31–40 of 82 posts
An ancestral mount Shasta in California collapsed sending a debris flow 28 miles covering something like 675sq km
[1] https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2019/11/15/the-blackhawk...
For comparison, this is between 4 and 5 times larger than the Osceola Mudflow ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola_Mudflow ) that formed the 550km² of fertile plains around the south end of Puget Sound (near Seattle) and knocked a huge chunk out of Mount Rainier. If you drive from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, notice how flat the land is and think about how that was hilly Cascade foothills and glaciated drumlin…
> According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Ear…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related, there's a cool transition if you hike up the Greenwater river (starting at the town of Greenwater, heading towards FS70) there's a cool transition where the geology switches from Osceola mud to the more typical Cascade foothill geology (about half a mile from the White river).
its a real geologic zoo around there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lengths people will go to to avoid using the metric system!
I think most people can understand what a meter is, or what a kilometer is, but would have no idea of what a kilojoule is, or what the energy inside a barrel of oil is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Ear…
Plate techtonics was very new (and rather controversial, as I understand it), science in the late 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#History_of_the...
For comparison, this is between 4 and 5 times larger than the Osceola Mudflow ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola_Mudflow ) that formed the 550km² of fertile plains around the south end of Puget Sound (near Seattle) and knocked a huge chunk out of Mount Rainier. If you drive from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, notice how flat the land is and think about how that was hilly Cascade foothills and glaciated drumlin…
I grew up in this area... there are two tragedies that most people living in this area don't realize. One, before the war a good chunk of the region was populated by people of Japanese origin who farmed and never got their farms back after the war, and two, it is some of the richest farmland in the world - now covered with concrete tilt-up warehouses, highways, etc. Humanity is interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plate techtonics was very new (and rather controversial, as I understand it), science in the late 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#History_of_the...
My grandfather (a vulcanologist) set up measuring stations in Iceland in the 1930s to prove that Iceland was spreading apart. Unfortunately, the war interrupted that, and he died in the war.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Ear…
They would mostly stop because now the Earth is nicely round. Most of the original bumpiness created during Earth's creation has been smoothed out. That's probably what he meant.
I often use that to explain how spinning cue balls can manage to change the angle of the shot, given the same impact point as a non-spinning cue ball, in an effect pool players call "throw." [1]
The peaks and valleys of the pool ball will reliably grip like gears. Sometimes the balls even stick together momentarily before they release, changing the outcome of the shot, in another effect called "skid". [2]
Also the referenced site is an amazing deep-dive into a niche topic, worth a glance--especially the high speed videos demonstrating the physics of the game.
[1] https://billiards.colostate.edu/tutorial/throw/ [2] https://billiards.colostate.edu/resource_files/onoda_skid_ar...
> The falling mountain top would have displaced up to 27 cubic kilometres of rock—roughly enough to bury the entirety of Manhattan to about the height of the Empire State Building.
It's paywalled then on but I assume it's also enough rock to bury Dubai to the height of Burj Khalifa.