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Oil Leak Could Be Stopped With a Nuke
An anonymous reader writes "The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel.' It's so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."
Good to know, thank you for that informative post.
I don't think so (assuming any large blast can work at all in this case, of course); given the location is on the bottom of the ocean, and that the blast could require, for example, some drilling to place the explosive in the bottom...a nuke, with its small size, is much more practical.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Nukes are small, cheap and very efficient.
Here is a conventional underwater explosion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_Rock
"Between November 1955, and April 1958, a three-shift operation involving an average of 75 men worked to build a 174 meter vertical shaft from Maud Island, a 762 meter horizontal shaft to the base of Ripple Rock, and two main 91 meter vertical shafts into the twin peaks, from which "coyote" shafts were drilled for the explosives. 1,270 metric tons of Nitramex 2H explosives were placed in these shafts, estimated at ten times the amount needed for a similar explosion above water."
A nuclear underwater explosion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wigwam
The difference, with a nuke you just put it down where you want it with a cable, or more likely, a ROV, stand back and detonate it.
I don't think you can dump enough conventional explosives to get the necessary yield. The difference between obscenely large conventional bombs and nukes is three orders of magnitude. The yield on conventional weapons is close to 1:1 between their mass and an equivalent mass of TNT while nukes offer at least 1:100. You just can't get enough power out of conventional weapons without using a LOT of them.
Having said that, I'd still pay to take a cruise down there and watch the boom. I'll even sponsor Greenpeace and SeaSheperd to get too close to the blast zone shortly before detonation. :D
MOAB - 11 tons of TNT
Little Boy - 15.000 tons of TNT
The cold war arms race averaged around 25.000 tons of TNT, though there were some weapons made that did 50k and some with a theoretical limit at 100k tons.
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
If they were trying to seal the well I don't have much doubt that they could do it... and quickly. They tried (and failed) to secure an "oil collection device" that they sold to the news agencies as a "cap" but it is a "cap" designed to let them recover 85% of the oil that is spewing out. THEY DO NOT WANT TO CAP THE WELL. To permanently seal it off would mean they have to drill another one before they could start to profit off of this deposit again. Horrible ecological disaster, and we are still letting them try to profit off of it instead of capping it.
this was an exploratory well, not a production well.
I just happened to come across this a month or so ago and thought it was such a telling statement to Soviet engineering halfassery...
As an illustration as to why we should NOT follow Soviet engineering techniques, I submit Hell's Gate to you... (this thing has been burning for 40 years)
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEjoga1yrn0
A small amount of background: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63J4H120100420
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
You're missing about 3 zeros off your cold war bombs. Those bombs were in the 25 Megatonne range.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
... that someone has suggested setting off an underground nuke to close an oil well?
So you are going to trigger a device that will reproduce the heat found inside the sun, and are worried about oil "catching fire"? That's like worrying about dropping a 2000lb bomb on the gas tank of a lawnmower. Please.
Secondly oil does not "explode", it burns. Gasoline vapor explodes, but only in the presence of air because the reaction needs oxygen. Explosives explode because they contain the oxygen they need in their molecules. Nuclear weapons explode differently, they get incredibly hot and this heat causes a tremendous overpressure wave, as well as setting nearby things on fire. However nothing is oxidized in the bomb itself. Therefore it can happen in the absence of oxygen. The oil immediately around the blast would vaporize and burn - but then again so would some of the water and some of the nitrogen in the atmosphere. However the oil/water mix further out would not burn. I invite you to watch the Baker shot and try to see anything on the ship(s) burning. The water absorbs all the heat.
Hell if you're worried about "fire" - remember that the damned oil rig was on fire in the FIRST PLACE. Where's the fire now?
The water would be an excellent transmitter of the pressure wave, enough to shift the rocks and seal the well.
I have a special request, however. All global warming and card-carrying Greenpeace members should be placed on a boat immediately above the device if this is going to happen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Know your history.
The Stalinist purges had decimated the upper ranks of the military leaving the entire military structure in shambles. Furthermore, Stalin himself chose to ignore critical intelligence about the timing of the German invasion.
So if it were not for the insane dictatorial policies of the Communists, the Russian army would have been in a much better condition to fend off the German attack.
