tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33292733664289806102024-02-20T13:42:06.670-08:00Scientists - who are also members of the Church of Jesus ChristThe growing convergence among science, true religion, and philosophy as they seek what is irreducibly correct among different pathways to truth. Really.
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.comBlogger110125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-64478181543684396152023-01-16T13:40:00.000-08:002023-01-16T13:40:50.163-08:00Falsifiability - are data really necessary?<p>I used data in the plural in that title because the editors in the US Geological Survey point out that "data" by definition is more than a singular thing... unless it is a "data point." <span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif"> <br /></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">For years I was a volunteer and answered questions sent in to the USGS via their "Ask a Geologist" portal. We received questions from elementary school kids, from teens and adults interested in their world, and from some people who were not really asking questions. Sometimes,
their "questions" were not questions, but
someone spouting their personal theories... One man was certain there were "encased human bodies" on his property caused by the Great Comet of 1811. When asked where he got that information, he referred me to his personal website. Of course. If it can be found on the Internet, it must be true, right? We scientists generally try to respond in a considerate
manner, but at the same time we feel that, as scientists, it is always important
to keep the record straight. <i>To keep everything anchored in reality</i>.</span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif"></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">That particular individual went on to spout additional theories
about the Earth's magnetic field - and then inadvertently made
an important point that I felt I should reinforce. This was his final sentence: "<b><i>if we can do experiments, we can prove which theories are right and which are wrong</i></b>." </span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif"></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif"><b><i>My reply: </i></b></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">Your query to Ask-a-Geologist is clearly not a question, but instead a statement of your personal beliefs. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">As
far as I know, a majority of physicists teaching in universities still
at least pay lip-service to the idea that any theoretical conclusion
must be verified by experiment. <b><i>A theory must lead to a hypothesis that can be tested - i.e., it must be a statement or idea that is falsifiable.</i></b> <u>Falsifiable</u> is an idea that came from the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), and means that if tested, a theory is either false or it is correct - but it must be <b><i>false-or-correct-TESTABLE</i></b>
in the first place. For a little more than a century after the great
physicists Faraday and Maxwell published their work, this was for all practical purposes a
working definition of "physics." By the middle of the 20th century, the
rather attention-grabbing success of atomic bomb development by
physicists led to a golden age in physics, with branches expanding out
into plasma physics, solid-state physics (where I come from),
cryophysics, biophysics, geophysics, hydrophysics, optics, and other experimental
sub-specialties of physics.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span face="sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">However,
for at least 40 years now, a whole generation of theoretical physicists
(who now dominate some large university physics departments, and thus
control the hiring of younger new faculty) have been attempting to
reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics and the particle
physics zoo's Standard Model - by invoking </span></span><span style="color: #ffd966;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Theory" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>String Theory</b></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">. This theory comes in as many flavors as there are physicists, but </span></span><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">they all postulate as a common denominator the existence of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">undetectably </span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">tiny strings - and totally untestable extra dimensions</span></span></i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">. In an attempt to explain what is generally referred to as the (observed but poorly named) </span></span><b style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle">Anthropic Principle</a></b><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">, they appeal to a belief in a totally unverifiable and untestable </span></span><b style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse">"multiverse"</a>:</b><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"> an
infinite number of parallel universes, of which we belong to the one
populated universe by a sort of Darwinian natural selection. While
mathematically elegant, none of these theories are even remotely
grounded in testable reality. Not only is there no experimental proof
of any of this, but these theoretical physicists (if pressed) </span></span><b style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><i>will admit that their theoretical approaches are <u>unfalsiable</u></i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">. In other words, </span></span><b style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><i>they are no longer "doing physics", but instead are indulging in mathematical philosophy</i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">This
is one reason why I left physics as a profession after a Masters Degree
and continued my education in geophysics instead. If you are
interested in pursuing this theory-vs-experiment issue, I would
encourage you to read Peter Woit's book "<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305350668&sr=1-1">Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law</a></i></b>", and/or Lee Smolin's book "<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/061891868X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305350704&sr=1-1">The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next</a></i></b>", and/or Avi Loeb's book "<i><b><a href="Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth">Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.</a></b></i>"</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span><span style="color: #f1c232;"><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span face="sans-serif">Together these books give me peace of mind. There <i>ARE</i> scientists out there based in reality..</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;">.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;">~~~~~</span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br /></span></p>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-53433530884928757792022-01-06T17:56:00.005-08:002022-12-19T10:34:50.454-08:00...And You Will Have Knowledge – From FOUR Sources. ALL of them must be verifiable.<p> </p><p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">ABSTRACT</span></b>: Eyeballs. Science. News. Revelation/Inspiration, in no particular order.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> However, note that we all must question and verify <i>every</i> source of knowledge. For instance, if you hear someone emphasize the word “unbiased” regarding a public-domain news source, you should become deeply suspicious: why would the purveyors feel they even need to say that? If you hear someone making a distinction between science <i><u>vs.</u></i> religion, it is usually prima facie evidence that the speaker doesn’t understand either. Our modern social electronic world is as full of nontruth as our world was a thousand years ago – <i>Surprise!</i> Well, what can we do about this? The short answer is that <i>we should start with what we are reasonably certain of</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> There are really just four distinct sources of knowledge available to all human beings. By knowledge, in this case I mean information that is true. Just like a thousand years ago, all of them, including our own eyes, <i>must be verified</i> – all of them must be “truthed.” That sometimes requires looking for an underlying motivation behind something that seems… off. Seems wrong.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">DIRECT OBSERVATION</span><o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> The first source of information for all of us starting with infancy is our own eyes and our own ears: direct observation. This seems simple, but it is very important for two reasons: First, because we compare or scale all other sources of information against what we are certain we <i>know</i>. And second, because witness rules and procedures in courts of law make it clear that we cannot always rely on eyewitnesses. Or even our eyes. As Richard Pryor said, “Do you believe <i>me</i> – or your stinkin’ <i>eyes</i>?!??” We should at least think about what we saw with our eyes; quite a few innocent men have been executed because of faulty or biased eye-witness reporting. There is a compelling reason why any good scientist takes copious notes of her/his observations – our memories are the weak link here, not our eyes.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Let’s begin by considering in detail the first source of knowledge: our own personal observation. It is very rare in science to be able to conduct direct observation, believe it or not. If it were easy, the Greeks, Maya, Chinese, and others without instrumentation would have already answered all our scientific questions. Examples include the fact that the Earth is not flat; Greeks by the 5<sup>th</sup> century BC noticed a curved shadow on the Moon during Lunar eclipses, and even reported an observation of sunlight penetrating to the bottom of a well in Southern Egypt – and noting that it didn’t do this in Greece. Eratosthenes is believed to be the first person to determine the <i>size</i> of the Earth – through measurement – in the 2<sup>nd</sup> century BC. A century later, Posidonius, a Greek astronomer and mathematician, calculated the <i>circumference</i> of the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon. Greek observational science was not perfect, however: even Aristotle, revered for millennia as a brilliant scientist, thought hummingbirds did not have feet. Really.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">SCIENCE</span><o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Now let’s consider a second source: science. In order to “do” science, we must depend in almost all cases on <i>indirect observation</i> through carefully controlled experiments, and then <i>the use of inductive and deductive reasoning</i>. A rare exception from my personal life: I was in Northern Saudi Arabia after one of the terrible seasonal sandstorms called a <i>Shamaal</i>. There was so much dust in the air that initially we could not even land at the town of ‘Ar-‘Ar – the pilot could not see the ground to land! Many hours later, after waiting at a Saudi military airbase to the west in Tobuk, we returned and started our borehole logging experiments. I was leading this effort to determine if we could <i>indirectly</i> map the huge phosphate deposits in the region using caliper and gamma-ray logging (yes, we can: and I have published the results). Late that first afternoon, I realized that with my unprotected eyes I could see a huge sunspot cluster on the upper left quadrant of the setting Sun. I diagrammed it in my field notebook. I did this again the second day, missed the third day for some reason, but got it again the fourth day. I realized that with direct personal observation – with my own eyes – I could determine the <i><u>axis</u></i> of the Sun with respect to where I was standing, and its approximate <i><u>rotation rate</u></i> at the Sun's equator. I roughly calculated one rotation to be at least 20 days – it’s actually as little as 24.5 days at the Sun’s equator, and much slower, up to 38 days, at the poles. The axis of rotation of the Sun, looking west from 'Ar-'Ar, Saudi Arabia (about 31 degrees north latitude) is tilted to your right, and the sunspots go from upper left to lower right on the Sun's face. In my internet research, I do not see any evidence that the ancient Greeks, Chinese, or Maya were able to do this. <i>I saw this with my own eyes <u>and recorded it</u>. I know it absolutely to be true.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> For the purposes of the following discussion, you do not need a science degree or even use the word “science” if you are talking about sources of verifiable information guiding you. You could say “knowledge” or “data” or “understanding” when it comes to explaining what you are reasonably certain is correct based on the reliability of the source. I carefully added that qualifier “reasonably” to that sentence – because much “information” available in the public domain is not fact-based. Someone just pulled it out of their ear and yelled loudly about it to get advertising credits. It’s a sleazy business model: to monetize anger. It has also led to the unnecessary deaths of <i>many</i> mentally susceptible people during the Covid-19 pandemic.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Elsewhere I have made a separate distinction between <i>truth</i>, and <i>Truth</i> – the latter with a capital “T” – to distinguish between information that is ephemeral, and information that will not be revised in the future but is always that same information. The Sun will rise tomorrow, for instance, though you may not see it. Also, the nature or existence of God is something that <i>should</i> be unchanging, essentially by definition. It really should <i>not</i> be something that changes with temporary human fashion or culture or group opinion-swings. Fundamentally, if there <i>is</i> a Creator God, and He isn’t just a Transcendent God but an <i>Imminent God</i> who cares about His creations, then He should, by definition, be far beyond our comprehension. Similarly, the detailed evolution of the universe around us is permanently beyond our comprehension, though as scientists we get tiny, enthralling glimpses of it. We just do not have the wherewithal in the way of synapses to encompass a full understanding of either. To suppose otherwise is an incredibly arrogant assumption that implies that we are equivalent to God or the Universe.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> I will here also make a distinction here between short-term correct information (for instance, a weather report) and long-term correct information. The latter I will call Important Information. By this I mean long-term things, things that you would consider or think about if you or a loved one are/is approaching the end of life, for instance. Weather reports are an important source of useful information that we often consider as we go about our daily lives. My wife and I drove through a Sky River on November 12, 2021 – we had not checked the weather reports – and it was terrifying. The time scale is important here, however. On November 9, 2021, there were gale warnings for Port Townsend, WA, which we were visiting. The next day it was calm and sunny in Port Townsend. However, a weather report is well below the threshold of Important Information in terms of what is meaningful ten years from now – or 100 years from now. Is something important to you – or even relevant – 100 years from now? If so, then it fits in the category of Important Information.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Let’s continue to consider <i>science</i> as a source of information to help guide our decisions, and improve our lives. In science we acquire data, but we must also process and interpret it – data generally don’t explain themselves to the non-specialist – and then report our findings. As scientists, we think through our research results carefully, and then decide what it means. I’ve published over 300 books, maps, and scientific papers while working as a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey – and they all must go through technical review. This means that at least two other people – <i>whom I do not choose</i> – must read through my draft papers and vet them for consistency and correct logic. A science manager then reads through all the reviews and the revised draft <i>to make sure that the final result is <u>true</u></i><u>.</u> Do cigarettes improve your digestion after a big meal? That was the public consensus until 1965. By then however, enough data had been gathered to make a reliable interpretation that no, the cigarette company ads were incorrect at best. By 1965 science knew that any benefits beyond addiction-management were outweighed by the irreparable damage that cigarettes did to your lungs, your heart, your face, and your brain.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> But for scientific data to be reliable, you must first ascertain <i>that you have enough of it to even make a judgement or interpretation in the first place</i>. In science, this is called the sampling number, or “n” in an experimental investigation. A single experiment with a binary outcome (for instance just a yes or no) on a single parameter is not science. One of my uncles chain-smoked for 85 years and lived to the age of 97. That’s just a single data-point in a nicotine-benefits study. The second-hand smoke gave his mother-in-law, my grandmother, terminal lung cancer by age 88, however. These are just <i>TWO</i> data-points, and there are a <i>lot</i> of additional unseen variables.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> You need a large enough “n” to even carry out a reasonable statistical analysis of the data you acquire. A state-level cancer dataset would qualify. Which state has the lowest numbers of cancer deaths overall, for instance? Would you be surprised to learn that it is Utah (<b><i><u><span style="color: #3d85c6;">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/cancer_mortality/cancer.htm</span></u></i></b>)? Then can you suggest why? This raises an even more fundamental issue, however: is something even <i>testable</i> or “experimentable” in the first place? The philosopher Carl Popper (1902-1994) gave to the world the concept of “falsifiability”: can something <i>even be tested in the first place</i>? The existence of a God, the existence of a multiverse, what preceded the Big Bang, why <i>is</i> the Anthropic Principle… these are not things that can be tested in the ordinary meaning of a scientific investigation. These belong in another domain sometimes called meta philosophy: <i>sort</i> <i>of thinking about</i> philosophy. They are just big ideas that make us feel warmly smug that we can think about them, but otherwise (unless there is an application) they are useless to humans and their well-being. These things constitute Important Information, but science cannot help us here.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> The concepts of a large enough sample (that “n” number), along with falsifiability, are profoundly important. But there is another almost hidden issue: any large number of data points will <i>always</i> <i>include</i> <i>noise</i>: systemic noise, random noise, instrumental noise, as well as experimental design biases. There is no such thing as a perfect experimental approach, no matter what some NSF grant proposal might assert. In a simplest case example, let’s consider a single variable set, for instance adult height vs. weight. In simplest form, this can be represented as y = a + b*x. The variable “a” is how much one weighs when X (one’s height) is zero – and is just included for general completeness here. One would think that the result would be a straight (upward-tilting) line, but we’ve all seen skinny and obese individuals, so it’s more complicated than that. Data points collected can easily be scattered all over an X-Y graph. If you have sufficient data, there will be data points that are “outliers” – well off the beaten path of what we <i>think</i> might be reasonable results. This could be a morbidly obese individual or someone suffering from anorexia. If there are enough sample points, we can do a quick statistical analysis and determine if a suspicious point is more than, say, two standard deviations away from the average trend of the rest of the data. Some immature scientists might even just discard a data point that they don’t “like” – but this becomes “cherry picking” and is no longer science. That scientist has introduced a new variable – personal sampling bias – into the data analysis.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> We can arbitrarily decide to throw out data points on a graph that lie more than two standard deviations away from the rest of the data… but this is an arbitrary decision also. Why not one standard deviation? Or three? Depending on how we carry out one of these arbitrary data-discard exercises, a “regression” – drawing a line (generally but not necessarily straight) through the data-points on that simplest X-Y graph – could tilt the function curve upwards (increasing weight with increasing height) or downwards (decreasing weight with increasing height). In this example (see figure 1) I am only talking about a very simple, two-variable system. You can represent it on a 2D graph, on a single piece of paper.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Another simple example from our recent trip to the Hoh Rainforest: How many seagulls show up if I throw crackers out into a parking lot in Forks, WA? This seems like an example of a simple scientific experiment. Or is it? Perhaps the final greatest problem with any scientific experiment is to <i>isolate variables</i>. <i>Dependent</i> variables are the nightmare of any scientific study. Toss out too many crackers and all sorts of birds (and perhaps squirrels) will show up, for instance. Throwing out just saltine crackers only, where a Western Gull only is likely to see it, is a personal experimental design bias in the form of several assumptions that may not be justified. Are there crows or scrub jays around? How would I even know that since they generally don’t want to be seen? These are examples of hidden, or missed, or dependent variables. When there is a lot of “scatter” in experimental data it almost always means that there are additional variables or biases affecting our data – complicating things that we may not even realize are there. Gravity, or wind, perhaps in this case. Different bird types that we do not see, perhaps. Some weirdness or blind spot in our data-collection system, or our electronic recording devices, or the species of surrounding trees, even. A more accurate solution could be a 4-D (or 19-D) graph (figure 1).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Related to this is the issue of accuracy vs. precision. If I keep shooting arrows at a target and they consistently land around a single point on the ground, well, I have precision here. If they end up consistently in the center of the target, then this is accuracy. Precision or repeatability in measurements or data-gathering does <i>not</i> lead to Important Information, because the results <i>may not be</i> <i>correct</i>. The trick, then, is to assess <i>accuracy</i>.</p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgcbP-SRbIU7Bv1MJS-FrKJVJ9OQ-daG6VS_LYB5dAyb_e2UrECMX63F9kJEw7GTWZqAOtAyxympTyUQflH8HJ8x_Rl4q9QPhT1jU-vrVqmlnoJPG_EYBv6x1jI1XZdhQmEwCbRodj8CRw-iZr2V3njmc6MtqxGHgrEvGesCl6xPNbjEcbdnI92Smnq=s608" style="background-color: #141414; color: #888888; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="332" data-original-width="608" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgcbP-SRbIU7Bv1MJS-FrKJVJ9OQ-daG6VS_LYB5dAyb_e2UrECMX63F9kJEw7GTWZqAOtAyxympTyUQflH8HJ8x_Rl4q9QPhT1jU-vrVqmlnoJPG_EYBv6x1jI1XZdhQmEwCbRodj8CRw-iZr2V3njmc6MtqxGHgrEvGesCl6xPNbjEcbdnI92Smnq=s320" style="background: rgb(34, 34, 34); border-radius: 0px; border: 1px solid transparent; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="320" /></a><br style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><p class="MsoCaption" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Figure 1. Regression analysis involves fitting a straight line (or sometimes a simple curved function) to a scatterplot of data. One or two noisy data-points can dramatically shift the result. <i>Image from Gonick & Smith (1993), "The cartoon guide to Statistics" Collins Reference.