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"New High-Grade Helium Discoveries in Tanzania"

Gas seeps containing up to 10.6% helium have been discovered in Tanzania ... Despite this, discoveries of economic helium (0.3% â) are still only serendipitously found while searching for petroleum

There's a datum for those who were debating the level of purity that is necessary for economical recovery and purification.

The comment about "serendipitous discovery" on the back of petroleum is ... interesting. Since there certainly is exploration work going on in the area (what can I say that's in the public domain? Well, this conference was very worth attending.) But when they finish their abstract with this :

The high concentrations of helium in the region are likely related to the heating and fracturing of the Archean Tanzanian Craton and Proterozoic Mozambique Belt by the younger arms of the East African Rift System (I get the feeling that they have (a) gas samples; (b) they know the samples are from near faults recorded from surface geological mapping [contrary to snark expressed up-thread, the Geological Survey of Tanzania are perfectly competent and have been working their valuable mineral resources for a century now]; (3) they don't have seismic to locate or delineate any actual traps (this is not too severe - there certainly is seismic available, for a price. Whether it covers their precise areas, I don't know, but there are traps in the region, just hard to get an exact handle on.)

The paper is only an abstract, but I get from it that they're looking at the relations of He:Ne and He:Ar to try to work out the level of groundwater transport and the residence time, from which they get their resource estimate.

Given enough development money, they might be in production in 10-15 years. If the market will support the development, which comments upthread about the sell-off of the US reserve of helium make unlikely, at least until the US glut is turned off.

Also

>peak coal - thousands of years left

You are half-right. Far more coal remains in the ground than has been mined,

That's considerably more debatable than you make it sound. I was reading an article a couple of years ago in my trade journal ("GeoScientist" ; there's a hint there), which suggested that we're already something like half way through our exploitable reserves of coal.

Just one quotation from the article (here).

Similarly, although the price of coal has quintupled since 2002, most countriesâ(TM) reserves have stayed static or fallen.

That is very much not what conventional economics would suggest : as the price goes up, people should search for (and find) more resources. If, of course, there are more reserves to find.

Which there don't appear to be.

Also

>peak coal - thousands of years left

You are half-right. Far more coal remains in the ground than has been mined,

That's considerably more debatable than you make it sound. I was reading an article a couple of years ago in my trade journal ("GeoScientist" ; there's a hint there), which suggested that we're already something like half way through our exploitable reserves of coal.

Just one quotation from the article (here).

Similarly, although the price of coal has quintupled since 2002, most countriesâ(TM) reserves have stayed static or fallen.

That is very much not what conventional economics would suggest : as the price goes up, people should search for (and find) more resources. If, of course, there are more reserves to find.

Which there don't appear to be.

The earliest tetrapods commonly had from four to eight digits on their fore-limbs and hind-limbs.

The last time I looked, octadactyl limbs were known, heptadactyls and (of course) the stereotypical pentadactyl ; I'm not sure whether hexadactyl limbs are or are not known from the fossil record, but I'm sure that tetradactyls are not reported except as reduced pentadactyls.

This corresponded to the ancestral lobe structure of their immediate fishy predecessors.

Hmmm, that's a VERY broad brush. I'd recommend Jenny Clack's "Gaining Ground" for a medium-weight introduction. (I'll admit - despite JC's relatively engaging style, I've not finished reading my copy.) There's also a commemorative volume coming out of the Geological Society's Publishing House for Pete Forey's work on the fishy end of the tetrapod continuum, which might be clearer. http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/publications/bookshop/page3213.html

Come to think of it, Forey's coelacanth book is pretty good too, when it comes to the different structures of fish limbs.

Power's generated mostly with coal. Current projections estimate that we have hundreds of years worth of coal left;

Did you see the recent critique of coal reserve figures in GeoScientist? It's not anything like as rosy as the popular view that we've got "hundreds of years worth of coal left in the ground".

A report from the EU Institute of Energy published in February 2007 calculated that the R/P ratio dropped by almost a third - from 277 years in 2000 to just 155 in 2005. If this rate of decline were to continue, the report warned, "the world could run out of economically recoverable reserves of coal (at current economic and operating conditions) much earlier than widely anticipated." In 2006 the R/P dropped again to 144. The question of why coal reserves are falling so fast, and whether the trend will continue, is only now beginning to be asked.

I'm not going to quote the entire article - it's far too much for a Slashdot post - but the bottom line is that coal reserves seem to be a lot tighter than popularly supposed. With coal prices having quintupled since 2002, conventional economics would suggest that reserve figures should have been increased (as higher prices can support extraction of deeper and/ or thinner seams, thus making greater volumes of coal basins economically minable) ; reserve figures have fallen, and by more than be accounted for by extraction. Which means that in the past there has been previous overestimation of reserves, if not outright lies.

Peak oil is here already ; peak coal will probably be closer to 2020 than to 2120. Within our lifetimes.

0.02 worth to think about.

(By the way, "GeoScientist" isn't a for-sale magazine ; it's the in-house newsletter of the Geological Society, written by geologists, for geologists. It's not quite as authoritative as Jnl.Geol.Soc.Lond, but it's probably more reliable (in this context) than the likes of New Scientist or Scientific American.)

I forget the name of the particular rare mineral/ore/whatever that defines the KT boundary, but is there a large amount of it on the moon?

Of course, IANAA (I am not an Astronomer) so I really have no clue.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm all for theories that may explain things better than the current evolution theories, but ID and similar non-theories are not them. Want some examples of animals changing? Look at platypi, or walking fish.

