Once upon a time, in a universe perpendicular to our own, there was a system of stars and a paradise. In that paradise, there were three races of beings, the gods, the purple monkeys, and the magic turtles. The gods, considering themselves better beings, decided to expel the monkeys and the turtles out of the paradise. The monkeys and turtles refused, so the gods decided to create a new world for the others. They called it “Earth”. Unfortunately, this earth was filled with molten rock known as lava. It came out of the only solid things, big mountains with craters in the top, called volcanoes. The turtles, being able to swim and magical, dove into the volcanoes and discovered the molten rock to be even hotter. They called this molten rock in the Earth, magma. They realized the volcanoes were “vents” or holes in the surface, or crust, and that they appeared in a specific pattern. They found some solid rock under the surface, in a layer of thick rock they called the mantle, and that some of the rock was going under other, creating more magma. They called this “subduction”. They called these giant rocks,tectonic plates.
The monkeys were discovering that the lava was cooling and that they were able to walk on it. In fact, some was forming water! They decided to pry some rock off and use it as a boat. It was pumice so they sailed the oceans, and realized that the oceans were taking them in a pattern, going north, were it was cold and the boat seemed to go down further, then south where it was warm and the boat seemed to be out of the water more. They called this a convection current. Back on land, they felt tremors in the earth. These quakes were destroying the buildings they had. They called themearthquakes. One monkey, named Elvis Richter, decided to create a scale of measuring these quakes. He decided this when he saw the seismograph readings of a very large earthquake and wondered if he could make sense for the rest of his kind. He decided that there would be ten numbers, each step was thirty-two times the previous. It became known as the Richter Scale. Another monkey found a way to locate the surface point of the earthquake, also known as the epicenter. The lead scientist of the monkeys discovered that the first shock, the vertical jolt, came before the others. The name of that monkey was Doctor Fritz Paulson, so society called these waves P-waves in her honor. She also designed the method of earthquake-proofing the buildings. Her method was very good in making the buildings more resistant to the earthquakes.
The turtles, meanwhile, had explored the mantle and eventually went so far down to the liquidcore. At first, they thought it was only liquid, but they found a solid section in the middle of the liquid. They called the solid part the inner core, and the liquid part they named the outer core. At one point, a turtle named John Geyser was swimming in an underground river when, all of a sudden, he was flung into the air above his home in the mid-ocean ridge, a length of mountains under the ocean. He went back down the hole to tell his friends, and they, in turn, told the entire turtle population. They named the spout of hot water “geysers” in John’s honor.
Occasionally, the turtles and monkeys would meet at the sacred volcano, where the turtles first disappeared, to discuss the new topic of geology, the study of this new earth. At one point, a turtle stormed off because the monkeys wouldn’t believe his theory of continental drift when he fell into a pool of hot water. This water was, he found out, hot from the volcano’s rocks that slid down from apyroclastic flow. The ash from the flow had superheated the rocks making them hot.
Now the meetings at the sacred volcano are about going back to the paradise, but the earth exploded and got flung into another universe, our own universe where it became dust that reformed into the world we know today. The monkeys and turtles were flung separate ways, into different universes. Maybe we’ll hear of them again, maybe not.
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