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Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

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Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#191

Post by FredPret »

hinkley wrote: post #164
TechBro8615 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the idea of using a big hole for garbage disposal that we would dump the garbage into the molten core and let it burn? Or is it more about using the hole as a really deep landfill?

Do you know what a hole from the surface to the molten core is called? An active volcano.

Scary thought but you’d (have to) stop digging way above the molten part.

It heats up way above 100C long before you get there, which should be plenty for geothermal energy.

I wonder if sustained high temperature exposure would gradually decompose plastic / toxic waste / other bad things into less harmful components.

Of course, heavy elements came from down there, so it’s probably not an issue to dump them back down. Just stay well clear of the water table!

I am of course not a geologist, and it’d be interesting if one could give a perspective on this.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#192

Post by klyrs »

Zamiel_Snawley wrote: post #174
klyrs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never drilled a hole with 10m diameter before, but I imagine they've been more careful about taking and studying cores than you were.

Surely you mean 10cm?

My word. I and at least one other poster here were misled by the picture at the top of the article.

But, for whatever it's worth, a trip to Wikipedia tells me that they took 2 years off, due to covid.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#193

Post by pavlov »

renegade-otter wrote: post #169
detourdog wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting because the whole ice cap as we know it is around 120k years ago which I don't consider the long ago on human development scale. This also appears to mean that in the past 120K there wasn't a polar ice cap. I read that as the worst case scenario we should be using for long term planning. This also may help determine how fast the ice was built and how fast it will melt. I'm completely an armchair pond…

Maybe humans become more developed because it got colder? Even on a country and global scale, the south is usually "behind" the north. It's hot, no one wants to do anything. The American south (Arizona, Florida) were tiny and unimportant until air conditioning entered the chat. Phoenix was at 100 thousand people in the fifties. The cold makes us think, the cold make us survive, keeps us on the edge - where we need to…

On the other hand there’s something to be said for a comfortable climate that leaves people with time to think when the everyday isn’t a constant complex struggle.

The Inuits of Greenland and Sami people of Lapland didn’t have Aristotle or Confucius.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#194

Post by mywittyname »

sleet_spotter wrote: post #127
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #71

That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?

As the hole gets deeper, the amount of time to bring up core sections and send the drill back down become significant. That combined with the previously mentioned short field season. Drilling more than a few hundred meters becomes very difficult logistically as well, especially in such a remote setting.

Like fetching the n-th element from a linked list by starting at the first node.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#195

Post by pclmulqdq »

lukev wrote: post #187
renegade-otter wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe humans become more developed because it got colder? Even on a country and global scale, the south is usually "behind" the north. It's hot, no one wants to do anything. The American south (Arizona, Florida) were tiny and unimportant until air conditioning entered the chat. Phoenix was at 100 thousand people in the fifties. The cold makes us think, the cold make us survive, keeps us on the edge - where we need to…

This is pretty ahistorical. Most of the world's great civilizations have been from warmer climates. Northern Europe is an exception, not the norm.

All of the world's "great" civilizations come from places with strong seasonality. The ones that didn't have winters had flooding seasons and dry seasons. Some of them had both. It also doesn't need to be bitterly cold for winter to have an effect on crops.

Sumeria and Egypt both had seasonal flooding. Italy and Greece have winters that are cold enough to disrupt agriculture. The Aztecs and Mayans had seasonal floods. The ancient Chinese empires had both. Japan has winters. The list goes on.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#196

Post by joshvm »

klyrs wrote: post #192
Zamiel_Snawley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you mean 10cm?

My word. I and at least one other poster here were misled by the picture at the top of the article. But, for whatever it's worth, a trip to Wikipedia tells me that they took 2 years off, due to covid.

It's more realistic to say that covid caused logistics issue two summers in a row. The first summer was presumably 2020 when almost every country locked down. In 2021 things weren't much better and the various polar programs were dealing with both caution and a backlog of issues from the previous year.

The actual downtime may have been significantly less than 24 months but still could have killed progress for 36. There's a pretty small window that you can deploy for these sorts of operations.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#197

Post by foota »

sleet_spotter wrote: post #127
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #71

That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?

As the hole gets deeper, the amount of time to bring up core sections and send the drill back down become significant. That combined with the previously mentioned short field season. Drilling more than a few hundred meters becomes very difficult logistically as well, especially in such a remote setting.

Who knew, drilling is O(N^2)

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#198

Post by tetris11 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #166
anigbrowl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of modeling is moving toward Julia, so if you don't want to give money to Mathworks here are some alternatives: https://juliaclimate.github.io/Notebooks/

I have moved all my "matlab like" work (mostly signal processing) into Octave for that same reason.

GNU Octave is surprisingly good. I had old MATLAB work from university that I wanted to revisit for teaching purposes, and was surprised by the lockout imposed by the pricing model of MathWorks[1] (120 € for an individual license, 260 € for teaching)

1: https://nl.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=ML&...

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#200

Post by anigbrowl »

javajosh wrote: post #189
anigbrowl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of modeling is moving toward Julia, so if you don't want to give money to Mathworks here are some alternatives: https://juliaclimate.github.io/Notebooks/

Note that the individual license for Matlab is $149/year [0], which isn't crazy IMHO. 0 - https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=ML...

Agreed, it's sofa change for an institution. But I remember cost being a big obstacle when I first wanted to learn serious programming around 1990, so I feel like free programming languages are better.
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