In this modern day and age, the very idea of thinking about waiting for even a second for the most important of transactions is an un-thought. It cannot be permitted.The sky will fall without instant gratification.
Instant-cooking dehydrated babies are our new product line - 9 months of growing replicated in just 30 seconds once you add boiling water.
It's as far as I got into the "Red (/Green/Blue/Indigo/Polkadot) Mars" series. After finishing the first (Red?) I'd got fed up with too many impossible things before breakfast and the original colonists were being replaced at gunpoint by prisoners and security people shipped from Earth. As I recall. Haven't bothered to get any of the others in the series. Don't think I'll bother picking up any more KSR.
To generate a tsunami, you need to move a significant area of sea floor vertically in a matter of seconds. Moving sea floor horizontally doesn't really do much (so if you see an earthquake report with a "beachball" (motion indicator) indicating a lateral movement, then you know there's unlikely to be any significant tsunami.
Yellowstone is a thousand km from the nearest coast. For an earthquake in Yellowstone area to generate a tsunami in the Pacific NW, you'd need a ground acceleration there of at least 0.5 m/s/s (1/20 g) and a movement of more than a metre. I can't turn that into an exact prediction of the necessary earthquake strength, but the 500-odd km from the Sendai earthquake epicentre was sufficient to make ground motions at Fukushima trivial - well within design limits. It was when the tsunami from above the fault rupture hit that the trouble started.
The Great Lakes are about a third further than the Pacific coast from Yellowstone. Because the energy radiates roughly spherically from the hypocentre (the underground focus of the rupture ; the more-often mentioned "epicentre" is the point on the Earth's surface vertically above the hypocentre), to a first approximation the energy delivered to a bit of ground decreases as the square of the distance from the hypocentre. So any Great Lakes tsunamis would be ~(1/1.3)^2 =~0.59 of the postulated Pacific coast tsunami.
There was a large quake in Yellowstone in the late 1950s (I remember finding a NatlGeog about it in a junk shop when I was a kid. As I recall, it raised substantial waves on one of the lakes in the park, but not enough to cause any damage. If you want to follow it further, you can dig out those reports, then apply the inverse square law described above and pump up your earthquake model magnitude until you get a tsunami you think worth thinking about. A step of 2 in magnitude is a 1000-fold difference in energy release.
With Yellowstone there is a significant difference to the Sendai quake (and the Boxing Day Sumatra quake) - most quakes associated with a Yellowstone event would be from rocks in tension, and rocks are weak. They fail easily in tension. To store lots of energy (to release in a quake) you need to have rocks in compression (as at subduction zones).
Evolutionary pressure for intelligence without matching pressure for small brain size
Brain tissue is physiologically expensive. There's your pressure for small brain size.
That it requires glucose to fuel it (instead of the mix of glycogen and fats which muscle cells can absorb in addition to glucose) adds to the physiological stresses produced trying to run a large brain.
I'm now wondering how large a brain (mammalian) can get before it can't lose heat sufficiently to avoid permanent heat stroke. Elephant sized, obviously - but how much larger?
It's probably helps to mention that while these conditions are nothing like those encountered in Caribbean, the British Isles and Europe are unused to extreme wind conditions, so [many] people aren't aware of how quickly these conditions can overpower you.
Hey hey, less of the broad brush there! While a bowler-hatted corporate thief in the City of London might not know what gale force or storm force means in real life, Britain, Ireland, Norway have enough of a seafaring tradition to know exactly what it means. Hell, thirty years ago I was 100km east of the Shetlands, watching 15m waves breaking up onto the decks as the 1987 "not-a-hurricane" storm hammered up the North Sea. A couple of years before that, I was using two ice axes to keep myself in contact with the ground in strong winds in the mountains.
I don't know when the US national weather service puts it's weather warnings out on the radio, but here they come out at 05:00, a lunchtime update, an early evening update, and the full report again at just before 01:00. Obligatory listening if you're going to sea, into the mountains, or just anywhere outdoors tomorrow. It's got a weird sort of poetry to it.
They also require quite a bit more effort to unplug than the standard 120v plug, so much that I can't reasonably see my toddler unplugging one.
