Word: crustal
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Knoll’s research interests include the early evolution of life on earth, the early fossil record of plankton, and interrelationships between crustal, atmospheric, and biological evolution during the Precambrian period...
...view of how mountains were built and seabeds stretched and rifted, and how continents oozed out of place and out of shape, was itself shifting, upthrusting, subducting. Plate tectonics, the giddy new geology, said that continents floated on some 20 crustal plates, 60 miles thick, kept in motion by ... yeah, well, we'll figure that out later. But in the 1960s and '70s more geologists than not had signed on to the theory. Most agreed, for instance, that India had rammed into Tibet at high speed (and is still ramming), heaving up former ocean floor to create the Himalayas...
...moon's thin skin of ice appears to have buckled as a result of turbulent water moving just beneath the frozen crust. The crumpling gave the ice a washboard topography made up of a series of parallel cliffs, each the size of Mount Rushmore. Elsewhere the spacecraft spotted bright crustal fractures crisscrossing older, darker ones, suggesting that the ice is being cracked and recracked by similar subsurface sloshing. Still elsewhere the ship photographed a crater whose floor seems to have swelled up from beneath--its central peak pushed above its rim--probably the result of slushy seas deforming the crater...
...surface, the new probing shows that the magnetic storms are apparently stirred up by the shearing action of the winds as they press past slower moving gases, just as the eruptions of volcanoes on Earth are produced by the pressures created by motions of its great crustal plates rubbing against each other. By learning to track these winds, the researchers believe they can take a giant leap forward in the science of forecasting solar weather...
According to Alan T. Linde, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the study's leader, what makes seismic events so destructive is not just that the earth moves but the speed with which it does so. In many quakes the crustal movement that leads to shaking takes only seconds to unfold, sending energy exploding in all directions. But recent analysis of data from strain gauges along the San Andreas Fault reveals that four years ago, a slip occurred that took a week to play out. Such slow sliding all but eliminates an earthquake's quaking...