This topic is so hot I though I should post something to make it a little cooler. Orogony is catastrophic mountain-building and land uplifting on a huge scale - as when the Indian sub-continent "slammed into" the Asian continent pushing up the Himalaya Mountain chain. On a geological time scale, that was an abrupt change. Diastrophism is the opposite.

Which is the correct spelling of the former term?

Orogeny...sorry for the mistyping in the post! I shall try to be more careful on the diastrophism part...!

That shows your sense of humor runs pahoehoe hot.

Thank you! (I am taking that as a compliment!)*grin* How do you like the new buttons? I see I have one missing...must rectify that immediatly!

(John)pahoehoe What is that, pray?:-)

The fluid lava that spills out of the craters and runs down hillsides like rivers - see the Etna picture just posted. THAT is Pahoehoe lava. The clinkery stuff is a'a.

I like what I think is the sound of pahoehoe :-)

pa HOEY hoey is the way it is pronounced with an European A (ah sound)

pah-HOI-hoi? pei-HOI-hoi? Nonr of the above? :-)

pah HOI hoi us the correct way to say it!!! =)

like pah HOY hoy?

It works...*grin* Now we can all say a few words in Hawaiian, though it might be hard to work in to a conversation. a'a is "Ah Ah" with the stress being the same on each syllable. Actually, Pahoehoe is more like "pa HO ee HO ee"...come to think about it. Five syllables in all.

I guess Mass Wasting would fall in this category - huge land slips, avalanches of mud and other transport of large masses of terra not quite so firma... (From Maggie) At least 46 people were missing yesterday after an avalanche possibly caused by volcanic activity buried several dozen homes in a village in the North peruvian Andes. The landslide buried parts of the village of Tacabamba 500 miles north of the capital Lima on Sunday afternoon. Some townspeople in the area say these are thermal geysers that exploded and could have been volcanic in nature. (A.P. Lima in The Guardian, 9.11.99)

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain

I grew up on the Mississippi, what a powerful, brown, muddy river. What strong currents..

Dangerous for those who do not understand and respect her. The river is still carving out its "proper" course through the landscape and has a very wide flood plain. Folks just love to build farms on their fertile flood plains then let us pick up the bill to rebuild the place every so often when it gets washed away. Big Muddy is just that, and I can feel the ooze between the toes...Yeesh! There is an equally large river running beneath the Mississippi we can see, btw.

If you ever fly over the Mississippi you can see the old river beds around the current one. I came across some information that due to flood control projects, among other things, the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana is now eroding back. The river no longer carries the same amount of silt to the Gulf of Mexico.

Interesting. I'll check the internet and see if I can get some data and a picture like you describe. I also remember seeing it from the air. It was astounding!

Ancient trees may explain story of Atlantis Marcia, I think this fits in here, feel free to cross post if you feel it fits elsewhere better :-) Ancient trees may explain story of Atlantis By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press WASHINGTON (September 14, 2000 5:45 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Researchers say ancient pine tree stumps found in a Swedish peat bog may hold a record of the great volcanic blast that some historians link with the end of the fabled Atlantis. Using radiocarbon dating, a team of researchers determined that the trees had been alive between 1695 B.C. and 1496 B.C., and a study of their growth rings showed a four-year period of severely depressed growth about 1636 B.C. Major volcanic eruptions have been known to blast enough dust into the atmosphere to cause frosts and limit crop growth, and one of the most powerful such blasts occurred when the Greek island of Santorini blew up in the mid-1600s B.C. That disaster destroyed a culturally developed island and some historians believe it gave rise to the legend of the lost continent Atlantis. "Our dating and the severe magnitude of this phenomenon suggest that it can be ascribed to the 1628-27 B.C. event, hence providing new evidence of a wider, more northerly area of influence," the team of Swedish scientists reports in the Sept. 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. While the team led by Hakan Grudd of the Climate Impacts Research Center in Kiruna, Sweden, dated the Santorini blast to 1628, other scholars use different dates, though all are within a few years. The Swedish team said their tree ring dating had a margin of error of plus or minus 65 years. Other scientists studying tree rings have found periods of frost damage and slow growth in the mid-1600s B.C. affecting Irish, English, and German oaks, pine trees in California and trees in Turkey. This is the northernmost evidence of an effect from the volcanic blast, the researchers said of the new Swedish find. "The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis of a major Northern Hemisphere volcanic eruption in 1628 B.C., which may have been Santorini in the Aegean Sea," they concluded. The climate impact of volcanoes has long been a topic of discussion, going back at least to Benjamin Franklin. The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora was blamed for a worldwide cooling in 1816 - known as the "year without a summer" in New England, where snow fell in June. Today Santorini is a popular tourist spot, where visitors can see the great caldera formed when the ancient volcanic island blew up and view excavations uncovering the remains of the ancient town. The first mention of Atlantis occurs in Plato, who discusses an ancient island or continent destroyed by earthquakes and sunk into the sea. Geophysical Research Letters is published by the American Geophysical Union, an international scientific society.

Thank you so much for posting something in here. I love this topic, but it is just about impossible to find things to post other than long-winded lectures... Mahalo again, Maggie!