A little copy/paste work allowed me to run it through google translate:
Science
Petroleum leak in the Gulf of Mexico can be eliminated nuclear explosion
Only one nuclear bomb could save the U.S. from ecological disaster
In the USSR, and not as fountains and stopped using the peaceful atom
Vladimir Lagowski - 03/05/2010
It is possible that unsuccessful attempts to stop the leakage of oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico through the underwater robots compel professionals to take extreme measures. Namely - to blow up next to the damaged wells nuclear warhead.
It sounds terribly and incredibly - the idiotic joke. But in fact there were several cases where catastrophes in the fields of fighting in this way. In the former USSR - five times. When nothing else has not helped. It's now in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil oozes out of the way from three places.
First underground nuclear explosion was used to extinguish burning gas wells in "Urt-Bulak (80 km from Bukhara) 30 September 1966. Power charge was 30 kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb exploded about 20 kilotons. But at a height of 600 meters. A near Bukhara - at a depth of six kilometers.
The idea of the method is simple: an underground explosion pushes the rock, presses it and actually squeezes the channel well.
Powerful nuclear "plugs" - sometimes 3 Hiroshima - we have enjoyed until 1979. And only once failed. In 1972 in Kharkov region failed to block the emergency gas blowout. The explosion was mysteriously left on the surface, forming a mushroom cloud. Although the charge was minimal - just a 4 kiloton. And laid deep - for more than two kilometers.
Total probability of failure in the Gulf of Mexico - 20 percent. Americans could take a chance. The chance of dying during the flight to the moon they were even higher.
Of course, we used a civilian nuclear program on the ground, the Americans as to the sea - under water where the ocean depth reaches 1500 meters.
But in principle there is no difference - you still need to drill a well at a distance from leaking. And it lowered the bomb. As in the movie "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis in the role of a driller. It is desirable that the calculations were done correctly. Such hope is: the U.S. is full of smart scientists and powerful computers. And Russia could have contributed. We still live peaceful nuclear demolition.
Nuclear war in the peaceful
USSR organized underground nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes in the period from 1966 to 1988. In total, the former Soviet Union tore more than a hundred atomic bombs. According to some data - 124, on the other 169. And that - not counting the military testing of nuclear weapons.
According to the official wording of the explosions were carried out in the interests of the national economy. Among them - the majority - for seismic minerals and for probing the depths. Explosions create underground reservoirs for gas storage, chemical waste, digging canals, building dams, increased the oil recovery. And did not think something harmful. Although, if the estimate, there are hundreds of atomic bombs, perhaps not in every nuclear war to explode.
Peaceful nuclear energy "fooling" and in the U.S.. And they began earlier - in 1962. But in the end produced a much smaller explosions in the interests of the capitalist economy. Although plans were grandiose.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Not a problem. Reactors in the US use water as an insulator for radiation for the very reason water is very good at it. We're talking about 1 mile UNDER water (a hell of a lot more than a typical reactor).
Wow, I dare say that's the coolest thing I've seen on /. in a long time.
Here's a better video, demonstrating the awesome size of the crater
It's like something right out of a movie, I'm shocked I've never heard of this and it hasn't been in any movies because that's really fantastic.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
For the US - the smaller "tactical" nukes went from 0.3, 1.5, 5, 10, 60, 80, or 170 kiloton explosive yield
Strategic nukes went from 170 kiloton to about 330 kiloton in the late cold war, with some larger bombs up to 9 and 25 megatons, 9MT was the most the US deployed on a missile and a 25MT dropped from a bomber, while the Soviets dropped a 57 megaton, their largest deployed was 25 megaton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons#United_States
So, if you were going to nuke an oil well, you'd use a tactical warhead like the W87
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87
300-475 kiloton yield and about 600 pounds.
Or a bomb like the B83
15-1200 kiloton
And for an illustration of why you should not follow American mining or waste disposal techniques, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
This thing has also been burning for 40 years.
Failure is relative. THIS is a failure. http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Cause R'lyeh is at 49 degrees South, 128 degrees West, which is in the Pacific. He prolly wouldn't hear it if he didn't hear the Bikini Atoll blasts.
non-sequitor. Parent didn't say anything about Soviet purges, nor did he HAVE to.. not without getting wildly off topic.
The GP post ridiculed Soviet loss of life in WW2, and/or implying that it was "Soviet" to oppose Hitler. Parent post responded to that.