</i><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> All of this is a long way around saying that science is <i>always imperfect, just like news (see figure 2)</i>. Science is a growing, organic thing, very dependent on human or data-gathering limitations, and biases. Science must be constantly tested, self-checked, and compared against older data – and technically reviewed. Those who worship science as the be-all, end-all of creation, <i>do so at great personal risk</i>. This actually has a name: it’s called Scientism. Another way of putting this: you think you’re smarter than the universe.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> As an example of how this imperfect scientific process might affect our very lives and health, consider the science we all saw unfolding in how to deal with the SARS-COV-19 virus in 2020-2021. The virus in its many manifestations, social contexts and variables including different spike proteins, social isolation, age, health, and the <i>wealth</i> of human victims is an experimental scientific nightmare. Stopping the Pandemic so far still seems so… incomplete... after nearly two years of evolving and expensive medical and governmental responses to it. Grotesquely amateur political interference made things worse, of course, but the nature of science is that there are <i>always</i> too many variables and internal biases to realistically take them all into account.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> In a way, the progression of data-gathering, and the evolving analyses we’ve seen during the Covid-19 Pandemic are characteristic of the very nature of good science: it is a growing, evolving thing. It is being conducted by very fallible human beings <i>but keeps getting better</i>. Science is <i>approaching</i> the Correct Answer(s), and every month the recommendations are more reliable, more useful. Masks? Different vaccines? Boosters? Lockdowns? Confronting self-serving, deliberate misinformation? These changing issues are just science happening in public view, self-correcting (ideally) and advancing in the right direction (hopefully). To make the assumption that <i>an early interpretation of that data must never change </i>is unrealistic – and profoundly uninformed. Science <i>approaches</i> truth as a final product. Except in very limited and simple systems, it never actually quite gets there. It’s far better than rabid, uninformed opinion, however. It’s like the famous Winston Churchill quote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><i>“Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”</i></b> – Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">NEWS/INTERNET</span><o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Let’s next consider <i>sources</i> of <i>publicly available knowledge – </i>the hope here is that all the research has already been done for us<i>. </i>Let’s start with, ahem, “news.” Many consider the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal to be reliable sources of information. There are some people who prefer Fox or InfoWars or MSNBC or the Daily Kos as their source of information because it complements something that they already believe to be true or correct (usually of a political nature). In logic, this is called a “confirmation bias.” In some cases, it is the akin to pouring gasoline on a dangerous fire.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> The Pew Charitable Trust finances studies on polling and biases. It has had an unbiased reputation itself for decades because it is <i>in their mission statement</i> to avoid bias. Ad Fontes (“to the source”) is related and does the same. They are both careful in their assessments, and deliberately apolitical. Pew ranks the NYTimes and the Associated Press as sources of reliable facts and information. It considers Fox News, and especially InfoWars and the Daily Kos, to be well outside of a green box (below) surrounding what Pew considers reliable sources of data, and far to the right or left politically. In other words, Fox, InfoWars, and the Daily Kos are not sources of reliable information according to Pew, but sources of wildly skewed opinion that is generally not fact-based. Fox TV personalities, for instance, rail against vaccines on air. <i>Yet it is established fact that every one of them is vaccinated</i>. There are sources on both ends of the political spectrum that Pew and Ad Fontes consider to be unreliable (figure 2).<o:p></o:p></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgowuyMOp_andzeEgB7med6F47rNzQZibUmH_H4-VyiimVr-oI0eYjo80ERWdYk0hab2CPU6t9Ku3AeEbSTRm-EX-sakQID6Hjc9dg80TztNK-ML32QTfmuLmQg-b_rMvrKtehE0Xuklg5G4Vqx5pDfXN7JPuIIPt82nj9ldsQJR3didlnprUyLdqI_=s1430" style="background-color: #141414; color: #888888; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1104" data-original-width="1430" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgowuyMOp_andzeEgB7med6F47rNzQZibUmH_H4-VyiimVr-oI0eYjo80ERWdYk0hab2CPU6t9Ku3AeEbSTRm-EX-sakQID6Hjc9dg80TztNK-ML32QTfmuLmQg-b_rMvrKtehE0Xuklg5G4Vqx5pDfXN7JPuIIPt82nj9ldsQJR3didlnprUyLdqI_=s320" style="background: rgb(34, 34, 34); border-radius: 0px; border: 1px solid transparent; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="320" /></a><br style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><p class="MsoCaption" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Figure 2. Ranking of news sources according to political bias and reliability. The green box is the place to trust. The orange, and especially the red boxes, include sources to avoid if truth is important to you. <i>Image from Ad Fontes Media, Inc. (2018).</i><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> In general, we should carefully avoid basing major life decisions (like vaccination) on anything political and/or not fact-based – on sources outside the Green Box in the figure above.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">REVELATION</span><o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Now let’s take a significant jump and consider a <i>fourth source</i> of information: revelation. Another way to say this: otherwise-unexplainable information from a completely outside source, <i>a Source we may already realize is committed to not violating our personal agency so usually doesn’t explain itself</i>. We all know examples of people who somehow “know” something important without an obvious reason why. In one type of example, we even have a name for this: a mother’s intuition. My own mother once put my baby sister in a highchair out in the backyard of our house. She wanted Barb to get fresh air and sunlight (before UVA/UVB was understood to contribute to skin cancers). Suddenly (I remember this) she rushed out of the house. She said later that she had a “bad feeling” about the baby being out there but didn’t understand why. As she picked up the baby and started to dismantle the highchair to bring it back inside, she saw something move on the underside of the table part: a huge black widow spider. It had been within centimeters of my little sister’s legs.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Unexplainable, outside source, un-asked-for information.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0;">Two Different <i>Depths</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> An analysis of revelation as a source of Important Information must be done at two separate depths or scales: personal revelation, and revelation at a much larger scale: from someone we implicitly or explicitly trust. This could be a parent, a teacher, a prophet (ancient or modern). If you are paying tithing, it strongly implies a belief and acceptance in a prophet or leader of a church as a reliable source of truthful information and guidance. I personally know people who fiercely object to vaccines and masks, though they claim to be members of the Church of Jesus Christ and say that they follow its prophet. If you don’t agree with that leader on, say, vaccination or masks, and you still pay tithing and attend that Church, then you are suffering a serious rational disconnect in your life. This is the equivalent of gross hypocrisy in conversation – or even schizophrenia. What else don’t you agree with him on?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0;">Reading Scriptures & Prayer<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0;"> </span></b>Perhaps the most consistent way to receive personal revelation is by reading the scriptures, and in personal prayer. It’s unsurprising that prophets for millennia have encourage the human family to study the scriptures available to it. There is a downside to this approach, however: the revelation you <i>want</i> may not be the revelation you <i>get</i>. If you do as modern prophets have suggested – “<i>search</i> the scriptures” – instead of just reading them from start to finish, you may be able to improve the efficiency of the want/get convergence here. Of course, if you have not read the Standard Works through a few times already, you won’t really have any idea what to even search for, Topical Guide notwithstanding.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0;">Worthiness<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="color: #0070c0;"> </span>There is another issue here that is perhaps the most important of all: being in tune. In short, <i>worthiness is critical</i>. Years ago, I worked with Venezuelan geology teams in the deep jungle of the Amazonas Territory (now Amazonas State). It was incredibly dangerous, where things like Bushmaster snakes were the least of our worries. One Venezuelan friend fell on his machete and sliced open his right radial artery. The USGS geologist that I had assigned to work with Henry said he saw a 2-meter spurt of arterial blood shooting out. He managed to stop the bleeding and together they called for an emergency medevac on their HF camp radio. There was someone listening on the frequency we used, and that someone called for a rescue helicopter. Henry Sanchez lost perhaps a third of his blood (he went into shock if he wasn’t upside down in the aircraft) but he lives in Tucson today. Another American scientist working in a different jungle camp came back to our base a week later and told me that they could <i>listen</i> to the rescue, but that their radio <i>could not transmit</i>. Gary had no idea that Henry had even survived. This is a long way of saying that you need a <i>means to communicate</i> that <i>works in both directions</i>, you need to have someone <i>listening</i>, <u>both ways</u>, and you need to be using the <i>right frequency</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> In the radio world there is a <i>lot</i> of information floating out there. You must tune into the transmission you seek. If you are not in tune with the Holy Ghost, because you are living a lifestyle dissonant with Him, then you can’t really expect that He will be terribly encouraged to even deal with you. <i>You are not working on the same frequency</i>. You cannot just yell “SAVE ME!” Or perhaps say, “I really like that flashy car – I <i>need</i> it. What? Well, no, I don’t have money – I don’t even have a job! You, God (somehow) <i>owe</i> it to me.” This sort of discordant thinking almost never works, the Prodigal Son being a notable (and for many of us, encouraging) exception.<span style="color: #0070c0;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0;">Testing<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> You must also consider the data reliability issue for personal revelation, just like in science, news, and even personal observation. Revelation must be testable, and this part can be frustrating because the process takes a long time to verify. Here there is yet another advantage to arriving at an advanced age. If you have received “understandings” (or whatever you wish to call them), and they are self-consistent and pan out over time, then you will have steadily increasing confidence in those understandings – revelations – if they arrive the same way. You have a growing database, so to speak. This often means in my personal experience that you are not thinking about the subject when the understanding arrives. With age, you will begin to note that the understanding or revelation does not even come into your mind in English or whatever language you tend to think in… but arrives as an <i>instantaneous understanding</i>. More commonly, the understanding is just a peaceful feeling in the midst of a personal disaster or general chaos. This even has a specific name: “<i>The peace that surpasseth understanding.</i>” I first experienced this after I had passed the written physics qualification exam at the University of Illinois, an exam to decide if you could go on to work on a PhD. That year, however (1970) there were over 1,500 graduating physics PhDs – and available jobs for just 236 of them in the United States. It’s amazing how I can still remember those specific numbers, many years later. The University of Illinois had decided to drastically cut back on their physics graduate student population: the post-atomic-bomb era was officially over: the country no longer needed hundreds of thousands of physics PhD’s. So, the Physics department that year added an <i>oral</i> component to the Quals, as we called them. This I failed miserably, meaning that I could not stay at the university beyond that semester. I faced a real personal disaster that also affected my wife, who had a year to go to finish her BA degree. As we stared into the sunset through the window of our little apartment, however, I had an incredible feeling of peace, of <i>not-to-worry</i>. This, I now realize, comes from the Atonement. Peace that mitigates suffering. That sense of peace is always remarkably devoid of details – it “…<i>surpasseth understanding</i>.” In other words, it usually makes no logical sense. Only four years later did I finally understood that sense of peace.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> It works. It’s very real. I’ve experienced it many times.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Less commonly, a revelatory understanding arrives with <i>very specific information</i>. In another personal example, which happened on June 7, 1995, the message to me arrived at the most comically illogical time. It came in the middle of a contentious meeting between the Saudi Deputy Ministry for Mineral Resources, the US Geological Survey, and the French counterpart of the USGS in Jeddah called the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières. Angry words were being exchanged and I was just keeping my head low to avoid being drawn into what I had earlier realized was just another example of Saudi paranoia… but which my French colleagues had yet to realize was not even a rational discussion. Suddenly, a diamond-hard, instantaneous understanding hit me. The message: “<i>The time to leave Saudi Arabia is in October – Do not worry about this. This is in answer to your prayers for the past 18 months concerning your wife’s declining health</i>.” When this bright and very sharp understanding arrived, I nearly fell out of my tilted-back chair.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> I walked home and unpacked that understanding, converting it to English to share with my wife. To us it made no sense initially… because our children would normally start school in August. This particular revelation arrived four months before our departure from the Magic Kingdom, as we called it. Months later we realized that the specific timing saved me from a Reduction in Force in the US Geological Survey… that took place with almost no warning in August 1995. It also meant that one son could finish his senior year in his Swiss boarding school, and not in a Virginia high school where he knew no one. He ended up totally fluent in French as a result. Five hours after that revelation arrived, I learned that the Saudi Deputy Minister had sent an order down through the chain of command: “Order Jeff Wynn to stop practicing his religion.” From the context, I realized that the Mutawa, the Saudi religious police, had been following us to our at-that-time-illegal Church house-meetings on Fridays.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> This was actually part of a larger Kabuki Theater exercise where an <i>Assistant</i> Deputy Minister was trying to mess with the mind of the <i>Deputy Minister –</i> whose job he wanted. However, that Deputy Minister was not stupid, and had already anticipated that his deputy would trigger a mass arrest of the LDS people in Jeddah at that time. This would have meant that half our Jeddah Ward population – Filipino brothers and sisters – would have been beaten and then deported with a massive loss of an annual income. However, with five hours of warning, I was prepared. When I got the Stop Practicing Your Religion message, I immediately offered my resignation from the USGS mission to Saudi Arabia… and requested reassignment to my former job in the United States. About 40% of the USGS Geologic Division was RIF’d in August 1995, and I returned in October.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> To recap the revelatory patterns: revelation usually but not always arrives unbidden, though you may have been thinking and praying about the subject off and on for months or even years beforehand. It arrives sometimes as a profoundly peaceful feeling that makes absolutely no sense considering the circumstances. Sometimes it arrives as a sharp, clear, instantaneous Understanding that must be unpacked and converted to English in order to share it with others.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> When you find yourself suffering through one of the many Bad Times in your life, be prepared: sometimes it takes 2 – 4 years to even see the Light at the End of the Tunnel. Pain and sadness don’t turn off like a faucet with a magical prayer. I got my PhD in Geosciences with an Electrical Engineer as a thesis advisor <i>four</i> years after failing the physics oral qualifying exam in Illinois. It was in a different field (I became a geologist, geophysicist, hydrologist and oceanographer, with publications in astrophysics and archaeology). It opened up huge opportunities for my family – they have all lived in multiple countries on diplomatic passports and are all multi-lingual.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Sometimes revelation arrives in response to prayers about how to fulfill an aspect of a Church calling – it usually arrives as a quiet, clear idea about what to do. When this fourth and most common revelation happens, it almost always arrives for me, at least, as a clear understanding before I can even kneel down to pray for help… and I generally smile, get down on my knees anyway, and just say thanks.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> Thus, knowledge comes to us, imperfect human beings, in at least four different ways, with many variants and complexities in each of the ways or sources. I think it’s reasonable to say that there are probably as many variants as we are each different people. Note, however, that if we don’t make a sincere effort to verify – truth out – our sources of knowledge, we run the risk of making life-changing decisions based on incorrect information, decisions that we may regret.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> If not done carefully, we could regret those decisions forever.<o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="background-color: #141414; clear: both; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #ffa400;">~~~~~</span></b></div></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div><span style="background-color: black;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="color: white;"><div style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="background-color: black;"> Not included in this list of The Big Four are two other means that humans have used to gather knowledge: <b>Philosophy</b> and <b>History</b>. I have deliberately put these at the last for a crucial reason: neither can be rigorously tested, knowledge derived from either cannot truly be falsified. However, philosophy is crucial for a number of reasons, including teaching us as humans how to think rationally. We cannot "do" science if we cannot use rigorous logic in experimental design, inference, or deduction. History, for a different reason, also cannot be tested - our sources are always at least secondary and cannot be easily evaluated even with video or audio verification - the past is irredeemably gone, unreachable, and un-testable. Even with video and audio recordings it is an Interpreter's game. Nevertheless, history holds scientists to an honesty standard. Without the history of science we can fall into that oldest fault-think: that we are at the top of the game, that we represent the ultimate success, and that we are perfectly and finally correct. History makes it abundantly clear that science is a very human, evolving thing - never perfect, but always getting better </span></span></div><div style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="background-color: black;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Philosophy and history thus enforce humility. </span></span></div></span></span></div><span style="background-color: black;"><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="color: white;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="background-color: black; font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: black;">From these six, then, all human wisdom stems...</span> </span><br /></span></div></span></span></div><br /></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-69348254680584720362021-02-22T16:36:00.001-08:002021-02-22T16:36:55.566-08:00There is Always Someone Smarter – Some Lessons on Self-Comparison<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">The IQ Test</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As a
12-year-old living in Bakersfield California, I was sent by my Catholic mother
to Garces Junior High. Unbeknownst to my parents, the administrators gave all
incoming young men an IQ test. There was not room for all 80+ of us in one classroom,
so it was made clear to us that the “dummies” would be sent to the “other”
classroom. Those of us not included in that group were initially organized in
seating according to the IQ results. There were six rows with seven desk-chairs
in each. I was initially ranked #2. I didn’t know much, but thought this was
sort of cool. The one guy with the same or higher score was named Kenny Larkin, and we
became friends. Like me, he hated sports. Unlike him, however, I could outrun
everyone else among all 80 young men – except one. This was because as a poor kid I had only a broken-down bike to get from home to school and back. The whole way home, every day, was uphill. And the bike only had a 3rd gear – so I had over-developed leg muscles.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We were
strictly segregated at Garces from the young women, who were taught by another
monastic group, this one comprised of black-veiled nuns. We rarely saw any of
the girls, and only at a distance. The Christian Brothers were a non-priestly
monastic organization running the boys’ side of the school. My mom and stepfather
were shocked to learn from me about several horrifically savage beatings<b>*</b> that
Brother Gerald and Brother Remy inflicted on us boys. Mindful of this, and of that
IQ test, my new stepfather cajoled my Mom over a year and a half into letting
me attend a public high school, Bakersfield High. He knew this school also had
a nascent version of AP classes called the “0.5 program.” Every class was
numbered, like English 9.4 for freshman college prep, English 9.3 for kids
expected to go into business or auto-mechanics, and English 9.1 for special ed.
