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Mystery of Loch Ness Solved?
ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Geologist Luigi Piccardi will present a paper in Edinburgh, Scotland, today which asserts that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster can be explained as surface disturbances caused by seismic tremors. Loch Ness sits on an active fault, and eyewitness sightings of the monster correlate closely with recorded seismic activity. Don't expect the search for Nessie to be called off any time soon, however. (Can anyone out there with a good fluid dynamics model run an earthquake simulation on Loch Ness and see what happens?)"
Maybe this makes more sense than the
temperature explanation,
but anyway you gotta love the
fake
photos.
earthquakes, eh?
...maybe the seismic activity just makes the monster, or whatever it is, surface.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
The BBC have a good article on this too.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
I assume he's not claiming that the sightings where people actually claim to see Nessie and not just ripples are caused by seismic activity.
We can't stop here! This is bat country!
Exceptin' that maybe twas tha Loch Niss monstarrr that caused those seismic tremarrrs, what? We nevar claimed she was a quiet lass, now, did we?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
So there is seismic activity reported whenever the monster is sighted? Obviously the monster is causing seismic upheavals as it stomps round the bottom of the lake. Ain't the guy ever seen a Godzilla movie?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I don't think the search for Nessie will ever end. For one thing, it's too big of a local cash cow, like Roswell. Each have become tourist attractions and spawned several books and t.v. shows. For another thing, it's just a lot more fun to imagine that a leftover relic from the Mesozoic era managed to survive millions of years undetected. Earthquake and weather balloon explanations aren't quite as ripe for mass consumption.
"Hey boss, I can't get ahold of any experts for a quote."
"Well then just find somebody who's awake."
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
Nonsense! They are incurable skeptics! I saw it, I really saw it. Too bad I didn't carry a camera, so I have my friend draw it according to my description.
/. /    |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!
Scary, isn't it?
 _
Has it occurred to any of these rocket scientists that the seismic activity might be caused by the monster?
If you have a big freaking sea monster thrashing around, you're going to have huge-ass standing waves in the lake. Like, duh.
That everytime something unexplainable happenings.. UFO's, lights, strange dreams, an NT Server that doesn't crash, and other such paranormal activies happen, theres always some guy that says its seismic. Everytime, but maybe thats just because when you compare a certain recurrance of events, your likely to find a pattern with something. A large creature living in a lake seems unlikely as hell, but stranger things have happened.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
secondly, first sightings (apparent) were 50 years ago.. is this beast still alive? dont read anywhere the expected life-span of a lochness monster.. maybe it died :)
And from what I read here, he make a lot of noise, euhm tremors, each times he surfaces.
We know Giant Squid exist but have never actually been able to film or capture a live one. We know dinosaurs existed once on this planet and all the stories about the Cylocanth(sp?). I think the concept of dinosaurs actually having walked the earth at one time is the concept that is causing most of the doubt in people. To find bones is one thing, but to actually acknowledge that these gigantic creatures actively ran around on Earth can be a somewhat disturbing and terrifying thought. Monsters by todays animals standards, there are still things on Earth, like the Giant Squid, that still fit into the "monster" animal category. It's existence isn't too fantastic, just a little bit unsettling.
It might be for the sake of science, but soon we will have no more myths to tell... nothing to dream about... Is it just me, or our life becomes too boring?
Spooky of the CyBurial Squad
Isn't there some less exotic "natural explanation" we can come up with?
Tsk, tsk. The so called 'Loch Ness' phenomenon is caused by the interaction between neutrinos and drowned haggis.
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
I bought the paper today for the first time in a while. One look at the papers headline and I needed to see what this once respectible (but very bias) newspaper had on the front page. After reading the article I was pretty pissed. I payed .25 cents for some guys opinion, who really didnt have much to say anyway. Its amazing what papers have sunk to these days. I felt like I was reading a tabloid. This person got published in this paper on very little other then "hey I am a scientist!" but as far as I can tell he is just as crazy as the other kooks.