Your point is actually a good one - although entertaining to dismiss this idea out of hand, it has been used before and there is a lot of engineering data available. But, and a large one - You don't just get Bruce Willis and friends to ride out to the site, put on some surplus space suits and drop the thing into a six foot hole. The engineering analysis for this could take months to years. Who knows? Maybe a couple of engineers in Houston are sitting in an air conditioned hellhole^Hoffice discussing this very issue with guys with very short hair and no sense of humor at this very moment.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article itself does not cite any source.
Here is what the article says:
- such bombs were indeed used, 5 times throughout the history of the USSR
- the first time it happened in September 1966
- it was a 30 kiloton payload, which was detonated 1.5 km underneath the surface
- after that there were 3 other successful explosions of such kind
- it once failed in 1972. The problem was that they "failed to cover an alternative gas fountain". I am not sure I know how to interpret that correctly, but from my understanding, there was an "escape tunnel" that lead to the surface of the planet, which they did not or could not block/cover. The result was that a "mushroom cloud" formed on the surface.
The article says the explosion compresses rocks (and all the stuff in the higher layers of the lithosphere), which block the channels from which the gas flows. Water could displace the rocks/matter underneath it - and achieve the same effect. That's a rough translation.
EOF
The difference between their case and this case is that the explosions happened underground, at a depth of 1.5 .. 2 km, those were NOT underwater explosions.
Another difference is that the Soviets used the method to deal with gas leaks, not oil leaks.
Maybe they should try using regular expressions instead?
The saddest poem
Stalingrad and Kursk were both over by the time the massive USAAF bombing campaign geared up. And there is no way in hell D-Day and the subsequent operations by the Western Allies could have succeeded if two-thirds of the Wehrmacht hadn't already been lying face-down on Russian soil. This is the reality: Russians did more and sacrificed more, by far, than any other people to stop Nazi Germany, and the numbers of troops and amount of materiel involved in the Eastern Front dwarf the entire rest of the European war combined. While it is literally true that "Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII," your follow-on assertion that "nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'" is an absurd denial of history.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
There were 27 so-called peaceful nuclear explosions in the US. one of the last in 1973 was supposed to fracture the ground in Colorado methane field to increase production. It has the contrary effect of melting a layer of glass underground and sealing off the methane. Russia used 115 bombs in similar tests . The seismic data they obtained is considered the best ever collected.
Italy took a large part in the trench warfare of WWI. Who do you think fought Austria-Hungary? Pixies? I highly doubt that the 5 million Italian soldiers (of which more than half a million were killed) just evaporated with the morning dew after it was over.
You imply that Italy lacked hardware, as though Fiat didn't exist or any other vehicle manufacturers, as though Italy didn't have more battleships than you've had hot dinners, etc. You further imply that because Germany came up with the autobahn that makes them more special than the people who basically invented paved roads in the first place.
No experience in desert warfare? Italians had been fighting in the Horn of Africa since the 1880s.
I'm afraid you are insufficiently informed to make a cogent argument. Italy was a failure primarily for being unable to motivate its military and use its forces decisively and effectively. In terms of supply and experience they were on par.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You have no clue, and I don't know how you got modded "interesting".
Uncontrolled flow from a well is not a good thing for oil production. It *damages* the reservoir. It will cost them money to let it flow. I don't mean in the sense of environmental costs, rig costs, or even in terms of oil lost while it flows out (which is a small drop in the bucket compared to the whole field over its lifetime), I mean in the sense of barrels of oil they will be able to recover from this field once the problem is solved versus if things had gone right. They don't want it this way. They sure as heck do want to cap the well, and as soon as possible.
Unfortunately capping the well isn't as simple as welding something on the top or clamping something on there. The full fluid pressure from a few km below the sea bottom are immense. The blowout preventer is built to take it, but it's apparently broken or jammed open, and clamping something else on there to contain the pressure isn't easy when the oil is flowing out and equipment at the well head is trashed to varying degrees. The riser above the blowout preventer (BOP) is not built to contain the full pressure at formation depth because it would be crazy heavy to hang beneath the rig, and the BOP is supposed to prevent the riser from being exposed to the highest possible pressures.
The reason the "oil collection device" would only ever manage 85% of the well flow is that some of the flow is from other breaks in the riser (the pipe that was extending down from the sea surface to the bottom) that is laying in a twisted mess on the sea floor. They closed off one of the breaks along it, but another is still leaking some distance away from the well head. That other one is where the other 15% of the flow is, and although the priority is on the big one, they're apparently working to capture the smaller one with another collection device. The collecting device above the 85% at the BOP failed because unfortunately it clogged with hydrates. They're hoping to fix that by either adding methanol (like anti-freeze) and/or heating it.
