Tag: geology

Bermuda Mystery Surfaces with Discovery of Massive Underground Structure, Revealing a New Deep-Earth Anomaly

A new seismic analysis has revealed an unusually thick structure beneath Bermuda, a geological oddity that defies conventional models and may rewrite scientists’ understanding of how the island chain emerged.

The unusual feature consists of a 12.4-mile-thick layer of rock beneath the crust, located within the tectonic plate beneath Bermuda. Scientists have never detected such a thick layer of rock under similar tectonic conditions, where the mantle is typically found.

Bermuda Mystery

The 181-island chain of Bermuda has long puzzled geologists. The oceanic crust beneath the islands sits at a higher elevation than the surrounding seafloor due to a mysterious swell. Typically, volcanic activity would account for such uplift, yet geologists believe the region hasn’t experienced an eruption in 31 million years—a discrepancy that has fueled decades of speculation.

The newly discovered structure may help resolve that puzzle. Despite the extreme age of Bermuda’s last known eruption, the massive rock layer suggests that ancient volcanic activity could have injected a significant volume of mantle material into the crust. That slab now appears to be pushing the ocean floor upward by nearly 1,700 feet relative to nearby areas.

Similar mantle quirks may explain the formation of other islands worldwide. At certain locations known as mantle hotspots, rising plumes of hot material generate volcanic activity that builds islands from below—Hawaii being a prime example. In most cases, however, the crust eventually moves away from the hotspot, causing the uplift to subside over time.

Bermuda’s uplift, persisting for more than 31 million years, defies that pattern. What exactly is occurring beneath the island remains the subject of active debate.

Imagining the Bermuda Rock

The team behind the discovery, spread across multiple U.S. institutions, including Yale and Smith College, reported their findings in a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They relied on seismic data to make their discovery, drawing from a seismic station located on Bermuda, which collected the data by observing large earthquakes occurring at great distances from the island. 

These observations allowed scientists to image the Earth below Bermuda to a depth of 31 miles. Changes in the signal received as the tremors reached Bermuda enabled the teams to identify the anomalous rock layer, which varied in density, thereby altering the seismic waves.

Earlier research on Bermuda’s geology revealed that the archipelago’s ancient lava was low in silica, indicating that it was produced from high-carbon rock. Further analysis of the material’s zinc content revealed that the lava originated deep in the mantle. Geologists believe that the rock originally entered the mantle during the formation of the Pangea supercontinent some 900 to 300 million years ago.

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Geology is racist as it is ‘linked to white supremacy’ claims Queen Mary University of London professor

A geography professor at a leading British university has described the study of rocks and the natural world as racist and linked the academic field to ‘white supremacy’.

Kathryn Yusoff, who lectures at the prestigious Queen Mary University of London, said that the geology as a subject was ‘riven by systematic racism’ and influenced heavily by colonialism.

The study of prehistoric life through fossils was also branded as an enabler for racism, with the professor referring to the field of palaeontology as ‘pale-ontology’.

Arguing that geology began as a ‘colonial practice’, Professor Yusoff stated in her book ‘Geologic Life’ that the extraction of metals such as gold and iron had created hierarchies, pushed materialism, ravaged environments and was the route cause of climate change.

Claiming that ‘geology continues to function within a white supremacist praxis’, the academic referenced the theft of land, mining and other geological practices as having led to the creation of white supremacy and a resulting ‘geotrauma’.

Professor Yusoff’s new book focuses on geology between the 17th and 19th centuries and puts forward the notion that non-white people have a closer relationship to land than white people.

‘Broadly, black, brown, and indigenous subjects… have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness,’ she wrote. 

Ms Yusoff is described as a professor of ‘inhuman geography’ on the official Queen Mary University website.

