Stuff You Should Know - Plate Tectonics Are What Makes Earth Inhabitable

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

It’s time to get jazzed about Earth science again. It’s only been 60 or so years since we’ve known the continents move around and we’re still figuring out exactly how they do. But one thing is for sure, that super-slow movement is super important.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and we're just moving slowly against one another starting static in the slowest possible way. Perhaps one day will be a mountain range. Yeah or a deep deep trench. All right you go you get down there I'll be up in the mountains. All right when I'm down there I'll be like hello how's the get down there. I'll be up in the mountains. All right, when I'm down there, I'll be like, hello, how's the weather up there? Ha, ha, ha. Jerry will be, you know, her nickname will sea level, Roland.

Sea level. Yeah, but we need to spell it with just the letter C. Right, see that. That's more nickname-y. Oh, well, it sounds mean all of a sudden. Sea level. Oh, I didn't mean it like that. Yeah, like Jerry's the sea level producer.

Right. Wow. That was just subconscious. Sorry, Jerry. That's okay. So since Jerry said that was okay, I say we just go ahead and move on because we're making all these plate tectonics jokes for a good reason Chuck. We're going to talk today in part about plate tectonics. That's right. But first we're gonna go back before that. Yeah, so I included this. I couple this together from a bunch of different stuff including our old vulnerable house stuff work site, Netgeo, log science, I go wrong there. Heritage daily, good stuff. Great. You of Calgary?

Yeah. The U stands for Upwardly Mobile. Upwardly Mobile of Calgary. And then Wendrium daily, which I hadn't heard of before, but it's cool little sight. Is it a Wendrium? On the daily. On the daily?

So yeah, I cobbled this together and I wanted to put this in there about the idea of what what people used to think of. I guess I'm fascinated with that lately because we just did a whole episode on on what people used to think before the scientific method. I feel like we talked about something similar in another episode and then now we've got this. But this to me is like we're right on the precipice of But this to me is like we're right on the precipice of

Essentially folklore and then scientific understanding this is essentially like the dividing line what we're looking at right here In this first little anecdote and then the other reason I thought it was really significant is because I think Madame Blavotsky who kind of comes up in a second she would would play really well today. Everybody would be like, what kind of BS are you selling? I want to give you some of my money. She would be a feature like Goop contributor, basically. Yes, you're talking about Helena Blavotsky, aka Madame Blavotsky, the Russian occultist from the 1800s, who was a member and co-founder in fact of the Theosophical Society.

That sounds like it would play these days, for sure. For sure. And something that, what, keep on saying, Blatowski, was going on about back then, was something called Lemuria. And we'll get to how that came about in a second as well, but this is the idea that a lot of the asafists thought that, hey, listen, religion is tried, science is tried, but nobody's still here

in the 19th century has fully explained how we got here and what's going on on planet Earth, but I am able to because I am the great Levotsky and I am, I have talented insight into the times that came before. Yeah, through psychic gifts, right? Yeah. So just drop your rubles in a bucket and I'll tell you. Exactly.

So she had, I think multiple books, but in one in particular, that came out in 1988 called The Secret Doctrine, she talked about how there were seven root races. This is another thing people were very preoccupied with. Where we came from. And the reason why is because just a couple decades before Darwin had published on the origin of the species And it's really difficult to get across like the

Revolution and understanding that book brought right and that made people fascinated like wait Okay, well where do we come from if God just didn't go boop 7,000 years ago where do we come from was figure that out and Again, this was at a time when science was very much mishmashed with the superstition, I guess. So you could really get some play with the superstitious stuff. And that's exactly what Belovatsky was doing. She was saying, um, check this out. This place called Lemuria. It's a lost continent. Everybody loves those. And it's where one of the three of seven root races came from. Yeah, the third root race in which giant hermaphroditic egg-laying humans,

pre-sex organ humans lived along with the dinosaurs. And everyone was like, Hey, sounds pretty good to me. Sounds good. Take my money. Yeah, so it made me wonder too if some of this obsession with where we came from too because you know we'll learn later other people talked about you know some of the original races

like was some of that rooted in things like you know horrors to come like we're the original people so we're the ones who count. Yeah, I think it definitely was, finds its roots in that, that era, that whole fascination at this time, yes. Okay, I thought so. And also there's something that comes up in another episode we're gonna talk about, scientific romanticism, which I guess this is probably kind of an example of, but that's like,

yeah, not only are we uncovering like this history in the deep past, we're uncovering my ethnic this history in the deep past, we're uncovering my ethnicities history in the deep past. And all we're going to find is the most splendorous, spectacular examples of how we're actually the survivors of a lost civilization that was even grander than anything we can understand now. That's another thing that people were pursuing.

