In Belgium you can add yourself to the http://www.robinsonlist.be/ and not get any calls anymore. This needs to be refreshed after two years. A list like this is European law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I moved to this house, I registered with the TPS. In consequence, the only cold calls I get (10 a day is not uncommon) are from companies calling from the Philippines or India. I can only deduce that the previous occupants had got onto a number of "sucker lists". What the half-life of these lists is, I don't know, but it certainly seems to be more than a year.
There was a little doubt before the first A-bomb test as to whether the reaction would ignite the entire atmosphere - not much by the time of the actual test, but a little.
I've vaguely heard this meme before. Assuming that it ever progressed beyond the minds of utterly uneducated politicians, who on Earth (literally, not figuratively) thought that the atmosphere of the Earth contained enough fuel to actually burn with it's oxygen content.
If such an event were possible at all, then the first time that there was a meteor impact, the atmosphere would have ignited, the flame propagated and "woosh" ; everything is toast.
Balderdash, not even worthy of the most idiotic of politicians.
The USGS estimate that 1/4 of the world's yet-to-be-discovered hydrocarbon reserves are in Arctic regions. In fact, there was a 3-day conference on precisely this topic at the Geological society in London a few years back - I attended.
Rest assured : this is being worked on.
Whether or not we as a species dare to actually locate, extract and burn this stuff is another question ; but the geology and oil industries are working on the "locate" stage.
(That said, it's equatorial Africa for me for the foreseeable future ; but I've no objection at all to going back to Canada, or Arctic Russia, or Norway.)
More likely they said "When you've finished with our through-ice radar system, which we've been developing for several decades, can we have it back and continue our surveying work in Antarctica. Say, you use it in the Northern hemisphere summer and we'll use it in the Southern hemisphere's summer. And that way, it'll be in use 10 months of the year, not 4."
As ChrisMaple points out below, there is very little compression of the rock itself. What is happening is that the relatively weak rock around 100-300km below the surface (the asthenosphere, from Greek "a-" (negator), "sthenos-" (strength) and "sphere" (sphere)) is displaced laterally, causing lifting of the seabed around the depressed continent. It flows back on a time scale of millennia because it has stiffness that would make toffee or asphalt look like water.
But does knowing that ice-melt will follow the canyon and dump into the relatively self-contained arctic instead of the N. Atlantic change real-word global-warming models?
Not hugely, since the north-flowing glacier (and probably sub-glacial drainage in this region too) empties into the Arctic Ocean, as you say, but the main area for the formation of "North Atlantic Deep Water" is the area between Greenland, Iceland, Northern Norway, and Svalbard.
There is noticeable (and fairly worrying) instability in the amount of such deep, cold, saline water being generated and flowing away south-west over the Greenland-Iceland Ridge, but that's more likely to be affected by flows from Scoresby Sound area than flows going off to the north of Greenland.
I'm a geologist who has spent most of the last 30 years working in the North Sea, and living and walking in Scotland.
but geological evidence suggests that prior to the last ice age, the North Sea was bone dry (being several hundred metres above sea level!).
Most of the North Sea has been a basin of marine deposition for the last 100-odd million years. The last time that the Northern North Sea was emergent was in the late Jurassic with the deposition of the Ness and Tarbert formations of the Brent group (economically hugely important ; there are several "elephant" oil field hosted in these units ; occasionally we see evidence of roots in the sands when we core them, indicating emergence). These were fed sands from the vicinity of Shetland, but the area has been subsiding in pace with sediment deposition since. The sea in this area is now typically over 100m deep.
There is evidence (blocks of Chalk Group coccolithophore limestone floundered in lava vents in the volcano centres of Arran, Mull, Rum and Skye) that the whole of Scotland was submerged to a depth of dozens to hundreds of metres ("below storm wave base" in technical terms) by 70Myr ago.
True, in the Southern North Sea the water is shallower, but that is a relatively small area, and to be honest, I count the whole lot ("Doggerland" and all) as just being a temporarily drowned part of the Rhine delta, with the Thames as a tributary of the Rhine which just happens to meet the sea before it runs into the Rhine. When you look at the thousands of metres of relative change of ground level versus sea level implied by those Chalk blocks hundreds of metres above present sea-level, it is hard to care about where the coast line is this million years.
It won't be very many hundreds of years before Loch Ness is physically isolated from the sea at either end and becomes a fully enclosed high saltwater lake!
Loch Ness is separated form the sea by around a 10-12m high ridge of bedrock through which the River Ness and Caledonian Canal cut for 10km. I've walked and cycled the canal towpath several times between Inverness town centre and a relative's home in the village of Lochend, at the end of Loch Ness (some Scottish place names are designed to use obfuscating language to confuse people about the areas geography). I've swum in Loch Ness on several occasions and can assure you of three things : it's fucking freezing ; it's fresh water ; and it's still fucking freezing.