Both of these collection devices run at the ambient sea floor pressures. They aren't built to stop the flow ("cap" the well) because doing so is extraordinarily difficult with broken equipment at the well head that can't be trusted to maintain its integrity if you confine the flow. You must understand that even broken as it is, the BOP is helping matters somewhat. The flow probably would be 10x higher if it weren't constricting the flow. Do you want it to break further? If they get desperate enough, they will try confining the flow next (that's what the "junk shot" is about -- clogging it up), but if the BOP comes off or something breaks in the shallow subsurface as the pressure builds up (i.e. a subsurface blowout), then the problem will be much, much worse, and you're going to wish they had NOT ever tried "capping" it. Can you imagine the outcry if the attempt failed and the flow increased to, say, 10000 or 50000 barrels/day? "Why wasn't BP more careful? Why didn't they just wait for the relief well?", they'll say.
They aren't going to do a riskier move before exhausting the safer/faster options first and making absolutely sure they understand which parts of the BOP and casing below can be relied upon. That takes time.
Let me put things in simpler terms. If a broken pipe in your house was slowly flooding your basement at an alarming but modest rate, and clamping something around the pipe had the real potential to BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE AND FILL YOUR BASEMENT IN 15 MINUTES if the clamp or the surrounding pipe failed in the attempt, would you be prompt about "capping" it rather than putting out buckets and a sump pump until you assessed the situation properly? They're trying to do this in more than 1000 metres of water, remotely. You have to move cautiously, try all the easier and safer options first, and be sure you aren't going to make it much worse.
But anyone who things that BP wants or prefers this well to "run wild" for the couple of months it will take for a relief well to be drilled is terribly uninformed and doesn't understand the nature of the problem or the economic impact of letting it do so.
If it were that simple, climatologists would be moving on to other problems. It's not. Get over yourself, you're really not as smart as you think.
Yes, er, other "problems". Like, er, let's stop the weather. Seriously. Climatology is OBSERVATION and INTERPRETATION. What the fuck do you think it is, precision science? Satellites all over the world and they still don't know with certainty which direction the hurricane will move in the next 24 hours. Give me a fucking break. Next you're going to convince me that a doctorate in philosophy has practical use in the world.
As far as I am concerned this whole "global warming" concept is about two things. Job creation for climatologists following this business model 1. Create awareness of a problem 2. Pretend to be able to solve said problem. Since climate change happens over GEOLOGICAL TIME, well the "problem" is only going to get worse, isn't it? This means permanent funding for governments willing to pay anyone who gives them an excuse to REGULATE and TAX people even more.
If you had any real scientific background you would be able to see the gaping holes in any anthropogenic global warming argument starting with mis-representation of data and continuing with failure to understand basic science concepts. As an example - a PULITZER PRIZE winning author - Thomas Friedman wrote a bock called "Hot, Flat and Crowded". Since he's won a pulitzer and I've enjoyed his previous works, I started reading - up until the point 1/3 of the way through when he tries to explain global warming with Carbon dating. The only problem is that the man has NO FUCKING CLUE as to how carbon dating actually works.
"This extra CO2 is not coming from the oceans. It's coming from the burning of fossil fuels. We know this because carbon can be dated, and the carbon dioxide that is produced from burning fossil fuels is of a different age than the CO2 contained in the oceans. And the measurements definitively show that the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere in the last fifty years is coming from fossil fuel combustion" - PAGE 119
Bzzzt - disqualified. Carbon dating absolutely does NOT work that way. A CO2 molecule's age can ABSOLUTELY NOT be determined. The "age" of CO2 in the atmosphere can ABSOLUTELY NOT be determined. But go ahead, follow the bleating sheep into a future of further taxation and regulation and lies. Me, I will stick to REAL SCIENCE and not believe bullshit because politicians, "climate scientists" and "Pulitzer prize" winners say it's so.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Could somebody who reads Russian please check the original text from the Komsomolskaya Pravda?
