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Reports on the Annals of the Former World

Started by Recusant, May 02, 2020, 08:30:19 PM

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Recusant

Quote from: Randy on May 25, 2020, 01:21:30 AMThat was one of the things I liked about working in an office. I usually ended up meeting someone from out of the country. I also got to travel to the UK a few times and work with my team. I'd learn a lot about how the USA is viewed. Many were engaged talking to me and having me explain a few things. I also lived in Germany for three years when I was in elementary school.

I traveled to the Philippines for two weeks once and got to enjoy the customs and the dialog we'd share, including getting completely drunk off a $1.00 bottle of rum made there. I was the only one of the group who didn't have a hangover which surprised me.

I met a doctor who believed in ghosts for instance and quite a few believe that witchcraft is real.

But I'm digressing and I didn't mean to hijack the thread. What I wanted to get to is that so many never travel abroad and talk to the natives. There is so much to be gained by sitting at the dinner table and talking.

It ain't digression, it's discussion. Tangled tangents are part of any genuine discussion. :spaghetti:

Or at least that's how we roll here. 

As for travel, not everybody in the US has a good opportunity to travel. Maybe they'll visit Canada or go to a resort in Mexico if the fancy strikes them. Some get to take a cruise later in their lives, but that's not the same thing at all.

If they're not in the military or working for an international corporation, the cost of living abroad for any length of time is prohibitive. A one or two week tour (preferably not as part of a package holiday) can definitely give a taste of the different perspective. If the person is receptive to that.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

Continuing on the geomagnetic front (gotta love those pop science headline editors  ::)):

"The Mysterious Anomaly Weakening Earth's Magnetic Field Seems to Be Splitting" | ScienceAlert

QuoteNew satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveal that the mysterious anomaly weakening Earth's magnetic field continues to evolve, with the most recent observations showing we could soon be dealing with more than one of these strange phenomena.

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a vast expanse of reduced magnetic intensity in Earth's magnetic field, extending all the way from South America to southwest Africa.

Since our planet's magnetic field acts as a kind of shield – protecting Earth from solar winds and cosmic radiation, in addition to determining the location of the magnetic poles – any reduction in its strength is an important event we need to monitor closely, as these changes could ultimately have significant implications for our planet.

At present, there's nothing to be alarmed about. The ESA notes that the most significant effects right now are largely limited to technical malfunctions on board satellites and spacecraft, which can be exposed to a greater amount of charged particles in low-Earth orbit as they pass through the South Atlantic Anomaly in the skies above South America and the South Atlantic Ocean.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

Freaky. No magnetic field is bad news for a lot of the inhabitants of this place, as stated in the article.

Randy

Quote from: Dark Lightning on May 28, 2020, 10:58:17 PM
Freaky. No magnetic field is bad news for a lot of the inhabitants of this place, as stated in the article.

Think of all the compass makers going out of business!
"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Dark Lightning

Quote from: Randy on May 28, 2020, 11:28:02 PM
Quote from: Dark Lightning on May 28, 2020, 10:58:17 PM
Freaky. No magnetic field is bad news for a lot of the inhabitants of this place, as stated in the article.

Think of all the compass makers going out of business!

I'm reminded of a physics lab I was conducting in the mid-90s. One pair of guys couldn't get their compass to act like it should, and I couldn't figure it out, either. I got them new equipment and moved them to another part of the room, where the thing worked properly. The following summer while inventorying the contents of the cabinets I discovered an immensely powerful magnet in the cabinet below where those two boys were working. Should have looked there that day, but I had enough going on and didn't think of it. I incorporated that into my next set of lectures on magnetostatics. If one put a steel plate on one pole, it took nearly all one's hand strength to pull it off, and if it slipped, blood blisters would ensue. I'm not sure what/where it came from.

Randy

An immensely powerful magnet and no idea where it came from? One would think that someone would be looking for it. When you left the physics lab for the final time did you take the magnet with you?
"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Dark Lightning

Quote from: Randy on May 29, 2020, 01:01:39 AM
An immensely powerful magnet and no idea where it came from? One would think that someone would be looking for it. When you left the physics lab for the final time did you take the magnet with you?

Oooooh, I was sorely tempted, believe me! I was told by one of the more experienced teachers that it came from a cyclotron, but those are all electromagnets. This piqued my interest, so I went and looked for different types of magnets. Either I was misinformed or misremembered what I was told (after all, it was ca '96), but it would appear that it came from a magnetron-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_magnet#/media/File:Magnetron_magnet.JPG

Though the one the school had was a bit larger. And HELLA strong.

Recusant

I've been watching Nick Zentner's geology talks on YouTube for a while now. Recently I watched the one on supervolcanoes. Zentner talked about the Yellowstone hotspot of course, and showed its historic path, leaving large (approximately 30 miles/48 kilometres diameter) calderas behind as it migrated east and a bit north to its present location. Or more precisely, as the continent migrated west and a bit south over the hotspot. (He also took a moment to debunk the "Yellowstone may be getting ready to erupt!!!" headlines that pop up every once in a while.) A new paper discusses two of these ancient calderas, and what they can tell us about the hotspot under Yellowstone.

"Discovery of ancient super-eruptions indicates the Yellowstone hotspot may be waning" | ScienceDaily

QuoteThroughout Earth's long history, volcanic super-eruptions have been some of the most extreme events ever to affect our planet's rugged surface. Surprisingly, even though these explosions eject enormous volumes of material -- at least 1,000 times more than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens -- and have the potential to alter the planet's climate, relatively few have been documented in the geologic record.

