261–270 of 286 posts
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Tsunamis are not like normal waves. I think they might be more like a really big rise of the tides.
Tsunamis are in fact a lot like waves, just real big ones. Tsunamis move quickly, a tide does not.
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I'm not really sure why there should be tsunami walls etc built, since the howevermany scores of nukes it takes probably will leave large parts of the pacific northwest uninhabitable (either de facto or by choice) for a while. So, it would be easier, cheaper and safer (but equally infeasible) to simply force resettlement of the population somewhere without a crack in the crust.
Underground nuclear explosions are fairly well contained; done at the depth required to deal with a fault, they'd probably be unnoticeable. Also, perhaps impossible, but that's a different story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtH0EDLcbwA
From Wikipedia:
"Cannikin was detonated on November 6, 1971 51°28′13.20″N 179°6′40.75″E, as the thirteenth test of the Operation Grommet (1971–1972) underground nuclear test series. The announced yield was 5 megatons (21 PJ) – the largest underground nuclear test in US history.[24] (Estimates for the precise yield range from 4.4[36] to 5.2[37] megatons or 18 to 22 PJ). The ground lifted 20 feet (6 m), caused by an explosive force almost 400 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.[38] Subsidence and faulting at the site created a new lake, over a mile wide.[3] The explosion caused a seismic shock of 7.0 on the Richter scale, causing rockfalls and turf slides of a total of 35,000 square feet (3,300 m2).[24] Though earthquakes and tsunamis predicted by environmentalists did not occur,[33] a number of small tectonic events did occur in the following weeks, (some registering as high as 4.0 on the richter scale) thought to be due to the interaction of the explosion with local tectonic stresses.[39]"
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In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of businesses use Apps for their email, but I'd hazard a guess that you're still looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if that were to suddenly disappear.
As with most people who reason about Google, you are off by at least two orders of magnitude in your estimate.
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I read the whole thing in gripping detail with Mt St Helens out my office window... I was imagining the horror of not being able to blog about my death as the Tsunami was approaching...
Then you'll realise the human impact was mentioned repeatedly in the article - population in the affected regions, elderly people, school children, estimated death counts by different organizations. That was one main focus of the article - how many people such an event would kill. Why is it necessary to prefix/suffix a comment on the article, with an "of course, people will die and that's obviously bad, we don't want…
I grew up in Central Oregon which is surrounded by fresh (geologically speaking) lava fields. I wonder if the Native Americans that were around when Mt Mazama was turned into Crater Lake worried about the disruption of their Obsidian tool making business.
nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific-northwest-1.15655
But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area of research.
So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare? You could build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be les…
So imagine you take one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_(shipboard)#/media/Fi...
Then combine it with one of these - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_balloon#/media/File:Clo...
Imagine the life-raft bundled around a central high powered air pump and heating unit which could deploy in seconds and heat enough air to generate the lifting power to get 6-10 adults/children (plus raft/heater/pump) in the raft to 15 meters in air within the remaining time before the wall of water/debris crushes you all. You would only need to maintain that altitude for long enough to get a tow from a helicopter (or drone) to safety or for the waters to recede.
It's doesn't seem like an easy engineering problem and I didn't even do any back of the envelope calculations to see the power required to lift 1000-1500lbs 15 meters in 10 minutes, but my gut says it's totally within the realm of our current engineering capabilities.
If we could build such a device that could be mass-produced for a reasonable cost and deployed en masse to schools and other highly populated areas within the subduction zone, it could potentially save thousands of lives that would otherwise have 0 chance of survival.
The problems that would need solving and the potential life-saving potential has me kind of excited and my brain is already getting ahead of itself thinking Kickstarter. So if you or anyone else would like to talk some more about this, I'd be more than game to start getting technical.
If anyone sees a glaringly obvious problems in this, please don't hesitate to call it out rather than just rolling eyes and moving on... wish I'd put this up when it was still on the front page.
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I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I loo…
From what I've heard, earthquakes are frequently modeled as following a poisson process
After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather-balloon-like device. You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later. Why is this a dumb idea?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9886142
Basically put a high-powered airpump and heating element in the center of a life raft with a balloon designed to lift a bunch of people above the tsunami wall
Helium is too expensive and rare to be deployed for this purpose (imo) and hydrogen is too reactive to be stored where these life rafts would need to go
As for the dangers associated with anything that could go wrong in flight or putting down somewhere dangerous... I think most people would rather take those chances than just be instantly crushed to death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of businesses use Apps for their email, but I'd hazard a guess that you're still looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if that were to suddenly disappear.
As with most people who reason about Google, you are off by at least two orders of magnitude in your estimate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google runs a company-wide disaster recovery testing event every year. Earthquakes are among the numerous scenarios simulated. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371516
The problem is that you can't really simulate the systemic effects of a really major quake (like a scenario where Mountain View is out of power for weeks).
There were Wall St firms that literally had to get the military to escort them into Lower Manhattan in the days after to rescue servers, tapes, etc and cobble something together in a satellite office.
No one wants a repeat of that, and you'll notice subsequent disasters like Sandy have barely been a blip for most as a result of policy changes.
At this point basically any major company will/should have procedures in place for "perfect" DR, the ability for everyone to work from home indefinitely (and alternate offices/infrastructure waiting for the few people who need something special, like the special needs of a trading desk), as well as obviously having back up data centers with full replication.
#/media/File:Life_raft.jpg){kind=link}