If your toddler did unplug your 240V US-type plug (Hubbel? I forget the names - someone else's problem)... so what? Electrical device stops working. And... ?
If your electrical devices can feed AC back into the supply lead for more than a half cycle or so of the line (60Hz in US, isn't it?) then you've probably got a more severe design problem than just the plug.
I suppose it's theoretically possible for the kid to get a shock by licking the socket - unless US sockets have been redesigned with conductor-covering shutters in the last couple of years. But I'd definitely take the "burned tongue or exploded tooth teaches best" approach on that. "Mummy, electric hurt me when I licked it!" - "well, johnny, that's why I told you not to do that. I didn't say it because I like the sound of my voice."
It's unqualified, so presumably degrees of arc - one of the longest established measures in the world, dating back to several hundred years BCE (middle Iron Age).
Bloody strange way of measuring temperature though.
I've certainly never seen one of these "voice assistants", and don't see any reason at all to go looking for one. I have noticed that my last three phones have has some sort of voice-activated thing which I need to figure out how to turn off. End of voice interaction.
Wil I use one in 20 years time? Maybe. If I'm tetraplegic.
you just abided by essentially a kill rate of the WTC bombing of 9/11 because you chose to have shit regulations.
More people died from fear of flying after the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks than died in the planes and on the ground. By now, it may well be double the number.
People are not very good at understanding risk, probably because it pretty much requires manipulating numbers.
I do not want my mind read and immediately obeyed.
Someone will create a keyboard shortcut (or voice/hand/right-big-toenail combination) that stands for "Do what I want you to, not what I told you to do, idiot machine!"
Or... perhaps I'm deluded about those "undo" icons I see in so many applications.
One of the things that annoys me about this terminology is, there is no way of knowing if a particular volcanic eruption is going to be a "supervolcano eruption" until after the event has finished. Sure, we can say that the last eruption from a particular volcanic centre was a supervolcano (more than 1000 cu.km dense-rock-equivalent of ejecta - that's the definition), but telling if the next eruption from that complex will be... effectively impossible.
A 1000cu.km magma chamber would have a radius of 6.2km. But from the surface (gravity, seismic, conductivity measurements), you generally can't see through the uncertainties at the top to detect the bottom. So you simply do not know the volume of your magma charge to start with. Then, absent samples, you don't know the gas content. And you don't know how efficient the chamber would be at emptying. Because we know that we find many solidified magma chambers underneath piles of geochemically compatible lavas and pyroclastic deposits, what we do know is that some magma chambers produce very voluminous ejecta deposits without emptying completely. (Though we do often see kilometres of movement on bounding faults which suggest kilometres of movement during that eruption.) Before the event, we've no real way of knowing how bad an eruption is going to be- very much the same problem as knowing how big the "next big one" on [insert name of fault] will be.
My oft-made prediction of the first megadeath (million casualty) earthquake being on the Himalayan Front complex under the Gangeatic foredeep is just an educated guess, and the Sumatran quarter-million deaths blind-sided me - an experienced and cautious geologist. The more I think about it, the more foolishly over-precise the term "super-volcano" becomes. We simply do not have (and probably never will have) enough information to predict if the next eruption of VolcanoX will be 1cu.km (Pinatubo, IIRC), 100cu.km (one to two Santorini 1600-ish BCE), or 1000cu.km (Toba, maybe Yellowstone).
Though I find it somewhat ironic that you went through great pedantic lengths explaining said specific meaning WITHOUT SUGGESTING A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE (that is layman-friendly). Any attempts at constructive criticism?
Well, if you tried to say what you mean, without misusing the technical terminology, then I might have an idea of what you were trying to say. As it is, you have failed in your attempt to communicate whatever it was that you were trying to communicate.
Volcanos are good at grounding aircraft - so everyone will have to go on ground transport.
The ash in the air will rapidly fuck any internal combustion engine. Plan on doing the last 2/3 of your migration on foot, along roads blocked with vehicles which have either run out of fuel, or seized their engines with ash-glass on the piston liners and valves.
They would tap the lower-risk edges instead of the volatile center, but there's still no guarantee.
Cooling the margins would also stiffen them. So, cool the edges and you'd do precisely zero-zip-nada-zilch to reduce the heat input to a smaller magma chamber with stiffer walls. That would lead to increasing the rate of pressure increase in the middle of the caldera, which would lead to it's failing sooner.
