There's a Hole in my Ocean, Dear Darlin, Dear Darlin

I just can't stop writing. This week's list of articles just had too many provocatively juicy tid-bits. One of the articles mentioned a giant hole in the Earth's crust, under the ocean, in the middle of the Atlantic. When we say large hole, we mean 1000s of square kilometers.

This is heady stuff. This is huge. The crust is oceanic and continental crust, and the continental crust is thicker, and lighter, and so rides higher than the oceanic crust. The crust covers the entire planet, and covers over the mantle. When it doesn't, we get volcanoes. The volcanoes come from a hole opening up a few square feet in size.

We have no idea what's going on here. We're investigating now, but it's completely new. And this is wonderful. It is not only about my favorite area of science, the ocean- it's a testament to the best of science. We don't know a lot. We want to know more. Science is about discovery, and curiosity, and knowing more, and recognizing that we don't know everything- and hopefully never will.

At the moment we know very little about this gigantic gash. It's hard to know how it fits into current Plate Tectonic theory. There is an incredibly remote possibility that it doesn't fit with Plate Tectonics, and the theory would have to be substantially reformatted. Likely we'll have to figure out how it fits in, and this will lead to some significant advances in Plate Tectonics and our understanding of the Earth's crust. Either way, the scientific method is open to experiencing the new, and going where the evidence leads. It is in this that science has it's glory. For in science, something is true until it is proven false- and there always remains that possibility that even the greatest of our theories will one day be overturned.