Derek

Seeing as Pinatubo affected climate world-wide, I'm not so certain that a suthern hemisphere eruption would limit its effects to that hemisphere.

There are definitely volcanoes in New Zealand, South America, and the Pacific Rim that fit the bill.

If you want some interesting reading about possible effects of cataclysmic eruptions,, try:http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Su per1

J

That tip will fall into the ocean. And you'd be surprised what a relatively "small" piece of rock (or in this case: ice) can do when it splashes into a huge water mass.

They already use geothermal energy sources in Iceland, and in Italy. In Italy, I THINK the majority of it is used as power sources for research labs (but I could quite easily be wrong in this).

Oh and on the yellowstone bit, there is a huge amount of energy stored underneath yellowstone, but there are a lot of issues with that.

The release of pressure by tapping into the geothermal sources could help release some of the immense pressure that is building up, or, if they fuck up, a sudden release of pressure, and a weak point in the bulge could be all it takes to allow the volcano to erupt.

74,000 years ago Mt. Toba erupted in Indonesia (I'm working on memory of something I studied a few years ago in uni so I could be wrong on the Indonesia bit, but I do know that 2,500 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean 35cm of ash from Mt.Toba was discovered). I think about 3,000 cubic kilometers of material was ejected in its massive eruption , there would have been a global temp drop of 5 degrees (according to Michael Rampino). And there is evidence to show that around this time, there was a bottlekneck in the global human population, it went down to a few thousand world-wide (This bottleneck was identified because mutations in mitrochondrial DNA of humans, {whose rate of mutation is known, and is passed from mother to daughter} were used to work backwards in time to the bottleneck). Mt. Toba was a VEI8 volcano (VEI = Volcano Explosivity Index, rated by orders of magnitude), as has Yellowstone.

In Yellowstone National Park, a VEI8 has erupted there with a periodicity of approximately 600,000 years. These massive eruptions had ash zones that far outsized the ash zone of Mt. St. Helens (check out http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Yellow stone2 (which had an ash zone that reached only 19 miles), which was a VEI5 and considered large by modern standards. The massive eruptions would have been 3 orders of magnitude larger than Mt. St. Helens, which caused a temperature drop of .10C, the affect on global temperatures of an eruption of such magnitude would have been massive. The ability of these massive volcanoes to spread ash & dust over massive distances is undoubtable.

An example of the correlation of eruptions and their ash zones would be, of an eruption that occurred in Bruneau Ridge around 10 million years ago. 1600 kilometres away, in Nebraska, in 1971 Mike Voorhies discovered fossilised remains of 200 rhinos, with those of camels, lizards, horses and turtles, which were dated to be 10 million years old. These animals all systematically showed signs of being killed by Marie's disease, a lung disease where the lungs where shredded by razor sharp ash particles and the animals affected choked on dust and ash, and drowned in their own blood. The fossilised remains were surrounded by two metres of thick ash. This ash, and ash from the site of the eruption were analysed, and found to match, exactly.

Also, for an interesting read, search for the transcript of "Supervolcanoes", it was aired on BBC2 a few years ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/ Sorry it's a little off topic!

This allowed Indonesia to be connected to mainland Asia, as well as Tasmania to Australia. I am uncertain as to the extent of the European Coast line, although it is likely certain that the English channel was dry land. There was much more land in the Bahamas. More and related info here. It is certain that some islands would disappear

And the Sahara was much more of a grassland with trees area, with plenty of people leaving rock drawings behind. So nomads with cities on the now submerged coastline is plausible as well.

Check out his reply to the original article.

There's a picture of the soil sample he's talking about, too.

"The best evidence in favour of a single impact, I repeat, is in the K/T record from the US western interior. In numerous outcrops from Alberta in Canada, through Dogie Creek in Wyoming to the Raton Basin in New Mexico an iridium-enriched clay layer occurs in coal swamp deposits at the palynological K/T boundary. This clay layer has a dual nature (Izett, 1990), and consist of two layers: a lower layer that contains spherules (best seen in Dogie creek (Fig. 7) morphologicaly indistinguishable from the Chicxulub spherules from the Gulf.

The upper layer is strongly enriched in iridium and shocked minerals, such as quartz, feldspar and zircons. The shocked zircons are shown (Krogh, 1993) to have the isotopic properties (Sm/Nd) of the pan-African basement of the Chicxulub crater. In all the mentioned localities the two layers are in contact with each other, without an intervening layer. Not even a single layer of one fall season of leaves or plant material occurs between the two layers. If the upper, iridium-rich, layer is from another impact than the Chicxulub impact, they have to be simultaneous, and have to occur on the same pan-African basement - in itself highly unlikely, but not impossible. A 300Ka separation between the two layers in all the localities, as Keller posits for the separation between the Chicxulub impact and the iridium producing impact, is therefore excluded - barring a miracle."

There is a growing movement in the geosciences that claims there is no evidence pointing to "mantle plumes." Everyone knows /. readers are well-balanced and open to new ideas, so in that spirit I offer up this link to the UK Geological Society.

Remember, an open mind is a terrible thing to waste.

I'm old enough to remember when Reagan's bizarro-world EPA chief James Watt said that trees cause air polution. This is another demonstration of politicians & pundits (seemingly mostly conservative talk-show hosts) willingness to use misdirection to distract people. "Forget about dependence on oil, look at this shiny hydrogen economy over here! Look at it!"

(Note to Republican apologists: While certain aspects of Watts' statement might be chemically correct, they are of course misleading and irrelevant to the problem at hand.)

Note to Anti-Republican ideologues: Pollution is a chemical process.

Trees cause pollution after all - Reagan vindicated