Sorry, Hawaii is formed by a phenomenon thats been going on for many
millions of years, as the chain extends underwater almost to the
aleutians. It turns out from radar and sonar data, that there is an
upwelling of really hot stuff from the lower mantle, through the mantle,
to the underside of the Pacific Plate, which punctures the plate and
forms islands. As the Pacific plate slowly drifts over time across this
upwelling, new punctures are created and new islands form. That the
Hawaiian chain is so long and so straight indicates that the Pacific
plate has been on a steady course for a couple hundred million years at
the very least, so the plates would not slide over the mantle as you
say. The dynamo pheonomenon that I was talking about, and you may have
miscronstrued, is the differential between the rotation of our mantle
and the core. The moons tidal drag causes the mantle to rotate slightly
slower than the core. This differntial in speed keeps our core molten
and generates our planets huge magnetic field. At the level of the lower
mantle, the magma is hot enough to be so viscous that this dynamo may
tumble like a gyroscope failure in catastorphic circumstances, like I
had previously mentioned...
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}