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Huge Reservoir Discovered Beneath Asia
anthemaniac writes "Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
China recently found HUGE amounts of minerals in tibet. The thinking is that the recent train is not about passengers, but about delivery of ore (copper, iron, etc). So now, they have water and loads of raw materials. The one mistake that they have going is that they are trying to use the most expensive energy ; oil and coal. It is cheap to obtain, but will only contribute to their growing ecology problems. If they decide to move to alternative and nukes, they will control the next 100 years. Scarey for those that like democracies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
From the linked article:
Scientists have very few answers, but they do know that the impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend. Huge areas of the USA would be destroyed, the US economy would probably collapse, and thousands might die.
Thousands . . . might? In that situation I'd say "hundreds of thousands will" is far, far more likely.
They're either hilariously overexaggerating the first part or hilariously underexaggerating the second.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
It's hard to say, though it does seem like an incredibly lowball estimate. Still, a major disaster that hits the US doesn't seem to cause anywhere near the same level of fatalities as it does in other areas, though a heck of a lot of damage is done.
I would have thought that a Yellowstone eruption was going to wipe out a few states, and pretty much anyone in them. The ash makes helicopter operation practically imposible and hot chunks of rubble will just sear through tires, leaving not much to evacuate with, assuming that the CO2 and sulfur emissions don't choke.
Please, I need a "-1, Informative" mod!
Picking and choosing Bible Quotes is a fun game.
If you follow up with Genesis 8:1-5, you'll notice that God "caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the [Flood] water subsided."
You want to explain how the >16,800 ft of water covering the world got dried up by God's wind? The version of the Bible that you quoted from is fairly explicit in saying that "the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed". Where did it all go?
Anyone can pick and choose quotes out of context.
OK, that doesn't really change my point. If the ENTIRE worlds ecosystem was destroyed it would take some time to revive it (probably millions of years) if it wasn't beyond recovery. They were told to take enough food for the year on the arc, what did they eat when they stepped foot onto a completely world. it takes about 4 months for carrots to grow from seed (for example) that's a long time to go without food. When the water did "recede" there would be no fresh water anywhere anymore, plants don't grow well in salty soil and we don't do well drinking salt or "salty" water. If there were no fish left, where did the current ones come from? I don't believe Noah had any fish tanks on the ark.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
OK, so if we accept that God flooded the entire world in a matter of days, why the heck can't you accept that He would just provide food as needed, or make all the sea animals survive because He wanted too? Essentially, if you accept one miracle, what's one more?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A witty saying proves nothing. --Voltaire
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No. Dear moderators, this person hasn't any idea what he/she is stalking about.
This water is really utterly tangential to any modern earthquake risk in East Asia. This water occurs at great depth within the earth, far below the relatively shallow depth at which large damaging earthquakes occur, and there is far too little of it to significantly disrupt seismic shear waves let alone significantly disrupt p waves from even an unusually deep earthquake. Its removal (which is by the way is impossible to accomplish) would, however, very slightly speed the arrival of extremely distant earthquake waves. Since you cannot feel these earthquakes to start with, at least lacking expensive seismic monitoring equipment, it's quite safe to say this would have zero effect on the damage caused by earthquakes -- that damage being dominated the very uppermost layer of the crust.
As for "lubricating" the plates, that's a passable laymans explanation of part of the role of water in plate tectonics, but this water is done lubricating the plates; the water lubricates the plates as they are being subducted, and plays an important role in subduction related volcanism (by lowering the temperature at which partial melting can occur in the mantle above the subducting slab), metamorphism, and related matters. This water has, however, already played that role. It was delivered to its present location in the mantle by subduction but was long ago squeezed out of the subducting hydrated rocks that contained it.
The article is misleading. It's not like there is a free body of water in the lower mantle. The water is carried there in hydrous minerals that dehydrate as they become unstable at the increased pressure/temperature of the lower mantle. That water, which was originally near the earth's surface, is then absorbed as new and different hydrous minerals form, ones that are stable in the lower mantle--like Mg-perovskite. One of interesting results of this research is the notion of water recycling on a whole earth scale, not just the upper few km.
Just FYI...I'm sure that's true for many people out there, but for myself, yes, of course there could be evidence to convince me that Jesus wasn't God. Partly that means that if some of the evidence we do have were different, I wouldn't believe. But as for the Cameron documentary--if the ossuary belonging to the guy named Jesus still had the bones in it, and those bones showed nail holes from crucifixion... Well, I would wait for verification the bones hadn't been tampered with, but there's fair chance I would no longer be a Christian after that. Combining the names with crucifixion would be a bit much.
I haven't seen the documentary or read the book yet, so I can only evaluate the statements they've made so far, but they've said some truly silly things, so I'm not expecting much from the documentary. (For example, Cameron claimed on the Today Show that a document called the Acts of Phillip "definitely identifies Mary Magdalene as Mariamne". Go look up the text online, it's linked from the Wikipedia article. It includes a woman named Mariamne, but it definitely doesn't identify her as Mary Magdalene. The word "Magdalene" doesn't even appear. The Mariamne in the story is the sister of Phillip, and she turns into a glass box full of light and fire when she's threatened. Some scholars think that she's Mary Magdalene, others identify her as Mary of Bethany...But it's all quite speculative.)