Magma Oceans and Triple Junctions - Listener Questions Part 2!
Jesse Reimink: Welcome to planet geo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you.
Really, really fast, really excited, excited, Chris bohi today.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. You get fun, Chris fun. Chris is a good Chris.
Jesse Reimink: Chris. He's got his fun pants on. That's always
Chris Bolhuis: He does. That's right. That's right. Hey, how you doing Jesse?
Jesse Reimink: Great, Chris. I'm great. We are picking up part two of listener questions. Last week, we talked about the first two about Michigan basin, and we talked about some hotspots and ultra low velocity zones. Today. We're gonna take a bit of a deviation and cover a few other topics from listeners.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. So we have a question from Natalie about the Mendocino triple junction. Which is a really geologically, very interesting. I don't know what you call it. Phenomenon in the Northern part of California. So that's, it's basically just open ended. Hey, can you educate everybody about the Mendocino triple junction area? And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna tackle this one.
Jesse Reimink: exactly. This is in Humboldt county. So Natalie, thank you for the question. A resident of Humboldt county, but it's north of San Francisco. , and so that's kind of where we're talking right on the coast , of California near San Francisco, north of San Francisco. And that. Plays an important role here because as most people might know, probably know the San Andrea fault runs through San F. Or runs very near San Francisco. And so that comes into play here in the Mendocino triple junction. And as the name implies, it is a triple junction, which these are amazingly interesting and complicated places around the world. It's where three tectonic plates come together, triple junction. So this is Mendocino, triple junction, where the three plates are coming together. What are our three PL
Chris Bolhuis: Well, I just wanna say, this is you don't get this in an intro level, geology textbook. you know, we talk about diverging plates and everything is so neat and tidy the plates go apart, right? A convergent boundary. They come together a transform boundary. They slide past each other. What the hell is a triple junction then we're you know, this is, this is not something that's typically covered, but it's super, super interesting. This is the Northern end. This is where the San Andrea's fault system ends is at the Mendocino triple junction. It's the Northern extent of this fault system.
Jesse Reimink: It's the Southern extent of the Cascadia subduction zone system. So all of the arc volcanoes, we've talked about Mount St. Helens Lasson volcanic field, all of
Chris Bolhuis: Shasta.
Jesse Reimink: Shasta. I mean, all those that run all the way up into Southern British Columbia. It's the end of that system. So right now we're from the north. If you travel from the north to Mendocino, you're gonna be going along the subduction zone system. If you head from the south to the north, you're gonna be going along the San Andreas fault system where these two tectonic. Regimes intersect. It gets complicated. And so what are the plates we're dealing with here, Chris? Like what are we gonna talk about? Cuz this is gonna be a little bit visually difficult to describe. So we're gonna have to be really explicit about it.
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. So we have the north American plate. That's easy. All right. So this is east of the San Andreas fault system and the north American plate is moving Southwest. Okay, then. So that's the one of the plate junctions. The other plate junction is the Pacific plate, which is moving north Northwest. Okay. So that's beneath the majority of the Pacific ocean. And then we have this little subplate that's involved in this triple junction called the Gorda plate. The Gorda plate it's a subplate of the Wanda Fuca plate. That is largely responsible for the Cascadia subduction zone and so on. So it's, uh, Jesse, like we need to paint a better picture, like in terms of So we have the north American. We have the Pacific plate. And then where do you put the Gorda?
Jesse Reimink: Yeah, the Goda place. So I think it's easiest to say, okay, the north American plate, let's just assume that's not moving for the, for the time being it is moving, but let's assume it's not moving. Cuz we're talking about relative plate motions anyways. So let's keep north America where the north American continent is coast of California, Oregon, Washington, all the way up to Vancouver island. Keep that stationary, the Pacific plate. Down by Los Angeles, San Francisco. That thing is sliding up to the north Northwest past this north American plate. So that's sliding up. If you're looking at a map view. Now the Juan da Fuca plate is off the coast of Oregon in Washington and Vancouver island. It's a relatively small one, but there's a plate there that is moving. To the east. So it is colliding with the north American plate and is an oceanic plate. it SubD ducks beneath north American continent. And so this Wanda Fuka plate and the Gorda subplate to the south, those are both moving to the east. They're moving right on this diagram. So they're moving right into the continent. They're going underneath of the continent, but we have this Pacific plate that's coming up to the north Northwest.
