Palawan Continental Terrane. “Palawan?” According to Google Translate, it means “Sleeper Fish.”
Sleeper gobies are members of the Eleotridae fish family, found predominantly in the tropical Indo-Pacific. There are approximately 35 genera and 150 species.
Interesting… sort of. The Palawan Continental Terrane is actually a fairly sizable chunk of material that has perplexed a few researchers as to where it came from, or how it originated. Before I yammer about that, let me point out what that word actually means… not Palawan, but “Terrane.”
A Terrane is a geologic term for a somewhat contigious block(s) of material that operate/move over geologic timescales as one unit. The boundaries are not really clear enough to call it a crust block or microplate, or microcontinent… though each of those could eventually wind up being a terrane once they get to a resting place, or are plastered onto a continent. Essentially, the material in the Terrane is related to all the other material in origin, chemical make up, and destination. Usually a Terrane originates from one crust block/plate and winds up attached to or sutured onto another. The Wrangellia Terrane is where I learned the term… that’s the region plastered to the North American craton east of where the recent Queen Charlotte quakes occurred at. If you think of bugs and windshields, you get the general idea of how terranes work and accumulate.
From the name “Palawan Continental Terrane” you would assume that it originated from some continent somewhere. According to Knittel et al., it’s a piece of the rifted margin of SE China. So where is it now? Well, it makes up a significant chunk of Mindoro in the Philippines. Mindoro is a collection of three uniquely different chunks of material. The other parts are the Philippine Mobile Belt that the Palawan Continental Terrane is sutured to, as well as a third unit that is made up of metamorphic material and a section that might indicate an ophiolitic unit… complete with gabbros. From Wikipedia: “a section of the Earth’s oceanic crust and the underlying upper mantle that has been uplifted and exposed above sea level and often emplaced onto continental crust”
Okay… so it’s a slow motion collision in process. More correctly, part of a slow motion collision in process. Why part? Well, this affects Taal and Laguna de Bay.
Mukasa et al. points out that other researchers have pinned their origin as products of the subducting plate at the Manila trench, and then further notes that the geochemistry of them has changed as they have grown older. Specifically, they differ from the other volcanoes in the northern part of that chain. (East Bataan Lineament). The reason for this, according to the authors, is the incorporation of Palawan Continental Terrane material into the magma production.
This could explain how Taal and Laguna de Bay could have become capable of making large calderas. By its nature, continental material is more silica rich than oceanic crust. The general thought is that leading shards of this material are intruding into and being caught up in the melt formation process.
As cbus20122 notes:
…It’s amazing that such a large eruption [Pinatubo] only produced a comparative blip of a caldera when looking at the other volcanic areas on the map…
Pinatubo, being on the West Bataan Lineament, is more north and further away from this source of silica rich magma.
Right next to the Taal/Laguna de Bay region is the Macolod Corridor. From the abstract of a pay to play paper by Förster et al (1990):
an approximately 40 km wide zone of still active intense Quarternary volcanism which perpendicularly crosses the Island in a NE-SW direction … we believe that the corridor is a pull-apart zone formed by a diffuse system of NW-SE oriented shearing.
And of course… a plot of sorts. Not my usual, I wanted to focus on quake depths in relation to the major players. This was put together with DivaGIS. Red Quakes are greater than 90 km deep, Blue quakes are less than 90 km deep. Somewhere around 125 km is where melt percolates off of the subducting slab. The majority of the deep spike is under and just to the southwest of the Taal parent caldera. (The one the island of Taal sits in). There are a few deep quakes up around Pinatubo, but nothing like the area around Taal. These are quakes from the USGS list back to 1975 and greater than magnitude 4.5 or so.
GEOLURKING
An after the fact addition: If you note my first graphic, there is a region that forms a “T” with the Manilla Trench that I called “Old South China Sea Spreading Center.” A closer look at this was done in “Basement structures from satellite-derived gravity field: South China Sea ridge” by Braitenberg et al (2005). You may find it of interest. It is what put the Palawan Continental Terrane where it is.
