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Mount St. Helens Eruption Baffles Scientists
jurt1235 writes "Mount St. Helens, which started erupting 15 months ago, is still erupting. The weird part is, by now every 3 seconds 10 cubic yards of lava is coming out of the volcano but scientists cannot determine from where it is coming anymore. From the article: 'The volume is greater than anything that could be standing in a narrow 3-mile pipe. That suggests resupply from greater depths, which normally would generate certain gases and deep earthquakes. Neither is being detected.'"
Uhhh... the earth?
I'd say it's probably coming from underground.
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
Hell?
Uncle Cletus' eruptions. Every five minutes. Like clockwork. Cannot be explained entirely -- even after considering his diet of beer and refried beans. By my calculations, the emissions should result in his losing five pounds every year. Yet, at every Christmas party, he shows up heavier than last year.
Perhaps these two scientific mysteries are related.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
One of my oldest friends is a professor of geology and geophysics at a University. Because most of what he has told me is off the record and unquotable, I can't give his name (I wish I could). He admits to me that geophysicists have no idea what is happening beneath the thinnest part of the earth's crust that we live on -- and that almost every theory they've created has been shut down by actual accounts of natural phenomena. I wish he'd go public with these thoughts, but I guess it would kill off his funding.
It really bugs me, actually, that these "scientists" we so admire may be geniuses, or they might just be grant-hunters. I know I always look for the best income for the least amount of work.
I study oil and gold extraction (I blog about gold mines, too) and I am amazed at how often scientists are proven wrong. I know that it is heretical to say that on slashdot (I was blasted about it earlier this morning on this very forum), but we as a society seem to have too much faith in scientific research finding facts that turn out to be just plain wrong.
What else have these same scientists theorized that may not be true? Is oil possibly a renewable resource (meaning there is near unlimited amounts deeper within the earth waiting to bubble up)? Is it possible to battle the build-up of CO2, or is much of it coming out of the earth and not manmade? How much of the global climate is an effect of heat expelled from inside our crust, and how much is from "eroding" atmosphere?
I rarely thank AP writers for their research, but in this case I have to. I'm glad the spotlight is being shined on the fallacies that come out of the mouths of scientists looking for more research dollars (on the backs of the taxpayers). I believe we DO need to carry out research -- not publicly funded -- but I also think we need to evaluate how much of what they discover is really factual enough to base wars, regulations and restrictions on. I understand that science is constantly finding new theories to fix their old ones, and I have no problem with continued research -- just as long as I don't pay for it involuntarily and as long as no one makes laws and restrictions based on non-facts. That doesn't seem to be the case, though.
It's obviously the work of an evil mastermind, setting up his new lair.
Since he needs the space, he's melting the rock in order to make space for his laboratory. The eruptions will stop once he's managed to carve his face into the side of the mountain.
My money is either on Hank Scorpio or Dr. Evil.
The lava is coming from HAAAYYYYLLLL.
We christen this theory "Infernal Leakage". Soon to be taught in every school south of Joliet, Illinois.
Mess with us, and we'll sue! WE know who's behind all this Geologyist perversion of the Truth, and we'll be soon beating them nearly to death on the sides of the road, not to mention getting them canned from their posts for uttering blsphemy against Go- -er- Infernal Leakage theory.
Are people taught to use "cubic yards" in US schools? I thought all science in the US used the metric system ?
CIA Factbook 2002 (US):"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/
if they get the camera up again you can watch it...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Yep, no need to keep looking for an explanation. Obviously the divine creator has confounded modern science once again.
Woe be to those who persist, lest their own homes be erupted upon.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Cardiologists must hate working here in the pacific northwest. This quake summary from the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network demonstrates what I'm sure is a corelary for coronaries:
http://www.pnsn.org/recenteqs/latest.htm
Toss in Mount Baker, Mout Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount Hood, and Mount Jefferson (all volcanoes in the NW), and I'm beginning to suspect we here could be accused of the same idiocy with which some people in the hurricane "belt" are blamed, but on a slightly more geologic scale.
