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In Bolivia, a Supervolcano Is Rising
dutchwhizzman writes "Uturuncu is a Bolivian supervolcano. Research suggests that it has an eruption frequency of roughly 300,000 years and the last eruption was, give or take a few years, 300,000 years ago. Research suggests that it started rising in a 70 km diameter by 1 to 2 centimeters per year, making it the fastest-growing volcano on the planet. Break out the tin foil hats, and store plenty of canned beans, because it may just erupt before Yellowstone pops its cork."
This'll make the price of cocaine skyrocket, harming innocent consumers the world over.
I thought tinfoil hats are to protect you from government mind-rays, not lava. Though tinfoil is pretty amazing stuff.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Looks like I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's 70km across, not circumference.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...
If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Because disasters that have passed are no longer newsworthy, and disasters scheduled for a hundred years from now aren't newsworthy yet.
In other words, if it isn't about "more or less now", noone would care and you wouldn't hear anything about it.
Anyway, I always wonder if it wouldn't be possible to drill a hole in the volcano and let off some pressure or something.
While this would be a very good source of geothermal power for us puny humans, I doubt that we could drill a hole wide enough to accommodate 1 cubic meter per second, which according to TFA, is the rate at which the magma chamber is growing. That, and you are left with the problem of what to do with the 86,400 cubic meters of magma per day (about 170,000 tonnes' worth), every day. Where do you plan on parking it?
While we humans pride ourselves on our technology and our ability to move things around and build things, a supervolcano is simply on too big of a scale for us. It would be like a mite imagining it had the power to tell an elephant where to go. Geology (vulcanism, earthquakes) and meteorology (hurricanes, tornadoes) is going to happen to us whether we like it or not. Hopefully one day we'll be smart enough to just get out of the way in time when it does happen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think you know how bad supervolcanoes are.
Think Mt. St. Helens.
Then multiply it by 1000. At once. Just for this guy. It would be bad. A lot of people on different continents would die from lack of food because the growing season would be nonexistent for many people. For years.
If the Siberian Traps go, we're all fucked. That's called an extinction event.
--
BMO
USA has been losing the drug war. After trillions of dollars spent with 3 (almost 4) decades of losses the WoD UStrategy has moved to mother-nature manipulation to initiate volcanic activity in global regions that produce and export drugs to US for power and profit. Finally a WoD UStrategy that will destroy the organic source of the problem. No more crops, way less consumers, and the end of another underground economy.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
A supervolcano is *significantly* larger than the largest recorded volcanic eruption, on the order of ten times or more. The last one, Lake Toba, was 70,000 years ago, or so. And according to what I have read, mitochondrial DNA shows a genetic bottleneck around that time where something reduced the human population down to a few tens of thousands across the entire world. And this is back when humans were a lot better at moving around and hunting and gathering getting their own food.
It would make the current level of human climate change look like a joke in particularly bad taste.
The largest volcanic eruption in historic times, in 1815 at Mount Tambora, ejected the equivalent of around 100 km3 (24 cu mi) of dense rock and made 1816 the "Year Without a Summer" in the whole northern hemisphere. The Lake Toba explosion ejected 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi) and probably created volcanic equivalent of a Nuclear winter for years, not to mention the acidic rain and other fun volcanic stuff.
You can read most of this at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
So yeah, we are talking about an apocalyptic scenario if this thing, or one of the other ones goes off any time soon. Billions would die, absolutely guaranteed.
Meh, there are a lot of meaty animals around if we get hungry. Why, I recently heard of this one species with 7 billion members, spread all around the world. Plenty to eat for years.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
A device that releases pressure from a volcano is called "a volcano."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not really. The poster was explaining that volcanic eruptions have a relatively short time effect on the climate. The first year after the eruption, the effect is big, and then exponentially decays with each passing year.
This means that a volcano is not going to give any kind of relief. A small eruption only means a few cool years before the global warming resumes on the old trend. A large eruption would cause a longer cooling period, but would kill most life in the first year. Either way, we're hosed.
There are no 'goldilocks eruptions' that would bring relief from global warming for a few decades, without causing substantial harm themselves.
Surely you mean Dome-sday ;)
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
No, I don't think oil is the same as magma, obviously, I was just comparing the numbers for reference.
I didn't intend on lining the bore hole. Just drill deep enough, and let the lava flow out. If the flow is big enough, the supply of additional heat should keep the hole open. If not, there's probably not enough pressure to worry about an eruption.
