into sandstone = weakening it so when it shakes from earthquakes, it reacts brittlely
 Falls apart
o Dated by historical records and archaeological dates like coins
 Dead is an endorheic basin
o Endorheic basin
 Water comes in and can’t flow out
 Its very hot so there is a lot of evaporation
o As a result, it has a high salinity in the waters
 The salt is from the weathering of rock
  Sodium and chlorine ions
o Density is high
 Can float
o Salt when it evaporates, it makes big thick layers
 Thick layers are highly mobile
 It pushes up thru the crust and makes salt diapirs (dome)
o Bubbles of salt
 Good traps for oil and gas (hydrocarbons)
 Thus, look for this when looking for gas; these pull
apart basins happening along incipient passive
margins
 Aretet
o Crusader fortress built on the Jordan River
 On top of dead sea fault zone
 Subject to numerous transform boundary earthquakes (up to magnitude 7 or 8
not really 9s)
o Due to the movement along the fault, can see separation and
dislocation along the fault lines in buildings (evidence)
 Ancient Roman city of Hippos
o Columns are left in place
 Able to track the direction that the earthquake come in from
 Based on how the columns fell
 Arabian plate is pushed north along the dead sea fault zone
o Escape tectonics near the Turkey because its being squeezed towards the east
 Escaping towards the north and Anatolian faults (over the Mediterranean sea)
 Mediterranean sea is a dying sea (old and not a lot of current sea floor
spreading)
o Being subducted underneath Turkey
o North Anatolian fault line (most dangerous)
 High activity and has a seismic gap where a lot of people live on it
 Seismic activity in Turkey
o Istanbul is onto of a major fault line
o Risk map
o Earthquakes release pressure and prevent pressure from building up
 Creating even bigger earthquakes
 Not necessarily a good thing
o Interestingly, the earthquakes are getting more recent from east to west
 Getting closer to Istanbul (more west)
 Called cascading earthquakes
o Because stress is released in one place but migrates up to next point
and to the next point
 Aya Sofia, Istanbul
o Buildings are destroyed then rebuilt
 Creating chronology of earthquakes
 February 2023 earthquakes
 o Happened at the juncture between transform plate boundary and east Anatolian fault
 Cascade of earthquakes
 One earthquake transmitted the stress down the fault line
o Dead sea fault turns into the East Anatolian fault and pushes Turkey to the West
 Map
o Like the Istanbul situation
 Seismic gap in the fault zone
 Length of fault zone that haven’t experienced an earthquake in a while
(recorded in recent times)
o Stress was building up
o Map
 No earthquakes b4 in green; earthquakes in red, blue and pink
o Vector map (top left)
 Red arrow (larger vector)
 Shows that the small sliver of crust between the 2 joining up fault segments
o Moved to the west by 3 meters in weeks
 Blue vectors (smaller vectors)
 Moved in lower velocity
Lecture 5:

 Today
o 2 types of mid ocean ridges
 Fast spreading ridges = East Pacific Ocean
 Slow spreading ridges = Mid Atlantic Ridge
 Caused by 2 mechanisms called slab pull and ridge push
o 3 ways to study mid ocean ridges
 (1) Direct observation
 Using a submarine; first one was called Alvin
o Really hard in practise
 Saw a lot of hydrothermal activity (hot water being pumped
thru = creating unique ecosystem)
 2 vents; black and white smokers
 (2) Ancient MORS
 Old examples that have been brought up to surface
o Ophiolites = ocean crust that has been shoved up onto land
 Can profile thru the whole thickness of the crust
 They are highly mineralized via the hydrothermal activity
 Rich in metals
 (3) Iceland
 Great example of MOR but its actually above surface (typically should be
underwater) due to being uplifted by a mantle plume
 Looking at glacial and volcanic events
 Age of the Ocean Floors
o Created by sampling and magnetic stripes to figure out the age
o Ocean floor is not very old
  Oldest ocean floor is 150 – 200 million years (compared to Earth which is 4.5 billion
years)
o See a pattern in the distribution
 Older crust at the margin but young crust at the center
 Get a lot of earthquakes due to subduction zones of old ocean floor
(expiratory date)
o Becomes dense and goes down into the mantle
o See a difference in width of the bands
o Same age duration but the thickness is much wider in Pacific than in Atlantic Ocean
 Because of the rate of creation of new sea floor spreading between 2 ridges
 East Pacific = fast spreading ridge
 North Atlantic = slow spreading ridge
o Bands are narrower
o Missing parts of ocean floors
 Lost a lot of ocean floor due to subduction underneath NA
 Remember; magma comes up thru the fissure and wedges the ocean floor
open symmetrically on both sides but in this case, its due to subduction that it
looks asymmetrical
 Causing earthquakes underneath continents
 Spreading rate map
o Fast spreading ridge speed (plates moving away from each other) = 20 cm per year
o Slow spreading ridge speed = 4 cm per year