At the same time, so it's pop culture, but again, it's kind of dressed up like it's following the same lines of science, but it's not really science. Fortunately, at the same time, there were like legitimate scientists working. It's just, they were still following blind alleys to some way, which I just, I'm gonna press the pause button right here. I'm not, I am in no way suggesting that science is done. Like we've reached

science, it's exactly perfect the way it is now. Yeah. Yeah. There's still plenty of problems with it. There's still lots left to discover. And so by, by casting dispersions or shade at this kind of a situation back in the mid to late 19th century. I'm not insinuating that our current reality is vastly superior and perfect. I'm just saying at this time there were big problems with science and pop culture meshing. Yeah. And you've, I'm glad you said that, but you've been clear where you are on that through the years, I think. Hey, we get new listeners every episode now. It's a good point. And that's a lot easier to say that than to say go back and listen to 16 years' worth of stuff. Right, or feel the bunch of angry emails too.

Yeah, we will never get those after you said that. So, Lemuria was not something that Blavotsky created. Lemuria has, well, this will all tie in to tectonic plates, believe it or not. Yeah, just wait. Just wait. It really does in a very neat way. It's spectacular. I love how you did this.

But there was a British zoologist named Philic, I'm sorry, Philip. Philip is not a name that I know of. Not even. No, phallic is in there, but who would name their kid phallic? And that phyllis. Gary Goldman, the great comedian, has a great bit on Phyllis, and that name being retired in 1933 by the government. Gary Goldman, the rock and roll part two guy.

Gary Goldman, a G. U. L. M. A. N. the great Stain of Comedian. I got you. Anyway, Philip, not Phyllis, nor Phyllic, Sclatter, or Sclater, wrote an essay in 1864 called The Mammals of Madagascar. And this one is sort of kind of funny when you think about how Madagascar, so clearly fits off of where it broke off from Africa, but Sclater didn't see that at the time.

He really wondered like, hey, I'm looking at Madagascar. It's right off the, just right off the coast of africa there and they have all these dozens of species of lemurs yet africa in india don't only have a few species of lemur he was wrong about that even which isn't the point uh... they didn't have any true lemurs but he was like why is madagascar just loaded with all these lemurs and africa so close has none.

And he says, here's what happened. There was a land bridge there and it was once all connected. And I'm going to call that big great continent, Lemuria, after the lemur. Yeah, he really liked lemurs a lot. So this is a lost continent. It includes the land bridge. And what Slater's doing here is what was kind of all the scientific rage It was like okay again like we came from

apes Animals evolved from other animals. Let's take that new worldview and figure out how that works And he couldn't figure out like how like similar species got it out there eventually Could be separated by hundreds of miles of water like similar species, got it out there eventually, could be separated by hundreds of miles of water, the best explanation that he thought was a land bridge that's just currently inundated with water.

And so like you said, he came up with Lemuria and that got very quickly deposited into the pop culture and people like Blavatsky and others were like, yep, Lemuria, and then let's add to it so we can get that goop money. Yeah, and land bridges were just, land bridges were the thing, and here's the, and we'll get to some more of this in a minute, but like they weren't totally off in all of this stuff. Like they were on the right track for some of it, some a little bit more than others. There was I think a German biologist

that you tracked down named Ernst Heckl, or Heckl, and he was like, hey, listen, Lamaria was not only a thing, but that's where we all came from. That was a cradle of humanity. There were 12 varieties of men, here we go with that stuff again. And we evolved from these ancient primates right there

at this place that is now partially under water. Right. What's nuts about the whole thing, though, is that that actually has happened before. There actually is at least one, and I'm sure there's plenty. It's not a lost continent, but a lost pretty decent size bit of land that is now covered by water

that once held people who lived there and it's called Doggerland. And it's just so nuts that like these guys were off in their interpretation of what they were seeing to explain species divergence. And as we'll see, like fossil beds separated by an ocean, but they still kind of match up on one coast of Africa and one coast of South America. All these things are trying to put together.

They were on the right track trying to explain it, but they were just awful little bit. And yet at the same time, they were explaining stuff that they didn't actually know really existed, but did. Does that make sense in a really roundabout way? Yeah, for sure. And when something like Doggerland happens where, you know, this was the land that was around basically what we now know is the UK. And it connected to Europe.

