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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Ridge push (also known as gravitational slides or sliding plate force) is a proposed driving force for plate motion in plate tectonics that occurs at mid-ocean ridges as the result of the rigid lithosphere sliding down the hot, raised asthenosphere below mid-ocean ridges. Although it is called ridge push, the term is somewhat misleading; it is actually a body force that acts throughout an ocean plate, not just at the ridge, as a result of gravitational pull. The name comes from earlier models of plate tectonics in which ridge push was primarily ascribed to upwelling magma at mid-ocean ridges pushing or wedging the plates apart.
Ridge push is the result of gravitational forces acting on the young, raised oceanic lithosphere around mid-ocean ridges, causing it to slide down the similarly raised but weaker asthenosphere and push on lithospheric material farther from the ridges.[1]
Mid-ocean ridges are long underwater mountain chains that occur at divergent plate boundaries in the ocean, where new oceanic crust is formed by upwelling mantle material as a result of tectonic plate spreading and relatively shallow (above ~60 km) decompression melting.[1] The upwelling mantle and fresh crust are hotter and less dense than the surrounding crust and mantle, but cool and contract with age until reaching equilibrium with older crust at around 90 Ma.[1][2][3] This produces an isostatic response that causes the young regions nearest the plate boundary to rise above older regions and gradually sink with age, producing the mid-ocean ridge morphology.[1] The greater heat at the ridge also weakens rock closer to the surface, raising the boundary between the brittle lithosphere and the weaker, ductile asthenosphere to create a similar elevated and sloped feature underneath the ridge.[3]
These raised features produce ridge push; gravity pulling down on the lithosphere at the mid-ocean ridge is mostly opposed by the normal force from the underlying rock, but the remainder acts to push the lithosphere down the sloping asthenosphere and away from the ridge.[1][3] Because the asthenosphere is weak, ridge push and other driving forces are enough to deform it and allow the lithosphere to slide over it, opposed by drag at the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary and resistance to subduction at convergent plate boundaries.[3] Ridge push is mostly active in lithosphere younger than 90 Ma, after which it has cooled enough to reach thermal equilibrium with older material and the slope of the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary becomes effectively zero.[2]
Despite its current status as one of the driving forces of plate tectonics, ridge push was not included in any of Alfred Wegener's 1912-1930 proposals of continental drift, which were produced before the discovery of mid-ocean ridges and lacked any concrete mechanisms by which the process might have occurred.[4][5][6] Even after the development of acoustic depth sounding and the discovery of global mid-ocean ridges in the 1930s, the idea of a spreading force acting at the ridges was not mentioned in scientific literature until Harry Hess's proposal of seafloor spreading in 1960, which included a pushing force at mid-ocean ridges as a result of upwelling magma wedging the lithosphere apart.[4][7][8][9]
In 1964 and 1965, Egon Orowan proposed the first gravitational mechanism for spreading at mid-ocean ridges, postulating that spreading can be derived from the principles of isostasy. In Orowan's proposal, pressure within and immediately under the elevated ridge is greater than the pressure in the oceanic crust to either side due to the greater weight of overlying rock, forcing material away from the ridge, while the lower density of the ridge material relative to the surrounding crust would gradually compensate for the greater volume of rock down to the depth of isostatic compensation.[10][11] Similar models were proposed by Lliboutry in 1969, Parsons and Richer in 1980, and others.[11] In 1969, Hales proposed a model in which the raised lithosphere of the mid-ocean ridges slid down the elevated ridge, and in 1970 Jacoby proposed that the less dense material and isostasy of Orowan and others' proposals produced uplift which resulted in sliding similar to Hales' proposal.[11] The term "ridge push force" was coined by Forsyth and Uyeda in 1975.[11][12]
Early models of plate tectonics, such as Harry Hess's seafloor spreading model, assumed that the motions of plates and the activity of mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones were primarily the result of convection currents in the mantle dragging on the crust and supplying fresh, hot magma at mid-ocean ridges.[4][7] Further developments of the theory suggested that some form of ridge push helped supplement convection in order to keep the plates moving, but in the 1990s, calculations indicated that slab pull, the force that a subducted section of plate exerts on the attached crust on the surface, was an order of magnitude stronger than ridge push.[1][4][6][10][11][12] As of 1996, slab pull was generally considered the dominant mechanism driving plate tectonics.[4][6][12] Modern research, however, indicates that the effects of slab pull are mostly negated by resisting forces in the mantle, limiting it to only 2-3 times the effective strength of ridge push forces in most plates, and that mantle convection is probably much too slow for drag between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere to account for the observed motion of the plates.[1][4][13] This restores ridge push as one of the dominant factors in plate motion.
