Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Tom--

First, not exactly Core-Gap, as you can see areas in WEur with Gap-like features, and areas in SWAsia with Core-like variations.

Second, what you see are Earth's crustal variations in magnetic anomaly, thus variations in iron content (the primary crustal constituent with magnetic properties) or overall density. Where the colors are blue, the crust is more more magnetic or more dense. Where the colors are red or magenta, there is less magnetic content and the crust may be lighter overall.

Look just at land areas, specifically North America. The eastern side is the Appalachian Mtns., some of the oldest in the world, with multiple folding episodes. Lots of iron buried in those granite and gneiss formations (the heavy blue lines) which supported the steel boom in the US throughout the Industrial Revolution. Also lots of sedimentary formations (the heavy red lines), including coal seams that still support industrial processes.

The western side, including the Rockies and Sierra, are more recent and more volcanic in origin--think of Mt. St. Helens, the swelling Yellowstone NP, and the San Andreas Fault, three symptoms on ongoing geologic activity in the province. Buried in those areas and stretching into the Great Plains are many sedimentary formations (red blotches) with abundant coal. Look at the Yukon territory, with lots of blue areas indicative of dense formations--gold deposits are found primarily in igenous provinces, rich in basalt and granite. Look at the North Slope of Alaska, with those bright red areas--that's probably oil, which is very light and reduced the crustal density significantly if the reserve is large enough.

Which makes us look instantly to the Middle East, where we see lots of red areas in the most likely places: Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Saudi deserts, some areas in southern Iran, and somewhat in the Caspian. Look also at Africa: lots of large, coherent areas with similar features, including the Gulf of Guinea, the Congo and nearby areas.

Note that Gap areas have much less interweaving of the blue and red lines, as in N. America and northern Asia--less geologic action, less formation folding and metamorphosis to cause increases in crustal density, less predictable organization to the patterns. More exotic minerals to be found, for certain--cobalt, uranium, diamonds, etc. in isolated locations, because of their igneous origins. Diamonds literally crystallize in pipes of molten rock (kimberlite) as the plume ascends almost vertically to the surface, so from above it would look like a very isolated occurrence.

This is all theory though, and my own at that--you'll need some professional geologists to look it over. I think you have something very valuable here, though--if such correlations can be made in areas of known deposits of valuable minerals and fossil fuels, then this is a guide to potentially greater finds. One thing to help the analysis along would be looking at the continental movements over time--that would be critical to correlations between continents (S. America and Africa, as the best-known example) and the potential resource locations.

It also lends, through much analysis, to a good explanation of the differences between countries that slogged their way through the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, and those still hooked on the Resource Extraction paradigm.