Chris Bolhuis: it creates at this weird area. The triple junction, it creates a convergent boundary because that subplate the Gorda plate. Isn't getting out of the way of the Pacific plate. Fast enough. So the Pacific plate is jamming itself up against that. And this creates then a really. Geologically and tectonically active zone. Cause something else that's important is, this triple junction is not, it's not a point you can't pinpoint it. It's it's this whole, it's a zone right. Where these three plates are all touching each other. And so it creates like really, really active areas, rapid uplift. Okay, because you, that's what you get when you have a convergent boundary. this causes mountains, like the king range, there is, a mountain range that is formed by this convergence. And it's one of the most rapidly uplifting areas. And it RS, the amount of uplift that happens right now in the Himalayas.
Jesse Reimink: Just such rapid uplift. These mountains are going up quickly and you can see the implications of this, the geological implications of this with stranded terraces. And so these are flat kind of benches near the coastline that are above sea level. And that's where sea level used to be. And the reason that those are up above sea level now is not because sea level has dropped it's because the land has moved up. So if we get some, seismic event that thrust the land up, those benches, they used to be at sea level. That's where the ocean was eroding. That used to be a beach it's nice and flat there, it gets shoved up. And then the ocean starts to erode. Down below that and make a new beach. So you kind of get a cliff that then becomes a beach and then that gets shoved up again. So we have these terraces in this region that are due to, well, they're a clear sign of the land uplifting really rapidly. All.
Chris Bolhuis: And we call that an emergent coastline. And it does this episodically you'll have a violent event or series of events that causes the land area to uplift and it strands. Then it leaves it stranded, the old surf zone where the waves were crashing back and forth, cutting this flat kind of terrace area and leaves a cliff then in its place. And then it starts to cut a new platform and then a new event happens and it leaves that platform stranded. And so these terraces are just a really, really cool feature. And they're assign a sign then of this rapid kind of violent uplift that typifies this area.
Jesse Reimink: That kind of gives us a brief introduction into the Mendocino triple junction region, which is a region there that's creating this rapid uplift. Uh, Natalie had a follow up question though, about the rocks themselves and, um, she's heard that these are newer rocks that they're younger than the continent itself and was asking sort of, okay. Is that true? And, and how do those get added to the continent and Natalie? That is exactly true. Those rocks that you are living on top of right now are young. They're new additions to the continent, the continent, the interior of the continent, where Chris is at in Michigan, where I'm at in Pennsylvania, these are much, much older rocks. These are added to the continent, hundreds of millions or billions of years. The rocks in the, what is called the Franciscan complex. This is basically ancient sea floor. That was scraped off onto the edge of the continent during subduction zone. So that Wanda Fuka plate used to be a lot bigger. It used to be in that region. It used to be subducting down beneath this. part of the north American continent during that subduction, this is not like a gentle dipping process. This is two tectonic plates running into each other. And so the top surface of that ancient sea floor, the Juan de Fuca plate, which has. Pillow basalts it has oceanic Mafi crust. It has sediments on top of it. All of that gets scraped off at this boundary and can get accreted to the continent and added to the continent. So we're kind of shoving a whole bunch of new rock onto the edges of the continent. So you have lots of stuff like sediments, you have basalts, you have cherts. So there's no wonder that there are seashells, you know, in the rocks, in the. Near where you live, because this is an ancient sea floor environment. That's just been scraped off onto the edge of the continent and then thrust up in this Mendocino, triple junction. So great question, Natalie. Very interesting area to live in. Um, you know, dare I say, one of the more interesting geological places , to live rocks. There are very, very cool.
Chris Bolhuis: very, very TECT active though. It has over 80 earthquakes a year that are 3.0 and larger. And it's had, I think it was, uh, back in 1992, they had a series of very large earthquakes that caused a significant amount of damage. And, and so yeah, very gorgeous area, but also very, very tectonic active.
Jesse Reimink: Yes. Extremely so cool place. Great question. Thank you for the question and, uh, you know, keep 'em coming. So, Chris, what's the next thing we're gonna cover here. We're gonna cover a question from Valer.
Chris Bolhuis: Val malaria.
Jesse Reimink: Yes. All right. Let's get
Chris Bolhuis: All right.
Jesse Reimink: who, uh, we've addressed a question from before I believe, but Val's curious, uh, really in. A lot to do with the moon. I suppose she says that, you know, the moon is moving away from the earth at a, a rate, and we're gonna discuss this, but you know, the question comes up. How did the moon form, what did earth look like during the time that the moon formed? What was this, what was this event like?
