I once had a unnerving conversation with some geologists about the fate of islands formed by volcanoes in deep oceans. They were saying things like:
“Think of these islands as extremely steep mountains, almost completely under water, made of a brittle material prone to fracturing and probably positioned on a fault line or perhaps even on a place where two separate tectonic plates are grinding together. Except while normal mountains only get buffeted by strong winds, these mountains are buffeted by ocean currents which carry a lot more force.”
They were genuinely surprised that in the few hundred years that we’ve had accurate maps of all these islands, there hasn’t yet been a case where an island catastrophically fractures and completely disappears from site, drowning everyone on it who wasn’t lucky enough to be within jumping distance of a boat that wasn’t physically tied to a part of the island that just sank.
I don’t like talking to geologists. I like thinking of the ground as being solid, not as a relatively thin flexible slab of rock floating on a huge ball of molten material.