But, the earth is hollow.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'" --Isaac Asimov
While I am not familiar with this particular AP reporter, I would prefer to see a news release by the USGS on the subject rather than one from a news service. I was a USGS geologist in 1980 and did field work measuring the bulge prior to the May 1980 eruption. Anytime we were interviewed regarding the science, the resulting published story was almost always incredibly skewed/magled/distorted crap.
I liked the anonymous reference to Velikovsky and the attack on publicly funded science. And the mixed metaphor (try shining a spotlight on a fallacy coming out of someone's mouth). On the basis of a supposed quote from an unidentifiable professor we are supposed to believe that all that research is rubbish? Yes, surely. Because an anecdotal unidentifiable urban legend is just so much more reliable than peer-reviewed scientists who put their reputations on the line when they go public with research based on reproducible experimentation or measurements. Which are falsifiable. Which happens to be a major component of scientific progress.
Pining for the fjords
FTA:
Ah... so obviously it's *NOT* coming from greater depths? Bzzzt. Wrong answer. While it may be true, it artificially creates a mystery where none should be.When the observations don't fit the way things are understood, there are only two possibilities: either the measurements we made are wrong, or what we understood previously was wrong.
If it can be readily deduced that there is not enough volume in their original estimate of the conduit's size to accomodate the quantity of lava being produced, then either we are wrong about how much lava is coming up, the lava is coming from somewhere deeper, or the conduit's size was estimated incorrectly. Let's assume (probably safely) that the measurements they took on the amount of lava coming up were correct.
Considering how little we really know about what goes on beneath the surface of the Earth, I'd say that these last two options still have a whole lot of merit. It's not entirely inconceivable, after all, that whatever they think they should have already found if they existed have simply not yet been found due to the limitations of current technology.
Stories like this artificially create apparent mysteries in a field where none belong.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Where in the hell is all that lava coming from?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
This is what happens when you let Intelligent Design into our schools.
It's winter, dear.
I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, you insensitive clod!
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The law of gravity as in Newtons Law is still pretty good, as long as you don't require lots of precision.
The laws of gravity were refined a lot, but Newtons law still would help you find solutions to problems, and that is what science is good for, even if some of them are only intellectual problems.
I would not be surprised if the Apollo moon missions had been working with formulas based on Newton, you don't need Einstein to land on the moon AFAIK.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
3 miles is pretty long, and 10 cubic yards isn't very much. Assuming the flow rate has been constant for the last 15 months, I estimate it would have spit out 130 million cubic yards, and there are 5.45 billion cubic yards in a cubic mile. Just how 'narrow' is it?
Possibly slow resupply of (in geologic terms) small amounts of lava does not nescesarily cause detectable earthquakes and gas release.
No. Don't worry about things like that, it would take steam away from all the Bush bashers.
I postulate that there is a VERY large supply of vinegar, baking soda and red food coloring somewhere nearby.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't worry it's not a bug, it's a feature.
i always laugh when these "experts" can't explain something they think they have a really good handle on.
So do they--though, I suspect, not for the same reasons. For a scientist, there is nothing better than getting a result that isn't what you expected, since it's almost sure to lead you to a better understanding than you had before, which is the driving motive behind all science.
Science can't explain something? It must mean that volcanoes are formed by intelligent eruption! From now on, geology textbooks will need stickers claiming that Plate Tectonics is just a theory, and that there are other theories that explain vulcanism -- like Loki raging against his chains, or something.
Plate tectonics is just a theory. Widely accepted and probably only limited to theory status due to an inability to properly test the theory, but a theory nonetheless.
The whole "well, we saw X, so THIS must be true" type statements in this article remind me of a joke delineating the differences between college majors:
An art major, an engineering major, and a math major are all in the same train car as it rides through England. They look out the window, and see a single black sheep in a field.
"All the sheep in England must be black!" exclaims the art major.
"No, at least one sheep in England is black," states the engineering major haughtily.