But hey, don't let me stop you. I'm an ocean away, and unafraid of going vegetarian for another decade or two. Please document the experiment thoroughly and make sure that your seismographs and petrophysics sensors upload their data to remote repositories frequently.
Only a small proportion of our ancestors ever lived in a cave. Because there just aren't that many caves. Once they needed to go somewhere else (e.g., to try to catch the migrating reindeer at that fording point 30 miles away), they developed tents, then wigwams and (USA) teepees - which are pretty close to archaeologically invisible. The multi-year roundhouse wasn't common until around 1500BCE - and even they can be close to invisible to geophysics, so we're wildly short of a reliable census of them.
There were permanent settlements 15,000 years ago.
Citation required.
Catalhoyuk doesn't go back beyond 7500BCE, unless they've found something major in the last couple of days. Jericho maybe 9,500 to 9000 BCE (PPNA levels).
You may be thinking of Gobekli Tepe - but there is little evidence of that site being a settlement site. There is so little settlement evidence that the prevailing interpretation of the site is that it was periodically visited by people from somewhere else, to build the monuments and later worship there. Somewhat similar to the way that 4500 to 5000 years later Stonehenge had no settlement associated with it, a "work" (or "ritual"?) camp a couple of km away with evidence of eating at only one season of the year, and no "villages" in the country in the next couple of thousand years.
by SecurityGuy ( 217807 ) :
I'm curious what technology we have that can actually drill into a magma chamber at all.
s122604 ( 1018036 ) :
Not enough to look it up on the internet apparently We have been drilling to that depth for awhile lately, and the temperature and pressure, while extreme, can be handled by modern materials and equipment. But not to make light, obviously this is on a scale and scope never tried before.
I'm going to guess that you're referring to the recent geothermal hole drilled in Iceland. You'll have noted that they used a water-based drilling fluid, which would have gone super-critical if it went much above 350degC. At which point the loss of predictability in the pressure-volume-viscosity relationships would have made pressure control in the well really, really difficult. I've had to kill a few wells with gas caps trapped which would have fractured the bottom hole formation if we'd brought them up to surface in one go, so we had to kill the well more slowly. A well kill would take a couple of weeks, and cost millions of dollars in materials (and tens of millions in rig hire) - "softly, softly killee monkey," as we'd say once the morning well-kill conference call was finished. That with only having to worry about the gas exsolving from the mud, Well control without "pressure = density (with pressure corrections) * vertical depth" (in appropriate units) is going to be a really esoteric art. I'm not sure that you could do it at all without both in-string and annular pressure sensors at depth - which I've only seen doing coil-tubing drilling. Problem with CT is that the hepta-core cable inside the CT tends to lose it's insulation above about 250degC.
Personally, I suspect that the drilling process - pumping fluid from surface, through the string, and back to the surface (with rock cuttings, to make progress) - has a major cooling effect on the rocks. In the process heating the drilling fluid - which would explain why monitoring the temperature of mud returns is a vital sensor in my panoply of sensors for telling what is happening down hole, and has been for 30 years. For a geothermal well - or an oil well, for that matter, this isn't a big problem, because as you let the well flow, that will bring the heat back to the wellbore. But you'll have taken your drilling tools out by then, and replaced it with a "completion" string.
You're conflating the measured depth of a wellbore (I think the current record is pushing 15km, but it changes on a monthly basis. A new record hasn't rated a comment for years.), and the vertical depth (integral of measured depth and wellbore inclination) - which is largely what control the downhole temperature and pressure. That has been static at 11.4 km since the late 1980s when the Russians couldn't make any further. The Icelandic well was pedestrian - no plans to go below 5km - but they're looking at the high temperatures instead. And they will be reduced - a lot - by the drilling process, then build up again as the wells are flowed. Which is why you need to do your temperature-time plots in dimensionless time (t-t0)/t0 where t0 is the time of ceasing pumping.
Drilling deliberately into a volcano would be a fascinating project to be involved in. I'm keeping my ear to the ground for work like that - and hearing nothing. I note there was a geoscientist job going at Potsdam a couple of months ago, but they weren't looking for anyone with any drilling experience.