 Slab pull (subduction is one control for rate of sea floor spreading)
o As you form new rock at MOR, its initially thin ocean crust but below that is the lithospheric
plate (mantle lithosphere) that’s cooled and stuck onto the bottom of the crust
 Absolute thickness increases as it gets colder and moves away from the MOR
o As plates get colder, it gets thicker and more dense
 Begins to subduct (at one point)
 Creating a pole in MOR and create tectonic stress conditions that allow for
the MOR to spread very quickly
o Resulting in fast spreading ridge
 Ridge push
o If you don’t have much subduction, the ridge push (the bigger influence)
o Diagram
 MOR (hot and thin) sit up in the ocean floor
 The thermal uplift is creating a slope
o There is pushing due to gravity sliding the plates down off the slope
and new magma forcing its way up thru the crack
 Ridge push
o In reality, both ridge push and slab pull occur all the time (together)
 Rate of spreading gives slightly different ridge morphologies
o Fast spreading ridge
 Not get much axial valley (small rift valley running thru the broader ridge structure)
 Magma comes up really quickly and fills it
o Never get down faulting
 o Slow spreading
 Much less magma around to fill as it spreads slowly
 Less magmatism and so much pronounced rift valley in general
 Direct observation with submersibles
o Submarines don’t go too deep (few 100s)
o Submersibles go 6 km of depth
 Not manned (nowadays)
 Smokers
o Once in submersible, don’t see if on a ridge because there’s no light = dark
o Saw little pinnacle; coming off them were smoke
 Smokes have different colours
 Supported a system of animals that were blind (fish and microbes)
o Basically, when there is an axial rift forming, there’s a lot of faulting along a mid ocean ridge
 Creating big cracks in the crust
 The cracks are ideal conduits for water to flow from the ocean into the crust
o Diagram
 Follows density rules
 Water gets cold and sinks down onto the crust
o As it gets down there, it gets hot due to geothermal heat
 As it gets hot, it leaches minerals out from the basalt rock
 The minerals are brought to the surface as it heats up
and rises up into the fissures/cracks
o Shot up with intense pressure into the cold
sea water
o Since the fluid was changed from really hot
to really cold, the minerals precipitates into
solid form
 Essentially, the little pinnacles are
collections of minerals from the
soup of hot fluid that’s filtered thru
the cracks
 The organism must not require sunlight and produce energy for life from the
chemicals in the water
 Chemosynthetic organisms
o Black smokers
 Precipitate metals (zinc, copper)
o White smokers
 Water doesn’t get high temperature (more colder)
 Instead release carbonate minerals
 Precipitation of minerals happens when that mineral-rich water cools quickly
o Pinnacles are porous and a chimney for release (on top)
o The minerals are sulfide minerals, iron sulfides
 Quite valuable
 Study of ancient MORS
o Ancient examples = ophiolites (skin of snake)
  The rocks brought onto land in MORS are green
 Metamorphosis due to the hydrothermal circulation, entire history of its life
as oceanic crust and by getting thrusted onto land
o Turning green via process of serpentinization
 Alteration of mineral olivine into serpentinite via water
 Ophiolites: Accretion of obducted ocean crust
o Rule of thumb; when converging ocean crust and continental crust occurs, continental crust
always wins with oceanic crust being subducted
 Not always the case
o Sometimes, silver of oceanic crust is thrusted onto continental crust due to complex collision
zones between different continental crust
 Not called subducted but rather obducted
 Occurs during accretion of various pieces of continental crust onto the side of
an existing continent
o Diagram (order of events building Newfoundland)
 First had an ocean floor called lapetus ocean
 Then island arcs converged onto the margin and thrusted a former slice of the lapetus
oceanic floor
 Pillow lavas
o Ophiolites allow us to see inside the crust and the stratigraphy
 At the very top, see pillow lavas
 Happens when lava erupts under water
o The lava is low viscosity and instantly cools when hits the water
 But it has pressure on it (underwater) and holds the magma
 Able to inflate into a balloon
o Pops and makes a new balloon elsewhere
 Thick layer of pillow lavas
o Pillow lavas
 Rounded, shell shaped with pointy downwards region
 Go on forever
 3 bya old pillow lavas
o Have the exact same form
 Rounded form with a pointy right hand side
o Go thru many different events
o Because of tectonic compression are elongated and green
 Serpentinite appearance
 See them in belts across the Canadian shield called greenstone belts
o Importance; hold a lot of minerals that we go and mine
 Gold
 Sheeted dikes
o If you go down the pillow basalts, you get into sheeted dikes (fracture where magma filters
thru and cools)
 It cools underground (intrusive)
 In sheet like form
o In spreading centers, get successive dikes
  Intruding up amongst themselves
o Example