English 9.5 was the much harder class intended for the smarties in the school. I
learned it was designed to encourage talent. It is the reason I ended up
attending the University of California at Berkeley and, ultimately, earning a
PhD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><b>*</b> My best friend in elementary and
junior high was Marcus Espitia, whose father was Mexican and whose mother was
African American. We had defended each other against bullies in Saint Joseph
elementary school for years, and started Garces together. One day in seventh
grade Brother Gerald was pacing back and forth in front of the class, declining
Latin nouns out loud from a book he held. Brother Gerald was a huge man – 240
lbs./110 kg. My friend Marcus had lifted the lid of his desk above where his
books were kept, blocking Brother Gerald’s view. From there he was shooting
spitballs at the guy sitting across the aisle from him. I watched as Brother
Gerald slipped down into that aisle without changing his monotonous repetition.
Suddenly he leaned hard on the top of Marcus’ desk, trapping his head inside
the desk, cutting off his air. I can still vividly recall Marcus’ arms and legs
thrashing around, his head locked in the desk as he tried to free it. Then –
still intoning the Latin – Brother Gerald lifted the lid with the hand holding
the book, and with his open right hand hit Marcus in the side of the face so
hard it physically lifted him out of his seat. Marcus hit the adjacent wall,
then slid to the ground, stunned. Still droning on, Brother Gerald proceeded to
pick up each book in the desk and throw it – as hard as he could – at Marcus’s
face. One. Two. Three. Four. Marcus finally got up off the floor and ran to the
door to escape… with books bouncing off him several times before he reached it
and exited. Brother Gerald then strolled back to the front of the class and
continued reading out the Latin declinations to us – without any vocal
interruption through this entire process. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We
all just sat there, frozen in our seats. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Through
much of the rest of my life, however, I wondered about what this IQ partitioning
did to all of those boys mentally? Especially, what did it do to those left in
the “dummies” class?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">“Old 160”</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Fast
forward a decade and a half. I had a PhD and was traveling for work with the US
Geological Survey. I’d just finished a training course in science management in
Monterey, CA, and on my way home to my family in Virginia I stopped in Long
Beach to see my sister. Barb had arranged for a float plane to pick me up and
take me to Santa Catalina Island off the coast. She was on a 32-ft sailboat
with her boyfriend, surnamed Rogers. My mother had warned me that “Rog” was a
successful attorney and proud of the fact that his IQ was tested at 160. He
boasted of this frequently enough that Mom referred to him as “Old 160.” The
amphibious plane landed in Catalina Harbor and Barb met me at the dock. She
took me and my suitcase to an inflatable Zodiac and drove me out to the sailboat.
For the next two days we motored around the island while Barb and Rog dived for
“bugs” – illegally harvested lobsters. My job was to stand at the side of the
boat to receive the grab-bag as they would bring one up every so often. We
raised sails only for the traverse back to Santa Barbara at the end of the
trip. Rog seemed to be probing me – and watching me closely – the entire time;
I sensed a weird vibe but didn’t know what to do about it except answer his
questions. I later gathered two things from Barb: (1) She and Rog had already
decided to part company as a couple, and (2) Rog had somehow gotten the
impression that I was super smart. A PhD does seem to fool some people. He also
understood that I was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ – and he
had difficulty reconciling these things. Finally, as we were docking back in
Santa Barbara, Rog looked over to me and said this: “Jeff, I admire you. In 30
years, I will be a lonely alcoholic, surviving until I die on this very boat –
if I’m lucky. You, on the other hand, will be happy and surrounded by
grandchildren.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The lesson
here seems obvious to me, as it was to Rog.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">3-D Chess</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My first
three years in the US Geological Survey were spent in the Denver field office.
I was part of three geophysics branches of the USGS, all centered in rented
office space on Colfax Avenue. I was the last young PhD hired in a huge hiring
spurt that lasted from 1971 to 1975. One of those other newly minted PhDs I
will call Gary. Gary was super smart, and made sure that everyone knew it. After
three years in Denver, I was invited to move to the USGS National Center in
northern Virginia, to become a deputy science office chief. This apparently led
several of my former colleagues to feel jealous. (I was naïve enough that I
didn’t learn this until later.) Once, while I was back in Denver for a technical
meeting, Gary invited me over to his house for dinner, and I accepted. As soon
as dinner was over, he pulled out an interesting game – a 3-D form of chess. Gary’s
wife immediately started to complain to him about mistreating his guest (this
must have happened before). The game had multiple vertical levels and different
pieces than traditional chess, with different movement rules – which he quickly
explained to me, the novice. One could move a piece horizontally, vertically,
and on diagonals. “Let’s play,” said Gary. His wife again told him that this
was inappropriate, but Gary insisted. After about 30 minutes, I said “I think
that’s checkmate.” Gary stared at the boards for almost 20 seconds. Then he
stared at me, without saying a word. I felt increasingly uncomfortable, and
suggested that I should leave because I had an early technical meeting the next
morning. Gary, wordlessly but still staring at me, just walked me to the door. I
was never invited to dinner there again. I learned later that he and his wife
divorced soon after. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But here’s
the thing: I’m not smart enough to beat <i>anyone</i> at chess. My high-school best friend once beat me at chess 24 games in a row. However, <i>this</i>
time I had help in the form of inspiration, guidance that I listened to and
followed. After no contact for ~20 years I learned that Gary had retired because
he had developed Parkinson’s Disease. I called to express my concern and
sympathy, and we talked for a long while. Our earlier friendship was renewed
with just that call. Gary was a humbler person, and I hope I was also. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">“This Man is <i>GUILELESS!</i>”</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><b><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></b>In
2002 I received two phone calls at my office in the USGS National Center. By
this time, I had returned from two mission chief assignments in Venezuela and
Saudi Arabia. Both calls were from colleagues to notify me that the position
for chief scientist for volcano hazards had opened up. “You should apply for
this,” both told me. I talked with Louise, who was working on Capitol Hill at
the time, and whose work-week-with-commute was 63 hours (we counted them). “By
all means,” she said. It would require relocating to the Pacific Northwest, but
we had visited Washington State during our obligatory,
State-Department-required Home Leave from Saudi Arabia years earlier – and we both
loved it. I applied… and then forgot about it. Two months later the selecting
official suddenly called, said he was in Reston, and wanted to interview me. What
I thought would be a 15-minute conversation lasted more than two hours. He said
that quite a few people had applied, and the list had been whittled down to
just three short-list applicants. A week later I got a call telling me that I
was selected. I called Louise. “By all <i>means</i>,” she answered. There
followed a horrific six weeks, where I had to wind down four separate research
projects, pack up an office and a laboratory, prepare and sell our house in
Virginia, find a house in Washington, and move with one of our sons and several
birds across the continent… while the DC Shooter was still at large. (He was
caught, just 7 miles from our daughter’s house, when we were passing through
Indiana.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There were
two other applicants for that job, however. One was selected later for another
management position in Denver. The other had been the chief of a science team
in the National Center, but had left that position under mysterious
circumstances. He was later selected to be the volcano program coordinator. One
of my senior scientists, who knew him well, remarked that this new program
coordinator was the smartest man he (Carl) had ever encountered. At the time
the USGS was experimenting with a misbegotten thing called “matrix management.”
In this system I had line authority over about 120 scientists and support staff
– but the program coordinator held the purse-strings, and had a say in how the
financial allocations were spent. The Golden Rule is “Him what got the gold,
rules.” Initially we worked together equably enough, but he apparently decided
that I didn’t have enough smarts for the chief scientist job. He decided this
because I would not follow Machiavelli’s “The Prince” as my guiding management
philosophy. I’m not joking here – that really was the issue. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So… why had
I been selected over him for the chief scientist position? He began to try to
manage behind my back, confusing the heck out of everyone in my office. I
confronted him several times, and he would back off with some excuse like “I’m
just trying to help you!” I tried hard to think the best of him, and went out
of my way to be open with all my information. At one program council meeting I
passed something to him privately. He stared at me, then turning to the rest of
the people present said in a loud voice and with a nasty smile, “This man is <i>guileless</i>!”
He did not mean it as a compliment. As I thought about this, however, I
concluded that I would not want to be any other kind of man. Machiavellian
game-playing at other people’s expense is not something I would <i>ever</i>
want for my legacy. To do nasty things – like force people into directed
reassignment moves to drive them out of the USGS just to make a point – was
something he recommended. “If they don’t <i>fear</i> you, they won’t <i>obey</i>
you,” he told me several times. I’m not making this up. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Eventually
I talked with my own senior executive supervisor, as this was causing
increasingly serious confusion among my staff. They were getting orders from the
program coordinator to stop whatever they were doing, and do a task for him…
without bothering to notify either me or my subordinate scientists-in-charge. I
was surprised to learn that my senior executive manager knew <i>all</i> sorts
of interesting things about this program coordinator – like, why he had been
forced out of that chief scientist job earlier. Eventually, with the
intervention of several senior executive managers, rules governing and limiting
the program coordinator’s behavior were written and signed – to his transparent
chagrin. Interestingly, and only surprising because it took so long, a
few years later the USGS abandoned matrix management as “unworkable.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The program
coordinator by this time found himself “glass-ceilinged” – he had been forced
out as a chief scientist by misbehavior once before, and now was being spanked by senior executives again. He was fearful of rotating back to a scientist position, certain that
people he had abused before would want to get even with him. (He was right – I
got quite an earful after he left.) The man left the USGS for a dean position
at a small distant university. On the last day we were together, he sat across
from me at the conference table in my office to discuss some funding issue. As
he was preparing to leave, I mentioned to him that I was resigning my chief
scientist position and returning to research; I didn’t say why. We both knew
that my job was a rotational management position, and that I had done my five
years of 55-84-hour weeks; Louise had repeatedly suggested to me that I might
want to consider getting a life for a change. He stared at me for a full half-minute,
trying to fathom what I meant by this – what was the strategic move I was
pulling here? Finally, as someone who had coveted my position for five years, and thinking I was somehow "gaming" him, he ground out, “Why are you telling me this?” I responded, “Professional
courtesy, I suppose.” He stared at me icily for another very long time, then
without another word put his notepad in his briefcase and walked out. I never
saw him again. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This man
was extremely intelligent. But he based his personal management style, the way
he dealt with other human beings, on all the wrong principles. I won the
years-long management fight with him, but not because I was smarter than he was. Many
people had ferociously negative opinions of him as a manager and as a human
being. I just happened to be the last one in a long line of people he had tried
(and often succeeded) to hurt. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">Where is this Going?</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Several
times during my initial years with the USGS, Louise’s brother told her I must
be secretly working for the CIA, because, he said, a job requiring me to travel
all over Saudi Arabia, Europe, the Far East, Australia, and South America – was
the perfect cover for a spy. When other people have asked me if I’m a spy, I’ve
just said no. Because I’ve never been one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There is
some reasonable basis for this thought, however. Once in Saudi Arabia a
non-descript man walked into my office, flashed his US Consulate badge at me,
and asked if he could ask me some questions. “Sure,” I said. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We have
heard rumors that there was a gun-battle in Hail, in the central Arabian Peninsula.
My colleagues and I cannot find meaningful information about this, but we are
aware that you travel all over the country for your work. Have you heard
anything?” In fact, I had – two of my staff who came from Hail told me that the
‘Amir’s office there was abandoned and covered with bullet holes. He took notes
and thanked me – and did not leave a business card. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Something
like this happened to me when I first got to Venezuela. The ambassador at the
time told me that a person on his staff wanted to talk to me. Again, a very
nondescript individual came into the ambassador’s office. He said that he
understood that I would be traveling all over Venezuela in my job as USGS
mission chief, leading the mapping project for the jungle-covered, roadless
southern half of the country. He reminded me that there are "<i>alcabalas"</i> –
Guardia Nacional checkpoints – on all roads between major cities in Venezuela.
As diplomats, they did not have paperwork that would get them through those
checkpoints. One had to have a reason to pass through them, especially a
non-Venezuelan. “Yes, this is correct,” I replied. “Would you please take
photos of roads and bridges and checkpoints in your travels, and share them
with us?” he asked. I stared at him. Sure, I thought – poison the trust that
our host agency, the C.V.G., had for the US Geological Survey? Huh. No, I said.
And, BTW, I never saw that man again. He was not a bad man, of course – just trying to do a job.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A year
later, after we had seen several deaths up-close in both Puerto Ordaz and the jungle, as
well as having had a number of close calls, a USGS colleague in the USGS National
Center sent down several programable “Fly-Away” HF radio transceivers. I had no
idea at that time how to use them. I asked around in the embassy in Caracas, where I picked the units up (Venezuelan postal service being so corrupt) and was told to go to the offices of the “Political Section.” However, it was made clear to me that I should go the Political
Section offices on the <i>sixth</i> floor, not the fifth floor (which is behind a
gold-leaf-lettered, fancy glass door). The Economics Section that I was vetted
to (I was a formal State Department employee with Ambassador-grade of FS-12 during
the three years I was there) was on the fourth floor, and the Commerce Section
was in the third. I took the elevator to the sixth floor, and when it opened, I
found myself facing only a blank wall with a steel door in it. The door handle had a
cipher lock. A man came out, said he understood I needed some help with a
radio, and took me downstairs to the secluded little park on the embassy grounds.
After looking around carefully, he showed me how to set up an HF antenna, and
how to program a frequency into the 25-kg radio. He then gave me a small, torn
piece of paper, with a 10-meter-band frequency penciled in on it, and told me
to call him at that frequency when I got home. I flew home to Puerto Ordaz, 700
km away, and set up the radio on my apartment terrace. I called the frequency
he had given me, and he answered. “Okay, it works. Please lose that piece of
paper now. Good luck in the jungle.” And then he hung up. I never learned his
name. He took a personal risk to help another human being who was at serious
risk working in the jungle. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">So, OK, I’m
not CIA, as I’ll tell anyone. However, I do </span><i style="color: #ffe599;">not</i><span style="color: #ffe599;"> tell anyone (except
Louise) what my IQ is. I got that number from a high school counselor’s folder
with my name on it as she discussed potential scholarships with me. I’ve given
lectures at annual MENSA meetings, but no, I am not a member of MENSA. And here’s
the thing: </span><span style="color: red;"><i>that IQ number is not important</i>.</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"> My wealth is not important. </span><span style="color: red;">Comparing
yourself to another person – read those stories above – leads to <i>nothing
good</i>.</span> <span style="color: #ffe599;">There is </span><i style="color: #ffe599;">always</i><span style="color: #ffe599;"> someone smarter than you, someone wealthier
than you. Just try to do good things for other people; compete with </span><i style="color: #ffe599;">yourself</i><span style="color: #ffe599;">
if that floats your boat. If you live your life right, you will do just fine when
you are forced to go toe-to-toe against the guys who think they are smarter, or
better, or tougher. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span><i><span style="color: red;">You
don’t need to buy into their problem.</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffe599;"> </span><span style="color: #04ff00;">And 100
years from now, it won’t matter anyway. </span><o:p></o:p></p>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-26670476133105282632020-11-06T16:01:00.001-08:002020-11-06T16:25:48.968-08:00A Long and Happy Marriage<p> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
1995, I crossed the dangerous Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia for a third time.
On this expedition Gene Shoemaker, the father of astrogeology and only human
buried on the Moon<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: medium;">*</span></span>, joined the Third Zahid Expedition (<span style="color: #6fa8dc;">https://www.empty-quarter.com</span>).
Together we spent five days and six nights at the Wabar meteorite impact site, mapping
it geologically and magnetically. We even collected thermoluminescence samples
to definitively age-date the impact. We published several scientific papers (including
the November 1998 issue of Scientific American) showing that a 3,500-ton
iron-nickel asteroid hit the sand at 7 to 10 kilometers per second. In
milliseconds it delivered a kinetic energy blast equivalent to a Hiroshima atom
bomb. </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So… What
does this have to do with marriage?</span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
the way back, both of us exhausted from the 17-hour drive and the high
temperatures, Gene and I were standing beside our Hummer vehicle in the late
afternoon sun while the engineers refilled the tanks for the final run back
into Riyadh. We had talked hypervelocity impact physics and geology for days –
what really happens when a 3,500-ton iron body detonates on impact? After six
days, however, we had run out of technical things to talk about. While staring
into the eastern desert Gene parenthetically mentioned that he and his wife
Carolyn had been married for 46 years – and that they were both surprised that “it
just keeps getting better and better – we are just happier and happier together
than ever before in our marriage.” </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
struck me for several reasons. For one, Louise and I had been married 27 years
by that point, and we had gone through some very hard times. Huh, I thought: there’s hope for us yet.
Another thing I had noticed by then – and Gene confirmed it for me from his
experience – was that couples who had been married many decades <i>all</i>
seemed to be happy. As a general rule, when one died, the other was not long in
following. Could these two things be related? Could this all be part of a
Larger Plan?</span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
I was first married, I slowly began to notice an interesting thing about Louise.
Without ever saying anything about it, she was always doing something small and
thoughtful for me. The better portion of food. Making the bed. Insisting I had
the better pillow. Doing the dishes if I didn’t get to it quick enough. There
were so many small things that I began to notice. After about a year (I’m slow
in a number of ways) I mentioned this to her. She seemed surprised and had to
think for a bit before she responded. “I love you,” she said. </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A lot
of the problems we had in the later, middle part of our marriage could be
attributed to a relatively simple thing. I had decided, after we had nearly run
out of cash several times, and once were afraid to even take a very sick baby
to a doctor, that my primary responsibility was to <i>provide</i>. I was the <i>husband</i>
– I needed to make sure I earned enough to support my growing little family. I
developed a habit of working routine 55-hour weeks. I travelled extensively for
field work – weeks at a time. I had become wedded to something else – my work. My
<i>duty</i>.</span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
said I am slow at some things. It took me <i>years</i> to come to a very simple
decision: Louise came first. My work, my personal and professional goals, even
the kids were secondary to anything that I might do that would make Louise
happy. It became the core of my existence. </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
morning I waited in the van to drive her to an appointment. She got in, and as
we started driving, she said “You are always so kind to me.” Huh? “What did I
do?” I asked. “You opened the door for me so with all these things in my hands
it was easier for me to get in. And now you’re driving me to an appointment.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Well,
duhh. </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s
become so ingrained for each of us, that neither of us takes any thought other
than to do kind and considerate things – small acts – whenever the opportunity
presents itself. </span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And Gene
was right: we are so much happier, after 52 years together now, than we were
even when first married. We worry about our kids and grandkids together. We
share interesting news stories. We prefer to walk together, even though we have
different paces. We ask the other first if it’s OK to spend money on something.