“The Macolod Corridor: A rift crossing the Philippine island arc” Förster et al (1990).
“The Nd-, Sr- and Pb-isotopic character of lavas from Taal, Laguna de Bay and Arayat volcanoes, southwestern Luzon, Philippines: implications for arc magma petrogenesis” Mukasa et al (1993)
“Permian arc magmatism in Mindoro, the Philippines: An early Indosinian event in the Palawan Continental Terrane” Knittel et al (2009)
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UPDATE:
NAME THAT VOLCANO RIDDLE by Suzie!
The prime minister and the volcanologist were having a heated debate about health and safety issues.
”You are grossly over estimating the danger” shouted AP in frustration.
”Yes its active but it has not erupted for a few thousand years, and the local fishing community, who admittedly get a bit confused about their birthdays, stay safe by holding hands!”
”Ahhhh but you are forgetting something important” retorted BP immediately ”smoking kills!”
—————————————————————-
ALAN`S EVIL RIDDLE
Years ago Friday, Her Serene Highness may have worn this green coat under the stars!
1) What am I?
2) My composition and uses?
3) Which constellation could be related to a cousin?
———————————————————
Suzie will do her own Dinging and i will do it for Alan.
Happy riddling Spica
VolcanoCafé 
yes, I am stumped too. I keep thinking Verdigris for some reason, but it’s not a mineral or related to Abba or whatever. Got a sore head today too…self inflicted misery…I should know better by now!!
OK, so from Suzie’s comments to Spica’s and my comments above: we need a country near international date line that has a former prime minister with AP initials. Let’s go from north to south through countries near the date line: (all the info from various wikipedia articles)
Russia/CCCP – only prime minister AP: Alexander Puzanov 1952-1956
US – no prime ministers
Marshall islands – have presidents, I can’t find prime ministers, no AP presidents
Kiribati – has a president who is also head of cabinet = prime minister, no AP presidents
Cook islands, Niue,Tokelau, Kermandec Islands, Chatnam islands – belong to NZ, see below
Samoa – has prime ministers, but no AP prime ministers
American Samoa – belongs to US, no prime ministers
Tonga – kingdom, no prime ministers
Fiji – has prime ministers, but no AP prime ministers
New Zealand – has prime ministers, but no AP prime ministers
Wallis and Futuna, French Polynesia – belong to France, French AP prime minister = Antoine Pinay 1952-53
So, looks like it must be either Russia or French Polynesia. Now let’s look at any potentially smoking volcanoes in these areas and where fishermen hold hands…
Aha, so again from Suzie’s comment above (while I was checking all this stuff), since the type of volcano is realted to black smoker, it is probably on a spreading centre and so it has to be on the south Pacific spreading centre, because this eliminates Russia/Kamchatka with subduction volcanism:
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Thumblinks/spacific_page.html
Ok, so then it has to be French polynesia and some volcano there… *** back to searching ***
I think we just were visiting the very same sites at the same time. But i could not find a french prime minister with P too.
Yes, possibly. 🙂
I’ll go with Bora Bora then (since you took Tahiti already :-D). Although according to wikipedia they are both extinct and all the active ones are under water:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_French_Polynesia
Still not sure about the holding hands fishing though – maybe some traditional polynesian method?
Or perhaps Mehetia, seems to be active:
http://www.volcanolive.com/mehetia.html
But I can’t find a French volcanologist BP…
Here’s a political map that shows which countries are in this area of the Pacific:
I was going for Democratic Republic of Congo because it has the only Prime Minister called AP at present, but if the goal posts keep shifting then it’s hard to keep up. Off to do other things. 🙂
how have the goal posts shifted lol?
