Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest

Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest(sciencedaily.com)

24 points by emot 1 hour ago | 12 comments

I feel like it's kind of misleading to say "earth is tearing its self apart" when talking about a subduction zone. Yeah I mean the subducting plate faulting as its pulled down is breaking.. but its still a compressive collision. If you crammed two things together and one of the things cracked, saying its tearing its self apart would be a real.. stretch.

jschveibinz 47 minutes ago |

Nic Zentner is a great lecturer on the unique geology of the Pacific Northwest. He has a lot of interesting material on YT. Here is the link to his academic webpage:

https://www.cwu.edu/about/directory/geological-sciences/nico...

overcast 23 minutes ago |

I've seen this movie, we need start preparing our Jaeger program with all of this AI capital floating around.

ucyo 35 minutes ago |

This is such a nice topic for visualisations, but not a single drawing or visual explanation. That’s unfortunate. The main pic is impressive but without context it’s disappointing a bit

gus_massa 15 minutes ago | |

The main pict is generated by AI and a misleading hallucination, or as we use to call it "totally wrong".

I'm not a geologist, so I have to take a few guess to read the main paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady8347

<IIUC>

When the slab in the subsection one goes under another slab, it does not get destroyed, but goes down quite intact. But from time to time (every few million years?) a part split. See figure 8 D. So the split is already covered with a huge layer of soil (like 10kn?) and above that a swallow sea (like .1km). Note also that they split is a very different way

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   Press     Research

So the main graphic of the press article is wrong in many aspects.

</IIUC>

sfink 2 minutes ago | |

The main pic makes absolutely zero sense. The sides are tilted upwards, so clearly they were moving towards each other. But there's a big gap, so clearly they're moving away from each other. I was mentally sketching out a scenario where it was first one then the other, until I realized it was just AI slop.

margalabargala 22 minutes ago | |

The main pic is AI generated, according to the credit caption.

thundercleeze 27 minutes ago |

This article is AI.

schiffern 15 minutes ago | |

Yes, it's an AI rewording of the LSU press release (credited at the bottom): https://www.lsu.edu/science/news/2025/09/shuck-sci-adv.php

Can we change the link to point there instead?

hyperhello 59 minutes ago |

> Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Nice picture.

inshard 41 minutes ago |

Vancouver Island is a special place.

analog8374 34 minutes ago |

subduction zone. a million years buried a mile underground, pulverized by lava and rocks, will erase literally any crime.