[HN Gopher] Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's ...
___________________________________________________________________
Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route
Author : defrost
Score : 162 points
Date : 2026-02-02 13:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| namenotrequired wrote:
| Can we take a moment to appreciate that Dr. Adam Smith works at
| the University of Glasgow?
| sethgrisham wrote:
| The invisible hand of the lithospheric drip
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You sly dog.
| cwmoore wrote:
| I would like to offer a digression on silver, but as it turns
| out the area was occupied initially for the fur trade:
|
| https://npshistory.com/publications/dino/green_river.pdf
| anthomtb wrote:
| Why does this article have a picture of the Maroon Bells? As
| opposed to something along Green River or, ideally, the 700m deep
| canyon being described?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Having recently gotten into watching documentaries or youtube
| videos of accounts of mountaineering expeditions it's amazing
| how lazy content creators, film makers and journalists can be
| when choosing what images or videos to show. You'll get
| something about climbing a mountain in the Andes and keep
| getting shown completely misleading pictures of Himalayan
| mountains, etc.
| PyWoody wrote:
| Simple, lazy stuff like that always drives me up the wall.
|
| The HGTV show House Hunters used to be _wildly_ inaccurate
| with their map location pins. On more than one occasion they
| 'd say a couple is from the Bay Area but when they show the
| map the location pin would be in LA County. Like, come on.
| That's not even close.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe the pin was closer and they were lying about it being
| in the Bay Area???
|
| Also, no need for exact location for these pins. The new
| home owners probably are fine with it not being exact
| toast0 wrote:
| There's a lot of duplicated geographic names in Northern
| and Southern California. If the production house isn't in
| the area, it's hard, close enough.
|
| I lived in Burbank, but I was in the unincorporated area of
| Santa Clara County, not the incorporated city in LA County.
| Incidentally, I was living in the South Bay, but not the
| South Bay in LA County, or the South Bay in San Diego
| County.
|
| Anyway, perhaps the couple is _from_ the Bay Area, but
| their house is in LA County right now. :P
| PyWoody wrote:
| A specific one that I'll never forget was actually a
| House Hunters International episode. It was years ago but
| the pin being off by about 400 miles burned it into my
| memory lol
|
| I think they were moving from Market Street to Amsterdam.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Clearly they're referring to the Santa Monica Bay Area
| gedy wrote:
| I think it's largely because they are "content creators"
| instead of trying to tell a story or share information.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I'll notice this with TV documentaries and segments on news
| channels quite frequently as well. I have the "GeoGuessr
| gene" as well as being decently well travelled so I spot
| this stuff all the time. One particular pet peeve of mine
| is movies or shows mean to be shot in medieval Europe but
| the "forest" they use is actually a tree plantation of
| North American native trees such as Sitka Spruce.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The content you create is only as good as the stock footage
| you have available to you. It's not like these people are
| trekking to the locations to acquire their own content. If
| you search in stock libraries for mountaineering in the
| Andes, and it only brings you footage from the Himalayas
| you're just going to use it.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| plenty of them are traveling, and the extent to which you
| see videos of people putting together stock footage
| indicates failure of the algorithm. although at this point,
| the algorithm has failed hard enough that I am down to
| subscriptions and chronological feed.
|
| Although, this larger structure did create one of my
| favorite internet algorithm outcomes: There is obviously
| intense hunger for authentic mountain videos narrated in a
| generic minecraft youtuber voice, and the resulting
| incentive gradient physically yeeted a minecraft youtuber
| to the top of mount everest
| (https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMitchellYT)
| wil421 wrote:
| Darn AI agents, I guess they are still cheaper than interns.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Sadly, they "learned" it from us. People have been doing this
| sort of shoddy fill work since the dawn of television (and
| even earlier if you count wildly misplaced / inaccurate
| textual descriptions).
| terminalshort wrote:
| Judging by the performance of AI agents at Geoguessr I
| suspect such errors are almost 100% humans:
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-
| geniu...
| gus_massa wrote:
| I was confused by the image too:
|
| A few images:
| https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=4e98a81333b88c42&udm=2...
|
| Map with elevation:
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gates+of+Lodore/@40.585090...
| legitster wrote:
| > Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
|
| Using what they can from free, public domain sources.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Fascinating to think of entire mountain ranges moving up and down
| like the skin on a wobbly pudding.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| And the speed at which it happens:
|
| > a cold, round anomaly about 200 km below the surface.
