alt.hn

2/2/2026 at 1:29:13 PM

Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route

 https://phys.org/news/2026-01-geologists-mystery-green-river-uphill.html

by defrost

2/2/2026 at 3:55:49 PM

For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).

by markbnj

2/3/2026 at 12:33:03 PM

And if you manage to wade through that tome, Myron Cook's Youtube channel [1] is an excellent place to continue your exploration of geology.

1. https://www.youtube.com/@myroncook

by jamincan

2/2/2026 at 5:42:43 PM

References to his books should carry a warning - something to the effect of:

"may inspire circuitous road trips involving many stops dangerously examining road-cuts on busy interstate highways"

by pengaru

2/2/2026 at 7:41:20 PM

I would pay good money for a field guide/itinerary to accompany "Assembling California".

More directly related to the Green River, I found Wayne Ranney's "Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery" an accessible/engaging intro to deep geological mysteries.

by jhundal

2/2/2026 at 5:36:15 PM

Second for John McPhee! Also Rising From the Plains.

by mclaurin10

2/3/2026 at 2:05:39 AM

I just finished Annals of the Former World. It's essentially a 700 page-long ode to geology, using scientific terms for their prosody as much as their meaning. I once saw someone else remark that "Rising from the Plains" was the greatest western ever written.

I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.

by jonstewart

2/2/2026 at 4:27:35 PM

I can also recommend: "The Earth: An Intimate History" by Richard Fortey

by arethuza

2/2/2026 at 9:45:47 PM

Can vouch for his “Oranges” too! A phenomenal writer

by OisinMoran

2/2/2026 at 3:51:33 PM

Why does this article have a picture of the Maroon Bells? As opposed to something along Green River or, ideally, the 700m deep canyon being described?

by anthomtb

2/2/2026 at 4:08:58 PM

Having recently gotten into watching documentaries or youtube videos of accounts of mountaineering expeditions it's amazing how lazy content creators, film makers and journalists can be when choosing what images or videos to show. You'll get something about climbing a mountain in the Andes and keep getting shown completely misleading pictures of Himalayan mountains, etc.

by indoordin0saur

2/2/2026 at 6:57:06 PM

The content you create is only as good as the stock footage you have available to you. It's not like these people are trekking to the locations to acquire their own content. If you search in stock libraries for mountaineering in the Andes, and it only brings you footage from the Himalayas you're just going to use it.

by dylan604

2/2/2026 at 10:54:09 PM

plenty of them are traveling, and the extent to which you see videos of people putting together stock footage indicates failure of the algorithm. although at this point, the algorithm has failed hard enough that I am down to subscriptions and chronological feed.

Although, this larger structure did create one of my favorite internet algorithm outcomes: There is obviously intense hunger for authentic mountain videos narrated in a generic minecraft youtuber voice, and the resulting incentive gradient physically yeeted a minecraft youtuber to the top of mount everest (https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMitchellYT)

by QuadmasterXLII

2/2/2026 at 5:03:59 PM

Simple, lazy stuff like that always drives me up the wall.

The HGTV show House Hunters used to be wildly inaccurate with their map location pins. On more than one occasion they'd say a couple is from the Bay Area but when they show the map the location pin would be in LA County. Like, come on. That's not even close.

by PyWoody

2/2/2026 at 7:15:40 PM

There's a lot of duplicated geographic names in Northern and Southern California. If the production house isn't in the area, it's hard, close enough.

I lived in Burbank, but I was in the unincorporated area of Santa Clara County, not the incorporated city in LA County. Incidentally, I was living in the South Bay, but not the South Bay in LA County, or the South Bay in San Diego County.

Anyway, perhaps the couple is from the Bay Area, but their house is in LA County right now. :P

by toast0

2/2/2026 at 7:36:03 PM

A specific one that I'll never forget was actually a House Hunters International episode. It was years ago but the pin being off by about 400 miles burned it into my memory lol

I think they were moving from Market Street to Amsterdam.

by PyWoody

2/2/2026 at 8:34:28 PM

Clearly they're referring to the Santa Monica Bay Area

by IncreasePosts

2/2/2026 at 6:58:22 PM

Maybe the pin was closer and they were lying about it being in the Bay Area???