It's probably several thousand years since Loch Ness was isolated from the sea.
Oh, and by the way, my relative has seen Nessie, and she's an idiot, therefore it is really really unlikely to exist. (Except as various fakes and frauds designed to rip tourists off, which is quite fine by me ; it's what they exist for.)
If you think that the other end of Loch Ness is near the sea, then you really need to look at a map. Or spend 3-4 hours cycling from Fort William to Fort Augustus. I really don't recommend cycling from Fort Augustus to Inverness.
There are several exposed fault scarps in northern Sweden and Norway on otherwise polished flat (by the glaciers) landscapes which indicate that some of the isostatic rebound has taken place (almost) instantaneously.
fig. 18. The Parvie fault at Lake Kamasjaure, some 70 km north of Kiruna. The c. 8 m high fault scarp forms steeply overhanging cliffs indicating reverse fault movement. See helicopter for scale.
The whole publication is worth a quick scan, even if you're not a geologist. Impressive pictures.
[Wearing my hard hat that says "Geologist" on the front.]
I've not seen substantive evidence that the New Madrid earthquakes were related to post-glacial rebound stresses. What is the source of the stresses in that part of central North America, I certainly don't know, and I've never seen any convincing arguments from someone who claims that they do know (but... it's not my continent, so I may have missed something in the couple of years since I last looked).
OTOH, the 1927 IIRC "Grand Banks" earthquake [EDIT : 1929 ; like I said, not one of my regular continents], which killed several people with falling masonry in Halifax [EDIT : and a lot of Newfoundland people by tsunami], and broke a number of trans-Atlantic communication cables by triggering density current underwater avalanches, has been ascribed to stresses from post-glacial rebound. The main grounds for this assignment being the orientation of the fault triggered and the sense of movement being appropriate for that stress field.
In theory, if all the ice on Greenland melted, how long would it take Greenland to spring back up again?
[...]are we talking years, decades, centuries, or longer?
The Laurentide ice sheet (over NE Canada) melted fairly rapidly (a couple of centuries) around 9000 years ago, as indicated by deposits of ice-rafted debris in the middle of the North Atlantic (without iceberg transport, how are you going to transport mm-size sand grains to the middle of an ocean? Let alone fist-sized "drop stones".). There's also abundant evidence of fresh-water influxes into the North Atlantic at that time, from the melting ice and emptying of lakes ponded behind the ice. The fresh water leaves changed fossil communities of diatoms and other microflora and fauna.
The region continues it's isostatic rebound to this day.
Therefore your answer is "thousands of years". Potentially, it could be hundreds of thousands of years.
If you were going to get all mathematical about it, you could make a case that the rebound would asymptotically approach "stability", and therefore would never actually get there. But in practice, there are sufficient external sources of variation in "sea level" that you'd need to be ignoring reality to swallow such an argument. If your (local) sea level is changing by -1mm/century because of continuing rebound, but there is a global increase in sea level of +1mm/century because of the opening of the Red Sea (with a mid-ocean ridge building along it's axis, displacing water), then in practice the isostatic rebound is no longer important.
What happens when Dropbox changes how everything works.
The large majority of their customers find that their "DropBoxes" (I don't know DropBox's terminology ; I've never considered wasting my time by looking at their service) have stopped working, and flood the company with (justifiably) irate support calls and hate messages.
What - you think they'd manage to get revised, bug-fixed clients out to every single user, including the ones with severely paranoid, tightly locked-down machines with a checksum on every file, particularly downloaded ones? Not a chance.
. . . And then they drown. Don't you remember your first 10 helicopter underwater escape training sessions? I remember mine, and am due for re-certification in under a year.
Whores (generally) like repeat custom. More income for relatively low additional risk. Cold-callers OTOH generally go for anal fisting on a first date.
I like this guy's idea.
They're the ones who don't carry their vaccination passport with them along with their travel passport.
I've just had to send my vaccination passport (for the yellow fever certificate, expires in a couple of years) off with my travel passport (over 9 years validity in that one), and lots of photos, to the Gabonese embassy to get my visa for working there. This is not a new requirement.
No, the knew he was taking a risky action (not getting immunized) then traveling in that risky state,
He could potentially attempt to defend himself by claiming that he did not know this (not being vaccinated) was "risky", having been told otherwise by authority figures (parents, church). And also, being a god-squaddie, he'd claim that the state he was travelling in was one of "grace", which is some form of perfection.
It's total clap-trap of course, but it would play pretty well in America.
You didn't see people in the "Nothing to Declare" channel. That doesn't mean that they weren't watching you.
No tinfoil hat paranoia here - if you watch appropriate TV programmes you'll see that they do a lot of their targeting using the abundant CCTV long before you get to baggage reclaim, reading body language, and just looking through the half-silvered window. You did see the mirror, didn't you?