And in 1931, a fisherman pulled up a barbed antler point, part of a weapon, basically, part of a harpoon that they were using 12,000 years ago, buried in Pete. They're like, well, wait a minute, Pete is in the ocean, Pete's in the forest. Why would it be 25 miles out into the ocean? And then they started poking around more and more in the decades since. And they're like, oh, well, this used to all be land, and beneath the North Sea are canoes and burial sites, and all kinds of other things that we can point to is pretty good proof that, yeah, this happens. There is land that used to be here that is now beneath the sea at different places on

planet Earth. And I mean, like a lot of land. This land stretched out from all points's surrounded the UK and stretched toward Europe from southern Scandinavia to Brittany in France It was just connected and there were riverbeds and all sorts of animals to hunt It was just really cool and then over time as the sea levels rose It became inundated and then there was a landslide and under sea landslide that really inundated it. And it was just lost to history because the people running around there were running around there you know, no less than 5,000 years ago, maybe 7. So everyone forgot about it.

But one of the noteworthy things that I found just completely fascinating is HG Wells show off that he was, set an 1897 book called The Story of the Stone Age in exactly that place. He didn't call it Daughter Land, but he set his story in this land that was now covered by water between the UK and Europe, and it turned out about three or so decades later that he was confirmed. HG Wells was a special human. Yeah, pretty cool. So he actually managed to combine the science and the speculation, speculiveness of the age, but he was never trying to say, like, this is real. This is a real book. He was like, this is fiction. It's awesome. Yeah, I like him for that.

Didn't he write, uh, didn't he write the original invisible man book? I think so. Yeah. I watched the, I've been trying to watch some scary movies in October and now I'm in in November a bit and I watched that invisible man update from a few years ago with Elizabeth Moss that I had never seen before. Have you seen it? No, it's good. Okay. And it's, you know, it's not the same story, HG Wells put forward, but it's, you know, it's based sort of adapted from that story. And it's actually really good and quite scary and has a great ending. Okay, good to know. So I recommend it. Did you ever get around to watching the G1 origins mini series? Now you got to email me this stuff.

I don't remember anything after I leave the studio. So you know the grudge that Sarah Michelle Geller was in in the 90s? Sure. That was based on, well I know the movie and I know it was based on an original Japanese film, right? Right, called Juwan. Yeah. And so somebody went back and made a prequel to the Japanese version. Oh, okay. That explains how everything got that way.

Uh-huh. Why did I get this scratch? Yes, it is so scary that like I will leave the light on from, you know, the family room to the bedroom as I'm going to bed and then turn it off remotely. I just won't turn it off and walk through the dark. It's's scary, it's awesome. Yeah, I didn't watch as many this year because movie crush isn't around. I used to like really heavily watch a lot of horror movies in October, but only caught a few this year.

And I still, I enjoy being scared like that and being in another part of your house and having to navigate your way back in the dark. Even in my 50s, it's always scary and kind of funny. Like, of course, I know that the supernatural being from the movie I just watched isn't in this hallway, but do I really? Exactly. I know.

All right. Off topic. Let's take a break, eh? Sure, let's. And we'll be right back. I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, I got my gun, Iant group text. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities, and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother.

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And yeah, this stuff you should know. Oh, you should know. You should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, so when we broke, actually, we were talking about horror movies, but a little bit before that, I was talking some about how it's a little frustrating, but maybe kind of funny that they didn't put together that Madagascar

so clearly broke off from Africa and fits very nicely if you just shove it back together right there in its spot. And as I was studying today, I have my light up globe on my desk. And when you look at that thing, my medium smart eight-year-old daughter can say, hey, daddy, it looks like Africa could fit into South America and it looks like all of these things sort of could be puzzled together to form a larger supercontinent. That's the medium smart, but she knows the word supercontinent.

That's a pretty smart one. But it seems pretty obvious to us now, but it was all about land bridges back then and sort of this idea of supercontinent came about a little slower. Yeah, because if you stand on any continent and just stand around and wait, you will not perceive that you're moving, even though you are moving. So they were not aware of the fact that the continents moved. And so of course that wasn't what they went with. They went with land bridges.

Again, it's a very sensible explanation. How did one thing get to another when it's covered by oceans? Well, there was land that used to be above the ocean and they just migrated across. It's happened before, there's dog or land, there's the bearing land bridge, all that stuff. But the idea that the continents moved that just was not around until another guy came

along who will talk about in a second. But there were like little inkplings of this idea that just weren't, there was like a light bulb that was just about to come on, but it just burns out right before it fully comes on. That's kind of what was happening with the idea that the continents moved. And again, just to reiterate, the whole reason people are thinking about this stuff is because fossil beds suddenly take on new meaning if we, if evolution and natural selection exists. Climate, climateological evidence suddenly takes on new meaning. Why species are similar but separated from one continent to another?