It doesn’t matter if the other says “Of <i>course</i> – you don’t have to ask!”
Kindness and thoughtfulness for the other always comes first.</span></span></p><span style="color: #fcff01;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is
my prayer – my expectation in fact – that when one of us passes to the Other Side,
the other won’t have to wait around, lonely, for very long. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> ~~~~~</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #a64d79;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: medium;">*</span></span> <span style="color: #ffa400;">January 6, 1998, NASA release: Lunar spacecraft carries ashes,
special tribute to Shoemaker</span></span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">There could be no finer tribute to the legendary planetary
geologist who said his greatest unfulfilled dream was to go to the moon.</span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Tonight, the ashes of Eugene M. Shoemaker are to be launched in a
memorial capsule aboard Lunar Prospector to the moon. The polycarbonate capsule,
one-and-three-quarters inches long and seventh-tenths inch in diameter, is
carried in a vacuum-sealed, flight-tested aluminum sleeve mounted deep inside
the spacecraft.</span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Around the capsule is wrapped a piece of brass foil inscribed with
an image of a Comet Hale-Bopp, an image of Meteor Crater in northern Arizona,
and a passage from William Shakespeare's enduring love story, "Romeo and
Juliet": </span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b>And, when he shall die,</b></span></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Take him and cut him out in little stars,</span></b></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And he will make the face of heaven so fine</span></b></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That all the world will be in love with night,</span></b></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And pay no worship to the garish sun.</span></b></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Shoemaker was best known for his work on extraterrestrial impacts
and for his later collaboration with his wife, Carolyn, in the study and
discovery of comets. He was long a distinguished scientist with the U.S.
Geological Survey at Flagstaff, Ariz., where he established the agency's
astrogeology branch. He was killed July 18, 1997, in a car accident in Alice
Springs, Australia, during field research on impact crater geology. Carolyn
Shoemaker was injured in the accident.</span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">"I don't think Gene ever dreamed his ashes would go to the
moon," Carolyn Shoemaker said shortly before leaving to witness the Lunar
Prospector launch. "He would be thrilled."</span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The Shoemakers' children and their spouses, as well as a sister and
brother-in-law, are also at Cape Canaveral for the event.</span></i></span></p><span style="color: #ffa400;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">"This is so important to us," Carolyn Shoemaker said.
"It brings a little closure, in a way, to our feelings. We will always
know when we look at the moon, that Gene is there."</span></i></span></p>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-66814005479146895912020-09-19T14:09:00.000-07:002020-09-19T14:09:55.408-07:00<p> </p><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #141414; color: magenta; font: italic bold 24px "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; position: relative; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><a href="https://www.ldsscientist.com/2011/12/white-age-and-respect.html" style="color: magenta; font: italic bold 24px "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; text-decoration: none;">Age and Respect</a></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #141414; color: magenta; font: italic bold 24px "Times New Roman", Times, FreeSerif, serif; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; position: relative; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></h3><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3862061529731685393" itemprop="description articleBody" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #141414; color: white; font-family: Allerta; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1.4; orphans: 2; position: relative; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; width: 536px; word-spacing: 0px;"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">When I was in my early 30's, my hair rather abruptly turned gray (from dark curly brown to mostly straight white, with occasional strands of dark brown in it). I inherited this from my mother, who was bothered that <i><u>her</u></i> hair turned white in the front during her 30's. I thought it was sort of cool-looking, however: her hair when I was a kid, and my hair when I was barely no longer a kid.<br /><br />In my late 30's I was invited to teach classes in applied geophysics to upper-division and grad students at the University of Maryland and The George Washington University. After meeting with the Department Chairs, in both cases I was designated a full professor at both universities. In part this was because I already had a long science bibliography from my work with the US Geological Survey by that time, but I suspect that it also had to do with my hair color. Respect!<br /><br />When I turned 40, I was called to serve as a counselor to the CJCLDS Dulles Branch President; this Branch was formed to help a large number of southeast Asian refugees who had arrived in Northern Virginia following the end of the Vietnam War. Right away I noticed that I was treated <i>very </i>reverently by our mainly Laotian brothers and sisters - they would bow deeply while making the 'wai', the hands-together formal bow of greeting. The deeper the bow, the greater the respect. I came to realize that their culture afforded <i><u>great</u></i> respect to older people - this was deeply ingrained from childhood. I remember feeling a bit awkward at being treated with a respect that I felt I had not earned. I still thought of myself as nearly a kid.<br /><br />At one point, we put on a Road Show with our Dulles youth. They were short of non-musician guys in the main part of the play, so Jared and I died our hair (my white hair, his golden hair) a deep black, in order to fit in. The box of hair-color said it would wash out with the next shower... but it didn't. For many weeks afterwards, people would pass me in the hallways in the immense US Geological Survey National Center, stop, turn around, and say "Jeff? Is that you?" Just changing the color of your hair can disorient people around you.<br /><br />In 2000, I was the General Chair of the Symposium for the Application of Geophysics to Environmental & Engineering Problems. This was the annual international meeting of the Environmental & Engineering Geophysical Society (full disclosure: I was president of this society in 2002-2003), and is called "SAGEEP" - because some international visitors can get authorization to travel to a "symposium", but not to a "meeting." Go figure.<br /><br />As General Chair, I organized this complex nightmare: we took over the Hyatt Arlington hotel for a week, I arranged for Dan Goldin, the NASA Administrator to be our keynote speaker, and we had over 300 international participants - who all seemed to need a letter to justify getting an American visa. I noticed that a number of people who I had called in to help me from among the DC Metro geophysical community would sometimes stare at me. One day, while driving one of them back to his office in downtown Washington, DC, the guy abruptly asked me how old I was? I was 53 at the time. <i><span style="color: orange;">"Wow,"</span></i> he said, <i><span style="color: orange;">"You look like you are older than that, and you look like you are younger than that. You have the energy of a 20-yr-old, but you had the guts to called Dan Goldin!"</span></i><br /><br />The hair again. That, and probably my sugar addiction.<br /><br />Now, in the United States we have a culture that fairly worships youth - and it was very disorienting to our younger Dulles Branch Laotian-Vietnamese-Kampuchean teenagers, recently transplanted from rural Southeast Asia. This youth-worshiping cultural emphasis can be felt just about anywhere in this country, but it is strongest in New York City and Los Angeles, at least in my observation. The desperate effort to look youthful in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood can sometimes lead to bizarre creatures that could only be described as moms trying to out-dress each other in their teenage daughters' clothes. Madonna recently complained bitterly that her hands looked OLD, and there was nothing she could do about them. With few exceptions (Helen Mirren and Judy Dench come to mind) his adulation clearly affects your ability to market yourself as an actor or an actress. Steven Spielberg once had to quell rumors that Harrison Ford was going to be digitally "younged" in an Indiana Jones film.<br /><br />At one point not long ago I looked at a passport photo, and compared it to a passport photo taken when I was 40. Hooo... when did <i>THAT</i> happen?!?? Around this same time I saw a TV special of before-and-after examples of several individuals getting a face-lift. The surgery was filmed, and it frankly stunned me. Don't get me wrong, I have done minor "auto-surgery" on myself a number of times. An infected ingrown toenail, acne cysts, and larvae multiplying in my feet in the jungle are strong motivations to pick up a scalpel.<br /><br />I was shocked at two things: the crude, intrusive nature of a face-lift surgical procedure (the anesthetized patient was treated like a slab of beef), and the... wrong-ness of the face afterwards. It's basically the "uncanny valley" of a robot not quite looking like a human. You see, as we age, a lot more changes than just the tension of our facial skin. The juxtaposition of young and old in the same individual is strikingly artificial, and it doesn't take a Michael Jackson to convince most people that they shouldn't mess with the natural progression of things. The human eye is finely-attuned to the most subtle changes in a human face - that's why working with a corpse (when I took the Advanced Trauma Life Support class at the University of Maryland Medical School) was so shocking. Visually you get mixed signals... all wrong.<br /><br />I rather enjoy being a grandpa, or as my father-in-law put it as he held our first daughter, <i><span style="color: orange;">"I'm the father of several aunts and an uncle." </span></i>I enjoy having clear, corrected vision after replacing my cataracts.<br /><br />The take-away here is that we <i><u>will</u></i> age, it's <i>NOT</i> bad, and moreover there is <i><u>nothing</u></i> we can do about it that won't look at least a bit bizarre (it's easy to identify the Hollywood types who have tried plastic surgery). If we didn't age, we wouldn't want to leave this planet. We would fear the <a href="http://ldsscientist.blogspot.com/2011/08/color-of-door.html" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;"><b><span style="color: cyan;">Colored Door</span></b></a> to the next level, and might choose to be stuck here permanently in a do-loop. If you think you want to live forever, consider the last time you were stuck at home on a rainy Sunday. Instead, I think it's great to enjoy each season of our lives and accept the admiration and respect that our changing faces and hair mean <i><u>we've earned</u></i>. The fact that I get to play with my grandkids and I don't have to change diapers anymore is sort of like<i> 'having your cake and eating it too'</i>.<br /><br />Life is good. There is a progressive order to it. <b><i>There is a reason for that order. </i></b><br /><div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~</div></div></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-6192510546193119582020-05-05T13:59:00.000-07:002020-06-15T12:24:24.860-07:00The First Vision - More significant than you might think.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
saw a pillar of light, exactly over my head, above the brightness of the Sun,
which descended gradually until it fell upon me. When the light rested upon me,
I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing
above me in the air. The first spoke to me, calling me by name, and said,
pointing to the other, “This is my Beloved Son. Hear Him.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">--Joseph Smith</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">There are some interesting physical phenomena involved here:
Gravity is apparently constrained, and there is a
“Beyond-a-19th-Century-technology-light-show,” among other things. These unusual
features were also apparent in the three visits by Moroni to Joseph in 1823.
Physicists have learned a lot in the past century, but mostly we’ve learned how
much we <i><u>don’t</u></i> know. Some possibilities (among the <i>known</i>
unknowns) are Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and Quantum Entanglement – any of which
may be involved. This is another reason for physicists to look forward to crossing
over to the Other Side: we’ll learn what they are, and what else is involved!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">TWO Brief Asides Here: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a. This wasn’t the
only time something like this happened. As noted, three years later in 1823 Moroni appeared the same way. These weren’t dreams either, but physical visits.
Moroni <i>physically</i> carried away the plates after the translation was
completed. Also, Joseph was not the only witness to this kind of visit; the
Three Witnesses, the Eight Witnesses (who handled <i>physical</i> plates), and
others (e.g., several in the Kirtland Temple) also witnessed similar visits.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>b. Why did God the
Eternal Father visit a humble, half-grown, poorly-educated kid in the boonies
of western New York – the wild west of the US at the time? Why not visit the
Pope Pius VII in Rome? The chief Imam in Makkah? President James Monroe? There
is an important pattern here: Christ himself was born in the <i>most humble</i>
of circumstances. He died in the <i>most humbling</i> and degrading way the Romans
could engineer. Humility is important – the Savior makes this clear time and
time again throughout the scriptures. <i>By example</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Remarkable Consequences followed from this visit: The First
Vision restored to us the <i><u>only</u></i> Pre-Nicaean “Primitive
Christianity” Church on Earth; One <i><u>not</u></i> “…made of The Philosophies
of Men, Mingled with Scripture,” but instead fully consistent with what Jesus
taught:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: 39.0pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
is the only Church that preaches <i>all</i> the Bible, including the principle of a S<u>eparate
Godhead</u> (Matthew 3:16-17 <i>“And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up
straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he
saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a
voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
</i>and Matthew 17:5 <i>“While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed
them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.”</i>), <u>Baptism for the Dead</u> (see 1
Corinthians 15:29<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>“Else what shall they do
which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then
baptized for the dead?”</i>), and a <u>Pre-Existence</u> (Jeremiah 1:5 “<i>Before I
formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the
womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.</i>” and Ecclesiastes 12:7 “<i>Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and <u>the
spirit shall return unto God</u> who gave it.</i>”), among other doctrines
unique to this Church – a Church that the Savior <i>countenances</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
is the only Church that has planned and <i><u>operates</u></i> 168 Temples,
with 49 more planned or under construction, all over the Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This
is the only Church, as far as I know, that is also <i>preached</i> in all the
World – even in China, even in Saudi Arabia (where my family were personal
witnesses), even in Israel (despite severe restrictions).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is likely even practiced in North Korea
(though sub-rosa among diplomats, inferred from our experience as such in
Venezuela and Saudi Arabia). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">This represents <u>only the 6th time</u> (according to my
count) that <i>God the Eternal Father</i> has physically visited the Earth.
Most other interactions with prophets (Abraham, Moses, Paul, the Brother of
Jared, Nephi, etc.) were with <i>Jehovah</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>THE SIX
TIMES FATHER IN HEAVEN WAS PHYSICALLY PRESENT: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>1.
Organizing Adam and Eve (Genesis, Temple)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>2. Casting
Adam and Eve out of the Garden (Genesis, Temple)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>3. Baptism
of Jesus (Matthew 3:16–17)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>4.
Transfiguration on the Mount (Matthew 17:5)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>5. To the
Nephites (3 Nephi 11:7)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>6. The Sacred
Grove (JS—History 1:11–20)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let’s now put
this into larger perspective (warning – we're entering the nerd zone here):<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Specifically, let’s talk about Exoplanets: In the 1830’s we
learned from multiple revelations that there were “other worlds” in addition to
ours. This was <i>far</i> beyond the science of the time. Astronomers were only
just discovering what existed in the Solar System – Neptune had not yet been
discovered. In fact, there is very <i>explicit</i> information about other
worlds in the Temple Endowment ceremony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To give a sense of how ahead-of-its-time this <i>other worlds</i> concept
was, bear in mind that it was only in 1933 that Edwin Hubble finally proved through variable stars in a photographic plate that some blurry things seen in telescopes were other <i><u>galaxies</u></i>!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">In the past 30 years astronomers actually began <u><i>discovering</i></u>
“exo-planets.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">As
of January 2020: 4,108 exoplanets are “firmly” verified. <u>18 can support
liquid water</u>. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(About 1,000 of
these exoplanets have been found by the Kepler satellite.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Kepler-452b
(1,402 LY) and Kepler-1638b (2,492 LY) are Earth-sized and orbit G-type stars
like ours, found at 0.75 – 1.5 Earth-orbit radii from their star. They lie in
the <u>“Goldilocks Zone”</u> – Not too hot/too cold.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Note
that the Milky Way galaxy hosts 100 billion stars… maybe twice that. It’s kind
of hard to count.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">We
have enough information from the local galactic vicinity now to suggest that 10% - 26% of stars can host an
Earth-sized planet. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">That
means there could be 5 billion Earth-sized “worlds” in our galaxy alone. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
1995 the Hubble telescope was turned to a dark, star-free part of the northern
hemisphere sky to gather a “Deep Field” image. This effort took 10 days to
gather enough photons to see anything in that apparently empty patch – a tiny patch
of sky the size of a tennis ball at a distance of a football field. Another
Deep Field image was acquired in the southern hemisphere the following year,
and both images were <i>full</i> of far-distant galaxies. These have been
extrapolated by cosmologists to suggest there are as many as 2 <i>trillion</i>
galaxies in the universe.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Some simple multiplication gives 2 x 10<sup>+12</sup> * 5 x
10<sup>+9</sup> ≈ 10<sup>+22</sup> worlds out there. That’s </span></span><span style="color: yellow; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (in other words, </span><u style="color: yellow; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">ten
sextillion</u><span style="color: yellow; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">) Earth-sized worlds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Of course, there are caveats upon caveats with this number.
