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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.
The BBC have a good article on this too.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
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?
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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.
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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.
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Scary, isn't it?
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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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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?
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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.
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"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.
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
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
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.
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$
Good luck to any tycoons trying this to boost their popularity : )
Tsk, tsk. The so called 'Loch Ness' phenomenon is caused by the interaction between neutrinos and drowned haggis.
Mmm, Haggis. I once had a friend in Scotland tell me that Haggis is a small mountain animal where two legs are shorter than the others from running around the mountains all the time (to which I responded, "You tell all the tourists that, don't you?"). Perhaps Nessie eats the little Haggises that run too close to the water's edge?
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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. ;-)
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After some digging, I found this reference to the "Surgeon's Photograph", the most famous picture of the monster: http://www.unmuseum.org/nesshoax.htm
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...
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E2 IN2 IE?
Don't forget the weather balloons that go off course and end up hovering over the lock at low altitudes.
Well if the tremors around the lake created the myth of the dragon, then a lot of people in the area would be conditioned to interpret whatever they see in the lake as a dragon/dinosaur.
Personally I think people are just seeing other animals and just assuming it's a dinosaur. Remember, Loch Ness IS connected to the ocean through canals, and various ocean creatures such as seals, porpoises, eels, etc. do get in...
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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!"
Disclaimer: I live five miles from Loch Ness
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I live just a few miles from Loch Ness, and I can tell you, it would be extremely improbable for seals or porpoises to get through the Caledonian canal. The canal isn't the problem, it is the ridiculously long set of locks that they'd have to navigate. They don't call it the "Highlands" of Scotland for nothing.
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I've heard that seals sometimes arrive through the River Ness, but I could be mistaken. Anyway, I should have said "can" instead of "do" get through the canal.
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But they were IN Scotland. They'd probably consider themselves more genuine than later Celtic groups...
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