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ifd you live in tacoma, mt. rainier is the one you worry about

pdf map of lava flow hazard from mt. rainier to tacoma

USGS earthquake info for Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument area (wide view)

USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory Mt St Helens seismic observations

Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network Mt St Helens home page (earthquake list)

USGS earthquake info for Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument area (wide view)

USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory Mt St Helens seismic observations

Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network Mt St Helens home page (earthquake list)

USGS earthquake info for Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument area (wide view)

USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory Mt St Helens seismic observations

Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network Mt St Helens home page (earthquake list)

The Great Salt Lake is too saline for sharks. However, as a resident of Salt Lake City, I can assure you that those brine shrimp are plotting to take over the world. This is just the first test in their program to disable civilian and military aircraft with lasers, thereby establishing an empire centered on the GSL.

Ummmmm...no.

This isn't a success. The earthquake today was on a completely different segment of the fault, and was significantly weaker than the prediction, not to mention over three weeks after the generous nine month time period.

Don't get me wrong, I like the research, they've had some surprising success in the past, and I hope they continue. But even by the generous error margins allowed for primitive earthquake predictions, they're wrong this time...and if you asked them I'm sure they'd say the same thing.

And yes, I am a geologist.


As another geologist, I agree.

Not sure where the submitter got his information, but this earthquake isn't even related to KB's prediction *at all*. This quake occured 250 miles northwest of KB's proposed area. In fact, it fell within the range of the area for the quake he predicted last year (the San Simeon earthquake).

However, I would be willing to wager that this earthquake *is* the one that the researchers involved in the Parkfield Experiment have been waiting for, only 11 years overdue. Especially since that segment of the S.A.F. through Parkfield has consistantly produced M6.0's or greater roughly every 22 years from 1857 to 1966.

Tritium decays to helium-3 via Beta decay, not alpha decay.

It's an excellent idea...for people who like the idea of a fully-backed currency...as long as there aren't too many such people.

In another Slashdot thread a month or two ago, someone proposed using physical pure-gold currency in all transactions. The problem is, there isn't enough gold.

Very roughly, the total amount of gold ever mined is on the order of three billion troy ounces.

The total amount of U.S. currency in circulation is on the order of six hundred billion dollars.

The current price of gold is about four hundred dollars per ounce, giving the value of all the gold in the world as about 1.2 trillion dollars. In other words, you'd have to put half of all the world's gold into Fort Knox to fully back all the greenbacks in the U.S. To be fair, trying to acquire enough gold to back all U.S. currency would play merry hell with the value of gold, and the dollar, so the numbers above are very approximate. We'll leave aside the damage caused by the economic dislocations of shifting so much capital about....

For silver, the comparable figures are 40 billion total ounces mined in the last two millennia, at $6.50 an ounce--total value: $260 billion. There isn't enough silver to back greenbacks, period. Also, silver is used commercially for a lot of things (photography, jewellery and other decoration, electronics...) and is currently being consumed faster than it is mined. Once again, trying to pull billions of ounces of the stuff out of circulation to back a currency would be an economic disaster.

Adopting a fully-backed currency may seem appealing, but it is a practical impossibility for the United States--there just isn't $600 billion worth of anything out there that could be readily relocated to Fort Knox.

Living just a half mile from the St. Clair River, which flows 190,000 cubic feet per second, Water shortages have never been a concern; but my "smart" lawn spreaker system is usualy just opening the valv and pushing the "manual start" button. I've only watered about 10 this year;
my seceret is;
1. don't cut too short, never less than 1.5 in
2. fertilize by putting half as much, twice as often if needed.
3. TLC, Thin layer composting or mulching

if the cut leaves start to build up, somethings wrong, usualy needs more water for them to break down.

National Map (National Map Viewer)

(and the somewhat related National Atlas)

Mount Tabor (here as well) is an extinct volcano on the east side of Portland, OR. There are many homes on it and a park on top. It is only around 650 feet above Sea Level and 400 feet above the surrouding area. It is not in the same chain as Mt. St. Hellens.