It takes on significance, and so they're looking around their world with brand new fresh eyes and trying to answer these questions, and they were coming up with all these different meta-narratives. And on the way to the idea that we have now, that the continents actually move, and they actually formed one large supercontinent in the past, Like I was saying, there were a few people who came along and

almost had it. Yeah. The idea of continental contraction was one pretty good idea and an alternate theory, you know, pre-technically shift. And that is that the earth was a huge magma ball, which is true. And as that thing cooled down over time, the land that it formed shrunk, basically, as things might do when they cool, and the continents broke apart. So that was really headed toward the right idea until the end, basically. Yeah, for sure. Another thing that they had trouble kind of explaining were things like mountains, like

I kind of kid it around the beginning, one of us will be a mountain range. They did have theories that parts of the earth were breaking off from one another and could go underneath other parts. But they just hadn't quite arrived there until Alfred Wagner came along in 1912 and published a book called The Origin of Continent and Oceans where he was kind of like, hey wait a minute everyone, this looks like a giant puzzle if you stand back and look at a map and you're just not standing back for enough. Get over on the other side of the room and then everyone did and they're, oh wow.

And this helps explain things like you're talking about why the coast of Africa and the coast of Brazil might share fossils even though they're separated by such a vast ocean. Yeah or share species or all sorts of different explanations. It would go on to become considered a theory of everything for geology, for earth science. In much the same way that our understanding of the atom is like explains quantum mechanics or vice versa. It was a really big deal that he came up with this, but it was not well received at first as we'll see like he was not considered a genius in his time. People ridiculed him essentially and his whole idea was very quickly forgotten for several decades until he was pretty much proven right. But in that book, the origin of the continents and oceans,

he's saying not only did the continents move apart because they used to form this supercontinent called Pangaea, all the land. They're still moving around today. And all the Victorians, and I'm sorry, these would be Edwardians maybe, where like, nah, I've stood still for like an hour at a stretch and I could not tell we were moving so we're not moving. And he's like, no, really trust me. The continents are still moving.

It explains everything. How about earthquakes? They're like, well, it's God putting His finger on Antarctica. He's like, no, it's God putting his finger on Antarctica. He's like, no, it's actually these plates sliding against one another. It's wrong. And they just kind of went back and forth like this until Wagner died in 1930 in a blizzard. Wow. Really, uh, really shot right to the ending there. So the other thing that was pretty brilliant was he was like, well, not only, you know, maybe we can't stand back. There's no room big enough

to where we can stand back and see how exactly that puzzle might fit. But what we can do, because, you know, under this theory of continental drift, we can look at the fossil record and look at different specieological phenomenon. And that is part of the puzzle as well. Like if we match up this place with that place, maybe in our minds eye, we can envision how they used to fit together even though it's not as tidy as Madagascar off the coast of Africa.

It's so cool. He took, he was a climate or a meteorologist and a geophysicist, right? He was a sharp dude. He took paleoclimatological data. I think there was like a fern species that he was tracking. There was glacier coverage, I guess, like evidence of old glacier coverage,

and then species and fossils. And he would take all this and basically say, okay, well, this fits here. And then this range now connects from India to North Africa. That explains that, that would fit. And he figured out not only that the continents fit together, exactly how they would fit together,

and not by geography, but by all of this evidence, all this data he had had and pairing it up. And so I mean, he really did some amazing work. And again, people were just like, we don't believe what you're saying. And then in the 50s and 60s, apparently, as Nat Geopus, as we got more technologically advanced in warfare, we started to confirm Wagner's theories

inadvertently, like when they were trying to detect submarines using magnetometers, or when they used seismographs to detect nuclear testing elsewhere in the world, these things actually inadvertently turned up evidence that, oh my gosh, the continents actually are moving and they're moving today and Wagner was right. Let's go dig them up and shake his hand. Yeah, and not only that, but now we know that Pangaea wasn't even... Pangaea is just the most recent supercontinent. Right.