 Due to ophiolites being thru many tectonic events, are deformed
 S shaped
o Originally regular sheets
 Layered Gabbro
o If you go below the sheets of dikes (further down into the stratigraphy), get gabbro (intrusive
form of basalts)
o If the basalts cool very slowly, the crystals grow larger in the magma chamber
 Get coarse grainy texture
 Called gabbro instead of basalt
o Within the magma chamber
 The high density crystals will sink, and low density ones will float to the top of
chamber
 As a result, get a layered appearance
o Dark minerals (high density)
o Light minerals (low density)
 Due to sedimentary processes within the magma chamber
o Axial magma chamber
 Because they are in center of the rift valley (right below the center axis)
 Building oceanic crust at MOR
o At the very top have pillow basalts
o Next have sheeted dikes
 They feed the pillow basalts
 Conduits where magma move from chambers to the surface
o Below has gabbro crystallizing
o Even below that, have first mantle rock (peridotite)
 Cools onto the base to make the mantle lithospheric part of the lithosphere
 Increases in thickness away from the central rift
 The Iceland Plume
o Iceland plume is lifting the island up out of the ocean
 Acting as the heat source
o Model
 The Icelandic mantle plume originates down at the core mantle boundary
 Because that’s where it’s getting its source of heat
o Core is much hotter than the mantle
 Afar triangle map
o The samething is happening except its now under oceanic crust
 The difference is that the magma doesn’t have to filter thru a thick of a crust in
Iceland as it does in the Afar triangle
o Large Igneous Province
 Region where there is a lot of flood basalt released over a short geological period
 Icelandic plume
o Map
 Dated by the flood basalt across the North Atlantic
  A large Igneous province
o Older flood basalts
 Can track the migration of the crust over mantle plume over
time
 40 mya, the Icelandic plume was responsible for breaking up Greenland and Europe
 Provided the heat for the MO floor to spread
o 2 things happening at once
 Rifting and movement over a mantle plume
 2 different type of movements are called absolute and relative plate motion
 MOR on Iceland
o Iceland is undergoing a relative motion where the 2 plates on either side of plate boundary are
getting rifted apart (at MOR)
o But also, MOR is moving with respect to the relatively stationary Icelandic plume
 Both sides are therefore moving to the west relative to the plume
 Called absolute plate motion
o Although the Icelandic plume is a big source of hot rock and wants to feed the MOR
(volcanism), the MOR is slowly being independent from the plume
 Ridge is moving off the plume
 Get phenomenon called ridge jumping
o Older ridge coming off the plume while a new ridge is connecting
the northern side of MOR with the southern side of MOR
 Won’t be long b4 the MOR is running straight thru from one
side to the other
 Map
o Green circles
 Outline the apparent migration of the plume
 In reality, the plates are moving over the plume
o Plume isn’t moving
 Geological map of Iceland
o See a lot of fissure swarms (Collections of fissures) across the eastern side of island which
was the old sea floor spreading
 Now transitioning to the western side of island
o Age of rock
 Youngest rock is towards the center and gets older symmetrically away form the
ridge system
o Basically, the spreading is jumping to the west
o The ridge that’s coming onto land is called the Reykjanes Ridge
 Reykjanes Ridge
o See linear cracks going thru the landscapes with spatter cones
 Along this line can divide the NA and European plates
o The fractures have steams
 Allow opportunities for water to filter down to the crust and be heated
hydrothermally
 Fissures
o From up top, not much difference in topography as in EAR
  Linear fissures, horsts and grabens
 Due to being on oceanic crust are less tall
o Again, the fissures are providing conduits for magma to come to surface
 Deep
 Grindavik
o A lot of earthquake activity
 Not very big (small tremors)
o Evacuation happening because the fissures are breaking infrastructure (no magma spilling
yet)
 Fissure eruption and a magma flow
o Producing smoke but not much ash (or explosion) with only gases released (not getting height
into the atmosphere)
 Magma fountains just releasing magma, that can travel in lava flow (down slopes =
valley)
 Can create topography but its predictable
o Protective structures to protect and prevent it from going into the town
 But some do flow into town
 Eldfell
o Not well predicated but managed to halt the progression of the flow by cooling it with fire
hoses being pumped by the sea
o Volcano produced lava flow
 Produced tephra
 Thousand year old lava flow near Reykjavik
o Sometimes, have big lava flow
 Following topography (rivers and valleys)
o See wormy texture because the lava is pahoehoe lava (high viscosity)
 Wrinkled up onto itself as it flows
 Lakigigar
o See series of craters = marking the fissures
 Eruption of Lakigigar
o Gases were a major problem
 Widespread famine destroying the vegetation
