I am currently involved in a debate of sorts on an Islamic message board.
I am Martini btw.
It seems that the Qur’an makes it clear that Allah put mountains here to stop the Earth from shaking. One of the posters on the site is using a quote from a community college’s web site to show that mountains stabilize land masses. Is the quote actually saying that, or is it saying that mountains roots stabilize the mountains themselves? Is the quote correct either way? Here is the link and the quote, but going to the link is better than reading the quote here because an illustration is given.
[qoute]Isostatic Balance Diagram:
This diagram shows how blocks of wood floating on water can be compared to blocks of crust floating on the mantle. Like an iceberg floating in the water, only a small part of the wooden block shows above the surface.
The parts of the crust do the same when floating on the mantle. Tall land masses like mountains have huge roots pushing down into the mantle to stabilize them. The taller the mountains the deeper the roots push into the mantle. Valleys on land and oceanic trenches at sea have the most shallow roots.
[/quote]
I realize that even if mountains do stabilize land masses that that no way validates the Qur’an’s contention that mountains stop the Earth from shaking but if the quote is incorrect or was interpretted incorrectly, my job of proving an inaccuracy in the Qur’an will be a whole lot easier.
It is true that moutains have ‘roots’ and behave like icebergs. From a global perspective they are just thick skin floating and a jelly. The thicker it is the more it protrudes both up and down.
Whether this ‘stabilizes’ is questionable though. Most mountains are a result of plate tectonics, and so are caused by “the Earth shaking”. The Himalayas are a result of the same tectonics that caused the recent earthquake, they’re on the other edge of the same plate. So if they’re here to stop it , are they doing a particularly good job?
Unfortunately I think you’ll find that attempting to debate a scientific point against a religious pronouncement is pointless.
You’re using the word stabilise to mean two different things.
Firstly, mountain ranges do indeed have “roots” in much the same way as an iceberg does. Normal Continental crust is in the order of 35 km thick, but is as much as 100 km thick beneath the Himalyas. See the samll diagram here. The thickness of the crust is not, however, related to valleys or individual mountains as evertything gets smoothed out. The Oceanic crust is pretty much a uniform thickness (roughly 6 km). The troughs at plate boundaries are the result of the denser Oceanic crust being forced under the thicker, but less dense Continental crust.
The notion that a mountain range and its “root” stabilises anything in the sense of preventing earthquakes is simply wrong. The forces which create mountain ranges are the same ones that create earthquakes.
Aren’t mountains kinda puny compared to the rest of the plates they’re part of? If you look at a topographic map of North America, there aren’t that many large mountain ranges, given the size of the continent as a whole.
Peace,
mangeorge
Well I don’t think anything is getting ‘stabilized’. It’s floating. Naturally it is going to reach an equilibrium where part of it is beneath the surface. But it’s not really ‘stabilizing’, it’s just all part of the same mass of rock.
When a swimmer floats is the bit below the water ‘stabilizing’ the bit above, or is the whole body doing the job of floating?
And the land mass certainly is ‘stabilized’. Plates move and there isn’t a thing mountains can do about it other than get squished up further.
It is correct that mountain massifs have “huge roots” pushing down into the mantle. However, the added phrase “to stabilize them” is meaningless. As others have indicated, the roots are simply the result of isostatic forces. Mountain massifs, like the rest of continents, are made of relatively light rock and “float” on the mantle. Like an iceberg, some portion of the mountain’s mass (the roots) is pushed down into the material on which it is floating (the mantle), and this is proportional to the height of the mountain. But this can no more be said to “stabilize” the mountain than the underwater part of an iceberg “stabilizes” the iceberg relative to the ocean. Although the mountain is more-or-less fixed in position relative to the rest of the continental crust, it can move relative to the mantle material on which it rests.
Mountains cannot be said to stabilize land masses either. They are the result of a collision between two land masses, or between an oceanic plate and a land mass. It is possible that the roots of a mountain range could produce some drag against the mantle and cause the plate to move somewhat more slowly than it otherwise would. However (1) the roots of the mountains are small relative to the total plate area, and (2) all plates are colliding with other plates somewhere on their margins, so this hardily matters. Even if one plate was not moving at all, other plates would be colliding into it from various directions.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by stabilise. Do mountains stop plate movement? No, they are caused by it. Do they prevent land masses tipping over? No. Maybe you mean something else. I don’t know.
E
Well, unless I’m reading that last sentence I provided incorrectly, it seems that the author of the article is stating that mountains keep the land masses from moving. I don’t know what else he could have meant by “stabilize them”.