There were supercontinents before that, because before Pangaea, they were obviously separate continents that came together to form Pangaea. And those continents had broken off from the previous supercontinent that we call Pinotia that was about 600 million years ago. And that was one before that called Rodinia, who was that like a billion years ago. And Earth has had lambast for about three billion years. So if you're looking at this on that timeline,

this is pretty quick movement. It's not to us today, it was it like half an inch a year or something or... Roughly one and a half centimeter, something like that. Yeah, it's, you know, that's cooking if you look at it on that kind of timeline. Exactly. So what we've arrived to today, Chuck,

is called plate tectonics. And it's essentially so Wagner's theory was continental drift, that the continents drift, and they were like, well, how Wagner is like, oh, yeah. Well finally, with plate tectonics, we've arrived at how. We still don't know exactly what the mechanism is, but what we figured out is that below the earth's crust, below what's called the lithosphere, it's the crust and the uppermost mantle, the really thick, hard stuff. That's about 60 miles or 100 kilometers thick.

Take your choice. There's something called the esthenosphere. It's like molten, it's viscous, it's liquidish, and it's separated from the lithosphere so that the lithosphere can move about on it. Right? It's like the oil. Yes. Sort of. Exactly.

Oil, all bearings, WD-40, all mixed together. That's what the lithosphere is moving around on. So now we know how it could happen. We still don't know exactly what creates the motion in the ocean, but we do know that this is what it's based on. One way or another, this is what it's based on, and it's possibly because of the convective currents coming from the center of Earth toward the outer crust and mantle. Yeah. And Johns Hopkins University, a few years ago in 2019, said this has been going on for about two and a half billion years,

which tracks with the other super continents we were talking about. And I guess this was a professor from the University of Florida named Ray Russo, an associate professor that talked about the Earth being what you call the, quote, large scale heat engine. And you know, like we talked about that just big hot ball of magma. And so, you know, all this heat coming from all these different things throughout these, you know, hundreds of thousands and millions of years is going to try, heat's going to try to go from warm to cold. It's going to flow from a warm area to a cold area. And if the heat is on the interior of the earth, it's going to try to move outward and in fact does towards the cold surface of the earth. Yeah, what's neat is the earth still hasn't cooled off from when it was formed almost 5

billion years ago. It may have by now, I don't know if it would have or not, but the thing that keeps it going, that keeps it hot, is well, left over heat, radioactive decay of all of these amazing atoms and elements that are in the core that are under such intense pressure that they just create more heat and that creates more pressure and so on and so forth, then you've got more and more radioactive decay. And then also, just the compression, the gravitational compression is so great, it actually produces temperatures. That's some pressure, right? And so all this heat is emanating, like you said, outward toward the colder surface.

And as it does, it carries the heat energy with it. As it gets toward the top, it starts to cool off. And it goes, oh, here I go back down, because the cooler stuff sinks. It's less dense, it's less buoyant than heat than the warm stuff that's coming up from the core. And then that stuff gets heated up and comes back up. And what I've just described is a convective current. It's the same thing that you get when you look at one of those awesome see-through glass cookware pots from the early 80s when the water's bubbling.

That's a convective current. It's the same thing. Yes. The bubbles of water are trying to get away from the heat source. They're rising as they get toward the top. They cool and they come back down. And that's exactly what they're saying

is happening. They being today's scientists is coming from the core, moving like that moves like all the molten junk that's in that 400 miles of asthenosphere. And as that's moving, they think that that is acting like some sort of maybe conveyor belt or something that moves the plates around. So we know they move on the asthenosphere and they think the convective currents are possibly the mechanism that actually moves them.

Yeah. And there's this other theory called slab pool. You were talking about those oceanic plates sinking to the less dense plates below them. And just think about when you're pulling a tablecloth off of a table, it's basically saying, hey, the tablecloth's coming, but so is that dinner plate that's sitting on the tablecloth.

You're coming with me. Right. And that's what slab pull is basically at point, I think it's, no, I said 0.5, 0.6 inches per year is the average speed, although science isn't fully in agreement on if things are going faster now or if they're going slower, but they have figured out that things are still moving, and as these plates are close to each other, there's going to be three different ways which they're going to interact, and that's going to help cause planet Earth, basically.

Divergent boundaries obviously are when they are diverging, when they're moving away from each other, and you're going to find earthquakes a lot along these areas. We talked about this in earthquakes and volcanoes and super volcanoes, so it's a bit of a refresher. Sure. But that's a divergent boundary. The other two are convergent. That's obviously when things are going toward one another.

