“This is a direct result of the crustal spreading,” Deffeyes says. “It brings hot mantle up near tl1e surface. There is probably a fracture here, through which the water is coming up to this row of springs. The water is rich in dissolved minerals. Hot springs like these are the source of vein-type ore deposits. It’s the same story that I told you about the hydrothermal transport of gold. When rainwater gets down into hot rock, it brings up what it happens to find there-silver, tungsten, copper, gold. An ore-deposit map and a hot-springs map zakelijke energie vergelijken will look much the same. Seismic waves move slo lwly through hot rock. The hotter the rock, the slower the waves. Nowhere in the continental United States do seismic waves move more slowly than they do beneath the Basin and Range. So we’re not woofing when we say there’s hot mantle down there. We’ve meas1ured the heat.” The basin-range fault blocks in a sense are floating on the mantle. In fact, the earth’s crust everywhere in a sense is floating on the mantle. Add weight to the crust and it rides deeper, remove cargo and it rides higher, exactly like a vessel at a pier. Slowly disassemble I the Rocky Mountains and carry the material in small fragments to the Mississippi Delta. The delta builds down. It presses ever deeper on the mantle. Its depth at the moment exceeds twenty-five thousand feet. The heat and the pressure are so great down there zakelijke energie that the silt is turning into siltstone, the sand into sandstone, the mud into shale. For another example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet loaded two miles of ice onto Scotland, and that dunked Scotland in the mantle. After the ice melted, Scotland came up again, lifting its beaches high into the air. Isostatic adjustment. Let go a block of wood that you hold underwater and it adjusts itself to the surface isostatically. A frog sits on the wood. It goes down. He vomits. It goes up a little. He jumps. It adjusts. Wherever landscape is eroded away, what remains will rise in adjustment. Older rock is lifted to view. When, for whatever reason, crust becomes thicker, it adjusts downward. All of this-with the central image of the basin-range fault blocks floating in the mantle-may suggest that the mantle is molten, which it is not.