Chris Bolhuis: she asked, did it create a lot of earthquakes? A lot of volcanic eruptions?
Jesse Reimink: So we're gonna go through how the moon formed and we're gonna, you know, give a brief introduction into this. And then the, the currently the moon's orbit, but suffice to say when this collision happened and Chris let's set the stage for what this collision is, but basically the moon formed by a collision of two planets, a proto earth, and what we call Theia, this Mars sized impactor. What did earth look like? Like during this.
Chris Bolhuis: so this was really, really early on in the formation of earth. At the time a proto planet, we were destined to become a planet. So we're sweeping out the debris in our orbit and. This massive impact or roughly half the size of earth slams into us. Like you said, it's, it's this thing that we've, we've deemed, or we've called it Theia. Like this kind of event, the simulations, if you Google, this are really, really dramatic. I mean, it it's a little horrifying. Um, but something like this has enough energy in it to totally resurface the. It melted all of the crustal rocks during this collision and flung a bunch of stuff out away from earth.
Jesse Reimink: It actually probably melted the entire planet. So, right now we have the crust, the mantle and the core, the crust of mantle are solid, right. Even though the mantle is kind of plasticy, it's mostly solid. This event would melt the entire planet. So now we have what's called a magma ocean stage, which is a planet that has mostly just molten rock in it. There's no solid mantle. There might be some thin crust at the top, but then we have this solid inter mantle. That's really hot. It's all liquid. And that thing starts to crystallize. And this magma ocean phase is a really. Uh, there's a lot of research focus on magma oceans right now. Uh, because Mars probably had a magma ocean. The moon had a mag ocean phase earth had a magma ocean phase. So there's a lot of like interest in magma oceans, but suffice say the entire planet was reset, was melted. And then it started to cool and solidify, uh, potentially during this process, we formed these ultra low velocity zones, which we talked about last week in the question from Kathy and. So these mega ocean processes, like could, how does it, the questions are like, how does it crystallize? Does it start at the bottom and then cool. Crystallize upwards. Does it start crystallizing at the top and crystallize downwards? Like how does Bowen's reaction series, which we've covered in this episode? How does that work at a planetary scale? That's a pretty unknown, um, field of research at the moment. So, but anyways, suffice to say earth sucked to be on this time. Right? Chris?
Chris Bolhuis: not a good place to be at all. For sure.
Jesse Reimink: So Chris, this earth was in this mag motion stage after this impact, but how did we get the moon? Like where did the moon, how did the moon form.
Chris Bolhuis: Well with this, with an impact like this, there was a lot of material that was ejected off from earth and that material coalesced and became the material that would form the moon. At the time when this happened, the moon was, it began to rotate. It was rotating very quickly. It was coalescing. It was congealing together. And it actually it got into a locked rotation with earth very soon in the formation of the. So it was spinning rapidly. It rapidly slowed down and got into the lock rotation. This is why no matter where you are on planet earth, you look up at the moon. You're gonna see the same side of the moon. Okay. And like, that's a really common misconception that I come across actually quite a bit is that if you're in the Northern hemisphere, you see one side of the moon. if you're in the Southern hemisphere, you see the other side of the moon? Uh, no, we all,
Jesse Reimink: never, I've never had
Chris Bolhuis: it.
Jesse Reimink: that one. That's a funny one.
Chris Bolhuis: I actually had a friend who went to Australia and he came back and he told me about the other side of the moment and like, this is a weird situation to put, be put in. Right. Because what do you do? Do you say, well, no, um, actually that's not possible or do you just let ignorance be bliss and, and, you know, it's a, it's a really interesting situation
Jesse Reimink: this is where the term, you know, the dark side of the moon comes from is the side of the
Chris Bolhuis: that's right.
Jesse Reimink: see the only saw them when we sent satellites in spacecraft and Apollo missions around the dark side of the moon. So, you know, the famous, pink Floyd album? The dark side of the moon,
Chris Bolhuis: and it looks really, really different. The dark side of the moon, the, the side we don't get to see is very, very different looking than the side that we get to see a much thicker crust. Whereas the side that faces the earth is the thinner crust, which I'm sure you have. Like your little, you know, doctory theories about about the cooling history of the moon, but it did cool differently on the side facing earth versus the side not facing earth, which is how we know that it got locked in actually very quickly to Earth's rotation. You . Yeah,
Jesse Reimink: That's right. This is sort of what we call tidally locked. So one side's always facing the planet. And so the other question, the other part to Valeria's question was really about, do we have pieces of, the moon on earth? And the answer is yes, we do. we have pieces from two sources. Really. The first is the Apollo missions. Contrary to some misconceptions. We did go to the moon in the Apollo era, grab samples. They are now on earth and there's loads of people that study these things. And we also have meteorites from the moon that were ejected off the moon surface and made their way to earth. So we can find lunar meteorites on the Earth's surface.
