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.

Comments

Another article

[rleyton]

The BBC have a good article on this too.

Cause and Effect?

[clickety6]

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?

All the news that snoozes

[unitron]

"It's interesting," chuckled Hrvoje Tkalcic, a graduate student working at the University of California at Berkeley seismology laboratory last night.

"Hey boss, I can't get ahold of any experts for a quote."
"Well then just find somebody who's awake."

New poll: Your favorite monster

[smaughster]

• King Kong
• Godzilla
• Loch Ness
• Seismic disturbances near Loch Ness
• Bill Gates
• CowboyNeal

No way!

[jsse]

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.

Scary, isn't it?
&nbsp_
/. / &nbsp&nbsp |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!

Re:loch ness? its been over 50 years!

[wangi]

first sightings (apparent) were 50 years ago.. is this beast still alive?

I think you should read-up a bit more... Legend goes back as far as the 7th century (at least) when it was spotted by St. Columba (you know, the guy who brought Christianity to the Scots).

Be your own judge....

[NTSwerver]

Go to the live Nessie-cam and wait patiently until you witness the Loch Ness Monster/seismic activity for yourself!

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actually ... its simple chaos theory

[jstockdale]

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.