crocodile deathroll
Muse
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2002
- Messages
- 620
It has just occurred to me, the world's largest volcano is not as one would expect in Indonesia, Hawaii or Japan - or even Yellowstone (a volcano which could be 1000 time more explosive than Mt St Helens did in 1980) . But in one of the more unlikely places not known for it's volcanic activity. This place is the Great Artesian Basin in outback Australia, the largest artesian basin on earth and also may well be the world's biggest volcano. Over 700 hundred mound springs are active today; many of them extremely hot.
It was a common fallacy for over a century that the waters of the GAB was due to rainfall on exposed sediments even though such flow of groundwater can be shown to be physically impossible. It is in Prof Lance A Endersbee's view that the groundwaters in the Basin are derived from deep within the Earth.
His web page is here
There is now reliable evidence the upper mantle is a highly probable source of as such copious amounts of it are in fact more than 400 kilometres inside the Earth there may be enough water to replace the surface oceans more than ten times.
Read here
It is in my view that if the GAB were to erupt it would probably hit the Australian regolith like a bullet though glass and open up a great rift valley splitting the island continent in two.
Volcanos of this magnitude have happened before on this Earth. The last one was in Ethiopia about 30 million years ago leading to formation of the Great Rift Valley and the Red and Mediterranean sea. The Earth did survive that one and I am sure it will survive this. Albeit Australia would be a little worse for wear if it happens here again any time soon.
Not being a prophet of doom I feel I have to assure people that eruptions of this kind may be spaced tens of millions of years apart so the frequency of such eruptions would be even far more infrequent than eruptions at Yellowstone which may erupt at intervals of 800 thousand years. So I do not feel I need to be in any hurry to pack up and leave Australia.
CDR
It was a common fallacy for over a century that the waters of the GAB was due to rainfall on exposed sediments even though such flow of groundwater can be shown to be physically impossible. It is in Prof Lance A Endersbee's view that the groundwaters in the Basin are derived from deep within the Earth.
His web page is here
There is now reliable evidence the upper mantle is a highly probable source of as such copious amounts of it are in fact more than 400 kilometres inside the Earth there may be enough water to replace the surface oceans more than ten times.
Read here
It is in my view that if the GAB were to erupt it would probably hit the Australian regolith like a bullet though glass and open up a great rift valley splitting the island continent in two.
Volcanos of this magnitude have happened before on this Earth. The last one was in Ethiopia about 30 million years ago leading to formation of the Great Rift Valley and the Red and Mediterranean sea. The Earth did survive that one and I am sure it will survive this. Albeit Australia would be a little worse for wear if it happens here again any time soon.
Not being a prophet of doom I feel I have to assure people that eruptions of this kind may be spaced tens of millions of years apart so the frequency of such eruptions would be even far more infrequent than eruptions at Yellowstone which may erupt at intervals of 800 thousand years. So I do not feel I need to be in any hurry to pack up and leave Australia.
CDR
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