For one thing, the early universe did not have enough heavy elements for any
Earth-like worlds until sufficient stars had formed, grown old, and gone nova/supernova to provide the life-critical heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon,
nitrogen, phosphorus, silica, and iron, etc. How many of these worlds orbit in
a “Goldilocks Zone”? How many orbit single stars instead of complex binary
stars? How many have "correct" ratios of light isotopes (C, O, N, P, Si, etc.) to
heavy isotopes (Fe, Cr, Mn, etc.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">From latter-day revelation we know that the Father and the
Son have tangible bodies of flesh and bone (D&C 130:22–23 / Articles of
Faith 1). They look like us (or more correctly, we are organized in their
image). This <i><u>implies</u> </i>that Father in Heaven can be in only one place at a
time. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">I want to qualify this “implies” word <u>carefully</u>,
because the history of humankind is full of men who try to put human limits on
a Creator who is far beyond what they can possibly comprehend. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="color: yellow;"><i><u><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">But if so</span></u></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, then the significance
of Father In Heaven visiting <i><u>our</u></i> world even once is <b><u>huge</u></b>. </span></span><span style="color: yellow; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Much less </span><i style="color: yellow; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><b>six times</b></i><span style="color: yellow; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Why <i>Now</i>?</span></span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"> I put together a chart
of the (growing) Signs of the Times. I found seventeen separate prophesies
about these Signs in scripture – and more than half of the seventeen – nine –
have been fulfilled only since 1820! There are <u><i>just five more to go</i></u>, and
two are pretty terrifying:</span><span style="color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0);"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9eG3EkifItMlGQT9SCkGfnb6xOBBvC8vyoRk4CKjQDrOaBpE9Zh_OjNZSTHnJko-aJD-mrVAuxJL9RK5sVQ93MhIqX4Av-xyelp6StLke092TX6sf1doHqf7jSBMB51m48FTZ4mPavJU/s1600/SignsOfTheTimes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="1072" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9eG3EkifItMlGQT9SCkGfnb6xOBBvC8vyoRk4CKjQDrOaBpE9Zh_OjNZSTHnJko-aJD-mrVAuxJL9RK5sVQ93MhIqX4Av-xyelp6StLke092TX6sf1doHqf7jSBMB51m48FTZ4mPavJU/s320/SignsOfTheTimes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Clearly
the Signs are accelerating. <i><u>Gathering Steam</u></i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">In
“Nerdlish” the curve is <u>non-linear</u>; the 2nd Derivative is strongly
positive. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">Pres. Nelson reinforced this observation in the October 2018
General Conference: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">“If you think the church has been fully restored, you’re just
seeing the beginning… There is much more to come.… Wait till next year. And
then the next year. Eat your vitamin pills. Get your rest. It’s going to be
exciting.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">We
are celebrating the 200th anniversary of one of <b><i><u>just six Cusp Events
in all of human history</u></i></b>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: yellow;">I am so grateful that my Father in Heaven chose to come here
personally – first to bring about, and now to <u>accelerate</u> our salvation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="color: yellow;">==Jeff Wynn, 8Mar2020, the last talk given in the Grass Valley Ward.</span><o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<br /></div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-84742940542688984812019-01-15T21:07:00.000-08:002019-01-15T21:07:57.926-08:00Climate Change - Is IT REAL?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Yep, Nelly, that cow’s left the barn.<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You can choose not to believe in climate change, but it's pretty much a done deal. A landmark peer-reviewed study (Cook, et al., 2013) evaluated 10,306 scientists, and concluded that over 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and largely caused by humans. These are the guys actually gathering the data and doing the scientific analyses – not politicians. No “belief” is really necessary anymore, because evidence such as spiking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sea-level rise, the disappearance of arctic sea-ice, northward migrations of pests, and decimations of formerly healthy species are all around us.<br />
<br />
In fact, climate change has been going on since the beginning of time, and there is a huge trove of geologic evidence supporting the fact that our world is always changing. This evidence comes from stable isotopes in lake sediments. It also comes from fossil evidence such as cold-blooded fresh water animals whose remains have been found in Antarctica. It comes from packrat middens (ancient packrat nests that can be dated using Carbon-14) and tree-rings (Thompson, 1990). One of us has visited Anasazi building sites in the southwestern United States, and the density of these structures in now-waterless lands prove that a large number of people lived in a region that today could no longer support even a fraction of that evident population. We could fill our house with all the documentary evidence that has been accumulating that shows our climate has changed and is changing.<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What climate-change deniers are fighting about most about these days is a slightly more specific question: how much of the recent climate change is Anthropogenic – that is, caused by humans? It's no surprise to anyone that we are using more fossil fuels today than are being replenished, by many orders of magnitude. Records kept since the 1950's at an atmospheric observatory on Mauna Loa volcano's north flank in Hawai'i show a steady rise in CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> in our atmosphere. It has gone from 312 parts per million in 1955 to over 400 ppm today. (See for instance http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ).<br />
<br />
That’s a 25 percent increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in less than our lifetime!<br />
<br />
Recently, scientists have made enough measurements to quantify what is contributing to this CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> increase in our atmosphere. It’s not volcanic eruptions. A USGS scientist named Terry Gerlach (Gerlach, 2011) showed that volcanoes do not contribute most of the CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> to our atmosphere. In fact, they contribute a minuscule amount, two orders of magnitude less than the contributions to atmospheric CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> from humans. Here are the final measured numbers:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Volcanoes: 0.26 Gigatons of CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> per year <br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Humans: 35.00 Gigatons of CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> per year<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And it's <i><span style="color: #ea9999;">accelerating</span></i>: there has been a 550 percent increase in the rate of atmospheric CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> emissions <i>just since 1950</i>. CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> is a known greenhouse gas, as high-school kids sometimes prove in physics classes. A greenhouse gas is a gas that causes heat to be retained by our atmosphere. Methane is an even more effective heat-retaining greenhouse gas than CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> – and the dramatic increase in population in the past century of people who want to eat beef has dramatically raised the methane naturally released by herbivores in their fermentation-digestion process.<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How could the CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> emission rate ramp up so strongly? Well, for starts, China is bringing one new coal-fired power plant online nearly every week. There are commonly dense-smog days that are declared health hazards by the American embassy, because the Chinese government has blocked publication of the air-quality numbers. India is fast converting itself from a rural agrarian society to a society of middle-class people who ALL want their own car. While some American states and European countries are making small steps, they are nowhere near enough to offset the huge carbon and particulate emissions from just these two countries alone.<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is now even a new name for this era we live in: the <span style="color: #ea9999;">Anthropocene</span>. Until recently, geologists broke up prehistory into several categories:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Precambrian Era ended about 542 million years ago (we start seeing fossils).<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Paleozoic Era ended about 250 million years ago – when 95 percent of all living things died during what is called the Permian Extinction.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Mesozoic Era (the age of Dinosaurs), which ended about 65 million years ago when a 10-km/6-mile diameter asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We are now in the Cenozoic Era, which has several sub-sets:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Paleocene lasted until 56 million years ago<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Eocene (when horse ancestors first appeared) lasted until 34 million years ago<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Oligocene lasted until 23 million years ago<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Miocene lasted until about 5 million years ago<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Pliocene lasted until about 1.8 million years ago<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- The Pleistocene (Saber-Tooth Cats, Mastodons, etc.) lasted until about 11,000 years ago.<br />
- <span style="color: #ea9999;">The Anthropocene (the Epoch when Man changed EVERYTHING).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Until recently, the last ~11,000 years have been just called the Holocene. Now the Holocene has been divided up to add a more recent epoch: the Anthropocene: The Time When Man Started Changing Things. A singular characteristic: in the last century, mass-extinctions have accelerated so fast (Kolbert, 2014) that it's comparable to the extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs. Instead of a killer asteroid this time, it’s… humankind.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #ffe599;">There are a number of other Signs of the Times, but this may be the most seriously under-estimated one.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-18234905357229923572018-04-26T15:38:00.000-07:002018-04-26T18:06:03.057-07:00Subduction Events, Related Volcanoes – and Nephi’s Smoking Gun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In
1973 Hugh Nibley gave a lecture at the University of Arizona. We tried to get
him to autograph our copy of his book, “Since Cumorah,” (Nibley, 1967), but he
initially refused. “There are so many better examples now available, some
discovered even as this book was being printed, that I’m embarrassed to sign
this poor thing.” Eventually he signed it, however, and the book is still
treasured by our family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In
fact, while “Since Cumorah” was going through the publishing process and for
years afterward, hundreds of new geographic and scientific discoveries have
been made (and are still being made) supporting the veracity of historical and
geographical details in the Book of Mormon. All of these appeared more than a
century after the Book of Mormon was first released and were, of course,
unknown to anyone in Joseph Smith’s time, let alone a poorly-educated young man
living on the edge of a rough frontier. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> For
example, one item that did not make it into “Since Cumorah” was the surprising
similarity of details in 3 Nephi 8
to the events surrounding the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, which took
place 13 years after “Since Cumorah” was first published. To a professional
volcanologist, this chapter accurately describes a cataclysmic volcano-tectonic
event on a major subduction zone. Yet volcanoes, earthquakes, subsidence, and
allocthons are geological phenomena that don’t exist within 3,000 kilometers of
western New York State, nor were they known to any Americans in 1828. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Joseph
Smith grew up in Vermont and New York State. He received only three years of
formal education in his entire lifetime. Western New York is covered with
glacial moraines – huge gravel and boulder piles shoved down from their origins
in Canada by the glaciers that retreated with the Younger Dryas epoch about 11,700
years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Cumorah, the hill where Joseph found
the golden plates that he translated as the Book of Mormon, is one of these
glacial moraines. Joseph Smith had never seen a volcano nor felt an earthquake
in his short life. A primitive form of the field of volcanology existed at the
time, mainly in Italy around Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli volcanoes, but
Pompeii and Herculaneum had not yet been seriously excavated. Tectonics as a
scientific field would not develop until more than a century later. <br />
Back to Mount St. Helens: Its
1980 eruption was classified as a VEI 5 event – that stands for “Volcano
Explosivity Index Level 5.” This VEI scale (Newhall and Self, 1982) is
approximately logarithmic: a VEI 4 is about 10 times <i>smaller</i> than a
VEI 5 event, and a VEI 6 is about 10 times <i>greater</i> than MSH 1980. Third Nephi, chapter 8, describes a
geological event that would rank somewhere between a VEI 6 and a VEI 7. In 3 Nephi 8 we encounter
expressions such as "...there were exceedingly sharp lightnings...",
"...the city of Moroni did sink into the depths of the sea...",
"...the whole face of the land was changed...", "...there was
darkness upon the face of the land...", and "...the inhabitants
thereof who had not fallen could feel the vapor of darkness..." describing
the disaster that engulfed the Nephites nearly 2,000 years ago. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Huge,
hot pyroclastic density currents and tephra typically burn and bury all living
things within their reach during these events, and completely reshape the face
of the land. Magnitude 8+ earthquakes sink cities and everything else – there
is a drowned forest in Puget Sound that was sunk by the January 1700 AD subduction
megathrust earthquake (Atwater and others, 2005; 2015). Earthquakes this
violent commonly redistribute whole sections of mountains to cover and fill
valleys, sometimes even causing flanks of mountains to slide so fast that they fly
through the air before they hit; these are called allocthons by geologists; and
these monster events make smooth places very, very rough. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span class="MsoIntenseEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">For
“vapor of darkness” substitute “volcanic ash” and everything falls precisely
into place. This kind of ash suffocated many of the people who died during the
eruption of Mount St Helens on May 18, 1980; and the city of Yakima, Washington,
was essentially shut down hours later as a meter-thick blanket of ash fell on
the town</span></span><b><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">.</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Contemporary descriptions tell us
that day turned to night and the street lights came on around noon (Waitt,
2015). Please keep in mind that the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens
was relatively small when compared to ash and tephra falls now well documented
in Central America. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Central
America, of course, is an integral part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, so called
because of the string of volcanoes that all lie just inland from the Pacific
Ocean margins. The Ring of Fire includes hundreds of volcanoes, some of them
HUGE, including supervolcanoes like Cerro Hudson in southern Chile, Masaya in
Nicaragua, Katmai and Veniaminof, in the Aleutians, Sheveluch and the
Mutnovski-Gorely complex in Kamchatka, Aira in Japan, and Taupo in New Zealand.
We can't leave out Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, whose 1992 eruption
lowered the worldwide temperature by two degrees Celsius, and we must include
the long arc of volcanoes in Indonesia fronting the Indian Oceanic plate,
including the monster Toba. The phenomenal eruption of the Toba supervolcano
around 72,000 years ago may have reduced the proto-human population on Earth to
less than 10,000 individuals, according to genetic studies (Gibbons, 1993;
Ambrose, 1998). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> All
these volcanoes (except the Indonesian archipelago volcanoes like Toba) lie
just inland of the Pacific Ocean margins because they lie just above their
sources: the down-going Pacific Ocean seafloor that is being over-ridden by
continental margins all around it. Linking each over-riding continental plate
with its subducting oceanic plate are huge subduction faults. These are the
sources of the largest earthquakes in Earth's recorded history, including the
magnitude 9.5 Valdivia earthquake of 1960 in Chile (which caused a tsunami that
destroyed downtown Hilo, Hawai'i, about 8 hours later). Other subduction
earthquakes include the magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 Cascadia event of 1700, which sank
an entire forest in Puget Sound, and then created the "Orphan
Tsunami" that destroyed villages on the Japanese east coast (Atwater and
others, 2015). The magnitude 8.6 Aceh subduction earthquake of 2004 triggered a
tsunami that killed at least 250,000 people along the Indian Ocean margins. The
magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 triggered the meltdown of the
Fukushima-Di-Ichi nuclear plant and devastated the northeastern Japanese coast
yet again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> During
the colonization of Central and South America by Spain, a number of regional
Central American capitals (including Santiago de Guatemala, and Managua,
Nicaragua) were <i>repeatedly</i> buried
and/or pulverized. In each case, the city had to be entirely rebuilt, often in
a different location. To say that
earthquakes and related volcanic tephra-falls have changed the face of the land
in Central America would be an understatement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Since
the 1963 eruption that created the island of Surtsey, Iceland, and especially
since the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, volcanologists have known that
lightning storms are closely associated with Plinian eruptions (named for Pliny
the Elder, killed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD). This is because of the
prodigious electric charge dragged aloft along with the vast amounts of
volcanic ash that are blasted up to the stratosphere. Those electric charges
accumulate until voltage differences are so great that they must discharge back
to the earth via lightning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> But
what caused the "vapor of darkness" described in 3 Nephi 19 and 20?
This was almost certainly a smothering blanket of volcanic ash. As
attention-garnering as it was, Mount St. Helens 1980 was a relatively small
eruption (VEI level 5). Yet this event still lofted about 3 cubic kilometers of
material and left nearly a meter-thick blanket of ash on Yakima, Washington, 240
kilometers to the east, within a few hours of its eruption (Waitt, 2015). Can
ash put out fires? Yes – ask any forest fire fighter (one of us worked his way
through college fighting forest fires each summer) or ask anyone who learned
how to shovel dirt and ashes onto a campfire to smother it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> So,
what caused all this destruction? To get a handle on a “smoking gun”
responsible for 3 Nephi 8, we must examine the largest volcanic eruptions in
Central America (Sigurdsson et al., 2000; Jordan, 2003; Kutterolf, et al. 2008;
Grover, 2014). One sneaky but efficient way to do this is to accumulate
information on tephra, the fragmental (pea-to-cantaloupe-size) material blown
out by a volcanic eruption. More to the point, we want to know how <i>far</i> the tephra reached (we are not
really interested in ash here, because ash can travel all around the earth).
The greater the distance that the tephra falls reached, the larger was the
eruption. Two events stand out:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Masaya
volcano, Nicaragua, about 2,100 +/- 100 years ago. It deposited tephra as
far as 170 km distant.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Chiletepe
volcano, Nicaragua, erupted about 1,900 +/- 100 years ago and dropped
tephra as far as 570 km distant.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> Note
that these dates are very approximate (see Kutterolf, et al., 2008). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> The
Masaya eruption lofted approximately 8 cubic kilometers of ash and tephra,
nearly three times more than Mount St Helens in 1980. Both Chiletepe and Masaya
lie east of the subduction zone where the Cocos Plate is being over-ridden by
the Caribbean Plate at a rate of nearly 7 cm/year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This
rate of crustal movement is important, because it is nearly three times faster
than the Cascadia subduction rate in the Pacific Northwest of the US. This
faster subduction rate means that there are proportionally larger and more
frequent volcanic eruptions in Nicaragua than in the Washington and Oregon
Cascades. Central America is basically a gargantuan pile of volcanic lava,
tephra, and ash covered with recent soils and vegetation. In that sense, 3
Nephi 8 doesn’t record such a remarkable event, at least not by local standards
– except for the timing of it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> In
other words, the Book of Mormon is fully conformable with the geologic record
of Central America. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> This
subduction-earthquake-volcano cataclysm is just one example among many where
modern science seems to be converging with events and geographical details
recounted in the Book of Mormon. Other
examples include linguistics (for instance chiasmus, Egyptian names, and other Semitic
cognates seen in the Bible (see Welsh, 1969; 1981), and the remarkable
correlations of the first 17 chapters of the Book of Mormon with the
still-accumulating details of the Frankincense Trail (see Hilton and Hilton,
1976; Givens, 2002). The stories recorded in the Book of Mormon by prophets
over the 1,021 years of its internal history are remarkably consistent with
geologic, geographical, and historical evidence now known. The Uto-Aztecan language group in the Western
Hemisphere is loaded with both cognates and fossil linguistic structures only
found in Semitic languages of the Arabian Peninsula (Stubbs, 2016). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> None of this information, however, was available in Joseph Smith’s lifetime. None of it "</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">proves” the veracity of the Book of Mormon – but it sure hints at that direction pretty strongly. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="color: #f1c232;">That name Masaya is a coincidence, but it still took my breath away.</span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-49710933142255136652017-12-13T13:31:00.000-08:002017-12-13T13:31:47.690-08:00Is Water Wet?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #0b5394;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">In the
response below I had to throttle back my Inner Scientist from wanting to
strangle certain abusers of social media. Facts are NOT the same as
Alternative Facts. Internet Foo-Foo is NOT truth. Much of it represents
all the bad consequences of the 1st Amendment to the American
Constitution - without any redeeming good. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Q: So on social media there’s been a huge debate on whether
water is wet or not. I believe water is not either wet or dry. So is water wet? - Kacie M</span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">A:
This is akin to Medieval arguments about how many angels
could dance on the head of a pin. In other words, it's a pointless
issue. Water is water. Wet means something has water
on or in it in all versions of the English language that I am familiar
with. I did a cursory look and did not see a "huge debate" on
social media about water being wet or not. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">Social
media should NEVER be considered a source of meaningful
information, as there is no vetting, no peer review of the content you
see
there. People make up "Alternative Facts" and post them to social
media, and if it's done with flashy visuals, some weak-minded and poorly
educated people might take this stuff as fact. Don't YOU fall into that
old make-up-a-fact trap. That's
what humanity fought its way out of the Middle Ages to get away from.