Mount Hood is a "potentially active" volcano appoximately 60 miles to the east of Portland. This one is in the same range as Mount St. Hellens and could be potentially active. On the other hand, I am very sure that there would be signs coming from Hood if it was going to erupt any time soon, not just signs from St. Hellens.

Another interesting note from my geology class:
The Cascade Range (the mountain chain containing Mount Hood and Mount St. Hellens, but not Mount Tabor) is actually two separate geologic regions, one on top of the other. Towards the western side of the range, there is a much older, and more heavily eroded area with relatively low hills and mountains. On the eastern side of the Cascades, the much younger and taller Mountains were formed on top of the older mountains. The new mountains are formed by the subduction zone of the Juan de Fuca Plate (a small plate stretching from the northern end of Vancouver Island to the Northern part of California) under the North American plate.

Are you sure about that?

Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that most of the world will be covered by water...I realize burning fossil fuels creates water, but WTF? What are you talking about? The world is mostly covered by water. Between 70 and 75% apparently

Now where did that come from?

Jesus fucking Christ. From the plants that turned into coal, of course.

Now where did that come from?

Coal generally contains concentrations of uranium of from 1 to 10 parts per million, and from 2 to 4 times as much thorium.

Here. Here Here Here.Here.Here.

Those numbers are just a little high for something that is laid down in sediemnts.

Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

I don't think a 1.3 degree worldwide drop in temperature is miniscule. Check out http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/of97-262/of97-262.html

Like I said, there wasn't just one undersea earthquake off the coast of Japan last week, there were at least six. Your 2:05am UTC on 10 September was one of them, and there are another two at 11:40pm and 11:55pm Wednesday (Korean/Japanese time), which could be what this Yonhap chap is talking about.

Why are you looking at seismographs from Menlo Park anyway? North Korea is in Asia, not Northern California, it would take a trained expert to spot anything but a major earthquake on seismographs in the US. If you want to try and prove the experts wrong, at least go and look at the publically available images from seismographs in Japan.

It an Earthquake off the coast of Japan.

I kindly refer you to this and this

or check these out: NCSN - Drum Recorders

most of these show an event around 10:30 UTC on the 9th.

rho

who said seismometers haven't detected it?

check out: NCSN - Drum Recorders

most of these recorders show an event at 10:30 UTC on the 9th.

rho

That's todays data.

TFA said it happened on the Thurs 9th.

check out the data for the 9th: NCSN - Drum Recorders

something happened at 10:30 UTC on the 9th.

several recorders picked it up in CA.

rho

Forest fires don't produce seismic events.

But your source is nearly entirely American. If you read the Data Sources page, you'll see for yourself. Information can be silenced -- and it wouldn't be out of line with the direction the current administration is heading.

See also this site

Recall that 9-11 even created a seismic event

--

I believe the SwiftVets

See also this site

Recall that 9-11 even created a seismic event

--

I believe the SwiftVets

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

The 'gold standard' means a currency that is pegged to a fixed exchange rate with gold. Until 1971, you could redeem U.S. dollars for a set quantity of gold. In other words, you still have paper money in everyday circulation, and it's still vulnerable to counterfeiting.

Replacing all currency with gold coins (which seems to be what the parent means) is utterly impossible.

First, you have to carry highly-accurate balances (scales) with you to carry out financial transactions. A pack of gum costs about one three-hundredth of an ounce (about a tenth of a gram) of gold. Do you trust every store you visit not to put a thumb on the scales, as it were?

Of course, you could introduce gold coins of standardized weights and denominations. Gold would get shaved from the edges of these coins...you could probably take a dollar's worth off of every hundred-dollar coin and nobody would know by looking. (Even with those little ridges around the edge that are supposed to prevent shaving.) Regular wear and tear would also reduce the value of your cash. You still have the problem of awkwardly small weights for most transactions--I suppose you could introduce coins of other metals like silver, but then there would be a variable exchange rate between your small and large denomination coins....

