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How big was the Tonga eruption?

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Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#181

Post by smoe »

tacker2000 wrote: post #150
phist_mcgee wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the mix of your commas and periods in numbers a little confusing. >305,8 m/s but also 8.7m and ~1.4 hPa. I know that Europeans have a different notation to Americans, but is there a rule here I am missing?

No, there is no missed rule, the comma is the only official decimal separator in these parts. But I can relate to the the OP. Us here in the comma world are forever converting numbers in CSV and Excel files back and forth so as to display them in a proper number format. It’s like that darned USB port, you have to flip it 3 times to get it right.

Growing up in Switzerland with a dot as the decimal separator, I newer knew just how much of an outlier we are in this part of the world until now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...

We also use apostrophe as the thousands separator, so: 1'234'567.89 which I personally always found much more readable that using commas and dots. Is there any other country that uses this combination?

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#182

Post by obmelvin »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #172
distribot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they had incredible techniques. They could detect a remote island by the way the swell is disrupted. Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.

> Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it. Well, they didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage > Of the 270 men who left with the expedition, only 18 or 19 survivors returned. A 93% mortality rate really isn't a success by any metric. Losing 80% of your ships is nothing to be proud of either.

I don't see the point of your snark. What they did was quite hard for the time. What point are you trying to make?

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#183

Post by _qua »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #178

I posted a visualization of the shock wave as a submission, but I"ll repost it here. This is a satellite measurement of integrated atmospheric water vapor (IIUC), so changes in the density of air change the integrated measurement, such that you can see the shock wave travel around half the globe. https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2022/01/22... (it take a few seconds to load, but I believe this is one…

This is a 140 MB gif ◑﹏◐

I hope you don't mind, I reuploaded as an MP4: https://imgur.com/BbaLE5U

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#185

Post by foobiekr »

crakenzak wrote: post #171
lambda_dn wrote: post #165

Wondering if any ships were destroyed by the eruption the scale makes me think there had to be? Could Volcano eruptions be Earth's way of stabilizing climate change? i.e. sea water gets warmer and is no longer keeping the eruptions from occurring. Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?

> Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere? Interesting, this prompted me to read[1] into how it works and made me interested in why we don't pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to help cool down the planet and buy us more time to transition off of CO2/CH4 emitting processes? Is it cost prohibitive? We already cloud seed pretty often so there's infrastructure in place for a…

Because ocean acidification is also a problem and we wouldn’t actually follow through and reduce emissions with the borrowed time.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#186

Post by codesnik »

crakenzak wrote: post #171
lambda_dn wrote: post #165

Wondering if any ships were destroyed by the eruption the scale makes me think there had to be? Could Volcano eruptions be Earth's way of stabilizing climate change? i.e. sea water gets warmer and is no longer keeping the eruptions from occurring. Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere?

> Then the eruptions causes a drop in temperature due to the ash in the atmosphere? Interesting, this prompted me to read[1] into how it works and made me interested in why we don't pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to help cool down the planet and buy us more time to transition off of CO2/CH4 emitting processes? Is it cost prohibitive? We already cloud seed pretty often so there's infrastructure in place for a…

acid rains are no joke either.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#187

Post by parhamn »

_qua wrote: post #183
lnwlebjel wrote: post #178

I posted a visualization of the shock wave as a submission, but I"ll repost it here. This is a satellite measurement of integrated atmospheric water vapor (IIUC), so changes in the density of air change the integrated measurement, such that you can see the shock wave travel around half the globe. https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2022/01/22... (it take a few seconds to load, but I believe this is one…

This is a 140 MB gif ◑﹏◐ I hope you don't mind, I reuploaded as an MP4: https://imgur.com/BbaLE5U

As a 27mb video: https://imgur.com/a/dqc2Gii

I think it's super noisy so it doesn't compress well.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#188

Post by r00fus »

Bilal_io wrote: post #169
nameistaken wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the grand compromise. The US will convert to metric, however everyone else has to convert from commas to decimal points. Places using decimal separators and the metric system are the real winners here.

I'll celebrate for a whole week whenever the US converts to the metric system. I hope I'll still be young enough to handle it.

Since it's a big "moat" for parts manufacturing (mainly for defense industry)... I predict the USA will give up imperial units when it's empire finally collapses.

Perhaps in the next few decades as China builds its own economic sphere.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#189

Post by LeoPanthera »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #178

I posted a visualization of the shock wave as a submission, but I"ll repost it here. This is a satellite measurement of integrated atmospheric water vapor (IIUC), so changes in the density of air change the integrated measurement, such that you can see the shock wave travel around half the globe. https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2022/01/22... (it take a few seconds to load, but I believe this is one…

139MB is utter insanity for an animated GIF.

Crushing it with gifsicle can get it down to 125MB but clearly GIF is the wrong choice of format here.

Here's a HEVC compressed video version which is only 25M and suffers only extremely mild softness: http://david.gloveraoki.net/f/32M.mp4

It would probably be even better if I could work with the source video and not the gif version.

Re: How big was the Tonga eruption?

#190

Post by lovecg »

rootusrootus wrote: post #158
sveme wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit similar to how everyone misunderstands the size of Africa. Here's a nice toy to play around with for a couple of hours: https://thetruesize.com So it makes sense to compare the US to Europe as a continent. Got it. What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?

> What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US? My guess would be population density. The US has ~330M people, Europe has ~748M.

US is more dense though (going by www.worldometers.info). I think these explanations “why we can’t have good things” are too simplistic. Ignore rail and fiber for a second, and look at commuter air travel for example: European market is much more competitive and prices are much lower than for comparable flights in the US.
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