 Global problem
 Lakigigar
o The big plume of gas had aerosols in them (not ash)
 When in atmosphere, it can disperse
 Able to get into troposphere and across the Europe
o Subsides
 Caused the ultimate French revolution
 Widespread destruction of agriculture, livestock and
plants
o Aerosols block sunlight (on global scale)
 Impacting crop yields worldwide
 Pooled magma
o If the lava flows into bowl shaped basin
  They can be very thick
 Get columnar basalt cooling
o Thick pooling of lava that cools from bottom to top at the same rate
 When it cools, it forms cracks due to the contraction
 Grow from top and bottom until they meet in the
middle
o See hexagonal structures
 Successive lava flows
o About 8 to 10 km thick
 How we build up oceanic crust
 Fissure eruption at Eyjafjallajökull
o Halted air traffic across Europe
 Problem with aviation
o Eyjafjallajökull is a volcano underneath a ice sheet
 When first erupted, caused high magma fountains (typical)
 Didn’t release much magma
 However, its also underneath a small ice cap
 Eyjafjallajökull volcano sits underneath a small ice cap
o When involving magma with ice (not rare because volcanos create topography for ice to grow
on and be large)
 There are more hazardous situations that emerge
o When magma + cold water = explosion
 Different from eruption
 Powerful force
o Creates ash and fragments that spray widely
 Called a phreatomagmatic eruption
o Water when it gets too hot, it transforms into steam and creates pressure
 Explodes the magma into the air
 Katla (under a larger ice sheet)
o More risky situation
o Map
 Monitored intensely with GPS stations
 Notice immediate land motion
o Indicate that magma moved to surface
 Tilt stations
 Tell if the land has tilted
o Tilting indicates that magma has inflated the volcano
 Shattered rock
o The phreatomagmatic eruption caused the ash is shot up into the atmosphere (like aerosols)
 Ash = pulverised exploded rocks
 Extra sharp with pores
 Tephra
o Bombs
 Larger pieces of cooled magma
 Thrown out in far distances
 Eyjafjallajökull ash plume
o Prevailing wind direction takes everything from Iceland down into Europe
 Volcanic ash
o Trouble with navigation (statics)
o Ash melts into engines and resolidifies on the engines
 Dangerous
 Land of Ice and Fire
o Aside from melting water and turning into steam, volcanic eruptions melt a ton of water that
has to go somewhere really fast
 Fjallsjokull
o Outlet glacier
 Releasing from the main ice cap (a protrusion)
 Large floods
o The water from Grimvotn gets damned up within the ice sheet
 If enough water is produced it can produce huge floods called jokulhlaups
o The water finds its way down the outlets and sweeps into the sediment on southern part of
Iceland
 Creates muddy river systems (very powerful)
 Breaks bridges
 Moberg mountains
o A volcano underneath an ice sheet will first melt the area immediate around it but it ends up
poking a hole in the ice sheet
 Ice sheet acts as a mould for the magma to cool
 Results in a mountain formed in the middle of ice sheets called Moberg
 Moberg mountains/ Tuyas
o Predicative layering
 Diagram
 A
o Magma erupting into a small lake that’s melted in the ice sheet
 Get pillow basalts
o As it builds up, it produces hyaloclastite
 Where instead of magma making pillow basalts, it starts to
explode because of interaction with cold water
 Fractured magma making fractured basalt
 B
o When the water is released, it floods elsewhere
o Left with, subaerial lava flows like columnar basalts or solid lava
flows
 Flat tops that make round mountains
 Hyaloclastite breccia
o Process of magma exploding in cold water
 With fragments forming
 Pillow lavas
o Nice round appearance
 Also have fractures radiating from the outside in
  The reason why we have columnar basalts
o Cooling magma from outside in, it shrinks and cracks
 If a sheet = columnar basalt
 If on a smaller scale = just radial fractures
 Hekkla
o Not good for food supply
 Migration away from Iceland
o A ghost town now
 Reykjavik
o Geology responsible for 2 greatest industries in Iceland
 Geotourism
 Waterfalls, glaciers and blue lagoon
 Geothermal energy (hydrothermal energy)
 Electric grid built by deriving energy from water that’s heated in the surface
 How it works
o The water is pumped up and mixed with cold water
 The heat warms the cold water
 Cold water is sued to generate power
o Done because water pumped is enriched in
minerals (sulfuric)
 Produces cheap energy
 Geothermal energy and geyser
o Tubes carrying hot water around in power plants
 Powers greenhouses
o Natural example of geothermal energy = geyser

Lecture 6:

 Today
o Plates interaction around the Pacific Ring
 Ocean crust subducted onto an ocean crust = get island arcs (chains of volcanic
islands)
 Ocean crust converging onto continental crust = get felsic volcanoes called magmatic
arcs
 Oceanic crust passing pass a continental crust
 Wilson cycle
o (4)
 Once plate starts to subduct, the plates can come together (converge onto each other)
o (6)
 When all the ocean plates are subducted, we have mountain building processes at the