|
| > By estimating how far the drip had fallen and calculating the
| speed of its descent, the researchers estimate that the drip
| broke off between 2 and 5 million years ago.
|
| A few megayears later, the bit that broke off is still falling.
|
| 200km in 2m years, I make that in the ballpark of 0.1m per year
| - a bit less if it's > 2m years, and started below the surface.
| toss1 wrote:
| Makes the Pitch Drop Experiment [0] seem jump-to-warp-speed
| fast!
|
| [0] https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
| markbnj wrote:
| For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend
| John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I
| highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a
| good start :).
| arethuza wrote:
| I can also recommend: _" The Earth: An Intimate History"_ by
| Richard Fortey
| mclaurin10 wrote:
| Second for John McPhee! Also Rising From the Plains.
| pengaru wrote:
| References to his books should carry a warning - something to
| the effect of:
|
| "may inspire circuitous road trips involving many stops
| dangerously examining road-cuts on busy interstate highways"
| jhundal wrote:
| I would pay good money for a field guide/itinerary to
| accompany "Assembling California".
|
| More directly related to the Green River, I found Wayne
| Ranney's "Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and
| Mystery" an accessible/engaging intro to deep geological
| mysteries.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Can vouch for his "Oranges" too! A phenomenal writer
| jonstewart wrote:
| I just finished Annals of the Former World. It's essentially a
| 700 page-long ode to geology, using scientific terms for their
| prosody as much as their meaning. I once saw someone else
| remark that "Rising from the Plains" was the greatest western
| ever written.
|
| I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book
| single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is
| really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young
| field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.
| jamincan wrote:
| And if you manage to wade through that tome, Myron Cook's
| Youtube channel [1] is an excellent place to continue your
| exploration of geology.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/@myroncook
| gwerbret wrote:
| The actual paper (open access):
| https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
| phkahler wrote:
| What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have
| pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million
| years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.
| wiml wrote:
| That wouldn't cause the "bullseye" pattern the article
| describes, would it?
|
| I don't think the recent glaciation got as far south at Utah,
| anyway.
| grosswait wrote:
| You may be referring to the ice sheet, but there have been
| many periods of alpine glaciation in Utah. https://www.scienc
| edirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773... and
| https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/utahs-
| glacial-...
| compiler-guy wrote:
| It's a detailed paper by five highly qualified researchers,
| with over 100 citations, and thanks six different reviewers.
|
| It seems very likely to me that they would have said something
| about this theory if it were relevant.
| amelius wrote:
| A time lapse video would have been great.
| stubish wrote:
| Unfortunately the camera was lost to flooding about 2.5m years
| ago, so the only visual records are some rock art.
| amelius wrote:
| The relevant photons are still flying through space. And with
| a time lapse video of this scale, clouds are not a problem.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| The replacement camera is rocketing out there right now,
| faster than the speed of light to catch up with those
| photons.
|
| That'll bring those pictures back, lickety-split.
|
| Too bad it had to go back in time to do so, so it might not
| be overnight :\
|
| I love an advanced civilization anyway, I'll be getting the
| popcorn ready ;)
| jongjong wrote:
| Geology is fascinating. When geologists describe effects over
| long periods of time, it's like they're describing liquids, not
| solid matter.
|
| It's interesting to think about the fact that on a long enough
| timeline, all the matter that we consider to be solid actually
| behaves more like liquid; bobbing up and down like a rough ocean.
| The continents shifting apart like two opposing currents with the
| plagues sliding one above another like what happens when two
| great currents meet... All the solid objects we interact with are
| like liquids frozen in time and we're actually moving through
| time extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we are able to
| temporarily shape the 'liquids' before they eventually
| disintegrate and melt into a puddle; as also happens to us.
|
| Thinking about the world in this way makes everything we do seem
| much more complex, but at the same time, more futile, than it
| initially appears.
| qwerty_clicks wrote:
| As a geologist with 2 degrees and a lot of passion in the
| subject, I've never heard of lithospheric drip related to
| orogenic dips until now, but I love it and kick myself for not
| questioning the over simplicity of typical thought around lower
| crust processes enough.
| defrost wrote:
| As an exploration geophyicist who 1/ posted this, and 2/ can
| bang rocks together, I wonder if you've heard of _Continental
| Drip_ , Ormonde de Kay, 1973.
|
| It introduces an entire other level of simplistic thought.
|
| The _Sudpolarfluchtkraft_ is out there.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-03 23:02 UTC)