Because the tense of the riddle implies the Prime Minister is current and he relates to where the volcano is – but now you say it’s an old Prime Minister and is nothing to do with where the volcano is. I can’t keep up. 🙂
Tahiti with Mont Orohena or Mont Ronui
Tiahitia?
Sorry…spelling…Teahitia,
Tahiti quoi !
Prime Minister AP and Volcanologist BP do NOT relate the the geography of this volcano rather they relate to its name.
Its location will be easier to find when you identify the fishing community!
Black smokers are found on its craters.
Final result for Alans riddle:
Geolurking 1 Ding, Talla 2 Dings.
Dont start guessing what use it might have, i dont know.
All Alan gave me as an answer was http://www.mindat.org/min-1483.html
Oooh! Thank you – I’m glad the old brain is still working a bit having got it in such a tangle with Suzie’s riddle. I couldn’t find out what it was used for either! 😀
I would think that it would be a good source of Vanadium.
I guess I should have read KarenZ’s follow-up… she beat me to it.
Well done GeoLurking & Talla 😀
At a guess, Fernandinite CaV5+8O20•4(H2O) would be a source of Vanadium which is used as a catalyst or in alloys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium
Final hints!
Source Wiki – Estonian AP and/or Russian BP may have given their name to this Volcano
The nearest island to it ‘floats’ on the date line – the local fishing community that hold hands to stay safe are mammals
The volcano is classified as active as it has black smokers on the rims of some of its craters
Piip?
Ding!!
Without that hint i would never have guessed that
Ants Piip and Boris Piip?
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1000-271
Ants Piip an Estonian Prime Minister and Boris Piip a Russian volcanologist are both accredited by Wiki as possibly having this marine volcano named after them. It is c60 kms from Bering Island, Kamchatka.. The Islands only claim to fame is its large and thriving colony of sea otters – who form rafts at sea at night by holding hands in order to protect themselves from predators! It has not erupted for at least 7,000 years but is classified as active due to its large number of black smokers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sea_otters_holding_hands.jpg 🙂
Cute!
“Ants Piip an Estonian Prime Minister and Boris Piip a Russian volcanologist are both accredited by Wiki as possibly having this marine volcano named after them.”
Must be Boris – he was a (the?) pioneer of modern Kamchatkan volcanology.
The offices of KVERT and RAS FEB IVS are on Piip Boulevard, Petropavlovsk
Sorry – meant to add great riddles and well done to the winners!
Evening
Here is the Iceland update. Seems the brunt of the activity is still located in TFZ
First part shows elevation in colorbar also some volcanoes have been added
Do not hesitate to ask if you want to have your pet Icelandic volcano or zone added. It’s only a few clicks away (and some ‘puter time). I can also do some zooms on a specific zone.
Second part shows age of the EQ (red is younger)
Thank you, Dfm. Really a nice one.
I would be interested in Askja quakes from last year on, if that is possible to do. 🙂
And IMO report on last week’s quake activity in Iceland (Icelandic website):
“Vikuyfirlit 29. október – 4. nóvember. Rúmlega 700 jarðskjálftar hafa verið staðsettir með SIL mælakerfi Veðurstofu Íslands í vikunni. Flestir skjálftar mældust við Eyjafjarðarál úti fyrir Norðurlandi, sá stærsti var 3,8 að stærð. Auk þess voru smáhrinur austan Öskju, í Ölfusi og við Húsmúla. Í Mýrdalsjökli mældust fleiri smáskjálftar inni Kötluöskjunni og nokkrir í nágrenni Goðalands og Hafursárjökuls.” (in English: The week from 29. Oct. to 4. Nov.Around 700 earthquakes have been located via SIL system of IMO during this week. Most of them were identified at Eyjafjörður trough out of North Iceland, the biggest one was 3.8 magm. Aditionnally, there were some small quakes east of Askja, in Ölfus [i.e.near Selfoss, South Iceland] and next to [mountain] Húsmúli. Withing Mýrdalsjökull, more of the small quakes were withing Katla caldera and some next to Goðaland [i.e. Thorsmörk] and Hafursrárjökull.)
http://www.vedur.is/#syn=skjalftar (of today)
And there have been two quakes over magn. 3 today at the same place as the 5.6 quake at the beginning of the swarm. http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalftar
all of last year ? 2011 ?