And that's where you're going to get those mountain ranges. When two continents are going to hit one another, they're going to buckle up and either go up or down, so they're either going to get a mountain range or something like the Mariana Trinch on the ocean floor. Right. And then you have transformed plate boundaries and that's when things are not moving away or toward each other, they're just sort of generally happily side by side going by one another very slowly saying, hey, how you doing? We might be cracking apart here and there as we touch one another, but we're not smashing against one another very slowly.

And you're also going to find earthquakes here along these fault lines. Yeah. I say we take a break because I mean, you mentioned like volcanoes and earthquakes and all that happening There's a lot of action that happens thanks to plate tectonics and in fact it turns out that life actually may not be able to exist on earth Where it not for plate tectonics. They're that important. Let's do it I got my best job, my job now. I got my job, my job now. I got my job, my job now. My SK, kid of Virginia, hey, kid. Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcast called Tosh Show, brought to you by I Heart Podcasts.

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that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're gonna hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. My dad, the father, JFK, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us

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So I've been inviting different people to join me to be my plus ones to ride shotgun, if you will, and sometimes actually getting the driver's seat. I'm so honored to be A- your plus one and B- your partner in crime. My date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. I didn't know we were dating! I think bringing in new voices will add a little june se'é quoi, a little j'âge, to this season of next question. By the way, I'm not totally abandoning the idea of a one-on-one interview. Sometimes that's the best format.

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Okay, Chuck. So one thing I wanted to mention is tectonic is a strange word. And it sounds super futuristic and technological. It's actually a very old medieval word that was used as what you would call a builder or carpenter. So plate tectonics is the actual process of building Earth. And that's a really apt name for it because that's what's going on with plate tectonics. Because when all that magma starts to come up, it doesn't just move the plates.

At places where there's a gap between the plates, that magma comes up and comes out. And as it does and cools, it forms new rock, essentially new earth. And over the course of millions and millions and millions of years that moves up and out and over and does all sorts of other cool things until it's eventually recycled back into magma where it will be heated and eventually brought back up as new magma to form new continental crust. So tectonic is a really great word for this whole process. Yeah, totally. And you were talking about, or I guess I was talking about the fact that we

spoke about volcanoes and how they form in volcanoes and super volcanoes. But as a refresher, these plates are causing, you know, they're moving around. And when there's a break in the crust, that's basically like a event for all that hotness underneath and that lava to come out or to erupt. This is what I'm going to recommend my second movie of the day. May have talked about it before, but the documentary, Fire of Love, of the day. May have talked about it before, but the documentary Fire of Love is amazing. It's about volcanoes. It's about this couple, these volcano hunters. And it is one of the most amazing, some of the most amazing footage I've ever seen in my life is this 16-millimeter film footage that this couple shot years and years ago that this current documentarian

has put together in the form of fire of love. Okay. You would love it. All right, I'll check it out. Yeah. Is it even better footage than Joe getting spit out of the volcano? Yeah. He just jumped in and Joe versus the volcano because that was a pretty amazing site.

It's pretty amazing that no one pony will win this one. Okay. So, I haven't seen that movie in a while. I hope it holds up. It does. Okay, so as I was saying, there's a lot of stuff that the plate tectonics do. In addition to volcanoes, you're like volcanoes,

big whoop, again, this is how new crust is formed. Like all that magma comes up out of these vents, where even on land and forms new land, her new undersea crust, right? Yeah. That also does all sorts of other things too. Like when that magma comes up, it's bringing all sorts of minerals and elements and all

sorts of crazy super-heated stuff that's really reactive and ready to just party essentially when it comes at shooting out of these magma vents. And it actually, I did not realize this, one of the things that under sea volcanoes are responsible for is balancing the ocean's salinity. I never thought like where did the salt come from? It comes from the magma that's spitting out at the bottom of the ocean.

Yeah, and we came from there. And so it's no coincidence that our blood has about the same salinity as seawater. Yeah, pretty cool. And then on land, those same openings down to the magma chambers below, what we typically think of as volcanoes, when they erupt, they create new land too. They replenish land, they replenish soil over time. So yes, there was a direct connection between volcanoes that are formed by plate boundaries and life on Earth, but it gets even more arcane than that. Yeah, for sure. You know, we mentioned earthquakes. It's also no coincidence that we're going

to find, you know, earthquakes don't happen everywhere. They are clustered around these tectonic plate boundaries. And when they press together, when those plates move, and for them, it's a sudden movement, that energy's got to go somewhere, and that is what an earthquake is. We should do one on the fault lines, like the San Andreas fault, maybe the most famous fault line. I feel like the rock did that. It's done. That's funny. What else? What about the rocks, the undersea rocks? So remember when I said that they used to and probably still do have magnetometers,