I should have given my quarter to a person asking for change.
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
There is no Loch Ness monster. Get over it and do something useful with your time. :-))
This is one of the cool things about living today. We don't have to dedicate 100% of our time to surviving. We have some time that we can use for things that serves no other purpose than amuse us.
Of course this extra time sometimes produce very strange results, like links starting with g and ending with x, television, you name it. And then of course evil things like Napster(kidding
So it is ok not to be productive all the time. I have a problem with that, I can't sit and stare at the TV for hours, the least productive thing I can spend my time on, is posting here. I know that I should learn that it is ok to be bored from time to time and just relax, but its so hard to be bored in these xDSL days.
Anyway to sum it up, all these things that are not useful are often very fun, and we need fun.
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Ah well . . . at least it keeps them busy and off the streets.
No, I'm not a member, just stumbled on the link whilst reading around the story.
You might also remember the cartoon series based around loch ness monsters... The Family-Ness - classic stuff. I always liked silly-ness...
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Maybe he'll also be the one discovering that Bill Gates wife is fake to. Only a product of BG's fertile imagination.
Or maybe, just maybe, the whole world we live in and people we meet are all fake.
In a world filled with harsh realities and pain and hurt maybe the myth/mystery of loch ness is a good thing? and beyond that who are the sort of people that spend their whole dis-proving things like this. im wondering that if in her spare time she tries to prove that wile e. coyote would be dead by now. and beyond that these must be some seizmic activites that do things like this? oh well no matter let whatever be. be.
"You have the right to remain fabulous!" -Chief Clancy Wiggam
Please, don't try to disprove this theory saying that a sea monster could cause sismic tremors.
Have you an idea of how much energy is released in even a small quake (the one you don't feel but it's registered only by seismographs)? Either the monster is blowing nukes under that lake, or...
By the way, I don't think that this is the right explanation for the sightings. People easily see what they desperately want to see. Think of UFO abductions and things like that.
Yeah, we all know that this seismic temor theory is as much rubbish as all the other theories. If only this scientist dude had had an secret thistle-whistle (just like Eslbeth and Angus) to use to summon the Nessies, then he wouldn't have needed to waste his research grant.
Go to the live Nessie-cam and wait patiently until you witness the Loch Ness Monster/seismic activity for yourself!
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Moderator's essentials
You'll be amazed at the monsters I see after a bottle Scotch!
Either Piccardi or sfgate.com wasn't paying attention some 1600-odd years ago. The Picts were a distinct race to the Scots.
Blancmange
the /. effect caused a server in san francisco to fall over lowering the overall temperature of the room enought to cause the heating system to kick on. naturally, the heating system was hot water driven, and requiring the intake of additional water. this lowered the overall level of a californian lake causing a down-river pond to dry up. the ducks who's habitat included that pond were forced to fly away, creating a turbulence within the wind. this caused a monarch butterfly to flap its wings, thereby causing a tsunami off the coast of japan^H^H^H^H^H scotland which when colliding with the shore produced seismic tremors which converged, forming a standing wave, in the bedrock below loch ness. the kinetic energy of the vibrating surface caused the surface molecules to spontaneously rearragne into a disturbance which when viewed from approximately level, appeared to look remotely like a vague figure resembling a monster.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Would you like to stop seeing those monsters? Avoid looking in the mirror.
Dude999
Member #1 Coalition for the freedom of possibly real sea creatures.
So are the seismic activity an explaination of the Lock Ness Monster or is the Lock Ness Monster an explaination for the seismic activity.
Loch Ness Monster is no more. But there's the sightings of the fat programmers in silicon valley who jump up and down and make the earth shake. I saw it on Discovery Channel.
Science is killing poetry.
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What ? Me, worry ?
Last summer my gf and I got a bed & breakfast in Perth, Scotland and the host told us about a 100% guarantee on meeting Nessie method:
Most people go to Loch Ness, drive around for hours, don't see anything, feel sad, go to a local pub and drink a lot of Scottish Whiskey.