Your smart phone doesn't work because of some made-up fact about
electricity. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-67596866773166940352017-01-16T15:23:00.001-08:002017-01-18T17:46:35.885-08:00Climate Change - Is It Real?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Repeatedly
I have had questions about climate change addressed to me, both
electronically in USGS Ask-A-Geologist queries, and verbally from acquaintances
There are a lot of things floating around in the news media about
climate change. A lot of this is correct, some of it is foo-foo, and far
too much of it is deliberate obfuscation by people who have a<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> self-serving financial</span> agenda. </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sadly, t</span>here are scientists who sell their soul<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">s</span> to corporations (whether Big Carbon, Big Pharma, or Big Tobacco), but we will not go there... </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: lime;">Q: Is climate change real, is is this some liberal Mother Earth Tree Hugger thing<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> going on?</span></span> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="color: #e06666;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b>A: A short summary of what's going on:</b></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #e06666;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 18px;"><u><b>T<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">HE</span> K<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">NOWNS<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">:</span></span></b></u></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">1. Virtually all climate specialists not paid by Big Oil agree that the <b>Greenhouse Effect</b>
is real. In fact, it was first reported in the scientific literature by
Joseph Fourier (of Fourier transform fame) in 1824. It's been tested
and proven repeatedly ever since.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">2.
There is a lot of yearly and decadal variability in climate data.
Anyone can cherry-pick the weather data to prove any point they want to -
including waving a snow-ball in a Senate hearing - but that's not
science. If someone is trying to convince you that climate change is not
happening, ask yourself: who's paying this guy?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">3. CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>
in the Earth's atmosphere has gone from 315 ppm in 1958 to over 400 ppm
today (Mauna Loa observatory). Virtually all scientists with integrity
accept that most if not all of this change is due to human activity. The
reason? The change has been accelerating (second derivative is
positive) since about 1850, when the industrial revolution really got
underway. By second derivative being positive, I mean that it is ramping
up faster and faster as time progresses. This is the well-known "hockey
stick" graph made famous by Al Gore. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">4. Is <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">the increase <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">in</span> CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span></span> human<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">-</span>caused? If we look at the carbon isotopes in this increased atmospheric CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>, we can show that it is definitely caused by fossil fuel burning. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 5,730 years. There is a certain amount in the atmosphere and living plants from cosmic rays transforming nitrogen in the upper atmosphere - this is well-calibrated by many studies. With a half<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">-life this short, if something bearing carbon is buried and put out of reach of the atmosphere, the carbon-14 <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">drops</span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">below measurable levels</span> by 50,000 years. </span>Fossil fuels thus have NO carbon-14 in them. Burned, these <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">fossil carbon sources contribute only carbon-12 and carbon-13 to the atmosphere. It's not hard to calculate how much <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">fossil carbon has been burned: about 300 billion tons since 1800 AD. It's also not hard to measure the levels of carbon-14<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">, the radioactive isotop<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">e</span>, in the atm<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">osphere over the past two centuries<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">: it's sequestered in tree-rings and other places where it can be measured, year by year. Human involvement in the growth of CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span> in the atm<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">osphere is<u><i> proven by the steady drop of carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere since 1800.</i></u></span></span></span></span></span></span> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">5</span>. The last time the atmospheric CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>
reached this 400 ppm level, according to the geologic record, was
during the Pliocene (5.3 to 1.8 million years ago). At that time, about
half of Florida was underwater (including the places where ~80% of
Florida's population now lives). I've pulled Pliocene marine fossils
(sharks' teeth and echinoderms) out of land deposits in central Florida
with my own hands; they are on my bookshelf.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">6</span>. There is a latency of CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>
after it gets into the atmosphere, and some scientists calculate this
to be about 30 years. Translation: it tends to stay there. The oil you
burn today will really be impacting your kids 30 years later. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">7</span>. A gallon of gasoline, which weighs 3 kg, will produce about 10 kg of CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>. The extra mass comes from the oxygen you might want to breathe instead. That<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"> gallon translates to</span> 50 kilometers traveled in my car. And that's not counting the CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>
generated to extract and refine the gasoline. The Energy Returned on
Energy Invested for Athabascan tar sands is between 4 and 7.
<u><i>Translation</i></u>: a rather huge amount of energy is used up just getting the
bitumen into the form of gasoline. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">8</span>.
Nearly 5 billion impoverished people on Earth want to have a high-protein lifestyle
like their grandparents could not have even dreamed of. This means
vastly-increased herds of vegetation-eating, meat-producing animals. The
amount of methane a cow produces is truly breath-taking (pun intended):
up to 500 liters of methane a DAY. That's more than a 5-drawer file
cabinet. Methane is 37 times more potent than CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span> as a Greenhouse Gas for capturing solar heat. Tha<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">t </span>pushes it up beyond the volume of my office in CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span> equivalent - in one day. <u><i>One normal, flatulent cow</i></u>.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">9</span>.
Increased temperatures mean more glacier calving, and more melting of
Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland ice caps, which are collapsing at truly
stunning rates - and the collapse accelerating. Less <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">ice</span>
on the ground and on the polar oceans means that the darker -
light-and-heat-absorbing - under-layers will be exposed, trapping yet
more solar heat and making the inevitable change non-linear.
Translation: these changes are accelerating with time. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">10. Nine of the ten hottest <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">years <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">in now-centuries-old</span> records have happened in the 21st Century. <span style="color: cyan;"><b><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally" target="_blank">2016 was the hottest year, globally, ever.</a></b></span> </span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><u>It's not hard to draw some conclusions from all this</u>:</span></span></b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">1. Do NOT buy beach-front property, <i>Anywhere</i>.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">2. Move to the Pacific Northwest<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">, or the Canadian prairie provinces. They <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">will be among the <u><i>very</i></u> few winners <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">of clima<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">t</span>e change.</span></span></span> </span></span> </span><br />
<span style="color: #e06666;"></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #e06666;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 18px;"><u><b>THE UNKNOWNS:</b></u></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">There are still several unresolved questions:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #e06666;">1. How <i>FAST</i>?</span> </span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">How quickly will the global climate change consequences befall us? Th<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">e current</span>
speed of change has never happened before, as far as geologists can
tell, in Earth's history. Ever. Predicting our future depends on climate
modeling, and these models are fraught with assumptions and
disagreements. However, they are beginning to coalesce, and they are now
in general agreement. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: #e06666;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">2. How <i>BAD?</i></span></span></b></span> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i><u>Likely</u></i> consequences include (but these cannot be easily quantified):</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i><a href="http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/"><b><span style="color: blue;">Sealevel rise</span></b></a></i>...
and because of tectonic settling this will be worse on the east coast
of the U.S. This means more, far-reaching devastation from storms like
Katrina and Sandy are in our future.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/EOS_mann_emanuel_2006.pdf"><i><b><span style="color: blue;">We can expect bigger and more devastating hurricanes</span></b></i></a> <span style="color: blue;"><i><b>and tornadoes</b></i></span>.
If seawater rises and hurricanes grow in average size, then the storm
surges they drag with them will reach deeper and deeper into the
continental interiors. About 80% of humanity now lives within 100 km of a
seashore.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/agm/publications/documents/wmo_cc_desertif_foldout_en.pdf"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">Greater and more terrible droughts and wildfires</span></i></b></a> can
be expected. Because of well-intended but ultimately catastrophic
wildfire suppression policies over the past century, these fires will
become truly terrible in the continental U.S., Russia, and Brazil.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">A consequence of droughts and wildfires: <a href="http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/giss_crop_study/"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">massive disruption in the world's food supplies</span></i></b></a>.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">We are already seeing <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural-History/dp/0805092994" target="_blank"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">the sixth mass extinction of animal life</span></i></b></a> -
and explosions of other destructive types of life (e.g., jellyfish,
toxic algae). The current mass extinction of wildlife (habitat
destruction and over-hunting) is comparable to what the Chicxulub
asteroid did 6<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">6</span> millions years ago. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">We are already seeing <a href="http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Eperg/Brierley_and_Kingsford_Cur_Biol_19_2009.pdf"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">acidification of the oceans</span></i></b></a>,
with consequent dissolution and destruction of coral reefs, a major
host of biodiversity - and the world's protein supply. The Great Barrier
Reef of Australia is catastrophically collapsing as I write this. </span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div>
<span style="color: #e06666;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><b><u><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">3. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Is it <i><span style="font-size: medium;">already</span></i> beyond our control?</span></span></u></b></span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The question <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">arises: are we already at the "tipping point"? The effect of clima<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">t</span>e warming on gas hydrates (methane clathrates) that lie beneath the continental shelves is a <u><i>HUGE</i></u> unknown. Most estimates (from seismic <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">reflection data) suggest that these clathrates are many orders of magnitude greater than all other known hydrocarbon reserves (coal. oil, gas) on Earth <u><i>combined</i></u>. Gas hydrates are methane trapped in water ice below about 300 meters of seawater. This is the depth where pressure a<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">nd cold ocean<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">-</span>floor temperatures currently trap them - where they remain stable. These met<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">hane hydrate<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">s have accumulated over m<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">illions of years from dying sea-life that drops to the ocean floor (some may derive from oil and gas deposits below the se<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">a-floor sediments). A single cubic meter of these "gelids" can produce <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">up <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">to<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"> 180 cubic meters of methane - the internet is replete with photos of "<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">ice" that is burning. <u><i>A cru</i></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><u><i>cial unknown</i></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">: will attempts to extract this stuff "open the doors" to a catastrophic release of vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere? </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The gas hydrates/methane clathrates issue leads to inevitable questions about <i><b><a href="http://www.unige.ch/climate/Publications/Beniston/CC2004.pdf"><span style="color: blue;">non-linearity</span></a> in </b><a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/climate.html"><b><span style="color: blue;">climate forcing</span></b></a></i> - and <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_%28climatology%29"><i><span style="color: blue;">tipping-points</span></i></a></b>.
In other words, can things get out of control? Is it already too late -
will we see a runaway temperature rise? Will we see inundation of most
of the world's great cities (a real Waterworld)?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: #e06666;"><b><u>The geologic record s<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">uggest</span>s <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">it <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">may <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">very well</span> be too late</span></span></u></b></span> -
it's happened before for natural reasons - but the geologic record also
shows that the Pliocene warm period came on far more slowly than what
we are seeing in <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">our</span> modern world climate: it took hundreds of thousands
of years to raise CO<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span> levels then - <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">something that</span> humanity has <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;">accomplished</span> in just the past half century.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: #cc0000; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b>We are already in unknown territory, and precise predictions are probably not going to be correct.</b> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">~~~~~</span><br />
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AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-1757907673625472742016-08-08T18:28:00.000-07:002016-08-08T18:28:33.061-07:00Scientism - Its Fatal Flaw<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: orange;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Well,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b><i>*I*</i></b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>believe in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><i><b><span style="font-size: medium;">SCIENCE!</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b></i></span><br /><br />Heard that before? It's certainly nothing new - it goes back to at least Voltaire.<br /><br />Scientism is an expression in use for most of the 20th Century, and is often used to refer to science applied in excess - or applied unreasonably. The term<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>scientism</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>can generally apply in either of two ways:<br /><ol>
<li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0px;">To indicate the improper usage of science or of scientific claims,<sup><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> </sup></li>
<li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0px;">To refer to a belief that methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any inquiry.</li>
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In a broader sense, scientism is also used to describe the invocation of science as a focus of worship, generally by people who would describe themselves as atheists. It's sort of like Methodism, or Daoism, or... you can fill in the blanks here.<br /><br />Two recent articles,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: cyan;"><span style="background-color: yellow;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;">"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"</a></span>,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: black;">and</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="color: cyan;"><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;">"Trouble at the Lab"</a></span></span></span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>draw some obvious and frightening conclusions about this approach or life view.<br /><br />John Ioannidis, a physician and mathematician, published two seminal articles in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="color: cyan;"><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/" style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none;">2005</a></span></span>. They are among the most-cited papers in all of modern science - and they are incredibly embarrasing to scientists. In the first paper, Ioannidis convincingly showed why 80 percent of non-randomized scientific studies turn out to be wrong. Fully 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard (and thus far more expensive) clinical trials gave incorrect results. It is from studies like this that the medical doctors that you and I seek help from base their diagnoses and treatment protocols.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i><b><span style="color: orange;">Our lives depend on these being correct.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b></i>These incorrect results include recommendations to use hormone-replacement therapy in post-menopausal women, that mammograms and PSA tests are critical for extending lives, that anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil can help depression, that doing puzzles will ward off Alzheimers Disease, and that drinking lots of water during intense exercise is helpful.<br /><br />The problem?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: orange;"><i><b>Not one of these turns out to be true.</b></i></span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>THOUSANDS</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of stories in magazine articles have been written based on these published studies. The number of studies that contradict other studies of the same thing are so high that The Week magazine actually has a section called "Health Scare of the Week".<br /><br />Many physicians, on their own, have discovered that just taking a patient off of every drug can improve their health immediately.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />The truly glaring problem: the large majority of these studies<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: orange;"><i><b>cannot be replicated</b></i></span>. This means that other groups cannot repeat the same experiments and get the same results. Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 landmark studies in basic research on cancer.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i><b>T<span style="color: orange;">hey were able to reproduce the results on just 11 percent of the studies.</span></b></i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In a separate study done by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, only 25% of published results could be reproduced. These analyses aren't being published by disgruntled scientists, but by editors in the premier of all science journals: Nature. Dr. Ioannidis says that between a third to a half of medical research results has been shown to be untrustworthy. He suggests that physicians, when faced with all this potentially lethal error and confusion...<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: orange;"><i><b>simply ignore them all!</b></i></span><br /><br /><br />Ioannidis' second paper explains why these flawed studies happen and get published in peer-reviewed journals. Without belaboring the details (you can read them yourself), it comes down to many things - but things that compound themselves:<br /><ul style="line-height: 1.4; list-style: disc; margin: 0.5em 0px; padding: 0px 2.5em; text-align: left;">
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">The "publish or perish" ethos for young scientists to get tenure or grants</li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">Ignorance of what constitutes statistical significance<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>among most scientists</i></li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">Ego</li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">Fear of reprisals by peers or superiors</li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">The tendency of scientific journals to publish almost exclusively "new" and "exciting" discoveries</li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">Bias in research study design, bias in analysis, self-serving interpretation</li>
<li style="border: none; color: white; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0px; text-indent: 0px;">Fraud.</li>
</ul>
This latter issue is interesting, and when identified firmly it is supposed to lead to retractions of published articles. However, a University of Edinburgh study of 21 confidential surveys of scientists worldwide found that only 2 percent of them admitted to falsifying or fabricating data - but 28 percent said they knew of colleagues who engaged in these practices! If that difference hints to you at a broader problem, then give yourself three stars.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><br />The problem with Scientism is that it falls for the oldest trick in the book: it worships at the feet of the Golden Calf. One of several modern versions of the Golden Calf is Science. But like all man-made things, their faith is based on something that is fatally flawed. It is very, very human.<br /><br />Are we advocating that people not trust science? Absolutely not - just don't bet your life on it, and certainly don't pour your faith and belief into it! Science is still far better and more honest than the The Talking Heads and Corporate Paid Pundits on talk radio or "fair and unbiased" news channels.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
~~~~~</div>
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AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-86683666423237590682014-06-24T18:14:00.001-07:002015-04-23T19:51:25.962-07:00Hot Magnetic Oxygen Water World<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There is another version of the <a href="http://ldsscientist.blogspot.com/2011/05/anthropic-principle.html"><span style="color: cyan;">Anthropic Principle</span></a>, one that applies only to the planet Earth. We may be more alone, or unique, in this universe than the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation"><span style="color: cyan;">Drake Equation</span></a> - the calculation of the possibility of other life out there in the universe - may have led us to believe.</div>
