OVER the last week a new island has formed in the Pacific Ocean near Tonga. But, no, it is not because sea levels are falling!
Rather it is the consequence of a volcanic eruption.
A volcanic eruption allows molten rock, ash, and poisonous gases to escape from the earth’s mantle sometimes resulting in the formation of a mountain or island.
The volcano off the coast of Tonga began erupting last Monday and apparently by Wednesday it had formed a small island.
The great majority of oceanic islands in the Pacific were formed by this type of volcanic activity.
While the volcanoes are active, the islands rise relative to the global averaged sea-level. When volcanic activity stops, the islands will cool and eventually start to sink.
So there are islands rising and sinking all the time.
In fact the problems at Tuvalu, where Al Gore has claimed seawater inundation from rising sea waters, may have more to do with natural subsidence.
UPDATE, April 1, 2009
According to this NASA newsletter the eruptions did not result in a new island, but rather a larger Hunga Ha’apai. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=37657&src=eoa-iotd
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Notes
Crikey! The Islands Are Still There: An Inconvenient Truth (Part 3). http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2006/09/crikey-the-islands-are-still-there-an-inconvenient-truth-part-3/
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Not to mention the Japanese pineapple industry that depleted all the fresh water causing sea water to flow in.
That word ‘may’ sums up a lot of things if there is a bit of uncertainty. Appropriate use of the word ‘may’ could even be a precursor to understanding risk management. But the sea level is rising so why bother desperately displaying your spin and weave.
Hi Bazza,
Effective risk managment at Tuvulu may require a consideration of natural subsidence, erosion, aquifer depletion, sealevel rise and politics… and what else?
bazza,
Reading most of your posts, it seems, that we are living on different planets.
Here is just one paper from hundreds, that disputes your claim. (peer reviewed)
http://www.cpom.org/research/djw-ptrsa364.pdf
I’ll refrain from commenting here until the usual suspects do but linking volcanism with mountain building, in terms of the current plate tectonics paradigm, is a bit of an intellectual stretch.
The cause of this eruption, in the middle of an ocean, remains ha
rd to explain – all volcanic activity have to be caused by thermal surges in the upper mantle/lower crust region. Radioactive decay cannot supply this energy by definition.
Given a cooling Earth, from previous posts here in terms of SST, one might suggest that the 2009 volcanism might have its cause in the thermal flux of 1998, which itself might then be related to an earlier thermal flux of solar origin.
Is there, therefore, any evidence for a periodicity of volcanic activity?
If there is, what present observations might it be explained by.
Hey, those are natural gases, not poisonous.
Louis,
maybe those subduction zones were caused by the SHRINKAGE of the earth??
If you are into wild theories try this site:
http://www.creationscience.com
The religious theme will throw many off, but, the man IS a successful MIT PHD Engineer through West Point with much Mathematics, Physics, Geology…. Makes for interesting reading. Does not conflict with the electric universe either!! I ran across it looking for information on the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon section was excellent so I read the rest. Quite impressive if conventional paradigms don’t measure up for you.
What a hoot. Marcus puts up a climate model as a rebuttal for the sceptical position. No hypocrisy here…
KuhnKat
I don’t think they are subduction zones, especially near Tonga – though a shrinking Earth has been proposed by Vadim Anfiloff (geophysicist) to explain anomalous earthquakes on continental Australia.
The Grand Canyon explanation on the site is a bit iffy – I had a quick scan but need to read it fully. It’s better explained as a large lichtenberg structure but that raises EU theories and at present these are heretical here (See Bob Foster’s Editorial on the latest E&E on Anthony Watt’s site).
There was also a raised island just a few hundred km from the ABC’s infamous sinking islands in the Solomons chain. Remember the ones that Tony Jones (spivanthropus climatensis) claimed was evidence of rising sea levels. Yep, the 1.2m localised sea level rise that wasn’t even replicated 80km away on Bougainville.
Funny how that other bastion of scientific rigour, the CSIRO, has all these isolated mid-pacific sea level monitoring sites while they carefully avoid contradictory data from 200 year old sites like Fort Dennison in Sydney. And don’t we all just love they way they obscure a single once-off jump in a century long record behind an annual mean increment figure. They never explain how a single jump in sea level over a year or two can possibly reconcile with a gradual annual temperature increment over the same century of data.
But of course, anything makes sense to CSIRO after 4 cones.
Ian Mott,
Interestingly some years back one of my family in the RAN told me that the Tuvalu survey done by the wife of another RAN officer was doctored by the Tuvalu govt. to ensure IMF funding. There was no imminent rise in sea level! They are, as Nigel Caldwell so eloquently put it, lying to us.
And try to get geodetic data or similar for Tuvalu from the web – once day it was accessible, the next, not. Very frustrating state of affairs.
Louis,
wouldn’t there be much secondary debris that would easily identify the source if it were a Lichtenberg structure??
I have a general idea of what you are saying but certainly am not well studied.
KuhnKat,
Being not well studied, and realising it, is an advantage here because you have the ability to see things without the bias of academic instruction or brainwashing. I wish we had more like you :-); There are too many brainwashed boofs commenting here.
Some of the secondary material has been washed away by subsequent rains, and would be now in the delta. It’s because we have water flowing down these structures that the automatic, and logically reasoned, that it’s water erosion that did it. This logic cannot be faulted if this is only what you know historically, and from an ignorance of earth structure. It’s the old case of expecting a mechanic to repair a printed circuit board.
And what would secondary material be? Playing around with an electric arc-welder gives clues – whenever one welds a work you produce lots of small molten spheres that Dr. C.J. Ransom has consistently replicated in his Electric Arc experiments. These small spheres are plasma pinches (Z-Pinches) of molten rock, or metal, and often have equatorial ridge on their surface. Some spectacular ones are known from South Africa, and the usual explanation is that past humans made them – no these things are simple Z-pinch effects of enormous electric currents impacting on the Earth.
Another instance of secondary debris are the ubiquitous iron pisolites on the soil surface, usually laterite, (iron rich crust over weathered rock). Now these things should be found on the tops of the flat lying parts of the Colorada Plateau that the Colorado River incised. Anyone looked at these areas either side of the plateau that the Grand Canyon cut?
There are many such deposits here in Western Australia, but the conventional explanation is that these small pisolites are the result of tropical weathering in which iron concretions grow chemically around “chemical” seeds etc. Well, ah, yeees, but how do you remove all the matrix to leave a surficial layer of these “mini-marbles” on the surface? You can’t but if armchair geology is your joy in life, then it could be easily reasoned to have happened without leaving the comfort of your armchair, what I sarcastically describe as Lyellian Logic, in honour of Sir Charles Lyell who bequeathed us the present approach to science.
The creationist site you linked to is limited by their historical data to explain observations and the ONLY force available to them is water via the Noachian Flood. But as often happens in geology, there is an irritating tendency to “hide” crucial evidence either in erosional episodes, or in the case of the evolutionists, in the “gaps” in the stratigraphic record, old oceanic crust into subduction zones, etc.
It’s part and parcel of the deductive method to use well reasoned logic to prove things that are impossible to prove experimentally. And practitioners of the deductive method do so because they have not learnt the scientific method. Einstein was an expert deductionist, for example.
But keep giving the Boofs here hell, :-).
Yes, Louis, the local government people in the solomons were also keen to grasp any suitable hook for attracting funds. Guilt trips are their standard MO because they work so well on the ignorant.