This is not the right way, because Nessie is attracted to whiskey-fumes and when you're in the pub she can't smell them.
So you should go to the lake of Loch Ness, enter a local pub, drink a lot of Scottish Whiskey, walk to the lake, breath out and watch Nessie coming to you... The more you drink, the better your chances!
bash$
So the Loch Ness monster is big enough that it gets picked up as seismic activity? Wow.
Good luck to any tycoons trying this to boost their popularity : )
This article reminds me of possibly one of the coolest easter eggs ever included in a game. That of Nessie randomly appearing in some of you lakes in Simcity 2000. :)
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
I still hear people citing the pictures from last century as being evidence to Nessies presence. In fact, they are allegedly fake. There was an article in the Sunday Telegraph from a while back (probably spring or summer '94). The last guy in the conspiracy behind the photos told the story from his deathbed of how they faked the pictures. They built a small model submarine. The story was originally believed because the pictures looked good and one of the "eye-witnesses" was an officer in the Navy.
I've read more detailed, recent reports of Champ sightings than anything from Nessie enthusiasts. They've even figured out his (her?) taxonomic identity and given it a scientific genus (Champtanystropheus). If you go to the lakeside park in Burlington there's a statue commemorating all the sightings. Champ has even been commemorated by Uhaul!
And the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks are gorgeous this time of year. ;-)
Fight for your right to read books!
when i used to go skiing and swimming at a large local lake, i would often come upon large, seemingly solitary waves out in the middle of an otherwise calm channel
these "monster waves" were usually the result of an infrequent combination of boat wakes or one wake interfering with itself in an inlet. the odd triangular waves would perpetuate themselves, and travel across the lake until finally diminishing on the far shore, or by coming upon another boat's wake.
it was a fun pastime to track these guys down whilst on skis and jump them, but i thought nothing of the phenomenon until a few years later. that's when i read something (i think it was in popular science or discover magazine) about these large mysterious (and dangerous, as in iceberg dangerous) triangular waves in the north atlantic. study had proven that these were the result of converging currents and strong winds. until then, they were a mystery.
i thought, hey, if the same thing can happen in the north atlantic, and nobody knows until now how they form, maybe it's the same thing that's happening at my lake.. and maybe at other lakes - like loch ness - that have boat traffic on them.
anyhoo, i still want to see someone pull a live one out of the loch in a net, but until then i think a lot of the "humps" people see are just caused by wind, or temperature inversion, or seismic activity, or my monster waves...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
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E2 IN2 IE?
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
A good model might be just as hard to find as Nessie.
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Is it just me who thinks "Luigi Piccardi" is the italian version of (Jean-) Luc Picard?
Or should I just stay away from this tv for some time?
Up here in Canada there's a national lottery called the 6/49. The odds of hitting the jackpot is approximately 1 in 14 million, yet thousands of people buy tickets every week.
Anyway, about 6 years ago I heard a story on the radio about how London bookies sets odds for weird things happening. I can't remember the exact odds but they went something like this:
Elvis being found alive - 400:1
Loch Ness monster being captured - 600:1
A UFO landing on the White House lawn - 1000:1
And the biggest of all
A UFO driven by Elvis crashing into Loch Ness and killing the monster - 14 million to 1
which are the same odds as hitting the 6/49 jackpot. Kinda puts things into perspective.
This sounds compatible with, but distinct from, a theory offered up several years ago in an issue of scientific american. The idea was that there was a sieche (could be spelling this incorrectly), or a standing water wave, oscillating inside Loch Ness. These waves produce some very weird wave forms, such as waves in the apperant absence of wind, glassy calm at odd times, et cetera. At times, they 'go exponential', and the waves grow to a size where they begin dragging debris up off the bottom of the lake, such as sunken tree trunks. The combination of weird looking waves, weird water patterns, and dark colored, water-logged debris surfacing can make for a very convincing monster show.
