Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don’t have the room to shatter so they must bend.

Have we been able to do the same in a lab and would it have any commercial use? Bending a random bit of hard rock would be an interesting novelty, for sure.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 months ago

    Nope. The mantle is mostly solid. It’s just so huge and, under intense pressure and heat, bendy, that it still facilitates moving continents and ocean plates.