Earthquake in New Zealand lifts bizarre sea wall up to land

A beach in New Zealand just got a new tourist attraction: a six foot wall of seabed.
Seaweed that used to float up from the ocean bed now dangles down the side of the newly created wall
The mass of rocks and seaweed comes courtesy of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that thrust parts of the sea floor up and out of the water on Monday. It triggered tsunamis and landslides, stranded thousands, and killed at least two. But it’s the bizarre photos of the newly emerged seabed that are making the disaster go viral.
Some of the landscapes look completely alien, even though the cause is entirely terrestrial. This is the wonder of plate tectonics. The enormous slabs of Earth’s crust that our continents and oceans sit atop are not stationary. They move around, mostly at rates so slow that we can’t tell there’s movement at all (except by using scientific instruments). Mostly the plates exert a constant, gradual force in one direction or another.
This is how Mount Everest was formed. This is why South America and Africa fit together like giant puzzle pieces. The plates move, and they either collide into each other, separate, or slide past each other. Collisions make mountains, separations create valleys and oceans, and sudden slides causes



earthquakes.
A beach in New Zealand just got a new tourist attraction: a six foot wall of seabed.
Seaweed that used to float up from the ocean bed now dangles down the side of the newly created wall
The mass of rocks and seaweed comes courtesy of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that thrust parts of the sea floor up and out of the water on Monday. It triggered tsunamis and landslides, stranded thousands, and killed at least two. But it’s the bizarre photos of the newly emerged seabed that are making the disaster go viral.
Some of the landscapes look completely alien, even though the cause is entirely terrestrial. This is the wonder of plate tectonics. The enormous slabs of Earth’s crust that our continents and oceans sit atop are not stationary. They move around, mostly at rates so slow that we can’t tell there’s movement at all (except by using scientific instruments). Mostly the plates exert a constant, gradual force in one direction or another.
This is how Mount Everest was formed. This is why South America and Africa fit together like giant puzzle pieces. The plates move, and they either collide into each other, separate, or slide past each other. Collisions make mountains, separations create valleys and oceans, and sudden slides causes earthquakes.