Geology: And Now the Rouse Belts

• Share

While studying for a final exam in structural geology at Colorado School of Mines last year, Graduate Student George Rouse, 33, was struck by a strange geological coincidence: deep earthquake zones angle into the earth at an average of 60° from the horizontal. His curiosity piqued, Geochemist Rouse decided to look for an explanation. What he found has become the basis of a new theory that—if proven valid—will have earth-shaking implications in the field of geophysics.

Working with a $1.50 globe of the world, Rouse picked a seismic zone off the coast of Chile and projected it into an imaginary flat surface or plane slicing through the earth. He discovered that along the circle formed where the plane intersected the surface of the earth there were other earthquake and major fault zones—in the Pyrenees Mountains, the Red Sea and the western tip of South America. During the next three weeks, Rouse projected the planes of other earthquake zones to form 15 additional circles, or belts, on the earth's surface.

All-Telling Circles. Along the belts, he found, were most of the major seismic features of the globe: the ridges and faults associated with earthquake activity. Furthermore, most of the 19 points on the earth's surface where three Rouse belts intersected coincided with areas of major earthquake or volcanic activity. Significantly, the planes of the belts passed through the boundary between the earth's molten core and its solid mantle, each being approximately tangent to the core.

When Rouse presented his little globe and big theory to Colorado School of Mines Geochemistry Professor Ramon Bisque last September, Bisque was overwhelmed by the implications. "My God!" he said. "Yes," Rouse solemnly agreed. In the months since, Rouse and Bisque have discovered that primary mineral deposits, mountains, ocean-floor ridges and trenches and island chains also lie along the Rouse belts. They have even correlated variations in the earth's magnetic and gravitational fields with their all-telling circles.

Modeling Dough. What causes the stress in the plane of a Rouse belt, resulting in quakes, volcanism and mountain building? In the Mines Magazine, the Colorado scientists suggest that both interplanetary and glactic magnetic fields interact with the earth's magnetic field, thus tugging on the earth's iron core. But the core is prevented from responding to extraterrestrial magnetic pull by the inertia of the rotating mantle that surrounds it. The resulting conflict sets up stresses in the boundary between the mantle and the core that are released in planes tangent to the core.

For a rudimentary demonstration of their theory, Rouse and Bisque used children's Modeling Dough to mold a mantle around a solid core. The core was attached to a spindle that the scientists used to spin their model earth, accelerating it to simulate the effects of tugging magnetic fields. When the modeling compound dried and formed a thin crust, its larger cracks clearly defined major stress planes that were tangent to the core.