Also, no need for exact location for these pins. The new home owners probably are fine with it not being exact

by dylan604

2/2/2026 at 6:22:39 PM

I think it's largely because they are "content creators" instead of trying to tell a story or share information.

by gedy

2/2/2026 at 6:53:00 PM

I'll notice this with TV documentaries and segments on news channels quite frequently as well. I have the "GeoGuessr gene" as well as being decently well travelled so I spot this stuff all the time. One particular pet peeve of mine is movies or shows mean to be shot in medieval Europe but the "forest" they use is actually a tree plantation of North American native trees such as Sitka Spruce.

by indoordin0saur

2/2/2026 at 6:29:30 PM

> Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Using what they can from free, public domain sources.

by legitster

2/2/2026 at 4:45:08 PM

Darn AI agents, I guess they are still cheaper than interns.

by wil421

2/2/2026 at 5:16:37 PM

Sadly, they "learned" it from us. People have been doing this sort of shoddy fill work since the dawn of television (and even earlier if you count wildly misplaced / inaccurate textual descriptions).

by MarkusQ

2/2/2026 at 3:52:48 PM

Fascinating to think of entire mountain ranges moving up and down like the skin on a wobbly pudding.

by shermantanktop

2/2/2026 at 4:21:45 PM

And the speed at which it happens:

> a cold, round anomaly about 200 km below the surface.

> By estimating how far the drip had fallen and calculating the speed of its descent, the researchers estimate that the drip broke off between 2 and 5 million years ago.

A few megayears later, the bit that broke off is still falling.

200km in 2m years, I make that in the ballpark of 0.1m per year - a bit less if it's > 2m years, and started below the surface.

by SideburnsOfDoom

2/3/2026 at 4:27:37 AM

As a geologist with 2 degrees and a lot of passion in the subject, I’ve never heard of lithospheric drip related to orogenic dips until now, but I love it and kick myself for not questioning the over simplicity of typical thought around lower crust processes enough.

by qwerty_clicks

2/3/2026 at 4:35:09 AM

As an exploration geophyicist who 1/ posted this, and 2/ can bang rocks together, I wonder if you've heard of Continental Drip, Ormonde de Kay, 1973.

It introduces an entire other level of simplistic thought.

The Südpolarfluchtkraft is out there.

by defrost

2/2/2026 at 3:28:56 PM

The invisible hand of the lithospheric drip

by sethgrisham

2/2/2026 at 3:51:22 PM

You sly dog.

by IAmBroom

2/2/2026 at 6:03:33 PM

What about ice pressing down? The repeated glaciations might have pushed in area down and back up several times over 6 million years. Might have even caused that drip to break off.

by phkahler

2/2/2026 at 11:28:22 PM

It's a detailed paper by five highly qualified researchers, with over 100 citations, and thanks six different reviewers.

It seems very likely to me that they would have said something about this theory if it were relevant.

by compiler-guy

2/2/2026 at 10:50:01 PM

A time lapse video would have been great.

by amelius

2/2/2026 at 11:44:04 PM

Unfortunately the camera was lost to flooding about 2.5m years ago, so the only visual records are some rock art.

by stubish

2/3/2026 at 7:43:19 AM

The relevant photons are still flying through space. And with a time lapse video of this scale, clouds are not a problem.

by amelius

2/3/2026 at 2:04:22 PM

The replacement camera is rocketing out there right now, faster than the speed of light to catch up with those photons.

That'll bring those pictures back, lickety-split.

Too bad it had to go back in time to do so, so it might not be overnight :\

I love an advanced civilization anyway, I'll be getting the popcorn ready ;)

by fuzzfactor

2/2/2026 at 3:28:03 PM

Can we take a moment to appreciate that Dr. Adam Smith works at the University of Glasgow?

by namenotrequired

2/3/2026 at 2:32:32 AM

Geology is fascinating. When geologists describe effects over long periods of time, it's like they're describing liquids, not solid matter.

It's interesting to think about the fact that on a long enough timeline, all the matter that we consider to be solid actually behaves more like liquid; bobbing up and down like a rough ocean. The continents shifting apart like two opposing currents with the plagues sliding one above another like what happens when two great currents meet... All the solid objects we interact with are like liquids frozen in time and we're actually moving through time extremely rapidly. So rapidly that we are able to temporarily shape the 'liquids' before they eventually disintegrate and melt into a puddle; as also happens to us.

Thinking about the world in this way makes everything we do seem much more complex, but at the same time, more futile, than it initially appears.

by jongjong