The math major snorts. "No, he says. The only thing that we know is that there is at least one sheep in England that is black... on at least one side!"
It went a little something like this:
;P Happy New Year you sods!
Once there was a village in the country. The people were happy. The village was nice. In general things were pretty good. Then one day a man in the village discovered a deep dark hole just outside of the village. He yelled into it and was surprised that his voice did not echo back. He called a few others who also wondered at the discovery. Soon it was decided that the hole should be inspected further and people gathered the tools to do so. The first test was to yell "hello" as lous as possible and listen for an echo carefully. This failed. The next test was to throw a stone into the hole and listen for it to hit the bottom. This was done, but no sound was ever heard. The next test was to drop something more substantial into the hole and listen for it to hit bottom. Again, nothing was heard. More tests followed until...
It was decided that the hole was the perfect place for the village's rubbish to be disposed of. Day after day, week after week and year after year, they continued to throw their litter into the hole. Until one day many many years later, the man who discovered the hole heard a voice call from above just outside his home, "Hellllo". He was startled but ignored it. The next day he heard another voice calling followed by a small stone hitting the ground near him. It was then that he realized what had happened and wished he'd never found the hole outside of the village.
---
Now, I could simply make some flip statement about him having found Bob Goatse... but instead I'll make the point that perhaps the endless flow of lava is coming from the Earth's future where all of our waste is miraculously disposed of through some kind of wormhole...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
10 cubic yards every 3 seconds, I believe that comes out to 288000 cubic yards per day.
:-)
:-P
The article indicates that this has been happening at this pace for 15 months... so roughly 635 days. That makes 182,880,000 total cubic yards of lava.
With that much lava, you could cover a typical city block (1/4 mile by 1/4 mile according to my estimates?) 1417 feet (432 meters) deep. That's almost as tall as the Sears Tower (including the antennas), and taller than the Empire State Building. So fill one of them up with lava. That's enough lava for me
For this amount of lava to have come out of the "narrow 3 mile pipe" they mention in the article (assuming it doesn't get refilled and it's perfectly cylindrical), the pipe would need to be 178 feet in diameter... is that "narrow"? Dunno... I'm not a geologist
Doesn't everyone here love math! Thanks for the calculations.
Now how about getting just a few oddities and throwing them into the mix. (1) A volcano's magma does not force its way up and out... The Archimedes Principal clearly shows eruptions to be displacement reactions. This means that there is a sinking going on. Unless something crazy is going on like the earth is expanding or something like that. (2) Plasma Physics of the rest of the Universe indicates that we really aught to be measuring electrical energy flows in the area. (www.thunderbolts.info) We could be looking at inductive heating etc. (3) What about Subduction and Plate Techtonics here? Does this indicate we really don't know what is going on? Check this out! (www.nealadams.com/nmu.html)
This isn't troll -- It was added just to spice up the thinking so mods if you don't like it -- GET OVER IT!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
For the last time, theories that are fact don't get upgraded to laws. That's why putting a sticker saying "evolution is just a theory" in southern schools is so effective, because they don't know what theory means.
Two difficulties with that. One is that the Moon is supposed to have formed from a collision with a Mars-sized body over 4 billion years ago. That collision is believed to have melted everything down to a 1000 km. The other is that the mantle has abundant oxygen and heat, and plate tectonics says it is in convective motion mixing up the different layers (although very slowly) -- one would think all the carbon is now CO2 or CaCO3 or something by now.
However, there is still the matter of diamonds, which are not believed to be dead dinosaurs (diamonds are aged 1 billion years or more, typically) -- they had to have originated in the upper mantle (about 100 km down) and had to have been brought to the surface rapidly (to avoid reversion to graphite, although you get graphite pseudomorphs of diamond -- clumps of graphite shaped like diamond crystals which were probably diamonds brought up too slowly so they reverted to the stable graphite form). While diamonds are rare, and the Kiberlite pipe eruptions that brought them up are rare and maybe date only to an earier geologic epoch, there has to be something to produce reduced carbon down below.