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New Dating Places the First European Hominids in Southern Iberia

One of the most significant controversies in the study of human evolution and migration is determining when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from Africa. Recent geological dating techniques applied to the Orce sites in the Baza basin, Granada, Spain, have discovered human remains that are approximately 1.3 million years old. This finding supports the hypothesis that humans may have entered Europe through the southern Iberian Peninsula via the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than returning to the Mediterranean through Asia. 

New Dating Techniques Reveal Ancient Hominids 

According to a report by the University of Barcelona, the study, led by Luís Gibert of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre and Murray State University in the United States, utilized paleomagnetism to date the Orce region. Paleomagnetism studies the inversion of the Earth’s magnetic poles, recorded in minerals, to establish time periods. The new dating involved an area of Orce that had never been sampled before and was protected from erosion. 

“The uniqueness of these sites is that they are stratified and within a very long sedimentary sequence, more than eighty meters (262 feet) long,” explained Gibert. 

This extensive sequence allowed the identification of a magnetic polarity sequence with five magnetic events, placing the Orce sites between the Olduvai and Jaramillo subchron, approximately between 1.77 and 1.07 million years ago. Through a statistical age model, the researchers refined the chronology to a margin of error of only 70,000 years. 

The oldest site, Venta Micena, dates back to 1.32 million years ago, followed by Barranco León at 1.28 million years, and Fuente Nueva 3 at 1.23 million years. 

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Not all “fossil fuels” are from fossils, so where do they come from?

Dr. Willie Soon is an American astrophysicist and geoscientist.  He is a co-team leader at CERES Science and is a leading authority on the relationship between solar phenomena and global climate.  For more than 32 years he has been studying the Sun-Earth relations in terms of not only meteorology and climate but also in terms of orbital dynamics of Sun-Earth-other planets interactions, magmatic (volcanoes) and tectonic (earthquakes) activities.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Soon explained that a lot of what we’ve been told about energy and climate is false. “I would [say] about 80 to 90% of the papers published in so-called ‘climate science’ today should not be published,” he said.

At the end of the interview, he briefly spoke about examples of the evidence of God he sees in the field of mathematics.

For the sake of brevity, we have limited our article to the first part of the discussion which was about how hydrocarbons are produced.  You can watch the full interview below. For Dr. Soon’s commentary on the interview, which provides links to relevant science papers and a pdf of background material, follow THIS link.

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A Strange Plastic Rock Has Ominously Invaded 5 Continents

By now, many of us have seen the disturbing photos of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where the vortex forces of the world’s biggest ocean has created two massive patches of plastic waste and other maritime trash that litters our watery globe. But plastics aren’t happy just remaining in the form of a discarded shopping bag or McDonald’s straw—plastics tend to get everywhere. In fact, plastics are so ubiquitous, they reside in your body right now.

Plastics are now also infecting the Earth’s geology—so much that experts are now calling to formally recognize a new kind of sedimentary rock: plastistone. Deyi Hou, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China, and his colleague Liuwei Wang recently wrote a paper about the emergence of this new plastic-rock fusion.

“Sedimentary rocks are the dominant rock type found on the Earth’s surface, and they are highly susceptible to influence by human activities,” the paper reads. “We contend that these novel plastic forms meet the criteria of a sedimentary rock…we propose the adoption of an existing term ‘plastistone’ with a revised definition to collectively describe these novel plastic forms.”

This past March, geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos reported evidence of a “disturbing” find on a remote island of Trindade, which is about a four-day boat trip from Brazil. It was in this seemingly untouched paradise that geologists discovered stones effectively fused with plastic trash that formed a new type of rock.

And this wasn’t the first example.

Ten years prior, geologists first spotted these hybrid rock specimens on the coast of Hawaii. And since then, these stones have been found across five continents and 11 countries, according to Hou and Wang. Although some experts call these stones plastiglomerate, plastitar, plasticrust, or anthropoquinas, this paper puts forward the term “plastistone”—first coined in 2022—to keep nomenclature aligned with other sedimentary rock, such as limestone, dolostone, sandstone, and mudstone.

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