Flood basalts have tholeiite and olivine compositions (according to the classification of Yoder and Tilley). The composition of the basalts from the Paraná is fairly typical of that of flood basalts; ...
The origins of the concept of hotspots lie in the work of J. Tuzo Wilson, who postulated in 1963 that the Hawaiian Islands result from the slow movement of a tectonic plate across a hot region beneath ...
In 1971, geophysicist W. Jason Morgan proposed the hypothesis of mantle plumes. In this hypothesis, convection in the mantle transports heat from the core to the Earth's surface in thermal diapirs. In ...
Magmas of komatiitic compositions have a very high melting point, with calculated eruption temperatures in excess of 1600 °C. Basaltic lavas normally have eruption temperatures of about 1100 to 1250 ...
There is a current debate within the geophysics community as to whether convection is likely to be 'layered' or 'whole'. This debate is linked to the controversy regarding whether intraplate volcanism ...
The abbreviation Byr means "billion years" (109 or 1,000,000,000 years). A closely related abbreviation is bya "billion years ago".Byr was formerly used in English-language geology and astronomy as a ...
The pascal can be expressed using SI derived units, or alternatively solely SI base units, as:{\rm 1~Pa = 1~\frac{N}{m^2} = 1~\frac{kg}{m \cdot s^2}}Where N is the newton, m is the metre, kg is the ki ...
The fission of one atom of U-235 generates 202.5 MeV = 3.24 × 10?11 J, which translates to 19.54 TJ/mol, or 83.14 TJ/kg. When 23592U nuclides are bombarded with neutrons, one of the many fission rea ...
Radioactive primordial nuclides found in the Earth are residues from ancient supernova explosions which occurred before the formation of the solar system. They are the long-lived fraction of radionucl ...
Radioactivity was discovered in 1896 by the French scientist Henri Becquerel, while working on phosphorescent materials. These materials glow in the dark after exposure to light, and he suspected that ...
The gravitational binding energy of a sphere is found by imagining that it is pulled apart by successively moving spherical shells to infinity, the outermost first, and finding the total energy needed ...
If a star is massive enough, its core will eventually become sufficiently hot to fuse carbon to neon, and then to fuse neon to iron. Such a star will not become a white dwarf, because the mass of its ...
The first white dwarf discovered was in the triple star system of 40 Eridani, which contains the relatively bright main sequence star 40 Eridani A, orbited at a distance by the closer binary system of ...
In the early history of the Solar system, radioactive isotopes having a half-life on the order of a few million years (such as aluminium-26 and iron-60) were sufficiently abundant to produce enough he ...
The angular velocity of a particle is measured around or relative to a point, called the origin. As shown in the diagram (with angles ? and θ in radians), if a line is drawn from the origin (O) to t ...