Yeah as Inge said, really nice.
Thank you talla, sissel and Lurking for your kind coments about husband and Meg. Husband is doing the doggy sitting tonight as I am absolutely bushed after the sleepless night last night. Meg is not very well 😦 I think she’s been so stressed and her diet left a lot to be desired. So now she is just sleeping herself better. From what we have gathered life wasn’t too pleasant for her and her little body is now trying to recover because she feels safe.
Husband is also relaxing and as he says both his arms and back hurt so sitting up on the sofa is easier than lying and rolling over onto one or the other of his arms. So I have left the two nodding off together on the sofa!!
Thanks for another fascinating post Lurking. I haven’t fully digested it yet.
Also congratulations to this weeks point scorers :).
Take care everyone… bed is not calling any more ….It’s yelling and screaming at me 😀 😀
Sleep well Diana.
Manfred Betzswieser says the seismometers are working again, and he showed an image of the possibly oldest seismograph from China. I looked up the englisch version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismometer
Balls fell out of the dragons mouth and pointed into the direction of the earthquake… pretty neat.
Pretty intense Quake at Cerro Machin in Columbia.
I can’t locate a teleseismic candidate. Anyone else have any luck?
If not, it’s local and pretty long in duration.
In absence of teleseismic ones, this looks like a proper tornillo (although those are as far as I know only at Galeras?).
Tornillos occur at many volcanoes around the world – as far as I know, they’re common among most stratovolcanoes.
As for the quake – I’m not an expert on seismograms, and I’m not sure if this is volcanic, or a local tectonic quake. The quake shows up on the Nevado Del Ruiz seismograms as well, but to a much lesser degree of course.
And yet again my network is restored.
One of the boons of being in the IT field and having a copious amount of experience at it. Cook a router… go grab another and I’m back online.
Side note. While I was at the store picking up a router, I wandered over to the printer area. I have a lot of under the hood experience with them also. I was reading the specifics … the fine print that details the number of pages you get and is printed so small that you almost need a magnifying glass to read. ‘ * 3500 pages is based off of high capacity toner cartridges sold separately and not included in base printer ‘
{okay…}
I note the model number of the cartridges by opening up the toner bay, close it up and wander over to the toner cartridge shelves. Black – $66. The other three colors $74 each. Total, about $288.
Personally… I use an old HP 6m that I have had since it’s birth. The cartridges run about $95 ea.. it’s monochrome, and I get about 6000 pages per cartridge. That works out to 1.6¢/page. Not the 8.2¢/page of that color printer.
But… to give them some merit, it is cheaper than the one I scoped out about a year or two ago that came in at 14¢/page.
Sales representatives “clerks” don’t like me. While looking at the routers one self impressed “clerk” came over to ask if I needed help… this always strikes me as a territorial action on their part. {If I need help, I’ll ask for it.. leave me the #$@@ alone.} My response – “Nope.” I realize that the kid is only doing his job… which, if you boil it down to its pure essence, is to liberate me from whatever is in my wallet and make me feel happy about it.
Cynical? Yeah, I’ll accept that. But I call it common sense.
Worse: our stuff is made to die on us so we buy more stuff. I haven’t bene able to find an English version of this documentary by Cosima Dannoritzer, but there is an Italian, Portuguese, French and German version available.
Which is one reason that I am always quite pleased with myself and my ability to resurrect the dead… equipment.
On a whim… I took some dried out chicken bones and memory sticks and strung them on a chain. When a client would bring in a dead computer and I would put it on the bench, hook it up and got it to boot right up.. having done nothing… I would shake the chicken bones at it.