scale of Himalayas (called orogeny)
 A dying ocean
o Map
 Ticks = placed on the overriding plates
 Overriding plates, the pacific plate
o No continental crust under the pacific plate
  The east pacific rise is one of the fastest spreading centers in the world
 Producing new oceanic crust
o Due to many subduction happening on all sides, pulling them apart
(slab pull)
 The life cycle of oceans
o Looking at the closure of the pacific – learn a lot of closures in the past
o Actually, the pacific ocean closure is still apart of the process of closure of Tethys sea
(ancient sea)
 When Pangea broke apart, the surrounding continents pivoted to close the Tethys sea
 Resulted in subduction to allow Mediterranean sea
 As Africa pushed northwards
o Have entire mountain belt
 India worked northwards to ram into Asia to create the Himalayas
 The Pacific Rim records
o Alpine-Himalayan orogeny
 Due to break up of Tethys sea
 Still occurring today as Australia is pushing north and wedging upwards into
Asia
o Closing the Pacific ocean from left to right or west to east
o Map
 Margins of pacific ocean = Pacific ring of fire or Pacific rim of fire
 As a result of the subducting floors, have active tectonically region
(hazardous)
o A lot of volcanoes are there (yellow and red dots)
 Big earthquakes
 Where there is convergence have trenches
 Ring of Fire (map)
o All location of deep sea trenches
 Challenger deep = more deep than anys other part of the ocean floor
o Linear and curved bands of trenches (curved because moving curved plates around a curved
surface of Earth)
 Run parallel to chains of volcanoes
 Since subduction is directly related to volcanism
 How plates interact with each other
o Ocean crust converging onto ocean crust
 Subduction (the oldest of the 2 plates subducts)
 Next to the subduction zones have chains of volcanos called island arcs
o Ocean crust converging onto continental crust
 Subduction (since continental crust is more buoyant and thick, it always overrides the
oceanic crust (age doesn’t matter))
o Sometimes, plates cross or slide past each other
 3 types of convergent plate boundaries
o Oceanic-oceanic convergence
 As oceanic lithosphere is subducting and pushed into the mantle, it has a lot of water
(sitting on ocean floor)
  It gets heated up and the water is released into the overlying part of the
mantle or mantle lithosphere
o Magma mixed with water makes a high silica magma
 Very explosive and larger volcanoes (compared to dry
magma)
o Oceanic-continental convergence
 Same process
 However, because the continental crust is so much thicker that magma has less
opportunity to make it to surface
 Get big plutons = called magmatic arcs
o More magma is trapped within the crust b4 it makes it to surface
o Continental-continental convergence
 Obduction (instead of subduction)
 Get big crumple zone (or suture zone)
o Get high mountain plateaus like mount Everest
 The subducting slab delaminates
 To cut off part of the subducting slab so it falls down into the mantle
 Lithospheric thickness away from MORs
o Remember; MOR is where hot mantle rocks come up and melts thru decompression to create
new oceanic crust
 As you move away from MOR, the thickness of the lithosphere increases
 Because more mantle is being cooled and stuck on the bottom of the oceanic
crust
o Map
 Shows thickness of lithosphere
 Ocean crust (10 km) + lithosphere = closer to 100 kms
 Continental crust + underlying mantle (part of lithosphere) = 200 to 300 kms
 As you move away from MOR…
 The age increases, its thicker, colder and get more sediment raining
o Organisms dying in the water and falling down thru the water
column to increase the thickness of the plate more)
 Get more fluids circulating thru the cracks and hydrothermal activity
o Causes the lithosphere to be more dense as it ages
 At some point, its too dense to be floating on the asthenosphere and falls into the
mantle
 That’s when subduction starts
 Oceanic crust meets oceanic crust
o Descending oceanic plate beneath a younger oceanic crust
 Have chains of earthquakes (with high depths) where the crust is being bent and
being pushed underneath
 The earthquakes are much deeper than any place else (only in subduction
zones get deep depths)
o Get rising magma as the plate dehydrates and then the magma moves
thru the overriding plate
 Gets released as volcanoes
  A trench is formed where the bending first starts
 Accretionary wedge also occurs
 All sediment is being wiped off the descending plate (scraped off)
o Get pile of sediments
 Importance
 Place for oil and gas
 Hazardous
o Highly faulted (unstable)
 Mounds of sediment underwater
being caught up in large faults of
subduction zones (a thrust fault)
 Get megathrust earthquakes
o Because they are unstable
 Prone to collapse, causing tsunamis
 Oceanic crust meets continental crust
o Still have generation of magma at depth of melting and trench + accretionary wedge
 However, the magma is caught up at the base of the continental crust
 The magma is sitting in chambers for long time period resulting in batholiths