Plus the drug dogs (and bees) had been all over your baggage between it coming out of the plane and going onto the carousel.
Technically, if you walked up to the "Declare" counter and said "I've got a kilo of Bolivian Marching Powder here," then you have NOT committed the offence of attempting to import (etc.). Though you have committed the offence of "possession", and possibly also "intent to supply". You'd still be going down, but probably not as hard as otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
People provide mailbox services with built in shredders? Lovely!
Excuse me for a second while I check the back of my underpants ...
Nope, I can confirm that I don't give a shit.
Though I am pleased to be able to re-use a post.
Excuse me for a second while I check the back of my underpants ...
Nope, I can confirm that I don't give a shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I moved to this house, I registered with the TPS. In consequence, the only cold calls I get (10 a day is not uncommon) are from companies calling from the Philippines or India. I can only deduce that the previous occupants had got onto a number of "sucker lists". What the half-life of these lists is, I don't know, but it certainly seems to be more than a year.
Which law is he breaking?
Is there anything stopping him from having several lines going at once?
I have a steel (well, titanium actually ; but you couldn't tell by looking) plate that holds my head together. Can I wear that?
All didactic statements which allow for no variation to cope with unforeseen circumstances are foolish. No exceptions!
(Or, as I think Sun Tzu put it in The Art of War several millennia ago, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy unscathed.")
I've vaguely heard this meme before. Assuming that it ever progressed beyond the minds of utterly uneducated politicians, who on Earth (literally, not figuratively) thought that the atmosphere of the Earth contained enough fuel to actually burn with it's oxygen content.
If such an event were possible at all, then the first time that there was a meteor impact, the atmosphere would have ignited, the flame propagated and "woosh" ; everything is toast.
Balderdash, not even worthy of the most idiotic of politicians.
Nice! Thanks for that.
Rest assured : this is being worked on.
Whether or not we as a species dare to actually locate, extract and burn this stuff is another question ; but the geology and oil industries are working on the "locate" stage.
(That said, it's equatorial Africa for me for the foreseeable future ; but I've no objection at all to going back to Canada, or Arctic Russia, or Norway.)
More likely they said "When you've finished with our through-ice radar system, which we've been developing for several decades, can we have it back and continue our surveying work in Antarctica. Say, you use it in the Northern hemisphere summer and we'll use it in the Southern hemisphere's summer. And that way, it'll be in use 10 months of the year, not 4."
As ChrisMaple points out below, there is very little compression of the rock itself. What is happening is that the relatively weak rock around 100-300km below the surface (the asthenosphere, from Greek "a-" (negator), "sthenos-" (strength) and "sphere" (sphere)) is displaced laterally, causing lifting of the seabed around the depressed continent. It flows back on a time scale of millennia because it has stiffness that would make toffee or asphalt look like water.
The major cities of Greenland (pop. 56000) will rise back above sea level.
Not hugely, since the north-flowing glacier (and probably sub-glacial drainage in this region too) empties into the Arctic Ocean, as you say, but the main area for the formation of "North Atlantic Deep Water" is the area between Greenland, Iceland, Northern Norway, and Svalbard.
There is noticeable (and fairly worrying) instability in the amount of such deep, cold, saline water being generated and flowing away south-west over the Greenland-Iceland Ridge, but that's more likely to be affected by flows from Scoresby Sound area than flows going off to the north of Greenland.
I'm a geologist who has spent most of the last 30 years working in the North Sea, and living and walking in Scotland.
Most of the North Sea has been a basin of marine deposition for the last 100-odd million years. The last time that the Northern North Sea was emergent was in the late Jurassic with the deposition of the Ness and Tarbert formations of the Brent group (economically hugely important ; there are several "elephant" oil field hosted in these units ; occasionally we see evidence of roots in the sands when we core them, indicating emergence). These were fed sands from the vicinity of Shetland, but the area has been subsiding in pace with sediment deposition since. The sea in this area is now typically over 100m deep.
There is evidence (blocks of Chalk Group coccolithophore limestone floundered in lava vents in the volcano centres of Arran, Mull, Rum and Skye) that the whole of Scotland was submerged to a depth of dozens to hundreds of metres ("below storm wave base" in technical terms) by 70Myr ago.
True, in the Southern North Sea the water is shallower, but that is a relatively small area, and to be honest, I count the whole lot ("Doggerland" and all) as just being a temporarily drowned part of the Rhine delta, with the Thames as a tributary of the Rhine which just happens to meet the sea before it runs into the Rhine. When you look at the thousands of metres of relative change of ground level versus sea level implied by those Chalk blocks hundreds of metres above present sea-level, it is hard to care about where the coast line is this million years.
