Sunday, October 22, 2006

Hawaii earthquake

Western Geologist and Highly Allocthonous have already weighed in on this, but I figured I might want to float a highly speculative hypothesis. On Hawaii, most of the volcanism occurs on the southern half of the island, mainly from the Mona Loa and Kilauea volcanoes. Both of these volcanoes generally erupt from a series of NE/SW trending rifts- for the probable reason, see Western Geologists’ post on the regional stress field. If magma emplacement is causing substantial spreading in the southern part of the island, but not in the extinct north, then an accommodation transform fault may exist to allow that. Slip on such a fault would, as far as I can tell, be basically the right direction for the observed motion.


Hopefully the real seismologists will explain what actually happened at this week's GSA meeting. Is anyone going? Anyone? Bueller?
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3 comments:

  1. Western geologist22 October, 2006 22:32

    Definitely an interesting idea.

    I really wish I could make it to GSA. This is the first GSA I've missed since 2000. I can only make it to 2 meetings this academic year though, and GSA lost out.

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  2. Anonymous10 November, 2006 04:50

    Just wanted to let you know that this post has been included in the third installment of the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival (dedicated to the physical sciences and technology). You can see it all here:

    http://geekcounterpoint.net/files/GC046B.html

    Lorne Ipsum
    Chief Geek, Geek Counterpoint blog & podcast

    ReplyDelete
  3. C W Magee11 November, 2006 23:55

    Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival is now up here:
    http://geekcounterpoint.net/files/GC046B.html

    ReplyDelete