(urth) Abaia and the undines
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Tue Dec 9 21:37:34 PST 2008
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wolfe presumably knows--and expects us to know--that under the ice at
>> the South Pole currently sits a continent. What's going on here? Is
>> this one of those singleton clues Wolfe likes to drop?
>>
>> Possibilities:
>>
>> - Everyone agreed to a cartographic inversion
>> - Magnetic poles reversed
>> - Antarctica drifted, like, really far
>> - A Velikovskian pole flip
>
> Actually, Antarctica is the single strongest argument against my
> theory that the continents have shifted position noticeably by the
> time of BotNS: the Megatherian Erebus is named for the volcano
> on Antarctica in which, apparently, he makes his residence. I was
> kind of surprised that nobody mentioned this when I proposed it.
Existing volcanoes travel with the continental plates. In the case of
Hawaii, there's a relatively stationary hotspot in the mantle that burns
new ones through the crust as it passes overhead, leaving a trail of
volcanic mountains. Erebus is the last of a group of volcanoes over a
closing-up vent with no particular hot spot. (this is all pre-1980
concumer encyclopedia geology, btw,) So Mt Erebus stays at the edge of
Antarctica, whether Antarctica goes or stays.
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >
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