Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest

Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest sciencedaily.com

Scientists have captured a subduction zone off Vancouver Island in the process of tearing itself apart, revealing that these massive tectonic systems may die piece by piece rather than all at once. The discovery could…

29 points•emot•5 days ago•16 comments•

#tearing #apart #pacific #northwest #earth #beneath #tearing apart #apart beneath

16 comments

tracerbulletx4 days ago

I feel like it's kind of misleading to say "earth is tearing its self apart" when talking about a subduction zone. Yeah I mean the subducting plate faulting as its pulled down is breaking.. but its still a compressive collision. If you crammed two things together and one of the things cracked, saying its tearing its self apart would be a real.. stretch.

jschveibinz4 days ago

Nic Zentner is a great lecturer on the unique geology of the Pacific Northwest. He has a lot of interesting material on YT. Here is the link to his academic webpage:

https://www.cwu.edu/about/directory/geological-sciences/nico...

ucyo4 days ago

This is such a nice topic for visualisations, but not a single drawing or visual explanation. That’s unfortunate. The main pic is impressive but without context it’s disappointing a bit

gus_massa4 days ago

The main pict is generated by AI and a misleading hallucination, or as we use to call it "totally wrong".

I'm not a geologist, so I have to take a few guess to read the main paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady8347

<IIUC>

When the slab in the subsection one goes under another slab, it does not get destroyed, but goes down quite intact. But from time to time (every few million years?) a part split. See figure 8 D. So the split is already covered with a huge layer of soil (like 10kn?) and above that a swallow sea (like .1km). Note also that they split is a very different way

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   Press     Research

So the main graphic of the press article is wrong in many aspects.

</IIUC>

dylan6044 days ago

or as we use to call it artist rendering. Artistic visualizations have been part of articles long before generative AI came along.

margalabargala4 days ago

The main pic is AI generated, according to the credit caption.

sfink4 days ago

The main pic makes absolutely zero sense. The sides are tilted upwards, so clearly they were moving towards each other. But there's a big gap, so clearly they're moving away from each other. I was mentally sketching out a scenario where it was first one then the other, until I realized it was just AI slop.

thundercleeze4 days ago

This article is AI.

schiffern4 days ago

Yes, it's an AI rewording of the LSU press release (credited at the bottom): https://www.lsu.edu/science/news/2025/09/shuck-sci-adv.php

Can we change the link to point there instead?

overcast4 days ago

I've seen this movie, we need start preparing our Jaeger program with all of this AI capital floating around.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

16 comments

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