Chris Bolhuis: I'm gonna pick up with what you just said. Jesse how in the world are we possibly going to determine that a meteorite that we found on earth was actually something that was ejected off from the moon? How do we know that?
Jesse Reimink: Oh, that's a great question. So we know, well, we know a lot about the moon from. Orbiter data. So these, you know, satellites that have orbited the moon and collected chemical maps of the moon. Also the people who went on, walked on the moon, grabbed samples, came back. They're very different. Those rocks are very different from earth. We don't see lunar rocks rocks, like on the moon on earth. Very much at all. So they're very different. Okay. That's the first thing, but then you should be asked the question, how do we know it's from the moon and not from like Mars or mercury or some other planet, right. And the moon and earth are chemically. I just said the rocks are very different. And the rocks themselves, the mineral logical makeup is very different. But if you look at the chemistry of any given element, the moon and the earth are very, very similar. So if you look at, we've talked about isotopes before. If you look at, for instance, isotopes of titanium or isotopes of chromium, the earth and moon are almost identical indistinguishable. Whereas all other meteorites, including ones from Mars are very different. So we can do this sort of genetic tracing of planets by looking at the isotopic composition of specific elements from the rocks , that we can get back either from, Apollo emissions or from meteorites. So we can say, oh, this rock is from Mars. This Rock's from the moon. This one is from the Astro Vesta. And this one is from, some other meteorite class. We have this sort of. Categorization scheme that is chemical in nature. Isotopic in nature.
Chris Bolhuis: Um, one of the things that's really cool about the moon is that because there's no atmosphere because there's no tectonics lunar rocks, not a lot happens to 'em. They can get affected by impacts and so on. But what I'm saying is the moon provides earth. With some of its earliest memories because, the formation of the moon happened really early on an Earth's formation too. This massive collision happened very soon. So, our early rocks, we need the moon for these early memories because ours get recycled. They get destroyed by weather and erosion. They get destroyed or recycled by plate tectonics. The moon doesn't have that. So studying these rocks becomes like really important to people like you, because you're trying to, reconstruct when plate tectonics began on this planet, in order to do that, you have to understand how these things happened, you know, how the moon happened and what the impact of this impact was.
Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And the timing too, like we, we know it happened in the first, couple hundred million years of solar system formation, but we don't really know what it could have happened. 50 million years after solar system formation or 200 million years after solar system formation. So there's some uncertainty in that as well. Um, so Chris, does that bring us to the question about S orbit and the moons orbit?
Chris Bolhuis: Not yet. How many rocks did the Apollo missions bring back? I think that's kind of a cool thing. We brought back. 842 pounds of lunar rocks. Now that's like a, that would be a small load on our collecting trips. Jesse, it'd be like, you know,
Jesse Reimink: very
Chris Bolhuis: not a, not a ton. My truck is sagging, but, so 842 pounds All these rocks here that we brought back they are in a hyper secure like facility at the Johnson space center. And then we've actually taken 15% of those rocks and we store them in an offsite facility just in case . Okay. , and if you are one of the. that is fortunate enough. I was gonna say lucky, but luck really probably has nothing to do with it. Fortunate enough to get granted access to study these, the process is really rigorous and you may get a 10th of to study.
Jesse Reimink: very, very tiny amount. I we've, we've been, uh, I have a PhD student who's interested in doing some lunar work and it's such a difficult process. You have to prove that your lab. Is excellent and clean and you can do the analyses. You have to really grow to great length to show that you're not gonna screw up the lunar sample if they give it to you. And then you have to have this clear, like chain of ownership about every lunar sample, like who touched it, who held it, this really excellent record keeping. I mean, it all makes sense. These are really valuable pieces of rock, but. It's an arduous process, which, you know, we we've been debating. Okay. Is it worth it to go through this process to, to look at some of the moon or rocks, but anyway, very, very cool, very, you know, important. And hopefully we're gonna get some more soon, you know, hopefully in the near future, we'll get some more samples returned from the moon. So this brings us to Earth's rotation a bit. And as Val malaria, as you mentioned, the moon is receding from earth. At a, you know, a decent clip. I mean, it's not tiny it's, I mean, it is tiny, but it's not really, really small. Yeah. It's like the rate of continental plates drifting around right. It's couple centimeters per year. Right. Chris?