Translation starting from first paragraph:
It's obvious that unsuccessful attempts at trying to stop the oil leak from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico will make specialists go to extremes. [One solution]: to explode an atomic bomb next to the source of the leak. It sounds horrible and unbelievable, like some idiotic joke. But in reality there were several times when such methods were used to fight similar catastrophes. In the fomer Soviet Union - five times. When nothing else helped. Like in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil is seeping from three spots.
The first time it was used to extinguish an underground natural gas leak in Urta-Bulak (80 km from Bukhara [capital of Bukhara province in Uzbekistan]) on the 30th of September, 1966. The explosion had the force of 30 kilotons. For comparison the explosion at Hiroshima had a yield of 20 kilotons. Except at a height of 600 metres. And under Bukhara, at a depth of half a kilometer.
The idea is simple: the underground explosion compresses the ground and and closes the leak.
Powerful atomic "plugs" - like 3 Hiroshimas - were used here until 1979. And only once without success. In 1972, in Kharkov province, covering a catastrophic gas fountain didn't work. Even though the yield was minimal - just 4 kilotons. And put deep - a little over 2 kilometres down.
So, the likelihood of failure in the Gulf of Mexico is 20%. The Americans could risk it. The chances of dying during the flight to the moon were higher. Granted, we used the atom bomb on dry land, while the Americans will need to do it underwater, in the ocean, where the depth reaches 1500 metres. But there is no principal difference, the leak still needs to be stopped far from the actual source. The bomb must be lowered there, like in the movie Armageddon with Bruce Ulis [not well translated]. Granted, the explosion must be done properly. Yet the United States has many experts and powerful computers. Maybe Russia could help - it still has experts on peaceful use of atomic bombs.
After the two pictures:
The Soviet Union performed underground nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes in the period between 1966 and 1988. Overall, the total number of atomic bombs used in the territory of the former Soviet Union equaled over 100 bombs. Some estimates have the number at 124, others - at 169. And this does not include army use of atomic weapons.
Officially, the explosions were done in the name of national interests. They were used mostly for explorations of valuable materials [and something else]. They created underground caverns for gas storage, dug canals, and other things. And they weren't thought to be dangerous, although to be sure, 100 atomic bombs would never be used in every atomic war.
Peaceful uses of atomic bombs were done in the United States too, which started such activities in 1962. Yet there weren't nearly as many uses for the capitalist interests, even though the plans were far more grandiose.
Yes, I'm sure that the Sandhurst wargames were completely equivalent and unbiased. Nevermind that even if they accounted for all the material properly there was no way that they could truly replicate differences between the mindsets of British and German commanders AND rank-and-file soldiers.
In 1940-1 Germany had enough air power to do the job. I wouldn't call it supremacy, but the Battle of Britain was a draw in Germany's favor, it's just that the Germans didn't understand that well enough to keep pushing. Because Hitler decided that Russia should be attacked before Britain much of the air power that might have kept the pressure on Britain was diverted east, otherwise Britain would not have recovered.
That the Kriegsmarine was not immediately equal to the task is granted, but German industry could have rapidly built enough transports for a one-off if the idea were taken seriously. If a German invasion force could rapidly advance off a beach head such that British naval intervention would be mitigated in immediate importance (essentially give the beach back for a period of time, decisively create a pocket supplied and supported by air focused on expanding to critical resource/transit hubs) there might have been a chance. The British would not have been imaginative enough to have seen that coming.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
It's called The Curse of Tecumseh, or the Tippecanoe Curse. Well known myth. How Reagan broke it is a mystery, but some think that there's an astrological reason why the curse faded away. (It was made during an earth cycle, and Reagan's term started the fire cycle, or something like that.)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
It probably wouldn't have been like Britain, at least not for a while - Nicholas II was definitely "old school" as far as monarchs went and had zero desire to share power with anyone. The German Empire was closer to a constitutional monarchy than Russia was going into World War 1 and, thanks to Wilhelm II's idolization of the military, was basically a military dictatorship with a "representative" rubber-stamping committee in the Reichstag.
