61–70 of 82 posts
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93 million miles you mean
No, I mean 3 million Olympic size swimming pools, you "do anything to avoid metric system" person
Article didn't mention it but lightning is a significant force in mountain erosion too.
I don't think I have ever heard of this, have any more details?
In the morning, clear blue skies, and we climbed up to have a look. Was sadly not very dramatic, we were expecting chunks of rock blown off, but you could see that the sudden heat had created fresh fissures, and around what we thought was the ground zero of a strike, the surface of the rock had become friable for a few centimetres.
But water/ice is always going to be a dominant feature in rock wasting, those lightning cracks just give it easier ingress.
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 wonder can we put a kind of "earth turbine" to capture some of that energy? Maybe tap it somehow to not release all in one catastrophe and make it safer at the same time.
I am always amazed how thin the biosphere is - 3km down in the water , 3 up in the air - so roughly 1/1000 of the radius of the earth. And the vast majority of the biomass could probably be found in couple of hundred meters close to water level.
There is stuff living in rocks down to about 4km depth (the limiting factor is heat), including far below the seafloor. It's still an open question whether this biomass, some of which has been out of contact with the surface for hundreds of millions of years, exceeds the biomass of surface on Earth, but it's at least in the same ballpark.
> As the rubble crashed down, the energy released would have been equivalent to around six times that of the Tsar Bomba Interesting, wonder if this Approx 1190 event had a global impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period Seems that ended in 1250, coincidence ??
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its a real geologic zoo around there
Love the geologic zoo! I refer to botanical gardens as 'botanical zoos' as well
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> 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…
Geology went hard for uniformitarianism during the 19th century as a reaction against the earlier "catastrophist" worldview, which had interpreted all major land forms as consequences of the great global flood described in the Bible (or something like it). This yielded a strong preference for theories involving continuous processes operating over long spans of time, and skepticism of theories involving sudden, violen…
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Geology went hard for uniformitarianism during the 19th century as a reaction against the earlier "catastrophist" worldview, which had interpreted all major land forms as consequences of the great global flood described in the Bible (or something like it). This yielded a strong preference for theories involving continuous processes operating over long spans of time, and skepticism of theories involving sudden, violen…
Wasn’t there some massive icedam caused lake that was the size of basically the entire Pacific Northwest and it flooded out in a matter of years? And nobody believed that could happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_Lake_Missoula
It's why western Washington state is all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_scablands
The geology texts that predate plate tectonics are . . . interesting. They really didn't know where volcanoes and mountains came from.
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Wasn’t there some massive icedam caused lake that was the size of basically the entire Pacific Northwest and it flooded out in a matter of years? And nobody believed that could happen.
Right, figuring that out was an important step in our appreciation that catastrophes happen and are impactful on a large scale, you know, not just little things that get covered up by longer-term, consistent processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_Lake_Missoula It's why western Washington state is all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_scablands