In lieu of counterfeiting, people would instead alloy the gold with less expensive metals. A coin that was 95% gold and 5% other metals would look and feel an awful lot like the real thing.

Oh, and the United States has about $700 billion in circulating notes and coins at the moment. A total of about 3.4 billion troy ounces of gold have ever been mined in the world, with a current market value of about 400 USD per ounce. In other words, switching over to gold as a medium of exchange would require the United States to acquire more than half of all the gold ever mined anywhere in the world and cast it as coins. (Fine, I admit that's a simplification. Trying to acquire enough gold to replace all U.S. currency would screw up the world's markets--currency and commodity--so badly that it's hard to say precisely how much gold would be required, or what its value would be. Regardless, it would be ruinous.)

In the short term, nuclear power is a coal-killer, not a oil-killer -- oil only accounts for something like 2-3% of electricity generation in the US; coal accounts for 50%. In the long term, however. nuclear power can reduce the need for oil. (For instance, it can provide the cheap energy needed to create fuel cells, charge batteries, and other alternative methods of powering vehicles.)

Oil - 18%
Coal - 33%
Nuclear - 10%

Reference (as of 1998)

California: High Taxes, Mudslides, Wildfires and Earthquakes.

We also have Volcanoes! Of course they're not all active. But be vewy vewy quiet, some of them are only sleeping. I'll take earthquakes over hurricanes throwing livestock, automobiles, and houses at me.

Nah, don't ignore them. It's more fun to play with them. Tell them you found a Golfball on Mars.

-

Fissioning U-235 releases about 200 MeV/fission, or about (2e8 eV/fission)(1.6e-19 J/eV)(6.02e23 fissions/235 g)(0.075 g) = 6e9 Joules per tonne of the more enriched coal. That's about 1.6 megawatt-hours of heat, that can be derived from fissioning the U-235 in a tonne of coal.

Bituminous coal has an energy density of combustion of about 25e9 Joules per tonne, or about 7 megawatt-hours of heat from burning a tonne of coal.

At first glance, the combustion seems to win, especially when you consider that you can only get about 10% of the energy out of the uranium without reprocessing. But if you use the U-238 too (to make plutonium, which will then also fission in a conventional reactor), you get about 100x as much energy as from fissioning just the U-235. Of course, that takes reprocessing the fuel at least once, which is energy intensive, and there will of course be losses in the system. So maybe you only win by 30x. The fission should yield about 50 megawatt-hours of heat in a proper breeder-reactor setup. That's more than ten times the heat of combustion. Even "crappy" coal with only 1.5ppm of uranium in it could match the energy of combustion.

Wow.

Except Earth isn't composed of 70% water.

It's useful to me, considering I've been tossing around the idea of attempting to write my own a nav. system (even if I currently have only a basic CS undergrad's understanding of routing algorithms and no knowledge of GIS at all, nor any idea where I can find free maps which have road names included (the USGS doesn't seem to be much help))...

But that's me. I like technical articles on a site oriented towards technical people; maybe that's just weird though...

This one is more than sufficiently-nerdy and geeky enough and expensive enough to easily warrant a /. front page, IMO.

Thanks to the NASA space shuttle SRTM mission (Feb. 2000) most of the inhabited area of the earth has been been scanned into digital elevation datasets.

All of North America in 3 arc-second (a.k.a 7.5 meter) resolution is available here: http://edcsgs9.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/srtm/North_Ame rica_3arcsec/3arcsec/

Using various GPS mapping programs your dad should indeed be able to track his location on waterways.