These would be drilling plans that you've seen in news reports on fracking, I'm going to guess. They're a small fraction of drilling plans.
Drilling a well with a step-out of 10km is possible, but very difficult. Without searching my database of the 150-plus wells I've drilled, I don't think I've ever gone above 8km step out (and that was an approximately 9-month well which we got to sidetrack #6 or 7 on). But let's say that you can drill your well from 10km away from the region you want to investigate (fracture/ fault zones may make that impossible for lost circulation or wellbore instability reasons)... what do you gain. Your wellhead and drilling derrick are maybe a minute or so flight time further from the origin of anything they trigger to surface elsewhere.To what benefit? Your petrophysics investigation tools still have a depth of investigation into the wall rocks of up to a metre - except for the seismic tools, which you can do with a pickaxe and shovel to bury the geophones and seismic sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Heretic!
BURN the heretic! With fire!
In this modern day and age, the very idea of thinking about waiting for even a second for the most important of transactions is an un-thought. It cannot be permitted.The sky will fall without instant gratification.
Instant-cooking dehydrated babies are our new product line - 9 months of growing replicated in just 30 seconds once you add boiling water.
"sketti"?
Their purpose is exactly the same as your purpose : to make little copies of their genomes in new bodies.
Yellowstone is a thousand km from the nearest coast. For an earthquake in Yellowstone area to generate a tsunami in the Pacific NW, you'd need a ground acceleration there of at least 0.5 m/s/s (1/20 g) and a movement of more than a metre. I can't turn that into an exact prediction of the necessary earthquake strength, but the 500-odd km from the Sendai earthquake epicentre was sufficient to make ground motions at Fukushima trivial - well within design limits. It was when the tsunami from above the fault rupture hit that the trouble started.
The Great Lakes are about a third further than the Pacific coast from Yellowstone. Because the energy radiates roughly spherically from the hypocentre (the underground focus of the rupture ; the more-often mentioned "epicentre" is the point on the Earth's surface vertically above the hypocentre), to a first approximation the energy delivered to a bit of ground decreases as the square of the distance from the hypocentre. So any Great Lakes tsunamis would be ~(1/1.3)^2 =~0.59 of the postulated Pacific coast tsunami.
There was a large quake in Yellowstone in the late 1950s (I remember finding a NatlGeog about it in a junk shop when I was a kid. As I recall, it raised substantial waves on one of the lakes in the park, but not enough to cause any damage. If you want to follow it further, you can dig out those reports, then apply the inverse square law described above and pump up your earthquake model magnitude until you get a tsunami you think worth thinking about. A step of 2 in magnitude is a 1000-fold difference in energy release.
With Yellowstone there is a significant difference to the Sendai quake (and the Boxing Day Sumatra quake) - most quakes associated with a Yellowstone event would be from rocks in tension, and rocks are weak. They fail easily in tension. To store lots of energy (to release in a quake) you need to have rocks in compression (as at subduction zones).
Does this put your mind at rest?
Brain tissue is physiologically expensive. There's your pressure for small brain size.
That it requires glucose to fuel it (instead of the mix of glycogen and fats which muscle cells can absorb in addition to glucose) adds to the physiological stresses produced trying to run a large brain.
I'm now wondering how large a brain (mammalian) can get before it can't lose heat sufficiently to avoid permanent heat stroke. Elephant sized, obviously - but how much larger?
The OP isn't much of an Apple Fanboi if there isn't at least some semen in there, gluing the cat hair and cornflakes together.
Hey hey, less of the broad brush there! While a bowler-hatted corporate thief in the City of London might not know what gale force or storm force means in real life, Britain, Ireland, Norway have enough of a seafaring tradition to know exactly what it means. Hell, thirty years ago I was 100km east of the Shetlands, watching 15m waves breaking up onto the decks as the 1987 "not-a-hurricane" storm hammered up the North Sea. A couple of years before that, I was using two ice axes to keep myself in contact with the ground in strong winds in the mountains.
I don't know when the US national weather service puts it's weather warnings out on the radio, but here they come out at 05:00, a lunchtime update, an early evening update, and the full report again at just before 01:00. Obligatory listening if you're going to sea, into the mountains, or just anywhere outdoors tomorrow. It's got a weird sort of poetry to it.
