Farallon Plate Remnants
The Rockies are fifteen hundred kilometers, or one thousand miles, to the east. The cause must be the tectonic plate that built these mountains. Its name is Farallon. Farallon started off normally enough. It plunged beneath the North American Plate at a forty-five degree angle. This process sprouted volcanoes to form the Sierra Nevada in what is now California.
Next, mantle motions pulled North America westward over Farallon, and the plate scraped along the bottom of the continent - for fifteen hundred kilometers. As North America continued its westward trek, Farallon settled to the bottom of the mantle.
The image is output from a model run using the TERRA mantle software. To learn more about Bunge's work, visit his web site at: http://www.geophysik.uni-muenchen.de/Members/bunge.
Farallon Plate inside Earth's mantle.
Farallon is now hidden deep inside the Earth
Farallon has been recycled back into the Earth
Video slate image reads, "Animation of Faralon Plate remnants
Simulation: Faralon Plate inside Earth's mantle".
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animator
- Stuart A. Snodgrass (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
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Scientist
- Hans-Peter Bunge (Princeton University)
Release date
This page was originally published on Thursday, March 14, 2002.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:57 PM EDT.
Datasets used in this visualization
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TERRA software
ID: 461
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.