What makes the theory more interesting is the fact that the same sort of wave has been identified in Lake Champlain in Vermont, which is, as all good Vermonters know, the home of Champy, the Lake Champlain monster. Both Champlain and Ness are deep, narrow lakes, of the sort given to producing sieches. Of course, on at least one instance, the monster in Champlain has been a gigantic sturgeon (it was shot and killed by a woman who saw it thrashing in the water behind her house), but a wave of this sort, periodically disturbed by seismic activity, would seem to be likely to produce the off shapes in the water that people have reported seeing.
And as someone may have mentioned, the best argument against there being a Nessie in the sense of a giant monster is the ecology of the lake. Several studies have been done of the lake, and every one of them finds that the food chain in the lake could not support a large predator, much less the breeding stock that would be neccesary to keep the sightings going for hundreds of years.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
What happens? I'd say that when someone uses fluid dynamic model to try to see the Loch Ness Monster, they waste an inordinate amount of time, that's what happens.
Seals and porpoises are mammals. What do they do, hold their breath for a couple of miles?
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
So, what you're saying is, when there are seismic tremors, Nessie gets uncomfortable and diplays the otherwise unusual behavior of coming to the surface?
Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, but when A correlates with B, it is just as possible that A causes B as it is that B causes A. It seems that very few people account for this in their reasoning about phenomenological studies.
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Liberty uber alles.
Disclaimer: I live five miles from Loch Ness
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Nessie has nothing on Lake Tahoe's singing fish.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
That geologist is French, and the English and Scottish have not liked the French for a very long time. This is all just a french plot to thumb their noses at the Europeans with the cooler accents and less homosexuals in their population.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Is one which assumes the existence of that which it attempts to prove.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I'll bite. I very much consider myself a skeptic. But there's simply too much information that cooberates the possibility of what one would consider a 'monster', living in the Loch.
t ml
/ sn93paper7.htm
Lets talk about size. The Loch is in some points 800 feet deep. The total size of the Loch is 21 square miles. More then enough for something to hide in. Someone suggested that the Loch was trolled, eliminating the possibility of something being in there. 21 square miles isn't exactly small. It would be impossible to sift through the whole thing.
Puting that aside, it's been proven* there are caves in the Loch. The article mentions that sightings increase around the time of earthquakes. Ever been in a cave during an earthquake? Man or beast.. you leave, and quickly. Coming from Alaska, I can tell you that bears quickly exit their dwellings during an earthquake. That fear is in all creatures.
Studies have also shown that there is enough fauna to support a larger predator**. I've also seen figures that show there's enough plant life to support a larger creature as well, but I couldn't find those links, so you'll have to take my word for it, sorry.
In the end though, you have to at least consider some of the sightings as evidence before any of what I mention matters. Other sighting have happened in other parts of the world***, typically around bodies of water that resemble the Loch (Enough fauna, plants, size, fairly stagnant water, caves). It wouldn't be the first time we found something long thought extinct****.
Just keep your mind open. Consider either possiblity.
* http://www.myspace.co.uk/nessie/nessie/lochness.h
** http://www.lochness.ws/lochness/papershine/paper7
*** http://www.champquest.com/
**** http://ne.essortment.com/coelacanthfish_regm.htm
old tales of a nessie-like beast are told in british columbia, canada. the serpent supposedly lives in lake okanogan, coincidentally(?) a very deep and narrow lake like loch ness. a while ago i heard a plausible theory that the serpents were actually a result of constructive interference of waves generated by winds blowing across the lakes...as the waves travelled across the narrow axis of the lake they bounced off the shore and combined with waves travelling the other way, producing a wavy serpent-like wave formation.
My cat's breath smells like cat food.--R. Wiggums
What better way to try out Google's new image searching facility than looking for pictures of the loch ness monster?
Ahhh... That is Crapppp! I've Seen her with my own wee eyes.