Chris Bolhuis: it is. It, it actually is. It's like 38.2 millimeters per year. Okay. Well, the moon is 384,000 kilometers from the. So when you put it in perspective, like it's not a lot, but then when you compound this with geologic time, that's one of the beauties of geology or, or just like deep time in general is holy cow. Yeah. 38 millimeters a year adds up to a lot in the long run. You know, it just puts scale in perspective.
Jesse Reimink: So here's the, question about the earth, moon distance, right? There's a big questions about the history of that distance, because it's moving away now we know that really well. If you back calculate, if you say, oh, the moon is moving away at, you know, what is it? 3.8 centimeters per year,
Chris Bolhuis: Yep.
Jesse Reimink: 38.2 38.2 millimeters per year. If it's moving away at that rate, now let's back calculate. Let's go back in time and. Would that evolution have changed. So if you take that rate and you just go backwards in time, it would mean that the moon was literally at the Earth's surface 1.5 billion years ago. That's the rate here. And so we know geologically that cannot be true. We know that the moon was not right next to the earth, one and a half billion years. So we know that this rate is not constant. Like, you know, the moon didn't form and then just start migrating away from earth. We know that this rate has been changing since the moon formed 4.4 billion years ago. The question is how much, and you know, this is a pretty active research area. There's a pretty good ideas that about two and a half billion years ago, the moon was about three quarters of the distance it is today. So, that rate has. Changed over time and maybe it, maybe it kind of goes in and out a little bit, or it, it has been slowing or speeding up its rate of leaving earth or moving away from earth. But, we have to go back in time and put these like points in time to say, what was the earth, moon distance back in time? The oldest one we have the oldest reliable measurement is about 2.3, 2.5 billion years ago. And the uncertainty on that three quarter of the distance is pretty large. So we still don't know a lot really far back in time.
Chris Bolhuis: But we also know that as the moon recedes or retreats from earth, it's removing energy from the earth and it slows the rotation by 2.3 milliseconds. Per century . So that seems like a ridiculously small amount. But what that means is if you go back to the, age of the dinosaurs, that we were actually rotating faster then than we are today. And so our days were on the order of maybe 22 hours per day. So we had more days per year. This will continue. The moon will continue to remove energy as it recedes away from earth until it slows Earth's rotation down enough, where we're also tidally locked with the. So the, if you were on the moon, you would always see the same side of the earth, like how we see the same side of the moon and that'll happen. you know, there's a ton of variability in this, of course, because it may not be the same as, as time goes on in about 50 billion years, we'll be, tidally locked we will orbit each other once every 47 days. So we have a little ways
Jesse Reimink: little ways, 50 billion years. That's you know, what is that? 10 times the lifetime of the solar system at the moment. So that's a ways in the future. Well, this is such an interesting question. Um, great question, malaria. This is such an interesting your topic. How did the moon form what's the relationship to it? Both from the present day, like, you know, why is the moon moving away from us and what's the future of that and what was it back in time and how did the moon form? Very interesting questions. Chris, one last one to wrap up here. This is a question from Chelsea and, uh, Chelsea says that I just learned about a place called rainbow mountain in Peru, and would love to hear a podcast about it. We had to do some looking I've I actually have seen pictures of this now that I looked it up. Right. What rainbow mountain in Peru, it's also known as Vinny KUKA, and it's a place in Peru that is quite a popular tourist destination, actually. And very, it seems Instagramable, perhaps.
Chris Bolhuis: Uh, absolutely. Look, if you haven't ever seen this, then stop push, pause, and Google image it. It is so unbelievably, beautifully colored. Um, they're like, I don't know. It's like six or seven different vibrant colors. Okay. Of, and it's all sedimentary rocks. Isn't there a place in China that has this too, Jesse.
Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I think so the, these things are not uncommon. Chris, you and I we've actually collected rocks like this in the black Hills of South Dakota. I mean, it's not quite the same scale. The UNC Papa sandstone, which you and I love collecting famous for its, uh, you know, housing rattlesnakes in the area that we were looking for it, but. These are sedimentary layers that in the, in the young Papa sandstone in the black Hills, South Dakota, they're really finely layered. So they're like a centimeter or millimeter scale layering of these same colors, pinks, purples, lavenders, whites, like really, really beautiful colors in sedimentary rocks. This rainbow mountain or Vinicuna is that except expanded the layers. Meters tens of meters and the rocks are tilted. So they're kind of striped along the mountain side. And what forms this coloring this in general coloration in sedimentary rocks are not uncommon.
