Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest | Hacker News Reader

Earth is tearing apart beneath the Pacific Northwest

sciencedaily.com

29 pointsemot16 comments

I feel like it's kind of misleading to say "earth is tearing its self apart" when talking about a subduction zone. Yeah I mean the subducting plate faulting as its pulled down is breaking.. but its still a compressive collision. If you crammed two things together and one of the things cracked, saying its tearing its self apart would be a real.. stretch.

Nic Zentner is a great lecturer on the unique geology of the Pacific Northwest. He has a lot of interesting material on YT. Here is the link to his academic webpage:

https://www.cwu.edu/about/directory/geological-sciences/nico...

This is such a nice topic for visualisations, but not a single drawing or visual explanation. That’s unfortunate. The main pic is impressive but without context it’s disappointing a bit

The main pic is AI generated, according to the credit caption.

The main pict is generated by AI and a misleading hallucination, or as we use to call it "totally wrong".

I'm not a geologist, so I have to take a few guess to read the main paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady8347

<IIUC>

When the slab in the subsection one goes under another slab, it does not get destroyed, but goes down quite intact. But from time to time (every few million years?) a part split. See figure 8 D. So the split is already covered with a huge layer of soil (like 10kn?) and above that a swallow sea (like .1km). Note also that they split is a very different way

     /\      ----
    /  \         ----
   Press     Research

So the main graphic of the press article is wrong in many aspects.

</IIUC>

or as we use to call it artist rendering. Artistic visualizations have been part of articles long before generative AI came along.

I agree, a lot of them were horrible too.

The main pic makes absolutely zero sense. The sides are tilted upwards, so clearly they were moving towards each other. But there's a big gap, so clearly they're moving away from each other. I was mentally sketching out a scenario where it was first one then the other, until I realized it was just AI slop.

This article is AI.

Yes, it's an AI rewording of the LSU press release (credited at the bottom): https://www.lsu.edu/science/news/2025/09/shuck-sci-adv.php

Can we change the link to point there instead?

I've seen this movie, we need start preparing our Jaeger program with all of this AI capital floating around.

> Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com

Nice picture.

Vancouver Island is a special place.

subduction zone. a million years buried a mile underground, pulverized by lava and rocks, will erase literally any crime.

> will erase literally any crime.

It would be a shame if your car ended up in the the subduction zone

I'm not anti AI-text, especially if it's technical, but come on, my brain tried to escape my skull reading the first few sentences. Can some effort be made at least to make reading palatable? if it's AI writing, why not just prompt it to go to the point and aoivd trying to sound clever while being annoying to read? I think every article generator should put an absolute "do not use metaphores: you're very bad at it and it is off-putting" in their agent.md, at the very least.

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