If your toddler did unplug your 240V US-type plug (Hubbel? I forget the names - someone else's problem) ... so what? Electrical device stops working. And ... ?
If your electrical devices can feed AC back into the supply lead for more than a half cycle or so of the line (60Hz in US, isn't it?) then you've probably got a more severe design problem than just the plug.
I suppose it's theoretically possible for the kid to get a shock by licking the socket - unless US sockets have been redesigned with conductor-covering shutters in the last couple of years. But I'd definitely take the "burned tongue or exploded tooth teaches best" approach on that. "Mummy, electric hurt me when I licked it!" - "well, johnny, that's why I told you not to do that. I didn't say it because I like the sound of my voice."
It's unqualified, so presumably degrees of arc - one of the longest established measures in the world, dating back to several hundred years BCE (middle Iron Age).
Bloody strange way of measuring temperature though.
Wil I use one in 20 years time? Maybe. If I'm tetraplegic.
More people died from fear of flying after the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks than died in the planes and on the ground. By now, it may well be double the number.
People are not very good at understanding risk, probably because it pretty much requires manipulating numbers.
I don't know about you, but my flint knapping is up to the task.
One can read polysyllabic words. On can write polysyllabic words. And one is there to keep an eye on those two suspicious intellectuals.
(I know - it's version 378 of a very widespread joke.)
Someone will create a keyboard shortcut (or voice/hand/right-big-toenail combination) that stands for "Do what I want you to, not what I told you to do, idiot machine!"
Or ... perhaps I'm deluded about those "undo" icons I see in so many applications.
A 1000cu.km magma chamber would have a radius of 6.2km. But from the surface (gravity, seismic, conductivity measurements), you generally can't see through the uncertainties at the top to detect the bottom. So you simply do not know the volume of your magma charge to start with. Then, absent samples, you don't know the gas content. And you don't know how efficient the chamber would be at emptying. Because we know that we find many solidified magma chambers underneath piles of geochemically compatible lavas and pyroclastic deposits, what we do know is that some magma chambers produce very voluminous ejecta deposits without emptying completely. (Though we do often see kilometres of movement on bounding faults which suggest kilometres of movement during that eruption.) Before the event, we've no real way of knowing how bad an eruption is going to be- very much the same problem as knowing how big the "next big one" on [insert name of fault] will be.
My oft-made prediction of the first megadeath (million casualty) earthquake being on the Himalayan Front complex under the Gangeatic foredeep is just an educated guess, and the Sumatran quarter-million deaths blind-sided me - an experienced and cautious geologist. The more I think about it, the more foolishly over-precise the term "super-volcano" becomes. We simply do not have (and probably never will have) enough information to predict if the next eruption of VolcanoX will be 1cu.km (Pinatubo, IIRC), 100cu.km (one to two Santorini 1600-ish BCE), or 1000cu.km (Toba, maybe Yellowstone).
Well, if you tried to say what you mean, without misusing the technical terminology, then I might have an idea of what you were trying to say. As it is, you have failed in your attempt to communicate whatever it was that you were trying to communicate.
The ash in the air will rapidly fuck any internal combustion engine. Plan on doing the last 2/3 of your migration on foot, along roads blocked with vehicles which have either run out of fuel, or seized their engines with ash-glass on the piston liners and valves.
Yellowstone has no associated tsunami threat.
Nature doesn't have a mind, so it can't know what is happening let alone plan it for any teleological end.
Are you some sort of believer in the supernatural?
First time I've seen Kim Stanley Robinson described as "YA".
Cooling the margins would also stiffen them. So, cool the edges and you'd do precisely zero-zip-nada-zilch to reduce the heat input to a smaller magma chamber with stiffer walls. That would lead to increasing the rate of pressure increase in the middle of the caldera, which would lead to it's failing sooner.
But hey, don't let me stop you. I'm an ocean away, and unafraid of going vegetarian for another decade or two. Please document the experiment thoroughly and make sure that your seismographs and petrophysics sensors upload their data to remote repositories frequently.