Ridge push is primarily opposed by plate drag, which is the drag force of the rigid lithosphere moving over the weaker, ductile asthenosphere.[3][14] Models estimate that ridge push is probably just sufficient to overcome plate drag and maintain the motion of the plate in most areas.[14][15] Slab pull is similarly opposed by resistance to the subduction of the lithosphere into the mantle at convergent plate boundaries.[3][14]
Research by Rezene Mahatsente indicates that the driving stresses caused by ridge push would be dissipated by faulting and earthquakes in plate material containing large quantities of unbound water, but they conclude that ridge push is still a significant driving force in existing plates because of the rarity of intraplate earthquakes in the ocean.[15]
In plates with particularly small or young subducting slabs, ridge push may be the predominant driving force in the plate's motion.[13][14] According to Stefanick and Jurdy, the ridge push force acting on the South American plate is approximately 5 times the slab pull forces acting at its subducting margins because of the small size of the subducting slabs at the Scotia and Caribbean margins.[14] The Nazca plate also experiences relatively small slab pull, approximately equal to its ridge push, because the plate material is young (no more than 50 million years old) and therefore less dense, with less tendency to sink into the mantle.[13] This also causes the subducting Nazca slab to experience flat slab subduction, one of the few places in the world where this currently occurs.[16]
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Ridge push (also known as gravitational slides or sliding plate force) is a proposed driving force for plate motion in plate tectonics that occurs at mid-ocean ridges as the result of the rigid lithosphere sliding down the hot, raised asthenosphere below mid-ocean ridges. Although it is called ridge push, the term is somewhat misleading; it is actually a body force that acts throughout an ocean plate, not just at the ridge, as a result of gravitational pull. The name comes from earlier models of plate tectonics in which ridge push was primarily ascribed to upwelling magma at mid-ocean ridges pushing or wedging the plates apart.
Slab pull is a geophysical mechanism whereby the cooling and subsequent densifying of a subducting tectonic plate produces a downward force along the rest of the plate. In 1975 Forsyth and Uyeda used the inverse theory method to show that, of the many forces likely to be driving plate motion, slab pull was the strongest. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at oceanic trenches. This force and slab suction account for almost all of the force driving plate tectonics. The ridge push at rifts contributes only 5 to 10%. Carlson et al. (1983) in Lallemand et al. (2005) defined the slab pull force as: F s p = K × Δ ρ × L × A {\displaystyle F_{sp}=K\times \Delta \rho \times L\times {\sqrt {A}}} Where: K is 4.2g (gravitational acceleration = 9.81 m/s2) according to McNutt (1984); Δρ = 80 kg/m3 is the mean density difference between the slab and the surrounding asthenosphere; L is the slab length calculated only for the part above 670 km (the upper/lower mantle boundary); A is the slab age in Ma at the trench. The slab pull force manifests itself between two extreme forms: The aseismic back-arc extension as in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc. The Aleutian and Chile tectonics with strong earthquakes and back-arc thrusting. Between these two examples there is the evolution of the Farallon Plate: from the huge slab width with the Nevada, the Sevier and Laramide orogenies; the Mid-Tertiary ignimbrite flare-up and later left as Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates, the Basin and Range Province under extension, with slab break off, smaller slab width, more edges and mantle return flow. Some early models of plate tectonics envisioned the plates riding on top of convection cells like conveyor belts. However, most scientists working today believe that the asthenosphere does not directly cause motion by the friction of such basal forces. The North American Plate is nowhere being subducted, yet it is in motion, and likewise for the African, Eurasian and Antarctic Plates. Ridge push is thought responsible for the motion of these plates. The subducting slabs around the Pacific Ring of Fire cool down the Earth and its core-mantle boundary. Around the African Plate upwelling mantle plumes from the core-mantle boundary produce rifting including the African and Ethiopian rift valleys.