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The deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth's crust reached down to about 7.6 miles (12 km) below the Kola peninsula of northern Russia. The technology available to humankind cannot get below that depth (and that depth took 24 years of drilling and billions of Rubles to achieve). The rocks are so hot and plastic with overlying rock pressure at those depths that the hole closes in on the drill bit - and partially fills the shaft back in from the sides as the bit is drawn back to the surface to be replaced. So... the maximum depth achieved by humanity's best effort is less than 1/10,000 the Earth's diameter, or the distance of a short commute on a Monday morning. We actually know more about galaxies, comets, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn than we do about what lies below our feet on our own planet. No matter how you look at it, we cannot really touch virtually all of the world beneath our feet.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In other words, everything we think we know about the interior of the Earth is obtained by very indirect means, and a lot of this is from mathematical modeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To see below the depth of the Kola well, we must rely in electrical geophysical methods like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotellurics"><span style="color: cyan;">magnetotellurics</span></a> (which is one of the things that I "do" as a geophysicist; it can detect resistivity layering down to perhaps 50 km or so), and on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_seismology"><span style="color: cyan;">earthquake seismology</span></a>. For nearly a century seismologists have traced the powerful vibration signals from very large earthquakes as these signals propagate and refract through the Earth. By comparing the time of arrivals elsewhere around the planet - and whether just P-waves, or P-waves and S-waves together make it - they can discern contrasts in density and other physical parameters as these change with depth. P-waves (or primary waves) are pulses of energy, momentarily compressing the material they pass through. It's the blast wave from an explosion expanding outward. S-waves (or secondary waves) are shear waves, oscillating material back and forth, sideways, as they pass through the material. Think of how you would move your hands forward and backward to tear a piece of paper. A key feature of S-waves is that they cannot propagate through a liquid. Think of trying to use your hands to tear water. By the 1920's seismologists had used the initial earthquake seismic information and some density calculations to conclude that there is a solid iron core to the Earth, surrounded by an outer liquid iron part of the core. The outer liquid core is overlain by a hot and plastic Mantle, and finally by a relatively thin crust serving as a very thin solid shell above them both. All living things live on or just beneath the top of that crust.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The methodical genius who first figured all this out was a quiet Danish lady named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inge_Lehmann"><span style="color: cyan;">Inge Lehmann</span></a>, who died in 1993 at 104 years of age.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Seismology and magnetotellurics show us the layering in the Earth with depth. Indirectly we also know that the center of the earth is very hot. After all, there are volcanoes and fumaroles, and the deeper you mine in places like South Africa the hotter it gets. Nearly everywhere scientists have measured temperature in wells, a thermal gradient exists: deeper means hotter. But we also know there is a lot of heat below us for several other reasons, including plate tectonics. <i>SOMETHING</i> has to be powering whole continents to be able to wander around. And then there's the magnetic field of the earth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What distinguishes Earth from Mars and the Moon? A magnetic field, an atmosphere, liquid water - and life. The last requires the first three in our limited observations so far. Without a magnetic field to deflect it, Solar radiation would sterilize the Earth and disrupt any attempt for life to gain a foothold. Solar radiation would also strip away any atmosphere, which is apparently why Mars doesn't have much atmosphere left to speak of. Mar's atmosphere is only a few percent of the density of our own atmosphere - though there is evidence of much more at one time in the distant past.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What distinguishes Venus from the Earth? Venus has an atmosphere, but it has fallen under a runaway Greenhouse Effect - too hot for water and in fact so hot that raw sulfur is a liquid on its surface. The Earth lies in what is sometimes called the "Goldilocks Zone" where it's not too hot and not too cold, between roasting Venus and frigid Mars. Water on Earth not only exists, but can exist in all three states (solid, liquid, and gaseous). This is not so for Mars or Venus, neither of which has a magnetic field, nor plate tectonics, nor significant water.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It has been apparent for quite awhile that the Earth's magnetic field is the reason why life exists on our planet. A magnetic field, however, requires some sort of dynamo to create and sustain it. How to power this? Well, if there are enough radioactive elements - or sufficient heat from the collapse of the proto-planetary disk to form our planet - well then maybe there is enough energy to drive a dynamo. However, this requires a lot of assumptions that scientists cannot test - they can't drill deep enough.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is another problem: hot things tend to cool when surrounded by colder things... like interplanetary space. A magnetic field driven by an internal dynamo cannot last forever.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hot things cool in two ways: by conduction and/or by convection. Conduction is like the metal pot you cook your cream of wheat in. Heat transfers from a hot source beneath to a cooler part above without any motion of particles involved. With convection, however - the bubbling cream of wheat - the heat is transferred by particles moving in three-dimensional loops called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_circulation"><span style="color: cyan;">hydrothermal</span></a> cells. You see them as bubbles driven by steam in the sauce pan. A hotter particle of the wheat from the bottom, in contact with the metal pan, rises because it is hotter (and thus less dense) than the particles above it, thus transferring heat from the bottom to the top of the cream of wheat. If the stuff cannot convect - if it's not liquid enough - then it will get hotter and hotter until it burns. It not only tastes terrible, but the sauce pan is a bear to clean up afterwards. In the same way, the solid iron core can only conduct heat out; like the metal sauce pan it cannot convect heat. However, the liquid iron outer core and the hot and plastic mantle above it <i>can</i> convect heat - and these convection cells of highly conductive material must be the source of the magnetic dynamo. The convection cells in the mantle are also what's driving whole continents around across the face of the Earth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Remnant magnetization in rocks 3.5 billion years old, however, proves that the Earth's magnetic dynamo has existed for at least that long. The oldest known life is found in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite"><span style="color: cyan;">stromatolites</span></a> - clumps of cyanobacteria - just about that old. This is not a coincidence. If there was no protective magnetic field, the stromatolites and then algae (and Earth's atmosphere) would not have survived Solar winds and radiation. But 3.5 billion years is a long time for something to stay hot enough to drive a magnetic-field-producing dynamo. Older computer models based on relatively low thermal conduction assumptions for iron seemed to suggest that it would take awhile for the solid iron core to give up its heat. This could conceivably sustain a dynamo lasting that long. According to these older models, the heat from the core would take billions of years to conduct out to the outer liquid core and Mantle where a different form of heat transfer - the much faster convection - takes place.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the last several years, however, scientists have been forced to re-evaluate what they think they know about the center of the earth. Several years ago, another piece of information became available from some Japanese extreme-high-pressure experiments. Iron at pressures and temperatures we calculate must exist in the center of the Earth has a far higher thermal conductivity than anyone had thought could be possible. According to milecular orbital theory, if you smash material together hard enough, it frees up electrons and changes its conductivity. This means that the Earth's heat-driven dynamo should have burned out billions of years ago. In other words, the Earth's magnetic field would have then died, and the atmosphere and any nascent life would have all disappeared before most of the geologic record could even take place. Think of dead Mars.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Speaking of geology, fluid and gas inclusions in ancient rocks tell us that around 2.5 billion years ago the Earth's primordial atmosphere of CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> and nitrogen transitioned to an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. The world as we presently understand it began then. In part we can blame this on the stromatolites and photosynthesizing plant life that was expanding at that time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the 1970's a few scientists offered what seemed like a ridiculous idea: the Moon formed well after the Earth formed. It formed in its current size and shape when a large Mars-sized planetoid crashed into the proto-Earth and splattered material into space around the Earth. That material blasted into multiple orbits then coalesced to form the Moon, leaving a very different - and very hot - planet Earth behind. Computer models show that this is easily feasible. If so, then the Earth would have glowed like a small star from the massive infusion of heat from all the kinetic and potential energy of the collision. This idea is now taken seriously for several reasons, but mainly because the rocks on the Moon are sooooo much like the rocks on the Earth, and sooooo different from rocks on Vesta, Ceres, Mars, and Venus. We can discern these by optical spectroscopy, coupled with sampling meteors that the spectroscopy says must come from those places.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Could that ancient impact hold the answer for why we have such a long-lasting magnetic field around our planet? That seems to be the best explanation at this time. If so, then life exists on this planet because of some pretty amazing circumstances: </div>
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<li>it exists in a narrow Goldilocks Zone, </li>
<li>it was given a huge heat boost by a collision from a large planetoid, and </li>
<li>its crust was given a lot of water from impacting comets that allowed it to be less solid, more flexible, and have an ocean of liquid water. </li>
<li>Photosynthesis then started early and gave this planet an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and finally</li>
<li>The Earth's magnetic field lasted a very, very long time.</li>
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Those are a lot of things that had to come together at just the right time for life to form and evolve here.</div>
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There are so many coincidences - like the Anthropic Principle that allows molecules - and thus life - to exist. It seems remarkably like our Earth has its own local version of the Anthropic Principle: just the right features and additions at just the right times to allow life to form and evolve over an extended period of time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://eps.berkeley.edu/people/bruce-buffett"><span style="color: cyan;">Bruce Buffett</span></a>, a geophysicist at Berkeley puts it this way: <b><i><span style="color: orange;">"The more you look at this and think about it, the more you think it can't be a coincidence. The thought that these things might all be connected is kind of wondrous."</span></i></b> (Discover, July/August 2014, p. 41)<o:p></o:p></div>
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With all the exoplanets being found in solar systems nearby in the Milky Way Galaxy, what is the likelihood that one of them could have all these coincidences? Since Galileo, humanity has been humbled to know that it <b><i>isn't</i> </b>the center of the universe. </div>
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However, it appears that we certainly are unique.<o:p></o:p></div>
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AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-10920030162971207122013-12-31T20:56:00.001-08:002014-03-08T21:00:35.830-08:00Masaya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Anyone who has read 3 Nephi 8, especially if they are aware of some of the details of Mount St Helens' 1980 eruption, have pondered expressions such as "<i><span style="color: magenta;">...there were exceedingly sharp lightnings...</span></i>", "<i><span style="color: magenta;">...the city of Moroni did sink into the depths of the sea...</span></i>", "<i><span style="color: magenta;">...the whole face of the land was changed...</span></i>", "<i><span style="color: magenta;">...there was darkness upon the face of the land...</span></i>", and "<i><span style="color: magenta;">...the inhabitants thereof who had not fallen could feel the vapor of darkness...</span></i>" that engulfed the Nephites nearly 2,100 years ago.<br />
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Central America, of course, is an integral part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, so-called because of the string of volcanoes that all lie just inland from the Pacific Ocean margins. The Ring includes hundreds of volcanoes, some of them HUGE, like Cerro Hudson in southern Chile, Masaya in Nicaragua, Shasta in California, Mount Rainier in Washington, Mount Edgecumbe near Sitka, Alaska, and Katmai and Veniaminof, the monster volcanoes of the Aleutians. Farther east, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the Ring of Fire includes Bezymiani, Sheveluch, and Mutnovski-Gorely in Kamchatka, and Alaid and others in the Kuriles. The Ring includes Usu, Fuji, and Sakura-Jima, the best-known volcanoes in Japan. We can't leave out Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, whose 1992 eruption lowered the world wide temperature by two degrees centigrade, and we must include the long arc of volcanoes in Indonesia, including the monster Toba. The phenomenal eruption of the Toba supervolcano around 72,000 years ago may have reduced the proto-human population on Earth to less than 10,000 individuals according to genetic studies.<br />
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All these volcanoes (except for Indonesia) lie just inland of the Pacific Ocean margins because they lie just above their sources: the down-going Pacific Ocean seafloor that is being over-ridden by continental margins all around it. Linking the over-riding continental plates with their subducted oceanic plate are huge subduction faults. These are the sources of the largest earthquakes in Earth's recorded history, including the magnitude 9.5 Valdivia earthquake of 1960 in Chile (whose tsunami destroyed downtown Hilo, Hawai'i, about 8 hours later). Other subduction earthquakes include the magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 Cascadia event of 1700, which sank an entire forest in Puget Sound, and whose "Orphan Tsunami" destroyed villages on the Japanese east coast. The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake of 2010 triggered the meltdown of the Fukushima-Di-Ichi nuclear plant and devastated the northeastern Japanese coast. The huge magnitude 8.6 Aceh subduction earthquake of 2004 created a tsunami that killed at least 250,000 people along the Indian Ocean margins.<br />
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During the Spanish era, a number of regional Central American capitals such as Santiago de Guatemala and Nicaragua, Honduras, were repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. To say that earthquakes and related volcanic tephra-falls changed the face of the land in Central America would be an understatement.<br />
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Since the 1963 eruption that created the island of Surtsey, Iceland, and the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, volcanologists have known that lightning storms are closely associated with Plinian eruptions. This is because of the vast electric charge dragged aloft along with the prodigious amounts of volcanic ash that are blasted up to the stratosphere.<br />
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But what caused the "vapor of darkness" described by Nephi? This was almost certainly a smothering blanket of volcanic ash. Mount St Helens, 1980, was a relatively small (VEI 5) eruption. This event lofted about 3 cubic kilometers of material, and left nearly a meter-thick blanket of ash in Yakima, Washington, 244 kilometers to the east, within a few hours of its eruption.<br />
<br />
To get a handle on a smoking gun for 3Ne:8, we must examine the largest volcanic eruptions in Central America. One way to do this is to accumulate information on tephra falls that reached out great distances - the larger the reach, the greater the eruption. Two events stand out:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Masaya volcano, Nicaragua, about 2,100 years ago, left tephra as far as 170 km distant.</li>
<li>Chiletepe volcano, Nicaragua, about 1,900 years ago, left tephra as far as 570 km distant.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Note that these dates are somewhat approximate (they come from <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007GC001631/abstract" target="_blank"><span style="color: cyan;">Kutterolf et al, 2008, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems</span></a>). The Masaya eruption lofted approximately 8 cubic kilometers of ash and tephra, nearly three times more than Mount St Helens. Interestingly, ancient human footprints have been found at Acahualinca - these are ~2,100-year-old fossils discovered along the shores of Lake Managua, Nicaragua, frozen in the volcanic ash blown out from Masaya. Both these volcanoes lie eastward of the subduction zone where the Cocos Plate is being over-ridden by the Caribbean Plate at a rate of nearly 7 cm/year. This rate is nearly three times faster than the Cascadia subduction rate, which means that there are proportionally more frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Nicaragua than in Washington and Oregon. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b><span style="color: orange;">I'm just struck by that name: <i>Masaya</i>. </span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
~~~~~</div>
</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-41802915267613070942013-12-22T19:32:00.000-08:002013-12-22T19:32:16.438-08:00Earthquakes - do they occur at certain times of the day?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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According to my calculations, the 6th grade means students are around
11-12 years old. If so, then the Rising Generation is full of people a
lot smarter than I was at that age. The question below from Ask-a-Geologist is just one of
many like it: </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="color: lime;"><b>Q: Dear Geologist,</b></span></div>
<span style="color: lime;"><b>
</b></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: lime;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<span style="color: lime;"><b>
</b></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: lime;"><b>
Our name is Arianah and Cray and we are sixth grade students
at Preston Middle School in fort Collins, Colorado. We are currently learning
about how the Earth’s surface changes over time. We are curious about
earthquakes. We have a couple questions for you. Is there a common time when
earthquakes happen during the day? Also, why did you become a geologist?</b></span></div>
<span style="color: lime;"><b>
</b></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: lime;"><b>
Yours sincerely, Arianah and Cray :D</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: lime;"><b> </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
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A: </div>
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1. Earthquakes are essentially random. We understand why they happen, we understand where they happen, but we do <i>NOT</i> understand <i>WHEN</i>
they will happen. There are always
aftershocks following a main event, of course, but the main event cannot
be predicted. Extensive research has shown that there is no correlation
between earthquakes and certain times of the day or external<span style="color: red;"><b> *</b></span>
events - for instance there is no
correlation with either the location of the Sun, or of the Moon, or with
tides (alignments of celestial bodies, which cause neap tides or spring
tides, is called syzygy).
Some of the brightest minds on this planet have been searching for more
than a
half century for some evidence that main event earthquakes can be
predicted, but without
success. They can be <u><i>forecast</i></u><span style="color: red;"><b> #</b></span>, but not <u><i>predicted</i></u>. </div>
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</div>
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</div>
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2. I was a solid-state physicist and realized that if I didn’t
do something drastic, I would be stuck inside a laboratory all my life
with
radioactive sources and high-pressure cells. This was brought very much
to my attention one day when I had a high-pressure cell blow out and
spew Cobalt-60 all over the inside of our lab, and had to call in a
special
Spill Team. Also, by this time physics as a profession was drifting into
a dead end with string
theory, and I saw relatively little value to humanity to spending
billions of dollars to see if
another exotic particle existed. I checked out breakoffs of physics,
including
astrophysics, hydro-geophysics, weather physics, and geophysics, and
found the
last one to be very exciting. It also got me out into exotic places,
like the
Venezuelan jungle, the southeastern Alaska panhandle, the Empty Quarter
of
Saudi Arabia, etc. Geoscience gives me amazing opportunities to visit
these places and many more. But even more interesting to me is to be a
detective – to be
the first to discover something beneath the ground or the seafloor. I
was the first to say where the groundwater was beneath the San Pedro
Basin in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, and the first to map where titanium
sands lay beneath the seafloor off the coast of South Africa. That’s
ever so cool. </div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: red;"><b>*</b></span> It has been shown that if you inject fluids into certain
formations (e.g., deep sediments northeast of Denver, CO), you can
trigger swarms of micro-earthquakes. Basically this is the ground
shuddering to equilibrate and adjust itself to a slightly new stress
regime. However these sorts of events are so small that they are almost
never felt.They really are not earthquakes as the general public
understands earthquakes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: red;"><b>#</b></span> A <u><i>forecast</i></u>: in other words, there is an X% chance
that there will be a magnitude Y event on the Z fault zone in northern
California within the next 30 years. This is very, very different from
saying that there will be a Magnitude Y event at Z location on X day -
that would be a <u><i>prediction</i></u>. We can't do that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
~~~~~</div>
</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-78141436475985007832013-08-27T19:57:00.000-07:002013-08-28T06:27:32.748-07:00One-Eyed Science, One-Eyed History<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let me begin with two anecdotes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One day many years ago I was walking
down a hallway in a chapel in Sterling, Virginia. Walking towards me was our
Relief Society President. As she came near, she suddenly grabbed both my lapels
and shoved me into the wall, her nose inches from mine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="color: orange;">“Have you any idea of what you have<i> done</i>?!??”</span> she demanded. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My mind raced, but all I could say
was “Uhhh…” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="color: orange;">“As the counselor to the Bishop you
have been setting apart sisters in the Relief Society as they receive new
callings. As the Relief Society President I have been recording these. Several
months ago in separate blessings you told two sisters that they would have more
children. One sister has MS, and the other is 44 years old and newly married.
BOTH had been told by their doctors that they would never have more children.<i>
BOTH ARE PREGNANT</i>. “</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It took a while for me to realize
that (a) I had done nothing egregiously wrong, and (b) Jinx was not mad at me.
Both women gave birth to little boys. The father of one held my right hand in
both of his and thanked me repeatedly. The second little boy, whose name I will
never forget, lived just a few days. His parents asked me to join them at
Fairfax, VA, General Hospital to give this infant a name and a blessing. I drove down to the hospital with a deep sense of foreboding. As his father and I held his tiny body, and blessed him, he was struggling for all he was worth just to breathe. He
died shortly afterwards, and for weeks afterwards I cried every time I thought
of him, which was often. I’m tearing up as I write this, in fact, more than 30
years later. His parents, however, were calm as a summer morning. They told me
later that they knew where this child had come from, and where he had gone. He
was in the hands of a loving God, forever part of their family now, and waiting
for them on The Other Side. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another anecdote:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Many of us during our lifetimes will
have to wear an eye-patch. We may have amblyopia (“wandering eye”) as a child,
or we may have an infection, or we may scratch the cornea by rubbing the eye
when sand gets into it. There may be an injury, temporary or permanent.