J F Kenney and his Russian associates believe that starting with FeO, CaCO3 and H2O (stuff not hard to find in the mantle owing to limestone and water being subducted down and Fe being brought up by mantle convection) you can end up with CH4 plus higher chain hydrocarbons. The argument is that about 100 km down is the only place methane, octane, and above can form is that the thermodynamics works at those temps and pressures and that the thermodynamics don't work for turning plant/algae material into oil in the traditional "oil window" of about 1-2 miles down.
So, there you have it -- oil is created from the same place an process as engagement ring stones, not only does oil not come from dead dinosaurs but from rocks instead (although the subducted CaCO3 could have its origins in biology of reef building), but that oil is not latent solar energy (in the form of sequestered biomass) but that oil is in reality geothermal energy (geologic raw materials brought together by heat-driven mantle convection and endothermic reactions driven by mantle heat).
If oil is really geothermal instead of solar in origin, one could consider and advanced technological culture with the capability of somehow using the environment of 100 km down as a natural resource, and of establishing a closed-cycle renewable geothermal based energy economy based on -- oil! One could sequester CO2 deep below and get back reduced carbon, all driven by geothermal power, which has its origins in natural radioactive decay along with the latent heat of fusion of iron in the core.
I mean think about it. A lot of the speculation about advanced energy cultures for the far future look outward into space and of tapping the vast resource of solar energy on the Earth surface, in Earth orbit, and beyond -- think Dyson sphere. Has anyone speculated, either in popular science writing or science fiction, about an advanced energy culture fully utilizing the energy resource within a planet?
You may say drilling or tunneling 10 km is stretching it not to imagine 100 km? But who is to say drill. Some MIT dude suggested using a million tons of molton iron (some grant proposal) to melt and sink its way all the way to the core to carry some kind of probe to find out "what is down there." Who is to say that some related scheme may be able to both bring materials down to the mantle (say CO2) and bring back materials (oil and gas) in a closed loop? I am not saying it is practical with today's technology, but it is not anything violating
It seems like a simple explanation to me. Someone decided to pull a practical joke, so they hijacked a semi trailer, and dumped its entire load of Exlax into the crater. People can be so immature sometimes...
The Noodly One has blessed us with a miracle! (And I forgot my spoon...)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Studying geophysics I guess I should be able to answer questions like this one myself, but I am not able to do that right now as I have not had all that many lectures on the nature and forces of vulcanoes (I am mostly studying groundwater and technologies associated with this).
I wonder if this "too large" amount of lava could have anything to do with the blast in 1980? The blast must have caused some change in the way this vulcanoe works.
I guess the lack of earthquakes does disprove this idea if the rigedity below St. Helens is correctly estimated.
Anyhow I think this is very interesting, this is something I will try to keep myself updated on by studying articles in the geophysics library (I haven't found the articles of the magazines found there "online for free" so far).
As also mentioned in other comments geophysics do know astonishingly little about what is actually going on beneath the crust. Geophysics is a "young science" and there is a lot of new interesting studies and theories coming out all the time, but still none of them doesn't give a decent explanation of everything that is going on that we can detect.
How about Hooke's law on deformation of structural elements when external forces are applied to them, leading to legal requirements for civil engineers? Or the statistic observation on heating of electrical conductors from electrical currents, and on physiological effects of electricity on the human heart leading to the National Electrical Code?
Both physical laws are empirical and claimed as observations, and have limited applicability: Hookes Law about proportional deformation under load is only good until the loaded structure breaks down; likewise, the expectation of constant resistance or current-carrying capability breaks once the cable or connector has heated up enough to cause metallurgical changes in the material. Yet both are fundaments for important and long-lasting regulations.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
As a matter of faith and belief, of course I believe that His Noodly Appendage rests firmly behind these unexplained lava flows at Mt. Saint Helens.
But as a scientist, I have to ask, "Has anyone seen Godzilla lately? He doesn't seem to be in Japan."
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.