Slab suction is one of the four main forces that drive plate tectonics. It creates a force that pulls down plates as they are subducting and speeds up their movement, creating larger amounts of displacement. It is because of these forces, slab pull, ridge push, mantle convection, and slab suction that the Earth's crust is able to move and orient itself in various arrangements. This is how throughout the Earth's history there has been the ability to create super continents where all of the land mass has converged into one (for example, Pangaea). Slab suction occurs when a subducting slab drives flow in the lower mantle by exerting additional force down in the direction of the mantle's convection currents. This flow then exerts shear tractions on the base of nearby plates. This driving force is important when the slabs (or portions thereof) are not strongly attached to the rest of their respective tectonic plate. They cause both the subducting and overriding plate to move in the direction of the subduction zone. This force occurs between two colliding plates where one is subducting beneath the other. As one plate subducts, it sets up convection currents in the upper mantle that exert a net trenchward pull, and acts to suck both the plates together. Slab suction is weaker than slab pull, which is the strongest of the driving forces. When measuring the forces of these two mechanisms, slab pull in subducting plate boundaries for upper mantle slabs is 1.9 × 10^21 N. In comparison slab suction in the upper and lower mantle totaled 1.6 × 10^21 N. Slab suction in coordination with slab pull are used to analyze the speeds of plates work. When you combine the slab pull of the upper mantle slabs with the slab suction of lower mantle slabs you get a model showing that subducting plates move four times faster than non subducting plates. Computing the slab suction force can give us predictions of the plate velocities by using viscous flow driven by the slabs and adding it to the shear tractions the flow exerts of the base of the plates. Due to the flow in the lower mantle causing slab suction, changes in viscosity will have a much different effect than how it would apply to the upper mantle. In the lower mantle if you have a decrease in viscosity the flow will become much more rapid and increase the effect of slab suction and if viscosity in the lower mantle increases the effects of slab suction will decrease. Associated with the slab suction force is the idea of trench roll-back. As a slab of oceanic crust subducts into the mantle, the hinge of the plate (the point where the plate begins to subduct) tends to regress away from the trench. This occurs because there is effectively no force to hold the hinge in one location.
A push moraine or pushed moraine is in geomorphology a moraine (a landform formed by glacial processes) that forms when the terminus advance of a lowland glacier pushes unstratified glacial sediment into a pile or linear ridge in front of it. A push moraine is identified by its ability to push sediment upwards from its original horizontal position. Push moraines are limited in size by the advance of a glacier front and its tendency to shear over the top of any ridge large enough to resist the movement of ice. Pushed moraines generally occur in low, flat plains at higher latitudes and were formed during the glacial stages of the Quaternary ice age. They can be up to 100 km long and several hundreds of metres in height. Pushed moraines can be found in the North American plains, in Siberia and in Northern Europe. They were formed during cool, glacial stages, when glaciers advanced and covered large parts of North America and Eurasia. In some regions pushed moraines of more than one glacial stage can be recognised, or different generations from a single glacial phase. Since new glacial advances tend to destroy older pushed moraines, most were formed during the last (110,000 to 10,000 years ago) or second-last (238,000 to 128,000 years ago) glacial advances. Today push moraines can be found anywhere an advancing glacier is pushing sediment into a ridge at the terminus. The largest push moraine in the world is the Dirt Hills in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. The hills are located about 60 kilometres south-east of city of Moose Jaw, along the Missouri Coteau.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.