o Sometimes, the magma cools underground as granite bodies
 Magma sitting in big magma chambers = evolve (compositional different
magma)
o Get evolution of magma the longer it sits on this chamber
o Since there is land sticking up above ocean
 There is lots of weathering = production of sediments
 Rivers and streams washing rocks from mountains; taking them to the
continental shelves (smaller and narrower since its worked into the
accretionary wedge)
o Don’t see big passive margin continental shelves
o In the backarc, see a thrust belt (frequently) because subduction is pushing into the magmatic
arc
 Magmatic arc is being put under compressional strength causing it to squish into the
thrust belt that sits behind it
o Also have crustal thickening because the magma thrusting (crust is becoming more thick)
 With thickness of crust, get isostasy
 The heavy and thick crust is dragging downwards (finding new balance)
o As it does so, it pulls the crust next to it (that’s not as thick)
 Get basins behind the arc
 Sometimes called foreland basin
 Age of the ocean floor controls steepness of descending plate
o (a) If the crust is young and not primed for subduction
 It will push underneath the overriding plate at a shallow angle and underthrust that
plate (almost lift up the overriding plate)
 Get uplift
o (b) If the crust is old and primed
 It will go down at a steep angle readily
  As a result, pull the overriding plate
o Have extension and pulling on the overriding plate (suction effect)
o Japan is a perfect example of the pulling effect in (b) because there is the Sea of Japan behind
it; opening up due to the pulling and opening up at subduction zone
 Map
o In Andes, angle of descent is completely flat (flat slabs)
 Volcanic island arcs
o Indonesia is an example
 Arcuate form of volcanoes (very active)
o There is down going of the Indo Australian plate underneath
o There is a line of deep water along the south (big trench) and tiny islands in between the
volcanic belt
 Accretionary wedge islands
 Lifted up above water level
o Behind it have a back arc basin
o Merapi volcano (most dangerous and active in Indonesia)
 “Fire mountain”
o Merapi volcano
 Good for soil if volcanoes produce lots of volcanic ash
 Provides nutrients = find lots of farms
 A lot of topography = rivers and streams = irrigation
 A lot of agriculture around volcanoes
 Highly monitored
 Lava flows up to 2-4 kms
 Example of stratovolcano
 Vs shield volcanoes (broad and flat)
o Produced by running magma
 Volcanoes on island arcs
o In island arcs, have intermediate magma in chemistry between felsic and mafic (not as
viscous)
 Get layers build up into sharp cone shape
 Magma with lots of silica is more viscous
o Means it doesn’t travel far = don’t get flood basalts (sticky)
 However, that stickiness traps gas
 Gas bubbles being trapped in magma itself
o Get froth coming up thru the volcano and is
being held down by the weight of the rock
above it
 Create a situation where high
pressure is building up
 With these build up, system is disturbed; maybe get a fault that breaks open
and magma finds a way to escape or landslide (sector collapse = big
landslide)
o All the confined pressure is released explosively
 o Sometimes have it shot directly in the air = get fragmentation
occurring = creation of big columns of ash
 Propelled by heat (many kms in the air)
 Called a vertical eruption column
 By night
o Stratovolcano (steep profile)
 With a fault running along the edge = releasing the pressure
 When magma comes out, get a big crater
 White Island Volcano
o Get an asymmetric crater due to the magma shooting at an angle
 Lake of sulfuric acid and active volcano
 Pyroclastic flow
o There is a big cloud of volcanic ash and chucks of debris shooting in the air
 It falls back down
 All that falling back at once creates a new type of flow, pyroclastic flow
o It’s a mixture of hot gas, ash, and magma coming down a slope by
gravity
 They glow (nuee ardente)
o They have density to them and hug the ground
 Travelling in huge distances like channels or across
topography
 Dangerous; very hot and fast
o Go far away from the crater itself
 Ignimbrite deposit
o When they stop, get ignimbrite deposit
 Picture
o Rocks and blocks of rocks carried at hundreds of kilometres per hour
o Not soft because they are hot (hot melted glass)
 When they cool, the fragments weld together
 Hard as rock and concrete
 Volcanic tephra
o A lot ash doesn’t necessarily get worked into the pyroclastic flow
 Ash can be hazardous (lung disease)
 Tiny shards of pulverized fragmented rock (porous and abrasive)
o But good for soil
 Hazard assessment
o Date the ash deposits and pumice rock layers
 The crystals within them allow us to know when the crystals formed in the magma
chamber
 Radiometric dating
 How many eruptions?
o Use charcoal to do radiocarbon dating onto the burned wood
 Charcoal is inert and stable material (doesn’t rot or degrade)
 Carbon dating goes back only several thousands of years
o How frequent or how active the volcano is?