The difference between "explosive" eruptions and those that are quieter is due to the composition of the magma. Quiet eruptions, such as occur in Hawaii (where there have also been tsunami-causing landslides, by the way) are of magma that's more basaltic, explosive eruptions are of more granitic rock, that contains volatiles that boil off on release of pressure -- the comparison that's always made is to soda water, erupting in bubbles when the top comes off and the pressure is released.
On a related point, the Mt. St. Helens eruption became so damaging because a landslide similar to that predicted for the Canarys relieved the pressure on a much greater volume of magma than would have been released through previously existing vents, and moreover had the effect of directing its force laterally, rather than straight up, as the vents would have done. But a Canary Islands tsunami wouldn't result from such an explosion, it would be caused by the rockslide, as others have explained here. Soberingly, the volume of the Mt. St. Helens rockslide-debris avalance seems to have been on the order of 2.5 cubic kilometers, as described in http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Projects/Glicken/framewo rk.html much less than the minimum 150 cubic kilometers that Ward and Day predict in their PDF http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df.
And, as to the drilling question, there have been exploration holes drilled into magma bodies close to the surface, but the amount of pressure relief is miniscule.

Salt?

http://ut.water.usgs.gov/greatsaltlake/

It's about 20,000 years overdue to erupt.

The fact that two eruptive intervals (2.1 million to 1.3 million and 1.3 million to 640,000 years ago) are of similar length does not mean that the next eruption will necessarily occur after another similar interval. The physical mechanisms may have changed with time. Furthermore, any inferences based on these two intervals would take into account too few data to be statistically meaningful. To say that an eruption that might happen in ten's or hundred's of thousand's of years is "overdue" would be a gross overstatement. On the other hand we cannot discount the possibility of such an event occurring some time in the future, given Yellowstone's volcanic history and the continued presence of magma beneath the Yellowstone caldera.

Is it true that the next eruption of Yellowstone is overdue?

No. The fact that two eruptive intervals (2.1 million to 1.3 million and 1.3 million to 640,000 years ago) are of similar length does not mean that the next eruption will necessarily occur after another similar interval. The physical mechanisms may have changed with time. Furthermore, any inferences based on these two intervals would take into account too few data to be statistically meaningful. To say that an eruption that might happen in ten's or hundred's of thousand's of years is "overdue" would be a gross overstatement. On the other hand we cannot discount the possibility of such an event occurring some time in the future, given Yellowstone's volcanic history and the continued presence of magma beneath the Yellowstone caldera.

From the US Geological Survey's Yellowstone Page.

if the insurance companies were to show that the mississippi river is really an ancient and dormant fault line then you would see home owners buying up earthquake insurance like crazy.

You might google for "New Madrid earthquake", or read this page. On Dec 16, 1811, the first of three magnitude-8 earthquakes hit this area in southern Misssouri, near the Mississippi.

(Any readers in the area? Do you have earthquake insurance? If so, how much does it cost?)

The contaminated river in question is the Columbia. As the second-largest river (by flow) in the lower 48, and the largest to drain into the eastern Pacific ocean, I think it merits a mention by name.

But then I'm a local, so I'm biased.

Thankfully, the large flow means that the contamination is pretty dilute. The bad news, of course, is that said contamination flows through quite a few populated areas (including Portland), the river is used to irrigate and transport zillions of tons of wheat and other edibles, and lots of fish get pulled from the river and eaten.

I should have provided an easier link straight to the downloadable stuff. I believe they are adding DOQ data currently. The DLG hydrography data should be available free (from other USGS sources) in SDTS format. You have to find a conversion utility, which is a pain, but it's free in that (non)format. HTH.

For a still shot of a nuclear detonation occuring in space, check out this picture.

What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data.

What data is it that you need and is not available via the USGS National Map? There's a lot there besides topography, and it's constantly adding new datasets.

The USGS has a huge database of Streamflow data online.
You can pull tables for rivers near you, and see how often they flood.

With a bit of work, you can pull all sorts of things out of the current tiger dataset - for example, there are about 4.8 million unique street/zipcode combinations in the US.
See how many streets near where you live are unique ( two streets just down the road from me - Kentvale and Uthers - appear to be unique).

