Talk:3218: Subduction Retrieval

I win. 2603:7080:5240:fa00:f571:792f:a287:3b07 (talk) 03:21, 12 March 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I lost The Game. 2A04:4E41:320E:C27C:0:0:885F:A27C 04:47, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

@&$! 47.146.30.92 05:33, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Nope - you are disqualified for not signing your post. 82.13.184.33 09:14, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

By some coincidence this article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy03jw0pwx1o was on the BBC news website Wed 11th March (UK)- the evening before (9pm local time) this was added 2A00:23C7:B524:F801:4041:29F9:A548:6CDE 06:08, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

I added my first explanation on this website! Please feel free to correct/improve it. 2401:D002:8404:C900:E8CD:26D1:3D16:F675 06:33, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

A rough estimate of how fresh this news is would be 200 years: size of people allows to estimate ring has been carried down 12 m, and then I used 6 cm/year subduction rate. 152.77.153.162 08:04, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

This underestimates the time span IMO. Considering the folds in the crust below the crane, work obviously has been going on for quite some time already. The actual time of the ring going underground must be at least one order of magnitude higher, i.e., *ages* ago. Wait a minute ... the guy who claims to have lost the ring, does he go by the name of Sauron, by any chance? 2.201.115.145 10:28, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Can't be: the PSA is for today only, so maybe they've taken time to set up their stuff but they only started pulling a few hours ago. Now possibly they've actually already ripped out a length of the same order as the distance to the ring, but then it's not sure the ring has been dragged up very efficiently, since it looks like it is sticking out above the plate surface. So I'd stand with my 12m guess, but I expect they'll need to extract much more to get to the ring. 152.77.153.162 14:29, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Chances are that the ring melted being down that far. Dogman15 (talk) 08:58, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Depending upon the (unreliable, but article-assumed) scale, not really.

Gold melts at ~1000°C (any diamond in it would melt at ~4000°C, though any solder/etc used in its construction would presumably do so at lower temperatures). At least before the effects of pressure modify that.

At a subduction zone, the rock is relatively cool further down, as the 'surface' plate being subducted starts of cool and can soak up a lot of the heat from the 'hot cushion' it's being drawn down into. Even if we assume the humans aren't to scale, the junction should be no more than a few hundred degrees C (an additional 10C° per km of depth is one estimate, with some variation and a lot of unknowns that apply in an active subduction zone).

Presuming the ring landed in oceanic silt that is 'immediately' inexorably dragged down under the lip of the overlying plate, the effects of temperature would be minimal compared to a mid-plate depth (where it gets uncomfortable for miners). In addition, the water in the sediment would eat up the heat energy, given its extremely high enthalpy of vaporisation, up until the pressure drives that higher than the mineral/metal melting points (if indeed it does), further keeping the ring's neighbourhood cooler than it should be.

Pressure might be the big thing, depending on if the sediment layer that it lies in acts as a constant matrix to spread the load (i.e. not crush the ring), although you'd expect a mudstone-like process of compression (then metamorphic transition, once enough heat passed into it, probably before the gold suffered from pure temperature effects), so it might he distorted. But if it found itself being dragged through a thin enough faultline that the underlying and overlying bedrock were essentially rubbing together (the soft-stuff significantly squeezed out, but for some reason not the ring), then it'd be more like putting the ring between two millstones (but more so?), and it'd fragment and/or smear the gold ring. Any diamond might last longer before being shattered, however much it might gouge the passing rock away whenever it jammed, depending on how it was actually encased in other material. But various types of granite (as examples of the rock) melt at far less than half the temperature of diamond, lower still in the presence of water and pressure (possibly below gold, in those conditions?), so if a diamond (or even its ring) mechanically survives the process, it's probably going to still last a bit longer than the rock that's clearly still present and solid in the comic.

But it probably needs the attention of a good jeweler/repairer, at the very least.82.132.238.116 13:11, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Given the vast forces at play here, standing on the section that's being drawn out seems... particularly inadvisable. 82.13.184.33 10:59, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

There's a wedding ring in this cOmment. All comments above are one tectonic plate. and all the ones below are in another. 45.178.0.43 12:09, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

I thought throwing a ring in a geologically active high-pressure high-temperature structure was the only way to irreversibly lose it? 89.233.195.138 We’re coming upon the April fools comic soonCommercialegg (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2026 (UTC)