It was quite funny until some of the people started thinking it was real.
On a more serious note… I’ve seen some pretty crappy designs. You look at what is going on in a piece of equipment and you have to ask yourself… “What the hell was the designer thinking?” Such as a small plastic enclosure, with a spring and latch, that is 4″ from, and directly above, an assembly that normally runs at about 148°C. Plastic degrades as you slowly cook it. Eventually, it gets brittle and snaps right off on it’s own. In this case… about two to three years. Right about the time that they want you to buy a new one.
Would not this be your preferred machine: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exidy_Sorcerer.jpg 😆
BTW: There is the German expression named “Sollbruchstelle” (engl. “predetermined breaking point”) for the phenomenon you describe last. 🙂
Flakes – Frank Zappa
The term to be used here is planned obsolescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
First came up with light bulbs when the industry got together and noted that their bulb are to long living and shorter “work periods” would be better for making more money. The industry then decided that a lightbulb should not work longer than 1000 hours. It would not have to be that way. There is a light bulb cam showing a fire department in Livermore California where the bulb has been burning for over 100 years now. It survived 3 webcams so far. http://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm
Yeah… I’ve seen that bulb… the problem with it is that it is operating at a fraction of capacity and amounts to little more than a barely glowing wire in an envelope. I can make pretty much any lightbulb last years beyond its normal live if I cut the current down to a fraction of it’s rating.
Not to detract from what you have said.. it’s dead on the money and highly accurate. Even the pigtail CFL bulbs do not last anywhere near what the technology could make them last. The part about them that really ticks me off, is the huge “environmental” push for them. They spend millions of dollars trying to keep the population from being exposed to mercury, submitting power stations to great scrutiny to try and detect mercury in their stack gases and fining the bejeebous out of them when they can find it, then have us stick these little mercury filled bulbs in out houses and tell us we are saving the environment.
Horseshit. The highest incidence of mercury in the environment is not from the down-wind plumes from power plants… it’s from rainfall off of the oceans. You look at any plot of mercury concentrations and it follows the prevailing rain patterns.
Now… LED bulbs… though expensive, draw a fraction of the power that a CFL bulb does. It’s only been in the last few years that they managed to come up with white LEDs. Not to mention, they last for a phenomenally long time compared to incandescent or CFL. But it’s just going to be a matter of time before they figure out how to reliably shorten their life span…
Yeah, they will shorten that lifespan too. Other thing on bulbs. They forbade normal bulbs in the Eu by now to “safe energy”. not only that it is much more expensive to produce those new energy saving bulbs, but also, they are highly toxic and a problem because you may not dump them in normal waste. They are also designed to be turned on and left burning, if you switch them on and off like you are used to ( to save energy!) this reduces the lifespam of such a bulb profoundly and they are much more expensive. Also, yeah, 70 % of the energy of a normal bulb is heat. But now you can add this very same heat with heating up your rooms more in order to keep warm. So no energy saving there. And the enegery light bulbs light is in the blueish spectrumwhereas the normal bulbs had almost the same spectrum as the sun. People already suffer from depressions in winter due to too little light exposure, this does not help.
I stocked up on normal bulb before the were forbidden and will invest new LED lights when i run out of stock.
Rant over.
I just wrote a long answering post on Piip Fernandinite and Corvusite etc just now. It would be ready to go in.
Felt the Kentucky 4.3 around 12:10 EST. Was more a subtle skakey vibration kinda of thing maybe five seconds that made you wonder if you really felt it—but earthquake certainly popped in my head. Finally bugged me enough to check ER. Sure enough!
Real near wife’s family home area- That part of E. Kentucky. guess it was felt over a good part of the Appalachians..
It’s outside the 95% range, but a quick and dirty estimate is about 0.26 meters displacement along a 1.19 km section of the fault at that depth.