There's lots of interesting data out there, keep poking around in .gov sites, and you'll find all sorts of stuff.

Your link didn't work for me, but this one does. So what's the big deal? The Lips of Mars? (-:

How do I find a higher res MOC image of 28.38lat x 331.81long or thereabouts?

Woooo. You're really opening yourself up there.

I'll give a couple, because I'm not really that interested in writing a long diatribe on problems with your bible or monotheism as a whole.

Leviticus 11:20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.
Birds with four legs. Nice. In a similar mistake, god, in Leviticus 11:13-19 include bats in his list of fowls to avoid eating. Bats are not birds, and you'd think if he created bats, he'd know that. Seemingly he forgot.

Psalms 93:1 ...the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
Really? Anyone with any astronomy knowledge (eg, a 5 year old), knows the Earth rotates around the Sun, which it's self rotates around the centre of the Milky Way, which it's self is jetting through space at huge speeds. Want to get geological? Very well, the average movement of the current tectonic plates around the Earth thanks to the top cooled convection induced by the rapid cooling of oceanic crust is approximately 3cm/yr (reference).

Franky if the bible can't get fundamental basics like these right, then why refer to it as a source or morality?

including a 5.2 and 3.6 this morning

Whoa, calm down. There's nothing unusual here.

Magnitude 5 earthquakes happen about once or twice every year in Southern California. There were several smaller quake a few hours after the 5.3, but those are aftershocks and happen after every big quake.

Also, a 3.6 is not unusual at all.
Statewide every week, there are about 5-10 earthquakes that are magnitude 3-4. They happen all the time, and aren't really an indicator of anything.

So calm down, take a deep breath and welcome to the earthquake state.

Codelco also has a joint venture with BHP Billiton called Alliance Copper Limited, which uses another form of bioleaching to produce 20,000 tons a year of copper cathodes at a pilot plant in northern Chile.

Actually, I was just reading about the New Madrid system a few days ago. They've found evidence of past massive quakes in the area around AD 800 and AD 1300, suggesting a possible 500-year cycle.

If that's the case, they're probably safe for another 300 years.

"What's so great about that?" you might ask. If you want it in one word, that word is "Mining". Consider: in a nickel-iron asteroid, there is an amount of metal roughly equivalent to the metal mined in the course of human history. Not to mention rare heavy metals - Iridium, Osmium, Platinum - things that are scarce on earth but relatively more abundant in asteroids. A mining operation of that scale is more than lucrative - it also presents a way to attain necessary raw materials without tearing open the surface of our own planet.

If there is a sufficient profit motive in space, companies will find ways to do things cheaper and faster and, arguably, better (not being a terrible believer in an unregulated market, this last point is debatable). Prove that we can go get to the money, and people will go get it.

So the reason that Halburton is not mining Iridium from asteroids is that, plain and simple, even $400/oz for Iridium cannot cover the cost of mining, transporting & de-orbiting that metal from asteroids. I think what you meant to argue is that at some unknown time in the future when Iridium is much scarcer than it is today, and access to space is much cheaper than it is today, asteroid mining might be a lucrative business. Sadly, most "lucrative" commercial space opportunties prove just as ephemeral upon close examination. Remember the 80's propaganda about micro-gravity pharmaceuticals manufacture on the space station?

Personally, I do not believe that space will be conquered until private individuals and private companies find a reason to live & work there. I don't believe any amount of NASA technology boondoggles or NASA programs to put government employees in orbit will accomplish this. On the other hand, I'm pretty optimistic that within 5 years, we'll see a vigorous sub-orbital space tourism market as a result of the current X-Prize competitors' efforts. I think that NASA might have a positive contribution on space technology development if relies more on prizes and incentives for non-government actors. Big NASA projects like the Shuttle & space station (and I suspect a mission to Mars) accomplish nothing but the distribution of pork and the elimination of budget for more worthwhile projects.