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Journal: |
Nature & Nature Geoscience 2012 No.5
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Title:
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Author:
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Peter Molnar |
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Abstract:
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In an elegant analysis of landslides following the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, China, Parker et al.1 showed that estimates of the mass of material in landslides exceeds by two to six times the mass of material that moved upwards during the earthquake. With the sensible logic that the material within the landslides soon will be transported out of the Longmen Shan Mountains, they use this discrepancy to argue that erosion seems to remove mass faster than geodynamic processes supply it to the Longmen Shan. I applaud their analysis, but I think that they overlooked an aspect that renders this deduction only plausible at best, and quite likely false. That aspect is isostasy, Archimedes' principle applied to the Earth, which, when generalized to include an elastic surface layer, calls for equal pressure at any depth in the underlying mantle beneath the elastic layer2. |
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