That said, Russia's military probably would've been in better shape going into '39 under Tsarist rule than it was under Stalin. Russia's military was undergoing a modernization program (increased mechanization, greater operational staff independence, etc.) going into World War 1 that was a few years from completion. If World War 1 started in 1917 instead of 1914, Germany wouldn't have had a poorly organized, slowly mobilizing, poorly equipped army of peasants on its eastern frontier - it would've had an impossibly large, well-equipped professional army backed by a relatively modern infrastructure (Russia was working on getting their railroads up to international spec, among other things) bearing down on it instead and Germany knew it. That's part of the reason Moltke and the rest of the German General Staff were in such a hurry to start World War 1; their window of opportunity, rather small to begin with, was closing fast. Instead of completing the modernization program, though, Russia's military was quickly chewed to shreds by the Germans (note that the Russian military, poorly run as it was, easily handled the Austro-Hungarians without serious issue), devoured what was left of itself during the October Revolution and its aftermath, then re-adopted the grand Russian tradition of promoting officers based on political considerations instead of tactical merit under Stalin; granted, Nicholas II wasn't much better than Stalin on that front, but at least he didn't make a regular habit of killing large portions of his General Staff whenever he came down with a case of the "vapors". Similarly, Tsarist Russia's economy wouldn't have had to suffer through the pre-NEP "War Communism" economy, nor through Stalin's abandonment of the NEP and the Holomodor. Of course, some of the resulting gains would've undoubtedly been lost in the Great Depression, but millions of displaced Ukrainian peasants probably wouldn't have starved.
Long story short, Nicholas II's "divine" leadership would almost certainly have been no worse for Russia and its military than Stalin's leadership ultimately proved to be.
Also, the "tanks on horseback" bit is actually a magnificent bit of Nazi propaganda - like most militaries of the time, horses were used for reconnaissance and scouting. Don't forget that small, inexpensive, reliable all-terrain vehicles were a rather recent development; full scale production of the Kübelwagen didn't begin until 1940 and the Jeep didn't enter production until 1941.
Germany is like a 2 mob boss fight. Poland noob pulled by being too close. Got one shot. Belgium was a mage that got too much threat before the tank came in and pulled agro. France was likely the healer, tried to cast a heal on Belgium but it didn't help, belgium goes down, agro shifted to france which got wiped out. This whole time of course Russia was solo tanking the second boss mob (called the eastern front).
Huh? Soviet Union entered the war on Allied side on June 21, 1945. France and Belgium (and Netherlands and Luxembourg) were invaded on May 10, 1940, and occupation already in place by mid-1940. Up until the German invasion of its soil, the USSR was itself busy invading other countries (Finland, Poland, Baltic states), so it definitely wasn't "solo tanking" the Germans.
Oh, and Poland was Eastern Front, too, you know? Soviets actually helped the Germans there.
This whole time of course Russia was solo tanking the second boss mob (called the eastern front). Then England (a druid) started tanking and dpsing western front. And the US (warlock) and Canada (hunter) came in and started putting some heavy dps on the western front. Somehow they pull through and the western front goes down, and they all go over and help out the tank with the eastern front.
Again, huh? Western and Eastern fronts first met when the Battle of Berlin was going for more than a week - indeed, Soviet forces were already in the city at that point. What "help"?
How about putting an existing warhead into a pressure vessel?
Straight bore holes spiral in a predictable cone at a certain depth, and are predictably deflected in certain angles given measurements of rock samples retrieved from the drilling mud, or with deliberate adjustments. Given a measured depth of the bore hole and a known true vertical depth, you can predict the bore hole's location at any given depth using some calculus. If they even get close, they can send an explosive charge down the hole, create a cavity that intersects the original and then fill that.
Carbon-12 is stable. Carbon-14 is not stable, and has a half life of about 5700 years.
Carbon-14 is generated in the atmosphere by cosmic rays hitting a Nitrogen atom, and the atmospheric concentration of C14 to C12 is about one in a trillion.
Natural atmospheric CO2 can be created with any kind of Carbon atom, but fossil fuels will only create C02 with C-12 atoms (since the C-14 atoms would have long decayed). So if we find out that recently the atmospheric concentration of C(14)02 to C(12)O2 is different than the concentration of atmospheric C-14 to C-12, then we can determine the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere that is created by burning fossil fuels.
Following along that same line of data, we can also take ice core samples and examine the atmospheric makeup in the past, so that we can verify to check natural levels of C(14)O2, and ensure that they are much lower than current levels.
I am not familiar with Thomas Friedman, but it seems to me like his explanation of the evidence is just a bit dumbed down so that he doesn't have to explain the periodic table, isotopes, stable and unstable atoms, decay rates, and the other sorts of things that average day-to-day people gloss over at. :)
-Bill