like undersea to detect submarines? Well, this is actually one reason they figured out that Wagner is right and that it's plate tectonics doing it. They inadvertently detected that if you go along the sea floor on either side of a ridge, you're going to find that your compass goes haywire. Yeah, yeah. And the reason why is because as that magma comes up from the vent in the middle of the undersea ridge and

spills out over There's some minerals in there that actually kind of Clock the North Pole, right? Like like the the minerals that are magnet episode was really really Interesting I went back and listened to it again and I it's Even more difficult than I remember trying to explain it. But just suffice to say that there's minerals that align themselves with the North Pole. And in effect, when they become rock, they record where the North Pole was. Well, Earth's magnetic North Pole sometimes switches with the South Pole. It can wander throughout Earth and end up at the opposite side

And depending on when those rocks were formed from that undersea vent It will record where that North Pole was and so over the course of millions of millions of years I think the poles flip every one to 300,000 years something like that Those those new ridges that are created are going to get pushed further and further out from the vent so that if you went over them with a compass, you will see that they just keep flipping back and forth, marking each time that the North Pole changed direction. Amazing. I think so too.

They're like, well, the only thing that explains this is that the continents are actually pushing apart. They're forming new continents that's coming out of the vent, and as it cools, it's getting pushed apart by new stuff, hence the plate tectonics theory seems pretty accurate. Yeah, and it has an effect on the overall climate, too, because we tend to think when we think about plate tectonics, we think about the land masses that are moving, but that's also going to affect the shape of the ocean, and very much did inform the shape of the ocean two and a half billion years ago whenever all this stuff started, because it used to be, what did they call it, not a super ocean?

Panthasia? I can't remember. Basically, it's a super ocean. All the ocean. Yeah, all the ocean. But the current shape, like, what I'm about to say might sound silly, like the current shape of the ocean prevents the equator and the poles from having like wildly different temperatures. They have pretty wildly different temperatures according to us, like humans walking around on the planet.

But if it wasn't for the fact that it was that the oceans ended up shaped in such a way, where they are always supplying this warm equatorial water toward those polar regions, the difference in temperature between the poles and the equator would be, I don't even know. It would be crazy how and the equator would be, I don't even know. It would be, it would be crazy how big that disparity would be. It'd be a mess. Yeah, it wouldn't be like, oh, it's like hot at the equator and boy, it's super cold there. It would be, you know, I wish somebody knew what hundreds of degrees.

I don't know, but I do know that really weird stuff happens along temperature gradient. So you would not want something like that. It would not be hospitable for us. Yeah, but all of the ocean currents and because of the way the oceans are shaped, because of the way the continents broke apart, influences climate all over the place. Yeah, it carries water from here to there. And yeah, it's pretty interesting.

And again, you can trace it all the way back to the movement of the plates. There's also carbon dioxide, the amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere at any given point in time also serves as a global thermostat, right? And that if there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, it warms up kind of like what's going on right now. And when there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere

The water sea levels rise and is a sea levels rise rocks are weathered and a lot of the CO2 and the atmosphere gets sucked out of it into water to form limestone It essentially gets locked away from the atmosphere and as this happens enough Over enough time the atmosphere cools is the atmosphere cools. As the atmosphere cools, the levels lower again, and the opposite process starts to happen. Those rocks that are exposed now get weathered and that CO2 enters the atmosphere again. And then another way that the plate tectonics influence this is the stuff that gets formed

into limestone settles to the bottom of the ocean. And it's just trapped, it's trapped CO2. But as it forms part of a plate that ends up back down into the core, into the asthenosphere and gets heated up and turned into a magma again. When it comes out of the volcano, it brings all that CO2 with it, releasing it in an atmosphere. It's a really long, it's the carbon cycle. And over a really long theological timescales, it keeps the earth from getting too warm or too cold.

