Heading back home, but one last stop...

After braving the jungles of South America and the heights of the Himalayas, I headed back home to Seattle, but not without making one last stop at a famous transform boundary: The San Andreas Fault! Extending 810 miles through California, the San Andreas Fault is a transform fault, where the Pacific Plate and North American Plate are sliding against each other in a horizontal fashion. The Pacific Plate is moving northward, and the North American Plate is moving southward, causing a transform boundary to be formed.



A transform boundary is the boundary, as mentioned before, between two plates that are sliding past each other. The fracture lines that are the boundaries of the two plates are the transform boundaries. In this case, California is divided, with Southwestern California being part of the northward moving Pacific Plate, and the rest of California and North America stuck onto the southward-moving North American Plate.











Being a famous explorer, I was given a tour of the SAFOD, or San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, a facility drilling the San Andreas fault in order to research it's influence on earthquakes. They have set up several instruments along the drilling process in order to provide tests and samples for their lab. I wished I could have stayed longer, but my plane flight called and I was off!

Adventures in the Andes

My next destination was at the longest continental range in the world: The Andes Mountains. Located along the western coast of South America, the mountains heralded a long plane flight and a treacherous journey through the jungles of South America. Finally, I was able to marvel at the spectacular Andes mountains formed from the convergent subduction boundary with the more dense Nazca Plate from the ocean subducting beneath the less dense South American Plate.












A convergent subduction boundary occurs when a mobile oceanic plate plunges beneath another immobile plate. The boundary between the two plates is the convergent subduction boundary. When these two plates
converge, a characteristic deep-sea trench forms. Along this trench, a chain of volcanic islands form, or in this case, a chain of volcanoes like the Andes Mountains.





During my journey I witnessed several strange and exotic animals native to the Andes such as the Cock-of-the-Rock. The Andes is home to many other exotic wildlife, but before I had a chance to view them all we were approaching the top of the Andes, whereupon we decided to call it a day and travel to our next destination.



All images from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andes

Journey to the Himalayas

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/himalaya.html

       Hello all! As a world-famous adventurer who specializes in investigating earthquakes, my first stop was naturally the Himalayas - the result of the convergent collision of the Eurasian Plate and the Indian Plate! 71 million years ago, India was a separate island. Over time, it slowly drifted towards the Eurasian land mass (15 centimeters a year) and the two collided, causing land to rise up from the collision. This land is what we now call the Himalayas. Clocking in at 29,029 feet, the Himalayas are home to some of the tallest mountains on the planet, most specifically Mt. Everest. This majestically tall and famous mountain was caused by the collision of two tectonic plates. Over the world, I have visited several other mountains such as the Southern Alps that were formed by the convergent collision of two tectonic plates as well.

http://www.hitt-initiative.org/mla/?page_id=390

 





      So what exactly does "Convergent Collision" even mean? Well, if two converging plates each carry continents, the two continents may become welded into a single, large continent. The boundary that forms when these to continents collide (in this case the Himalayas) is called the convergent collision boundary. This collision causes the crust at the boundary to be pushed upwards into a towering mountain range like the Himalayas. Even today, India is continuously pushing northward into China, which means that the Himalayan mountains are slowly growing.

     As I journeyed up the Himalayan Mountains my guide served me some native food: Momo Dumplings and Cottage Cheese. The dumplings were stuffed with succulent meat, and I hope to enjoy them again on the return trip.

However, by the time we had finished eating it was nightfall, and we were instructed to pitch a greenish colored tent in the wilderness. Once we were done, we began to plan out our next destination in the safety of the tent.








                                                                                                                  http://live-less-ordinary.com/southeast-asia-food/himalayan-food-eating-himalayas

Welcome to IntelliQuake!

Welcome to IntelliQuake! This is a fictitious blog by Tim Drake for an Earth Science Class. This blog will follow my journey to several different boundary lines: Convection, Collision, Convergent subduction, Transform, and Divergent!