CompuServe Messages

Hi, Kamron– >> If the basin is only 200 million years old how can there be crustal sections out in the Pacific that have lower Paleozoic layers in them? Note in my reply to Don in this thread the discussion on the separations of Japan and New Zealand from their mainlands. Let one of these get swept away by a full-blown spreading, and you have your Pacific crustal sections. I have already told you many of the buildups atop the Pacific seafloor are non-continental eruptions from mantle plumes, especially Cretaceous ones; which ones does that not cover? Another mechanism is described in the Scientific American of July 1989. After India rifted away from Africa and Antarctica, at the end of the Cretaceous it was blown apart by the arrival of a hotspot that announced itself by erupting the tremendous Deccan traps. A rift formed there and split off a piece that contains the Seychelles islands NE of Madagascar; the rift is now the Carlsberg ridge, and seems to have been a relocation of an earlier rift that propelled India and carved off Madagascar. It seems reasonable to assume that the hotspot eruption caused the rift, as the combination appears in other cases. The hotspot is now near Reunion island E of Madagascar. The Seychelles are in the wrong ocean, but could be a model for similar findings in the Pacific. –Doug