 Ring of Fire
o Japan has a lot of earthquakes bc it’s a juncture of 3-4 plates
 Pacific plate (oldest) subducts underneath everything
 Get actual rollback happening
o Japan is getting suctioned into the trench
 Philippine sea plate is so young and is pushing Japan northwards bc its not
subducting and instead get compression towards the north
 Nobi Earthquake of 1891
o Birth of seismology = recognized earthquakes happening from movement along faults
 Tokyo after the great Kanto Earthquake
o Many damage but see big clouds of smoke
 Not only structural damage bit also infrastructure damage
 Rapturing of gas lines and pipelines of water
o Fire outbreak due to electrical cords being snapped
 Deformation and slip during March 11, 2011
o Magnitude 9 off coast of Japan
 Earthquake was felt (not much structural damage tho)
 Caused 2 important events
o (1) Flexure of the overriding plate
 In big megathrust earthquakes, there tends to be sticky spots
in the subduction zone
 Down going plate gets sticky while the overriding
plate gets pushed up as a result
o Once that pressure is released quickly in a
fault, it flicks back up (unflexes itself)
 Causes area of uplift and subsidence
where it used to be the shape of the
overriding plate
o Right image
 See a situation where the overriding plate was a bit bent but once the fault broke
 There were both a vertical slip and horizontal slip
 There was a vertical uplift next to the fault and subsidence away from the fault
 As the area that was under strain collapsed back down
o The coastal part of Japan went downwards during the fault while the
off coast of Japan went upwards (by a lot)
 March 11, 2011, Honshu Tsunami
o The flick up along the fault causes displacement of water
 Resulted in big tsunami in 2011 (measurable)
 Broke parts of icesheet in Antarctica
 At places near the rapture, get high waves (1 metre rise)
 Tsunami
o The 1 metre of water piles up
 Its when the wave gets to the shallow parts or bays; that’s when the piling of water is
associated with tsunami
 o Thus, the tsunami (bay waves) can easily override even the best engineered sea defenses
because it was lowered by the big flick
 It was unexpected
 Tsunami is often triggered by the collapse of accretionary wedges
o (1) Tsunamis can be triggered by literal movement on faults = rocks being moved away very
quickly
o (2) The accretionary wedge is nearby, unstable and faulted = its soft sediments
 There is a earthquake that shakes; creating a submarine landslide
 Don’t happen during the earthquake but could happen a while later (sneakier)
 Tsunami triggered by volcanic eruptions (3)
o Third way tsunami is generated
 Whole bunch of stuff entering the ocean = triggers tsunami
 Predicting major earthquakes around the Pacific Rim by identifying “seismic gaps” (severity of
earthquakes)
o There are parts of the Pacific Rim where plates are subducting and producing earthquakes all
the time (not to worry bc is subducting smoothly as usually)
 The red zones where the last rapture was 100 years ago or yellow zones with no large
earthquake record; are where we are most interested in (worrying bc it will cause big
earthquakes)
 Places where we don’t have data of mid-sized earthquake happening
 Trenching faults to identify history of movement and “recurrence interval”
o Recurrence interval can be used to predict earthquakes
 History of earthquake activity in a region
 Via structural examination of the landscape
o Dig big trench, map out faults and map out layers of sediments that
haven’t faulted yet
 Figure out when faults will occur to cause earthquakes
 Not very precise (large windows of error)
o Faults are usually cyclic in nature or
episodic
 Aleutian islands
o Chain of arced islands off the coast of Alaska and the Aleutian trench
 Alaskan EQ
o Important for development of plate tectonic paradigm bc, it was one of the biggest
earthquakes that we can even conceive of (magnitude 9)
 Happened in showy way
 In 1960s; when the first scientists pieced together how plate tectonics
happened
o Tuso Wilson putting the united plates of earth together and plate
boundaries where new plates were being formed or destroyed (big
advancement bc of this event)
o Pacific plate is being pushed under the South American plate
 Map
o The crust was under enough stress that it was flexed (position)
  When the fault raptured, the outer part of the bank went up while inner part went
down
 Total shift in landscape (overnight)
 Mount Logan
o Its lifted bc its under all of the stress (causing it to be lifted)
 Its in that same region
o Canada’s newest mountain = 5 my old
 Middleton island
o Happened in a showy way
 There were shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean (seabed); few metres deep that
was lifted above land overnight
 Ghost forests record
o There were ghost forests developed
 Forests that were growing in nice, above sea level environment that was suddenly
sunk down and inundated by salt water (killed off)
 Date each horizon to get frequency of earthquakes (what happens in a ghost forest)
o Nice forest = gets subsided and water comes in = kills off the trees
 A new layer of sediment grows above
 Get areas of dead trees
o Get dig underground to find areas of dead trees