It's a thermostat. And again, without plate tectonics, this would not be possible. And we probably would not be here today talking about this. Yeah, absolutely. If you're wondering where, you know, if things are moving, even that slowly, where might we be in a million years from now or something like that? That's a good question, and there are people that are studying exactly that. Their computer simulations, obviously, that scientists can run to see which way we're going

and how fast we're going and what might bump into what point. And they have estimated some things. They're good enough now to know and say say out loud, like, hey, listen, this is a guest still. We have no idea what's going to happen really. Tell all this to this and I'm not here. In a million years, or a hundred million years, but they're saying what we think might happen is one day just as there were previous supercontinents before Pangaea, we will all

be reunited again. And maybe that's when humanity really comes together. As one supercontinent in about 250 million years, and they've already pre-named it, Pangaea Proxima, which I guess is just, you know, what they're approximating, it will be like. There will be new mountain ranges, and in fact, they think once Africa eventually finishes going north and hits Europe, then that may be like, if you think the Himalayas or something, way do you get a load of like the mountain range

that's coming in 100 million years. Yeah. The rock needs to do a movie about that. Shh. Don't, I mean, that's probably a development already. Probably. Waiting on the sag strike to finish. Pangea Proxima.

But the rock's gonna get in the middle and hold for the kind that's apart. Yeah, yeah. You just sold a movie. Yep. So, you got anything else? I got nothing else. This is really fascinating.

I mean, 0.6 inches a year doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're talking about plate tectonics it's it's moving. Yeah a lot happens. Well if you were just by this you can go search plate tectonics on the website howstuffworks.com or anywhere on the internet and it will bring up all sorts of neat little earth science lessons and since I said that it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this, don't listen to us because we're not vets. Because on the white dog poop short stuff, we talked about cooking your own dog food,

which a lot of vet throw it in and said, don't do that unless you really have it dialed in with a pet nutritionist. And we talked about grain-free, I mentioned grain-free because one of our dogs required it because of an autoimmune issue, sweet buccally. And I was under the misinterpretation that or the misunderstanding rather that that was just sort of good for all dogs. And they were like, no, grain-free can lead to cardiac abnormalities. So we heard from lots of vets, this is from a very frustrated vets and stuff you should

don't fan. This is all it says. Hey guys, your white dog poop episode, Jorpey Bonkers, Pet Nutrition is a hot topic, unfortunately, not only should people not be getting advice from you, but there are a lot of people on the internet, a lot of quacks even within their own industry, they're saying that you shouldn't listen to. Sure. Home cook diets are difficult to do.

We see all sorts of medical abnormalities from unbalanced diets. It should be only done under the guidance of the veterinary nutritionist. Please do not even look for random recipes online, even if they're written by a vet, because of the quacks in our industry. I want to just stick up for my wife, her name be like yes she's she's got that covered. She's not some dummy who just looks up random recipes on the internet. Oh are you

guys making your own food? Yeah she cooks for a moment quite a bit. Okay. I think that's what they're responding to as I mentioned that. Yeah I think you mentioned it but what are my friends doing that? And I texted him right away and I was like, hey, do you stop cooking for your dog and so you get it down? Yeah, I mean, and that's right. You should talk to nutritionists. There's also like nutrition info sites, like legitimate sites that kind of help you balance

what you're cooking for your dog. But yes, random recipes on the internet are not a good idea unless you're cooking chicken dianne or something. I think he was under the impression like, hey, give him some fruits and veggies and protein and like you're done. Right. And that's just not the case. No. And in fact, we're not one to buzz market too much, but this vet said balance.it is a great option if you're looking for legitimate recipes and formulations and supplements. I think that's the one that you and me went and found initially. Oh, sure it is.

Grainfree is also dangerous, has been linked to dilated cardiomyopathy, still a developing area of research, but grain sensitivity is super rare in dogs and grain is fine for the vast majority of dogs. So when you recommend a food, look for a food that is compliant with WSAVA guidelines. I think we can all agree these are pretty reasonable things to want in a pet food company. Most of the food on the shelf does not meet these standards though, so people should talk to their vets. I'm thankful you didn't touch on raw food, which is trash, or the idea that vets are paid

by big pet food because we're not. That is a frustrated bet. I'm not even going to say just stuff you should not fan anymore. I have to say, yeah, you me went online and got her WSVA certification over the course of many years. Heck yeah. So yeah, she got it all covered everybody. Of course you do in your house.

Do I sound defensive? Who was that for? They didn't even sign their name. After all that, they signed it up. They signed it up. They did it. They signed it up. They signed it as a frustrated bit, so I took that to me and that's how they wanted to be addressed.

I see. Well, what was their email address? DrQuack at vet.com. Okay. Thank you, DrQuack. I mean, the frustrated vet. We appreciate that. We know that you are looking out for all the animal babies out there, hats off to you for that. And we would never accuse you of being owned by big pet food. No. That's just crazy talk. If you want to get in touch with us anonymously or otherwise and say, you guys stink, you stink to high heaven. We'd love to hear that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,

and send it off to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities, and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother.

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