viernes, 13 de febrero de 2015

Volcano Megafloods May Have Formed Europe’s Mightiest Waterfall



The canyon that holds Europe's most powerful waterfall may have been formed in a flash by just a few monster floods, new research suggests.

The carving of Jökulsárgljúfur canyon in Iceland, which is home to Detifoss Waterall, may have occurred in three separate megaflood events that lasted just a few days each, but were separated by thousands of years. The findings show that the landscape can dramatically transform in a very short time, said study co-author Edwin Baynes, a geoscientist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

"These very short-term, large-scale events can be quite important in long-term landscape evolution," Baynes told Live Science...

...  The rock dating suggested that a series of epic volcano-triggered floods sculpted the canyon in three short bursts of several days around 9,000, 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. At those times, volcanoes locked beneath the Vatnajökull Ice Cap, about 90 miles (150 km) upstream from the canyon, erupted, the researchers wrote in the paper. [...] livescience.com / Link 2

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