Roedecker
Banned
Highlander said:
I'm interested!
By the way, here is a possible way the island could be created. It's from another thread where I challenged others to create a scenario for a powerful artificial island nation. Anyway, here is the science:
The planet is a sphere consisting of various layers from surface to center, rather like an onion. The outer layer, or crust is fron 6 to 60 kilometers thick, then there is the mantle - some 3000 kilometers thick, over the outer and inner cores - both 2000 to 2500 kilometers thick. The cores are iron and nickel, with some silicon, temperatures at the center are on the order of 4000 degrees, and the pressure there is enormous. The mantle is semi-molten - it's constantly moving. The crust rests on the top layer of mantle, in very large chunks, which we call tectonic or lithospheric plates, and those plates are also moving all the time. When plates rub against each other, you get earthquakes. When the crust is punctured by pressure from below you get volcanoes, where magma from the mantle emerges as lava. The plate movement also accounts for the changes to a planet's geography over millennia, by what we call continental drift. When a volcano erupts, the lava flows out and cools to form layers of igneous rock. That gets broken down by weather and biological factors to form sedimentary rock and soil.
What those in the "Project" did was the controlled formation of completely new volcanic islands by the deliberate triggering of submarine volcanic eruptions. They selected an area on one of the tectonic plates, the thinner the better, and then they placed microwave transmitters on the seabed, focussed downwards to generate heat and pressure in the mantle. When the magma reached the 'boiling point', all they needed to do was set off explosives in a circle around the area they were raising sufficient to crack the crust, and then up popped large chunks of seabed supported on igneous rock, and the world had a new group of islands.
The maths and engineering were anything but easy, but the principal is exactly as in nature. Where tectonic plates lie adjacent beneath the seabed, there's what we call a spreading ridge of some 60,000 kilometers of volcanic mountain around the globe. The Mid-Atlantic ridge surfaces as volcanic islands such as Ascension Island. Or Iceland.
When the layers of igneous rock formed by lava get broken down by rain and wind into smaller chunks, rain and rivers carry the smaller particles down to the coast where it forms beaches, and then the lighter particles get carried even further out, so that you'll have pebbles, then sand, then silt on the seabed. That all gets mixed with biological wastes from dead sealife and that goes to form the gunk on the sea floor...as the layers build up, the pressure at the bottom turns it into sedimentary rocks again. We get mudstone and clay, with paricles less than 0.004 millimeters across, then siltstone up to 0.06 millimeters, then shale and graywacke (gray sandstone with mixed size particles of quartz, clay, and other minerals). All that stuff is on the seabed, what we call the abyssal plain, lying on top of the igneous rocks that form the crust, lying on top of the tectonic plates flaoting around on the mantle.