Word: crusting
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...site of the rift valley. If massive eruptions of lava were forcing the continents apart, Bryan says, the crews of the subs would have seen giant volcanoes like those in Hawaii. But they spotted only small mountains-a sign of minor uplifting by forces beneath the earth's crust. The new observations, he explained, suggest that the continents are being pulled apart and hauled along by semimolten rock moving like two giant conveyor belts in opposite directions...
...indicated that the molten rock had not been forced out under tremendous pressure. On the contrary, it seemed to have simply peaked from the interior of the earth through cracks created as the earth's surface was stretched. Explained Bryan: "Like a cobblestone street, the earth's crust can be pulled apart very easily. And it is the rift valley where this fracturing is occurring...
Back in the good old days in Austin, Texas, say 1970, a guy could risk trouble for deriding country-and-western music, or merely hollering the words "rock 'n' roll." This was, after all, the ancestral home of Texas Swing, where the Light Crust Doughboys had helped elect a flour salesman, W. Lee O'Daniel, Governor in 1938. Even such talented native Texans as Singers Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, blues rockers both, had been forced to head as far away from Austin as possible to make the big time...
...sediment before beginning to bite into the solid rock that they were looking for. Analysis of the core samples brought to the surface identified it as granite about 600 million years old. The find proved that the rock was continental shelf and not ocean basin crust, which is primarily basalt (solidified lava), which in the South Atlantic is no more than about 130 million years...
Last week the Glomar Challenger again made news. Another team of geologists announced that in July a drill lowered from the ship in midocean, about 200 miles southwest of the Azores, had penetrated 1,910 ft. into the earth's hard crust under the Atlantic bottom sediment. It returned core samples from depths never before explored; the previous record penetration was 260 ft. into the submarine crustal rock. Said Geochemist William Melson of the Smithsonian Institution: "It was like probing into the unknown, getting samples we had thought about for years but had never been able to reach...