I know you were making a joke (and for the record, it was kind of funny), but FWIW, the Mayans didn't die out. I was in Guatemala hanging out with a bunch of Mayans not quite two years ago (who, incidentally, were asking me what was with the "Mayan" 2012 thing they had been hearing about, lol). They've largely been incorporated into the culture of the countries in which they now live, but they still keep their ancestral lineage and speak their various Mayan dialects (Tzutachiel, IIRC, was the dialect spoken by the group I was with) as well Spanish.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Careful. There's enough pressure to lift the rock on top by 1cm per year, right? The issue with magma is that it CAN have dissolved gasses in it under tremendous pressure; when you drill that hole, if you don't maintain that same pressure, the magma starts to fizz. Fizzy magma doesn't weigh as much, so it gets pushed up, reducing the pressure, making it fizzier and less dense, etc. It just goes and goes faster and faster until all the pressure is relieved, and if it happens to erode a larger hole with the jet of superheated rock, well, that's another way to erupt faster. Think geyser (which accumulates superheated water under pressure until it finally starts to boil, then it all blows at once). Think Macondo blow out in the Gulf of Mexico.
There are some things where you're better off not poking them with sticks to see what happens. I think this might be one of them.
Contrariwise, if you thought you knew what you were doing (note the use of the contrary-to-fact subjunctive :-) you might be able to drill pressure relief wells around the edges, to get smaller "controllable" eruptions.
Protip: if 5% of a species survives, it's not extinct. But even 50% of humans dying would be considered bad.
Depends: which 50% is my mother-in-law in?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You probably Googled for "War on drugs costs" to get that figure. It's correct - the federal government claims to have spent about 15 Billion in 2010 on it's own website.
Maybe you missed the paragraph just below it saying "State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars." As you put it, "assuming constant dollars..." We're up to "at least" 40 Billion per year currently and about 28 years to total a Trillion, and a War On Drugs over nearly twice that time, making Trillions closer to reasonable. Just adding in that state and local component puts us nearly at multiple Trillions.
Beyond that, it's common for parts of the costs of fighting the war on drugs to be hidden elsewhere. Building Prisons often isn't shown as a WOD cost, even though a lot of it has been just that. The US typically, almost invariably, builds prisons because of overcrowding in older facilities rather than because they are wearing out. Then there's the staffing of those prisons - guards, wardens, and related cost money. That 15 Billion you quoted includes some prison costs, but the way the government calculates them assumes that a lot of prisons would be wearing out from age and so considerably understates how much of the prison building and staffing is WOD related.
Then there's foreign aid, a LOT of which is really drug enforcement when you're talking about Central America. (I don't want to suggest a lot of foreign aid in total is WOD related, as when we're talking "foreign aid in total" it's essentially an Israel/Mideast security related issue, but foreign aid to Central and South America and the Caribbean runs way above aid to, say, Africa over the long haul). When we supply, say, Columbia, with assault helicopters to track down Cocaine plantations, that's often carried in the foreign aid budget, and if we have to supply any of Colombia's neighbors, that don't provide so much raw Cocaine, with weapons (to balance the political situation we are destabilizing by giving one regional power all the neat toys), that's always carried in the foreign aid column.
Multiple full squadrons of assault helicopters, training and basing for them, attack helicopters to protect the assault helicopters when the plantations started deploying shoulder mounted rocket launchers, high grade crypto and commo that we don't export elsewhere (because the plantation owners can afford to hack and eavesdrop on older commo), and maintenance for all that - it isn't cheap. Then we have to let someone else in the region have a foreign aid grant to buy, say, destroyer escorts from US approved firms, so that the regional balance of power is maintained. Then our conservative politicians tell their base how foreign aid is all driven by liberals.
You can find funding that's really WOD related in quite a few areas beyond prisons and foreign aid. Part of the Dept of the Interior budget is for keeping people from growing dope in national parks, giving rangers better armament and more practice time. We use Dept. of the Interior personnel to search for tunnels along isolated parts of the US/Canadian border, and even sometimes the Mexican border. There's a line in the overall Homeland Security budget that's about 1/3rd of the FBI total budget. It's for the FBI to run ranges to train all the other security agencies like BATF or Treasury in firearms use. The DEA's weapon's training is thus not carried as a DEA cost any more, since the USA PATRIOT act consolidated that cost. Then the CIA and NSA lend some of their high tech support to the WOD, and it isn't always carried openly in that '15 Billion for 2010" figure either, but its impossible to tell just how much is hidden when you're talking about agencies whose whole budget is basically a black box item. Try adding in such things, and we could make a pretty good case for over 3 Trillion. For all we can be sure of, there's WOD funding shifted to Dept. of Energy, Educ
Who is John Cabal?
Also, point of correction: The term for the people is the "Maya". The languages are "Mayan". "Mayans" is an obsolete term that is not correct in any context.
(Also, they don't generally refer to *themselves* as Maya, but rather as "Tzotzil", "Winik atel", "Yucatec", and so forth. (Or, occasionally, "Indios", which I've never been able to figure out whether it translates as "Indians" or "Indigenous" - they call the North American Native Americans "Indios" as well.))
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.