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Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

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211–220 of 356 posts

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#211

There is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...

That would ruin the core samples

We dont want the core samples intact (we want to kill microbiologics on the way down to the goal, which is the crust and determination for other vacuous caverns under the ice, via both vertical and horiz boring. and cameras in crytal lenses to withstand the heat or polarize against the lightwaves of the lasers such that they are clear and a good image can be seen.

/Sci-fi..

My original comment is my idea based on the 1960s patents for nuclear tunnel boring machines which use the reactor heat to exchange the tunnel walls to molten glass... (And I am really into DUMBS - as are many)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832A/en

There are a lot of patents like this - so dont think this line of thought was abandoned, Hello Musk's Boring company... Good thing hes connecting State on a Deep level.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#213
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will also assuredly fuel some interesting ideas about the origin of the Piri Reis map. A 120k year old ice sheet could mean that humans once lived on Antarctica. It does make one wonder if any ancient sea fearing humans happened to carve a world map into a durable material such as granite which could have survived until the modern historic era. Maybe such a map, or other mythological artifact fueld the Roman ide…

The Polynesians used stick maps to identify currents and land masses relative positions. With no evidence I believe navigation cues were built into the vessel. By keeping celestial bodies aligned with marks on the vessel one can achieve a seasonal calendar as well as documentation on how to modify the configuration for the next leg of the journey.

IIRC the 'maps' made of organic materials were very much a rarity slash teaching aid for the later incarnations of traditional navigation cultures of the Pacific which we have surviving material on. Mostly they used mental maps, and of course the most sensitive instruments available at the time ... at least one example of which was hanging their balls off the edge of the canoe to see if they could detect a temperature shift. A good book on the subject is We: The Navigators though it draws only from one area.

Source: Have a Pacific art collection, have been to most of the major museums on the subject, interested in sailing, authored some of the Wikipedia (featured) articles on related watercraft.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#214

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.

Yeah, I realized that after I commented, and when I googled it, the Quora answer I got basically boiled down to "you don't know what will come back out."

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#215

This is a very important project. There is a joke in here about "why not wait 2 years for the ice to melt off if you wanted to look at the mud underneath?" But as the article states, "'This will change climate models because it redefines our basic understanding of how ice moves,' explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen." Much, if not the majority, of climate science is the creation of models (differential equations mostly) that…

It would seem to me, that the best way to do long-scale climate models of a body ; knowing its composition in layers over time is really important to be able to calculate the flow of the layers of composition as particles.

Think of the experiment of light as wave/particle...

Glacial/geological scales operate as thus ; as physical masses of particles, but move in more wave-like manners - so you'll have material suspended and located in the overall mass based on how they were consumed as a particle, but the characterists of the glacial mass will appear to be acting like fluid waves.

So maybe if you know the timeline of a glacial flow, you can predict where the most particulate-glacial-slurry is held (thus minerals, biologic wash off in certain events etc.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't going to be able to vacuum slurry up from several km down.

Even with a very small diameter hose/pipe?

The smaller pipe has less water in it, but the surface area the vacuum can act on is also smaller so the column of water equals out the same as with the larger pipe.

At sea level, that's about 30 feet deep. If you want to bring water up from deeper, you have to move the pump down the well and push the water up the pipe instead of trying to suck water up like the pipe's a straw.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Polynesians used stick maps to identify currents and land masses relative positions. With no evidence I believe navigation cues were built into the vessel. By keeping celestial bodies aligned with marks on the vessel one can achieve a seasonal calendar as well as documentation on how to modify the configuration for the next leg of the journey.

IIRC the 'maps' made of organic materials were very much a rarity slash teaching aid for the later incarnations of traditional navigation cultures of the Pacific which we have surviving material on. Mostly they used mental maps, and of course the most sensitive instruments available at the time ... at least one example of which was hanging their balls off the edge of the canoe to see if they could detect a temperatur…

Yes, I would believe that some as fragile as the stick maps was no way to cross an ocean.

What I think is interesting is the physical representation of an oral tradition. This is different than writing as employed today.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need to get back to the levels pre-industrial revolution?

The point is that net zero is most likely not going to stop warming with 400+ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 concentration most likely has to drop but naturally it does so very slowly. Arguably at this point we already need cooling because 40+C every summer in half of Europe (for instance) is getting annoying...

> at this point we already need cooling

A colossal volcanic eruption could do the trick, and those seem to happen rather unnervingly frequently.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#219
post #182
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a continuous 24/7/365 process. They have a drilling season each year, I believe about 6-8 weeks, have drilled at 2 different sites and been interrupted by the pandemic.

why was ice drilling interrupted by the pandemic?

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Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#220
post #193

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…

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.

That is only due to writing. I always felt that the high latitude civilizations led to technological development due to the high risk and high solitude.
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