Loch Ness is separated form the sea by around a 10-12m high ridge of bedrock through which the River Ness and Caledonian Canal cut for 10km. I've walked and cycled the canal towpath several times between Inverness town centre and a relative's home in the village of Lochend, at the end of Loch Ness (some Scottish place names are designed to use obfuscating language to confuse people about the areas geography). I've swum in Loch Ness on several occasions and can assure you of three things : it's fucking freezing ; it's fresh water ; and it's still fucking freezing. It's probably several thousand years since Loch Ness was isolated from the sea.
Oh, and by the way, my relative has seen Nessie, and she's an idiot, therefore it is really really unlikely to exist. (Except as various fakes and frauds designed to rip tourists off, which is quite fine by me ; it's what they exist for.)
If you think that the other end of Loch Ness is near the sea, then you really need to look at a map. Or spend 3-4 hours cycling from Fort William to Fort Augustus. I really don't recommend cycling from Fort Augustus to Inverness.
From http://www.sgu.se/dokument/service_sgu_publ/C836.pdf comes this caption:
The whole publication is worth a quick scan, even if you're not a geologist. Impressive pictures.
I've not seen substantive evidence that the New Madrid earthquakes were related to post-glacial rebound stresses. What is the source of the stresses in that part of central North America, I certainly don't know, and I've never seen any convincing arguments from someone who claims that they do know (but ... it's not my continent, so I may have missed something in the couple of years since I last looked).
OTOH, the 1927 IIRC "Grand Banks" earthquake [EDIT : 1929 ; like I said, not one of my regular continents], which killed several people with falling masonry in Halifax [EDIT : and a lot of Newfoundland people by tsunami], and broke a number of trans-Atlantic communication cables by triggering density current underwater avalanches, has been ascribed to stresses from post-glacial rebound. The main grounds for this assignment being the orientation of the fault triggered and the sense of movement being appropriate for that stress field.
The Laurentide ice sheet (over NE Canada) melted fairly rapidly (a couple of centuries) around 9000 years ago, as indicated by deposits of ice-rafted debris in the middle of the North Atlantic (without iceberg transport, how are you going to transport mm-size sand grains to the middle of an ocean? Let alone fist-sized "drop stones".). There's also abundant evidence of fresh-water influxes into the North Atlantic at that time, from the melting ice and emptying of lakes ponded behind the ice. The fresh water leaves changed fossil communities of diatoms and other microflora and fauna.
The region continues it's isostatic rebound to this day.
Therefore your answer is "thousands of years". Potentially, it could be hundreds of thousands of years.
If you were going to get all mathematical about it, you could make a case that the rebound would asymptotically approach "stability", and therefore would never actually get there. But in practice, there are sufficient external sources of variation in "sea level" that you'd need to be ignoring reality to swallow such an argument. If your (local) sea level is changing by -1mm/century because of continuing rebound, but there is a global increase in sea level of +1mm/century because of the opening of the Red Sea (with a mid-ocean ridge building along it's axis, displacing water), then in practice the isostatic rebound is no longer important.
The large majority of their customers find that their "DropBoxes" (I don't know DropBox's terminology ; I've never considered wasting my time by looking at their service) have stopped working, and flood the company with (justifiably) irate support calls and hate messages.
What - you think they'd manage to get revised, bug-fixed clients out to every single user, including the ones with severely paranoid, tightly locked-down machines with a checksum on every file, particularly downloaded ones? Not a chance.
. . . And then they drown. Don't you remember your first 10 helicopter underwater escape training sessions? I remember mine, and am due for re-certification in under a year.
Whores (generally) like repeat custom. More income for relatively low additional risk. Cold-callers OTOH generally go for anal fisting on a first date. I like this guy's idea.
I've just had to send my vaccination passport (for the yellow fever certificate, expires in a couple of years) off with my travel passport (over 9 years validity in that one), and lots of photos, to the Gabonese embassy to get my visa for working there. This is not a new requirement.
He could potentially attempt to defend himself by claiming that he did not know this (not being vaccinated) was "risky", having been told otherwise by authority figures (parents, church). And also, being a god-squaddie, he'd claim that the state he was travelling in was one of "grace", which is some form of perfection.
It's total clap-trap of course, but it would play pretty well in America.
No tinfoil hat paranoia here - if you watch appropriate TV programmes you'll see that they do a lot of their targeting using the abundant CCTV long before you get to baggage reclaim, reading body language, and just looking through the half-silvered window. You did see the mirror, didn't you?
Plus the drug dogs (and bees) had been all over your baggage between it coming out of the plane and going onto the carousel.
Technically, if you walked up to the "Declare" counter and said "I've got a kilo of Bolivian Marching Powder here," then you have NOT committed the offence of attempting to import (etc.). Though you have committed the offence of "possession", and possibly also "intent to supply". You'd still be going down, but probably not as hard as otherwise.
Weren't the Philippines once a US state (or something), which might excuse the confusion. To a small degree.