Fine post on this quake here: http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.de/2012/11/earthquake-in-eastern-kentucky.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+SciencyThoughts+%28Sciency+Thoughts%29 🙂
OT: Spotted over at WUWT
It’s and excerpt from a paper on the subject. The paper itself is getting pretty beat up by the commenters, some of which are Solar Physicists, but there is one thing in this paper that is missing from a lot of the “Planets vs The Sun” ideas and theories.
It proposes a mechanism. An actual physical mechanism that could conceivably be the link between the phenomena. It then goes on to try and test that linkage.
If it’s valid or not… well, that has yet to be seen. The authors think it’s valid, others do not. But it is real science, not mindless yammering by loons.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/10/is-there-is-a-planetary-influence-on-solar-activity-it-seems-so-according-to-this-new-paper/
The link? Well, the Sun undergoes something called Differential Rotation. That’s where the equatorial regions rotate at a different speed than the higher latitude regions. The Sun, being mostly gas/plasma, that is not such a weird thing. But down about 30% solar radii down, the Sun rotates as a Solid Body. The transition zone is where it is beleived that the sheer forces generate the magnetic flux that drives eventually the sunspots. That is where the proposed link occurs. From the tidal forces on that layer.
How do they know this? By analyzing and studying the spectral lines of the light at wavelengths specific to different levels. Elements emit photons characteristic of the environment that they are in… pressure, temperature, etc. These show up as emission/absorption lines. Looking at the Doppler shift of these lines allow the researchers to learn a lot about the motion and environment of the atoms/molecule that emitted/absorbed the light.
That is one reason that we know about the Livingston-Penn thing. Livingston-Penn noted that the magnetic field inside the cores of suspots (the dark area) were getting weaker over time. Below about 1500 Gauss, they won’t be strong enough to evacuate enough material from the core of the Sunspot to be visible. They will still be there, they just won’t show up in the visible spectrum.
Whether this is something new or something cyclic is unknown. The effect hasn’t been observed long enough to tell.
Click to access Livingston-Penn%20Data%20and%20Findings%20so%20far.pdf
Click to access 2009EO300001.pdf
m6.8 earthquake in Burma: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20285901
@dfm
It would be nice if you could do a plot on Askja from beginning 2011 till today. 🙂
🙂 Something like this?
@Diana.
I think your hubby should go to a physician and have him notify and attest the injuries. And for the rest, like GeoLurking said, I think this is very good advice!
Good luck, also with the new dog! 🙂
Your husband should see a doctor or A&E anyway to make sure that he hasn’t suffered anything more than severe bruising, if he hasn’t already done so.
Good luck and hope Meg is settling in well. if Bob has a cousin we can call it Meg so your dog will have an appropriately volcanic name. But there are already the following according to GVP:
Mega basalt field
Megala Vouno
Megalos Polybotes
* Diana’s husband, not Inge B’s.
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Icelandic humor. IMO comment on another bad weather front which is approaching Iceland: Things that have been flying from north to south over / around the house, may now fly in opposite direction.
http://www.ruv.is/frett/enn-eitt-ovedrid-a-leidinni 😆
Stay safe, Icelanders, esp. on yr. way to work tomorrow morning! http://www.vedur.is/vedur/spar/thattaspar/#teg=vindur
Haha, I like the joke.
With respect to weather, and Slovenia & southern Austria are again on red alert today and tomorrow for huge amounts of rain and widespread flooding:
http://www.meteoalarm.eu/en_UK/1/0/EU-Europe.html
This only after this happened less a week ago in the same area (scroll down for pictures) – 100 years waters:
http://www.rtvslo.si/okolje/rekorden-pretok-drave-in-save-situacija-je-na-meji-obvladljivega/295142
And I had to save myself out of spam – not sure what is so offensive in this comment? 😛
Ouch Ursula, thats bad, there has been severe flooding in the affected areas of southern Austria last week. Lavamünd had the highest water in a century. There were 2 meters of water in the village.
New post is up Riddle answers