 Thus, use horizons of ghost forests to find frequency of
earthquakes
 Cascadia subduction zone
o Extremely young oceanic crust being pushed under NA
 Created series of MOR
o Microplates that are part of a larger plate is being subducted underneath fully
o Dangerous situation
 Bc, its young plates that’s not primed to subduct
 Its being forced to because on the other side of continent, the MOR is
pushing NA over the new MOR
o Get lots of earthquakes in MOR (as expected)
o Some earthquakes in Cascadia subduction zone and volcanos
happening
 Magmatic arc
 But not as much earthquakes as we should get
 WARN sensors
o Connected by fiber optic cable to monitor over the ridge
 The accelerometer will measure any motion
 Send back several minutes b4 a big earthquakes
 Mount Rainier
o Cascade Range for which the Cascadia subduction zone is named
 There are numerous volcanoes going along the mountain
 Associated with threat of volcanic eruptions
 Also threat of torrential floods
o Bc magma underneath an ice sheet = melts fast = a big flood
  Water reacting directly with magma = larger expositive
 Cascadia earthquake sources
o Last time happened in 1700
 Predicted to happen every 500-600 years
 Effects of earthquakes depend on local geology
o What material cities are build upon (big factor)
 Different substrate can dampen or magnify the actual effect of seismic waves
 If build on bedrocks; exposure to seismic waves will not be as severe as built
on a soft sediment
o Due to liquefaction
 Liquefaction is when sediment grains become supported by water
o Grains of rock with fluid in between in but when shaken up, all the grains lose contact with
each other
 Act as liquid
 Catastrophic if build upon
o Building isn’t sitting on a firm foundation
 Transform plate margin: The San Andreas Fault
o San Francisco is sitting on a segment of the fault that has not moved in a long time
o Creeping segment
 Roads and fence built there are slightly being offset
o The northern parts of the fault = no movement
 Locked up
 Expected to move shortly
o The San Andreas fault is connecting the convergent margin of Cascadia subduction zone to
the series of MOR down in the south
 Connecting 2 different plate boundaries
 Mercalli scale (used in 1906 San Francisco earthquake)
o Known better for its fires that occurred afterwards
 Pipelines and gas lines were raptured
 Can’t put out the fires
o Mercalli scale = assess the degree of damage and map it out
 Metric for how much damage is in what place = map out where the rapture was based
off on
 Where the fault rapture occurred?
 1906 earthquake
o City was leveled off with rubbles everywhere
 Rubble was used to build new land with it
 It was used as a material to create and level off new places for people to build
their houses
o As cities were expanded outwards; built upon all of the fill (debris)
from 1906
 Poorly compacted debris
 Problem in subsequent 1989 earthquake
o Huge structural issues due to liquefaction
 The Andes
 o Magmatic arc
o Place where its young oceanic crust being subducted
 A lot of under thrusting
 The actual mountain (volcanic) belt is wide as a result
 Villarica and Lalima volcanoes
o Number of volcanoes in the southern parts
 Mostly not massively volcanic
 Classic stratovolcanoes (steep cones)
o Old eroded cone
 Went off due to lateral blast
 Lascar volcano
o In the northern part
o No precipitation = quite dry = no vegetation in that area
 Bc its dry, there’s no water to glaciate the volcanoes
 Removes the hazard of melting ice
o No formation of ice sheets
o Generate springs from base of volcano
 For water retrieval
 People live around it
o Monitor via seismometer and the gas output chemistry measurements of samples
 Lava flow from lascar volcano
o From felsic in composition = high in silica = magma flows very slowly and not very far (not
much different from glass)
 Get mushroom shaped lava flow
o Unlike in volcanic arcs which are intermediate in composition
 Chaitan volcano
o Watch for ash in the atmosphere (in Andes)
o See ash column and mushroom lava flow (not moving far; not even past the older crater)
 Built up to make a new peak
o Some volcanoes can put the ash clouds really high in the atmosphere
 Ash in atmosphere = reduce solar radiation coming in = cool the climate for a few
years (in each eruptions)
 Linked Earth events to increased ash clouds
 Obsidian
o See small vegetation
o Also observe ashy wet mud caused from the column of ash
 Coming back down
 Town of Chaitan devastated by a lahar
o The ash presents a new hazard called a lahar
 Different from a pyroclastic flow because it isn’t hot
 Lahar is remobilized ash that is washed into river and swept downstream (as
far as a river)
o Sneaky = can creep up a long time after the volcanic eruption
o Like wet concrete (lahar) vs hard concrete (pyroclastic flow)
 Still move very fast but silenced
 5 plate tectonic settings to remember
o (2)
 Where get the most explosive, ashy, felsic volcanoes
o (3)
 Get magma that is intermediate in composition
o (4)
 Can have earthquakes but tends to not have much in terms of volcanic activity
 Earthquakes are rather sallow
o (5)
 Follows the evolutionary process of creating embryonic basin and maturation of
ocean basin
Lecture 7: