3221: Landscape Features

Landscape Features

|< < Prev #3221 (March 18, 2026)

Title text: 'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

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Explanation

This is one of 76 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic is a map of the United States, explaining some of the most significant geologic/human activity in each region. It claims that, in each area, there is one major mechanism (plate tectonics, erosion, volcanism, etc.) which is responsible for the majority of interesting formations and features.

The title text plays off the fact that a large part of geology concerned with activity in the mantle, so explaining some geologic feature by saying "there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot" does not give much information. Saying this would let a distracted geologist buy time while responding to a missed question. Many of Earth's seemingly out-of-place features (e.g., Hawaii hotspot, Iceland, the Snake River Plain in Idaho, etc.) form from such mantle hotspots. Thus, it's an easy go-to explanation for many of the geological features people are often most curious about.

Location	Description	Explanation
Adirondack Mountains	???	The Adirondack Mountains are made of billion-year-old rock but were uplifted relatively recently, within the last 5–10 million years. They’re still rising today despite being far from any plate boundary, forming a dome with no clear tectonic cause, thus the "???" due to an ongoing mystery as to their formation.
Most of northern conterminous U.S.	glaciers	During the Last Glacial Period, this area was covered by an ice sheet that left its marks on the landscape, in the form of moraines, eskers, glacial erratics, etc.
Appalachian Mountains	continents colliding
Near Mississippi & Ohio Rivers	rivers
Southeastern U.S.	farming
Southern Florida	ongoing disputes between limestone and water
Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas	geology
Central column of U.S.	farming
Central Idaho/Yellowstone	a supervolcano
Eastern Washington	a megaflood	Most likely a reference to the Missoula floods and the Bonneville flood, a series of floods caused by glacial ice dam failures causing massive lakes to flood large regions of present-day Eastern Washington.
West Coast	a plate tectonic speedrun	Most likely a reference to the significant tectonic activity on the western coast of the US, caused by the collisions of the Juna de Fuca plate, Pacific plate, and the North American plate.
Desert Southwest	water and time
Northern Alaska	geology
Aleutian Islands	volcanoes
Southeast Alaska	glaciers	This part of Alaska (including Glacier National Park) and western Canada has many glaciers that are still carving the landscape.
Hawaiian island chain	volcanoes	Hawaii, including the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and seamounts northwest of it were formed by a tectonic plate moving over a hotspot, with volcanoes erupting and forming land as it went. The entire chain can be seen here.

Transcript

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Discussion

F1rst P0st!!! R128 (talk) 17:27, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

The ???? in New York is probably the Adirondack Mountains:

About 10 million years ago, the region began to be uplifted. It has been lifted about 7,000 feet (2,000 m) and is continuing at about 0.08 inches (2 mm) per year, which is greater than the rate of denudation. The cause of the uplift is unknown, but geologists theorize that it is caused by a hot spot in the Earth's crust.[18] A recent study has revealed a column of seismically slow materials about 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80 km) deep beneath the Adirondack Mountains,[20] which was interpreted to be the upwelling asthenosphere contributing to the uplift of the mountains.

Zzzt (talk) 17:58, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Geology being the cause of geological events is a tautology.--Henke37 (talk) 18:26, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

conterguous* 137.25.230.78 20:34, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Sections to explain

I'm not a geologist, so I don't know how to answer these questions, but I will leave this template here to eventually be copied into the article:

Location	Description	Explanation
Adirondack Mountains	???
Most of northern U.S. border	Glaciers
Appalachian Mountains	Continents colliding
Mississippi river basin	Rivers
SE U.S.	Farming
Southern Florida	Ongoing disputes between limestone and water
Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas	...geology
Central column of U.S.	Farming
Central Idaho/Yellowstone	A supervolcano
Eastern Washington	A megaflood
West Coast	...a plate tectonic speedrun.
SW	Water and time
Northern Alaska	...geology
Aleutians	Volcanoes
Hawaiian island chain	Volcanoes

Fephisto (talk) 18:59, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

...uh, why don't I just copy it into the article blank for now, actually?Fephisto (talk) 19:00, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
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