http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/02 ... ing-delta/
Caution: this is a no go zone.
Stephen,
I know you are tenured, and i am but a plebe, but we can talk because we are Smiths, and have no fear.
Could be, or could be not.This also means that it could be far younger than its estimated millions of years, since radiometric dating systems would have been completely randomized by the electromagnetic effects of interplanetary lightning bolts. Therefore, fossils and stratigraphic placement need to be seen from a catastrophic viewpoint and may be useless when it comes to measuring their absolute age.
And can we all PLEASE just drop that "uniformitarianism" term, as a redder herring than 'reconnection' ?
Approximately five million of years ago the East Pacific Rise, finally, split the Baja
Peninsula from the mainland of Mexico. The waters of the Pacific then poured into the rift
valley creating the Gulf of California. Since then, like a giant door swinging open, plate
tectonic activity along the East Pacific Rise has moved the Baja Peninsula 162 miles (260
km) westward from the mainland at the southern end of the gulf. The northern “hinge” point
of this tectonic system is in the Salton Trough.
May i suggest the possibility that it is not a lack of change at issue, but rather an abundance of time.
We can not reduce Earth's geologic timescale to our Lilliputian hominid frame of existence !
Currently, the loss of sediments in the Colorado River delta due to tidal currents and
wave action is much greater than the accretion of sediments by river transport. The net
effect is that the delta has entered a destructive phase. In the short term, however, there have
been no catastrophic effects from the loss of river input on the oceanography of the northern
gulf. Nutrient concentrations and productivity are high. The problems related to depletion of
fish stocks and endangered species (such as the totoaba and the vaquita) in this area are the
result of inadequate fisheries management, not the lack of freshwater or nutrient input.
However, because nutrients captured in sediments may be contributing to the northern gulf’s
high productivity, and there is a net loss of sediments, the long term future of the upper gulf
is uncertain.
(This aint just 'establishment' crap. It's measured every year by satellite)The Gulf of California, itself, is an oblique rift system with short spreading segments
connected by long transform faults. Rifting in the gulf began ~12–15 million years ago
when subduction ended west of the Baja California peninsula. As the East Pacific Rise
approached the palaeo-trench, the subducting Farallon plate broke into a number of
microplates; as subduction stalled, those microplates and the Baja California peninsula
coupled to the Pacific plate, resulting in the onset of rifting. The peninsula now moves
nearly completely with the Pacific plate, with ~ 48 mm/yr of spreading across the Gulf of
California representing ~ 92% of Pacific–North America relative motion. (Lizarralde, et al.,
2007)
http://fire.biol.wwu.edu/trent/alles/Ge ... Trough.pdf
One cannot preclude the genesis of Grand Canyon topography predicated on an initial EDM event, but land mass has clearly risen, fallen, stretched and compressed since then.
Just go and look
http://watermarked.cutcaster.com/cutcas ... z-Baja.jpg
[not EDM topography]
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/The%20Gu ... ornia.htmlIn Pliocene time, about seven million years ago, a zone of separation developed on the East Pacific Rise. The future Baja California peninsula and a piece of future California were sheared from mainland Mexico along a lateral fault, possibly the ancestral San Andreas fault which was then, as now, oriented northwest-southeast. During this early period of development, movement was right lateral, with the sheared-off slab moving northwest, but always in close contact with the mainland.[1]
The Salton Trough is an example of what geologists call a graben (pictured above)The Salton Trough, shown in this MODIS image acquired February 9, 2002, is the
northern landward extension of the Gulf of California and is still undergoing active
deformation and subsidence.
which is German for "grave". A graben is a strip of land bounded on opposite sides by
roughly parallel faults. Through movement of the faults, the strip of land sinks in a process
called subsidence. In the case of the Salton Trough, the graben has been filled with
sediments as it subsided. Although not restricted to them, grabens are characteristic of rift
valleys. The Salton Trough is the northern end of a much larger rift valley formed by
spreading and subsidence that runs the length of the Gulf of California.
This geology of the San Andreas fault is based on the U.S. Geological Survey,
Professional Paper 1515 titled The San Andreas Fault System, California edited by Dr.
Robert E. Wallace and published by United States Government Printing Office, Washington
in 1990 and 1991.
Web References
http://www.johnmartin.com/earthquakes/e ... fs_361.htm
http://www.data.scec.org/
http://ceres.ca.gov/ceres/calweb/coastal/mountains.html
http://fire.biol.wwu.edu/trent/alles/Ge ... Trough.pdf
Sorry the great graphicis arew too large to post under forum constraints. Just go to URL to look.
s