Sweet science: Putting corn syrup to work on Earth’s origins
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — How has the Earth evolved, and what’s in store for the future? It’s a sticky question that has graduate student Loes van Dam covered in corn syrup by the end of a day in the lab.
She thought using a computer model would be limiting. So she designed and built a large tank, filled it with 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) of corn syrup, and added six counter-rotating belts to study how tectonic plates drift and shift.
The corn syrup represents the Earth’s mantle, which melts to form magma at volcanoes and ridges. The belts are the drifting and shifting tectonic plates. Their intersection is the ocean ridge.
Syrup in the tank, which measures 5 feet (1.5 metres) wide, 5 feet (1.5 metres) long and 1 1/2 feet (0.3 metres) tall, slowly moves as the belts pull apart. Cameras record the flow in what van Dam has named the “ridge zone replicator.” One minute of each experiment equals more than a million years in time, to show how tectonic plates move mantle material.