Chris Bolhuis: Right. So you have really, you have pink purple and really vibrant. Which are like, most of these rocks are clays and carbonates, there is a mixture of them, but they've been oxidized with like iron oxidized, , various degrees of iron oxidation that turned those rocks, those vibrant colors. Then you also have in the mix of all this, you have these bright white colors. And , what usually happens when you have white colors? Like,
Jesse Reimink: the white, the white is usually just a, a really clean quart sandstone. So quartz is usually kind of whiteish and, uh, if you just have a whole bunch of it, it's hard to chemically alter quarts. And so you can't really rust quarts. You can't really oxidize it Or reduce it. And so quartz just remains this white color. So that's usually the white layers. You also have green layers in here, which are really stunning, and those are iron rich sediments that have the same kind of clay minerals in them that you were talking about. But this iron is reduced. It's in a reduced form. So it's not oxidized. It doesn't have more oxygen attached to it. It just means that the iron is usually forms a green mineral, um, or greenish minerals has a greenish hue to.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, the irons can't combine with oxygen to form a various like form of rust. Instead it forms with silicates to form some of these really common minerals that have this greenish hue. Like you said too, I love, love the green. I think the green is probably my favorite color of all of them. And then you have these, the bright, bright yellows. So the yellows usually indicate that there are minerals in that rock that have sulfur bearing minerals. So they form what we call in, in mineraly as sulfide. And it turns, 'em like this just bright, bright, yellow color. So. There we have that Jesse, but we still haven't gotten to what they look like. So imagine these vertically stacked layers that are all flat, right? When did the colors happen? When did they turn the colors that they turned?
Jesse Reimink: Well, it's a combination of both during depositions. So think of the reduced ones in order to have reduced sediments, usually you have to have, an environment. Is a reduced environment, bottom of a lake or a bottom of a swamp where, where oxygen can't get down to the bottom layer and oxygen isn't percolating through the water to get there. The reddish ones, the rusted ones. Those are usually surface depositions. So these are ones that expos to the atmosphere. These are sediments in stream beds, or, you know, coastal planes. And so some of these colors, most of them are probably formed during deposition. There are some of these minerals that we've talked about that will be formed after deposition during this diagenesis process, the forming of the rock itself. So taking a loose sediment and making it into a rock, there's a lot of fluids around you're forming new minerals. So some of them like the sulfur bearing ones like limonite night, which is a, an iron hydroxide, those can. During this lithification or DGen process making the sediment into a rock. So a combination of both,
Chris Bolhuis: But you don't get the striping with where we're at right now. We have flat sedimentary rocks in this area. If you haven't Googled image it, do it. It's beautifully striped with these vibrant colors. So how do you get this striping that shows up in areas like this?
Jesse Reimink: Yeah, well, we need to take those flat rock layers. We need to turn 'em on our side. And it's really just as simple as that in the black Hills, where we've looked at the Unkpapa sandstone, most places it's pretty flat, but in some places it's tipped up, tipped up on edge. And so you would see this striping pattern diving down into the ground. This is just done at a much larger scale in Peru where these sediments are tilted up and they sort of dive down this beautiful purple and pink and white and green striping is diving down into the mountain. It's just because those rock layers were tilted during the formation of the mountain range and these things are in, uh, Peruvian mountains. And so that makes sense that the rocks are folded and, tipped up.
Chris Bolhuis: Coming back to plate tectonics. Once again, the
Jesse Reimink: fun.
Chris Bolhuis: revolves around plate tectonics. Doesn't it?
Jesse Reimink: Uh, it makes it, that makes the world interesting. That is absolutely true. So Chelsea, great question. Very cool area. Uh, hopefully you've been there. That would be really cool. I, I have not, I would say, but. Maybe we put it on the bucket list, Chris. Beautiful striped sedimentary rocks.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. Let's go.
Jesse Reimink: Very cool. All right. Hey, thanks for the questions Natalie Valer and Chelsea. We really appreciate those. Keep reaching out. We love questions and, uh, stay tuned. We've got some really great episodes coming up in the next few weeks.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. Cheers.