Only a small proportion of our ancestors ever lived in a cave. Because there just aren't that many caves. Once they needed to go somewhere else (e.g., to try to catch the migrating reindeer at that fording point 30 miles away), they developed tents, then wigwams and (USA) teepees - which are pretty close to archaeologically invisible. The multi-year roundhouse wasn't common until around 1500BCE - and even they can be close to invisible to geophysics, so we're wildly short of a reliable census of them.
Citation required.
Catalhoyuk doesn't go back beyond 7500BCE, unless they've found something major in the last couple of days. Jericho maybe 9,500 to 9000 BCE (PPNA levels).
You may be thinking of Gobekli Tepe - but there is little evidence of that site being a settlement site. There is so little settlement evidence that the prevailing interpretation of the site is that it was periodically visited by people from somewhere else, to build the monuments and later worship there. Somewhat similar to the way that 4500 to 5000 years later Stonehenge had no settlement associated with it, a "work" (or "ritual"?) camp a couple of km away with evidence of eating at only one season of the year, and no "villages" in the country in the next couple of thousand years.
I'm going to guess that you're referring to the recent geothermal hole drilled in Iceland. You'll have noted that they used a water-based drilling fluid, which would have gone super-critical if it went much above 350degC. At which point the loss of predictability in the pressure-volume-viscosity relationships would have made pressure control in the well really, really difficult. I've had to kill a few wells with gas caps trapped which would have fractured the bottom hole formation if we'd brought them up to surface in one go, so we had to kill the well more slowly. A well kill would take a couple of weeks, and cost millions of dollars in materials (and tens of millions in rig hire) - "softly, softly killee monkey," as we'd say once the morning well-kill conference call was finished. That with only having to worry about the gas exsolving from the mud, Well control without "pressure = density (with pressure corrections) * vertical depth" (in appropriate units) is going to be a really esoteric art. I'm not sure that you could do it at all without both in-string and annular pressure sensors at depth - which I've only seen doing coil-tubing drilling. Problem with CT is that the hepta-core cable inside the CT tends to lose it's insulation above about 250degC. Personally, I suspect that the drilling process - pumping fluid from surface, through the string, and back to the surface (with rock cuttings, to make progress) - has a major cooling effect on the rocks. In the process heating the drilling fluid - which would explain why monitoring the temperature of mud returns is a vital sensor in my panoply of sensors for telling what is happening down hole, and has been for 30 years. For a geothermal well - or an oil well, for that matter, this isn't a big problem, because as you let the well flow, that will bring the heat back to the wellbore. But you'll have taken your drilling tools out by then, and replaced it with a "completion" string.
You're conflating the measured depth of a wellbore (I think the current record is pushing 15km, but it changes on a monthly basis. A new record hasn't rated a comment for years.), and the vertical depth (integral of measured depth and wellbore inclination) - which is largely what control the downhole temperature and pressure. That has been static at 11.4 km since the late 1980s when the Russians couldn't make any further. The Icelandic well was pedestrian - no plans to go below 5km - but they're looking at the high temperatures instead. And they will be reduced - a lot - by the drilling process, then build up again as the wells are flowed. Which is why you need to do your temperature-time plots in dimensionless time (t-t0)/t0 where t0 is the time of ceasing pumping. Drilling deliberately into a volcano would be a fascinating project to be involved in. I'm keeping my ear to the ground for work like that - and hearing nothing. I note there was a geoscientist job going at Potsdam a couple of months ago, but they weren't looking for anyone with any drilling experience.
These would be drilling plans that you've seen in news reports on fracking, I'm going to guess. They're a small fraction of drilling plans. Drilling a well with a step-out of 10km is possible, but very difficult. Without searching my database of the 150-plus wells I've drilled, I don't think I've ever gone above 8km step out (and that was an approximately 9-month well which we got to sidetrack #6 or 7 on). But let's say that you can drill your well from 10km away from the region you want to investigate (fracture/ fault zones may make that impossible for lost circulation or wellbore instability reasons) ... what do you gain. Your wellhead and drilling derrick are maybe a minute or so flight time further from the origin of anything they trigger to surface elsewhere.To what benefit? Your petrophysics investigation tools still have a depth of investigation into the wall rocks of up to a metre - except for the seismic tools, which you can do with a pickaxe and shovel to bury the geophones and seismic sources.