Now, in a study published in Geology, researchers have announced the discovery of two newly identified super-eruptions associated with the Yellowstone hotspot track, including what they believe was the volcanic province's largest and most cataclysmic event. The results indicate the hotspot, which today fuels the famous geysers, mudpots, and fumaroles in Yellowstone National Park, may be waning in intensity.

The team used a combination of techniques, including bulk chemistry, magnetic data, and radio-isotopic dates, to correlate volcanic deposits scattered across tens of thousands of square kilometers. "We discovered that deposits previously believed to belong to multiple, smaller eruptions were in fact colossal sheets of volcanic material from two previously unknown super-eruptions at about 9.0 and 8.7 million years ago," says Thomas Knott, a volcanologist at the University of Leicester and the paper's lead author.

"The younger of the two, the Grey's Landing super-eruption, is now the largest recorded event of the entire Snake-River-Yellowstone volcanic province," says Knott. Based on the most recent collations of super-eruption sizes, he adds, "It is one of the top five eruptions of all time."

[. . .]

Both of the newly discovered super-eruptions occurred during the Miocene, the interval of geologic time spanning 23-5.3 million years ago. "These two new eruptions bring the total number of recorded Miocene super-eruptions at the Yellowstone-Snake River volcanic province to six," says Knott. This means that the recurrence rate of Yellowstone hotspot super-eruptions during the Miocene was, on average, once every 500,000 years.

By comparison, Knott says, two super-eruptions have -- so far -- taken place in what is now Yellowstone National Park during the past three million years. "It therefore seems that the Yellowstone hotspot has experienced a three-fold decrease in its capacity to produce super-eruption events," says Knott. "This is a very significant decline."

These findings, says Knott, have little bearing on assessing the risk of another super-eruption occurring today in Yellowstone. "We have demonstrated that the recurrence rate of Yellowstone super-eruptions appears to be once every 1.5 million years," he says. "The last super-eruption there was 630,000 years ago, suggesting we may have up to 900,000 years before another eruption of this scale occurs." But this estimate, Knott hastens to add, is far from exact, and he emphasizes that continuous monitoring in the region, which is being conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, "is a must" and that warnings of any uptick in activity would be issued well in advance.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

900kY?  :haironfire:

Guess I'll be dead.  :clapping:

Personally, since I retired and my daily commute is a bit less than the 94-mile round trip on the freeways (58 miles of it on the San Diego Fwy), my expectation of death is greatly reduced.

I like reading the stuff you post, Recusant. Sometimes I stumble on it myself, but it's still cool.

Randy

I was planning to stick around for another 900,000 years but now I'm not so sure.
"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Recusant

Quote from: Dark Lightning on June 10, 2020, 01:45:03 AM
900kY?  :haironfire:

Guess I'll be dead.  :clapping:

Personally, since I retired and my daily commute is a bit less than the 94-mile round trip on the freeways (58 miles of it on the San Diego Fwy), my expectation of death is greatly reduced.

I like reading the stuff you post, Recusant. Sometimes I stumble on it myself, but it's still cool.

:boaterhat: It's my pleasure.

For any non-geologist with an interest in geology, Zentner's work is worth checking out. A superb geology teacher giving talks for the general public. He's mostly discussing the Pacific Northwest of North America and surrounding regions, but he does a fine job of covering the fundamentals of geology as well as specialized geological topics in an engaging way.

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dark Lightning

Quote from: Randy on June 10, 2020, 02:37:50 AM
I was planning to stick around for another 900,000 years but now I'm not so sure.

[clearing throat for loud proclamation...harrumph!] Accept the lard hey-Seuss cristoball as your personal savior and you will live forever!  ;D Damn, I would not want to live forever.

Randy

Nah, eternity sounds boring. Besides, worshiping for eternity does not seem like paradise to me.
"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Recusant

A nice long cycle. If our species is still around when the next peak arrives in 20 million years or so, they'll see some interesting times.

"The Earth has a pulse -- a 27.5-million-year cycle of geological activity" | EurekAlert

QuoteGeologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a "pulse," according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers.

"Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random," said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University's Department of Biology, as well as the study's lead author.

Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles of major geological events--including volcanic activity and mass extinctions on land and sea--ranging from roughly 26 to 36 million years. But early work on these correlations in the geological record was hampered by limitations in the age-dating of geologic events, which prevented scientists from conducting quantitative investigations.

However, there have been significant improvements in radio-isotopic dating techniques and changes in the geologic timescale, leading to new data on the timing of past events. Using the latest age-dating data available, Rampino and his colleagues compiled updated records of major geological events over the last 260 million years and conducted new analyses.

[Continues . . .]

The paper appears to be open access:

"A pulse of the Earth: A 27.5-Myr underlying cycle in coordinated geological events over the last 260 Myr" | Geoscience Frontiers

QuoteAbstract:

We performed spectral analyses on the ages of 89 well-dated major geological events of the last 260 Myr from the recent geologic literature. These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations.

The aggregate of all 89 events shows ten clusters in the last 260 Myr, spaced at an average interval of ~ 26.9 Myr, and Fourier analysis of the data yields a spectral peak at 27.5 Myr at the ≥ 96% confidence level. A shorter period of ~ 8.9 Myr may also be significant in modulating the timing of geologic events.

Our results suggest that global geologic events are generally correlated, and seem to come in pulses with an underlying ~ 27.5-Myr cycle. These cyclic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and mantle plumes, or might alternatively be paced by astronomical cycles associated with the Earth's motions in the Solar System and the Galaxy.

[¶ added. - R]



"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Tank

I read about this a few days ago in context of the magnetic pole switching.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.