Whenever we wear an eye-patch we have what is called mono-vision. We no
longer have stereo vision, and our depth perception is seriously impaired. We
may stumble over a curb or doorway, we may walk into a door jamb. We are
visually crippled, and we have continuing problems from our one-eyed vision, though we may partially adapt to the condition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What have these two stories have in
common? Consider the following.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In science we must evaluate the data
that we collect, and there are always arguments on how we do this. As I write this
there are at least two major schools of how to use statistics in science: how
to calculate a numerical probability, from a given set of data, that a certain
answer or conclusion is true. The main schools of thought are called <span style="color: #76a5af;"><b>Bayesian</b></span>
and <span style="color: #6fa8dc;"><b>Fisherian</b></span>. The former school teaches that a prior understanding – an eye on
what we think are the physical processes involved – must be built into the
calculation, and there is a deceptively simple equation to do that. Implicit in
this is that we are thinking about the larger picture – the underlying
principles. The Fisherian statistical school on the other hand, which dominates the biology field
at this time, believes that all information is contained only in the dataset. To
these scientists a prior understanding is only a bias, and must be discounted,
or it’s not good science. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However, any scientist who has
collected data knows that where there are data, there is always noise: random noise,
systemic noise, measurement noise. The tendency to evaluate all the data
blindly means that in many cases we are trying to fit a solution to noise. In
simplest terms, this is trying to draw a curve through dots scattered all over
a graph. A least-squares-fit line or curve drawn through some data points is called a regression
fit, or just a regression. If there is significant noise, this line can tilt in
a number of different directions depending on how the points are “weighted” –
how important the scientist thinks the outliers are. In simplest terms, we are
trying to make sense out of junk. We are giving weight to noise, and this means that we are often just trying to put lipstick on a pig. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This leads, as you can imagine, to
study after study that contradicts other earlier studies on the same topic. One
has only to read the popular science magazines or the morning news to become
painfully aware that “science” disagrees with itself at least as often as it
agrees. In one study of drug research papers, less than 15% of scientific
results reported could be replicated by other independent science teams. Should
you take vitamin C to strengthen your immune system – or avoid it because it
leads to greater cancer likelihood? Does hormone replacement therapy (HRT) lead
to greater or lesser likelihood of heart attacks or cancer in post-menopausal
women? There are scientific papers that support <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> of these conclusions. As mentioned elsewhere in this book, one
current magazine even has a section titled <i>“Health Scare of the Week.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Where are these disparate lines of
thought leading? Are we looking at the forest or just seeing a tree? Are we
letting something that is just noise become disproportionately important over
everything else? Are we missing the big picture? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a talk given by Jeffrey R.
Holland or the Quorum of Twelve Apostles titled “Lord, I believe,” he relates
the story of the man with the thrashing son, who says <span style="color: orange;"><i>“Lord, I believe. Help
Thou mine unbelief”</i></span> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[see Mark 9:22–24; also
verses 14–21]. </i>Elder Holland goes on to note that there are people who,
despite much of a lifetime in the Church, will find some small item that really
upsets them. They may not understand why the Mountain Meadows Massacre took
place, why a Church leader (Relief Society President, Bishop, General
Authority, President of the Church) did or said something. I personally know
people who have left the Church over such issues, or are unwilling to forgive some
offense, or cannot reconcile some remote event in Church history. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I count myself among these. A Mormon
family once instructed their six children to attack my 8-yr-old son whenever they
encountered him playing in our neighborhood cul-de-sac. This went on for a week before we accidentally found out what was going on. They later queried
their 5-year-old again, and then acknowledged that, well, Jared had actually NOT struck
their 3-year-old, but by that time the damage was done and there was anger on
both sides. The idea of encountering that couple in the Church hallways led me
to suggest to my wife, who had taken the brunt of the social ostracism, that we
simply stop attending Church. I will never forget her response. <span style="color: orange;">“<b><i>Last I
checked, this was <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CHRIST’S</span> Church,
not XYZ’s church!</i></b>”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Elder Holland’s key point is this:
hang onto the things you KNOW. Do not be afraid to seek answers for something
that bothers you, but at the same time don’t throw everything else out for one or two negative
things that bother or offend you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his
words, <span style="color: orange;">“</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: orange;">Now, with the advantage that
nearly 60 years give me since I was a newly believing 14-year-old, I declare
some things I now know. I know that God is at all times and in all ways and in
all circumstances our loving, forgiving Father in Heaven. I know Jesus was His
only perfect child, whose life was given lovingly by the will of both the
Father and the Son for the redemption of all the rest of us who are not
perfect. I know He rose from that death to live again, and because He did, you
and I will also. I know that Joseph Smith, who acknowledged that he wasn’t
perfect, was nevertheless the chosen instrument in God’s hand to restore the
everlasting gospel to the earth. I also know that in doing so—particularly
through translating the Book of Mormon—he has taught me more of God’s love, of
Christ’s divinity, and of priesthood power than any other prophet of whom I
have ever read, known, or heard in a lifetime of seeking. I know that President
Thomas S. Monson, who moves devotedly and buoyantly toward the 50th anniversary
of his ordination as an Apostle, is the rightful successor to that prophetic
mantle today. We have seen that mantle upon him again in this conference. I
know that 14 other men whom you sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators
sustain him with their hands, their hearts, and their own apostolic
keys.”</span>—Jeffrey R. Holland, April 2013 Ensign, p. 96.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I remember the little boy improbably born to
the mother who had MS, and how he came to dwell for a short time on this Earth.
I remember uncounted priesthood blessings that suddenly healed me, or in one
case brought a man out of a 4-day coma as I laid my hands on his head. I still
keep the list of the 13 steps that all had to happen in sequence for our family
to move to Venezuela, where incredible adventures and opportunities awaited all
of us. A failure to complete just one of the complicated steps would have
aborted the entire three-year stay. A few of these events and blessings would
have been remarkable coincidences, but the aggregate of them all is immense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My counsel is this: <i><span style="color: magenta;">Don’t get all wrapped up in a single
tree</span>.</i><span style="color: magenta;"> <span style="color: #3d85c6;">Look at the entire forest. If you feel your faith is being shaken by
something, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">first consider who benefits
from this</i>?</span> Then remember this from Elder Holland’s talk:<span style="color: orange;"> “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When doubt or difficulty come, do not be
afraid to ask for help. If we want it as humbly and honestly as this father did,
we can get it. The scriptures phrase such earnest desire as being of “real
intent,” pursued “with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no
deception before God.”11 I testify that in response to that kind of
importuning, God will send help from both sides of the veil to strengthen our
belief.</i>”</span> –ibid. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This requires some patience, or a
little faith, however you wish to view it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But from my vantage point, it’s so
very, very worth it. Your long-term happiness depends on this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">~~~~~ </span></div>
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AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-41605933253436473822013-07-13T16:59:00.001-07:002013-07-13T18:07:37.455-07:00Climate Change - Yes, Maude, she's out o' the Barn<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There are a lot of things floating around in the "news media" about climate change. A lot of it is correct, some of it is foo-foo, and far too much of it is deliberate obfuscation by people who have an agenda. There is a crude expression for scientists who sell their souls to corporations, but this blog will not go there.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I thought it might help to provide a short word summary of what's going on:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: orange;"><u><b>The Knowns</b></u>:</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">1. Virtually all climate specialists not paid by Big Oil agree that the Greenhouse Effect is real. It was first reported in the scientific literature by Joseph Fourier (of Fourier transform fame) in 1824. It's been tested and proven repeatedly ever since.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">2. There is a lot of yearly and decadal variability in climate data. Anyone can cherry-pick the weather data to prove any point they want to - but that's not science. If someone is trying to convince you that climate change is not happening, ask yourself: who's paying this guy?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">3. CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has gone from 315 ppm in 1958 to 400 ppm today (Mauna Loa observatory). Virtually all scientists with integrity accept that most if not all of this change is due to human activity. The reason? The change has been accelerating (second derivative is positive) since about 1850, when the industrial revolution really got underway. By second derivative being positive, I mean that it is ramping up faster and faster as time progresses. This is the well-known "hockey stick" graph made famous by Al Gore. Is it human-caused, though? </span>If we look at the carbon isotopes in this increased CO2, we can show that it is definitely caused by fossil fuel burning.<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">4. The last time the atmospheric CO2 reached this level, according to the geologic record, was during the Pliocene (5.3 to 1.8 million years ago). At that time, about half of Florida was underwater (including the places where ~80% of Florida's population now lives). I've pulled Pliocene marine fossils (sharks' teeth and echinoderms) out of land deposits in Florida with my own hands; they are on my bookshelf.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">5. There is a latency of CO2 after it gets into the atmosphere, and some scientists calculate this to be about 30 years. Translation: it tends to stay there. The oil you burn today will really be impacting your kids 30 years later. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">6. A gallon of gasoline, which weighs 3 kg, will produce about 10 kg of CO2. The extra comes from the oxygen you might want to breathe instead. That's 50 kilometers in my car. And that's not counting the CO2 generated to refine the gasoline. The Energy Returned on Energy Invested for Athabascan tar sands is between 4 and 7. Translation: a rather huge amount of energy is used up just getting the bitumen into the form of gasoline. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">7. Nearly 5 billion people on Earth want to have a high-protein lifestyle like their grandparents could not have even dreamed of. This means vastly-increased herds of vegetation-eating, meat-producing animals. The amount of methane a cow produces is truly breath-taking (pun intended): up to 500 liters of methane a DAY. That's more than a 5-drawer file cabinet. Methane is 37 times more potent than CO2 as a Greenhouse Gas for capturing solar heat.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">8. Increased temperatures mean more glacier calving, more melting or Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland ice caps. Less white stuff on the ground means the darker - light-and-heat-absorbing - under-layers will be exposed, trapping yet more solar heat and making the inevitable change non-linear. Translation: the changes will likely accelerate with time. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i><b><span style="color: magenta;">It's not hard to draw some conclusions from all this:</span></b></i><span style="color: magenta;"> <b><br /></b></span></span><span style="color: magenta;"><br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b>1. Do NOT to buy beachfront property. Anywhere. </b></span><br style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b>2. Move to the Pacific Northwest, or to the Canadian prairie provinces. They will be among the few winners of climate change.</b></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: orange;"><u><b>The Unknowns</b></u>:</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">There are several unresolved questions still:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b><u><span style="color: magenta;">1. How <i>Fast</i>:</span></u></b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">How quickly will the global climate change consequences befall us? This speed of change has never happened before, as far as geologists can tell, in Earth's history. Predicting our future depends on climate modeling, and these models are fraught with assumptions and disagreements. However, they are beginning to coalesce, and are in general agreement. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="color: magenta;"><b><u><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">2. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">How <i>Bad</i></span></u></b><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">:</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i><u>Likely</u></i> consequences include (but these cannot be easily quantified):</span><br />
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<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i><a href="http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/"><b><span style="color: cyan;">Sealevel rise</span></b></a></i>... and because of tectonic settling this will be worse on the east coast of the U.S. This means more, far-reaching devastation from storms like Katrina and Sandy are in our future.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/EOS_mann_emanuel_2006.pdf"><i><b><span style="color: cyan;">We can expect bigger and more devastating hurricanes</span></b></i></a> and tornados. If seawater rises and hurricanes grow in average size, then the storm surges they drag with them will reach deeper and deeper into the continental interiors. About 80% of humanity now lives within 100 km of a seashore.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/agm/publications/documents/wmo_cc_desertif_foldout_en.pdf"><b><i><span style="color: cyan;">Greater and more terrible droughts and wildfires</span></i></b></a> can be expected. Because of well-intended but ultimately catastrophic wildfire suppression policies over the past century, these fires will become truly terrible in the continental U.S. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">A consequence of droughts and wildfires: <a href="http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/giss_crop_study/"><b><i><span style="color: cyan;">massive disruption in the world's food supplies</span></i></b></a>.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">We are already seeing <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mass-extinctions-tied-to-past-climate-changes"><b><i><span style="color: cyan;">mass extinction of animal life</span></i></b></a> - and explosions of other destructive types of life (e.g., jellyfish, toxic algae)</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">We are already seeing <a href="http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~perg/Brierley_and_Kingsford_Cur_Biol_19_2009.pdf"><b><i><span style="color: cyan;">acidification of the oceans</span></i></b></a>, with consequent dissolution and destruction of coral reefs, a major host of biodiversity - and the world's protein supply.</span></li>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><b><u><span style="color: magenta;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">3. </span>Is it <i>already</i> beyond our control?</span></u></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The question has arisen: are we already at the "tipping point"? The effect of climate warming on gas hydrates (methane clathrates) that lie beneath most continental shelves is a <i><u>HUGE</u></i> unknown. Most estimates (from seismic reflection data) suggest these clathrates are many orders of magnitude greater than all other known hydrocarbon reserves (coal, gas, oil) on Earth <i><u>combined</u></i>. Gas hydrates are methane trapped in water ice below ~300 meters of seawater. This is the depth where the pressure and cold ocean floor temperatures currently trap them. They have accumulated there over millions of years from dying sea-life that drops to the bottom (some may derive from oil and gas deposits below them). A single cubic meter of these "gelids" can produce up to 180 cubic meters of methane - the internet is replete with photos of "ice" that is burning. The hydrocarbon-poor Japanese are pouring huge resources into extraction technologies right now. <i><u>A crucial unknown question</u></i>: will attempts to extract this stuff sort of "open the doors" to vast quantities of methane breaking out into the atmosphere?</span></div>
</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The gas hydrates/methane clathrates issue leads to inevitable questions about <i><b><a href="http://www.unige.ch/climate/Publications/Beniston/CC2004.pdf"><span style="color: cyan;">non-linearity</span></a> in </b><a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/climate.html"><b><span style="color: cyan;">climate forcing</span></b></a></i> - and <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(climatology)"><i><span style="color: cyan;">tipping-points</span></i></a></b>. In other words, can things get out of control? Is it already too late - will we see a runaway temperature rise? Will we see inundation of most of the world's great cities (a real Waterworld)?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #141414; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b><u>The geologic record says yes</u></b> - it's happened before for natural reasons - but the geologic record also shows that the Pliocene warm period came on far more slowly than what we are seeing in the modern world climate: it took hundreds of thousands of years to raise CO2 levels then - as fast as humanity has done in the past half century.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><b><span style="color: orange;">We are already in unknown territory, and precise predictions are probably not going to be correct.</span></b> </span><br />
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AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-17950413162419462672013-05-27T13:08:00.000-07:002013-05-27T13:08:35.084-07:00Deterministic Predictability and the Power Grid<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">This year we celebrate the formal 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of chaos theory and the end of deterministic predictability. The latter is the wonderfully intuitive idea that if you understand the physics principles and the starting parameters, you could then predict where a system would be at any time in the future. It’s seems intuitive: set up a row of dominos and you know exactly how things will end when you tip the first one, right? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">That everything-is-predictable-from-the-beginning-conditions idea, however, got us into the Viet Nam war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Around that same time in 1963 a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz showed that this idea was a failure, at least for most systems beyond what you could set up on a table. The reason? Most “systems” (like the weather, or transform faults, or power grids) are not linear, nor are they simple, like a row of dominos. A slight change in an initial parameter in your weather model (the temperature at one of millions of points over the tropical Atlantic, the amount of dust sent westward by a sandstorm in the Sahara a week earlier, the number of sunspots on the approaching limb of the Sun, etc.) and your final calculated outcome for the Atlantic Hurricane season can be totally different from what your computer had calculated just an hour earlier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">DANG, you say. I really need to know when a hurricane/tornado is going to hit! I’m running a BUSINESS here for heaven’s sake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Well, don’t give up hope – we can’t predict earthquakes, but meteorologists have made huge progress in the past two decades. Nate Silver in his book “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420411X"><span style="color: cyan;"><b>The Signal and the Noise</b></span></a>” points out that massive new computing power, coupled with the vaster integrative capacity of thousands of human minds, have together contributed to huge progress in predicting weather out for more than a week at a time. They correctly and precisely predicted the landfalls of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. For human reasons, however, very few people took the warnings for Katrina seriously and thus many people died as a result.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">However, weather forecasters still can’t predict when a hurricane will <i><u>start</u></i> (though they know when the hurricane season will “light up” their boards), nor can they predict very well the power of these monsters when they hit. The damage usually comes not from the wind, but from the so-called low-pressure storm surge that lifts the ocean up 5 or 10 meters as the eye of the storm approaches land. Think: a 20-foot wall of ocean pouring in on your neighborhood at 20 miles per hour. As an interesting anecdote, Nate Silver shows that <i><u>local</u></i> television weather people have a truly abysmal predictive record, far worse than the NOAA weather forecasters, whose data they can easily access for free. How could this possibly be? The reason for this is very human: no forecaster wants to get flogged for UNDER estimating the likelihood of precipitation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Let’s go back again to the foundations of predicting things. This is, basically, prophesying. Deterministic predictability actually does hold, at least theoretically. The problem is having ALL the parameter data PRECISELY correct in your weather model. It is also important to have a computing grid fine enough that when you do your calculations the temperature and pressure on any given point is not that different from that of any adjacent point. In other words, so the point-to-point behavior can be treated mathematically as approximately linear. Some of Lorenz’ earlier computer models used to try to predict the weather gave different results when run more than once. What? But everything input was the same! Not quite, it turned out. The starting numbers were returned to the computation with only the third decimal place retained – in other words the numbers were rounded up. 26.2653 became 26.265 - and the final results were startlingly different. It took Lorenz awhile to realize this, but there was a big clue down there in the minute decimals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Classical physics teaches that given the current state of a system, all future states can be calculated. It seemed to work in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century: it was used to predict the orbits of planets and comets, and slight perturbations successfully guided the search for Uranus and then Neptune (and in 1930 a small perturbation in the orbit of Neptune led to the discovery of Pluto, though that case is arguable). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">However, back in the 1880’s, Henri Poincaré was studying the three-body problem, in which three bodies continuously influence each other in celestial mechanics in complex and overlapping ways. Poincaré noticed <b><i>“…that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.”</i></b> He concluded that prediction is impossible for three bodies orbiting in space. Contemporaries thought they just had a data quality problem, but the root was much deeper than that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">So chaos theory, but without that name, preceded Lorenz by nearly a century. Chaos theory, by the way, has a common metaphor that is fairly widespread: the so-called <span style="color: orange;">“The Butterfly Effect”</span>. This stems from the title of Lorenz’s 1972 presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: <b><i><span style="color: magenta;">“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”</span></i></b> This is also called <b><i>‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’</i></b>, and it’s a trademark characteristic of a complex non-linear system. On the other hand, the trademark behavior of a chaotic system is apparent randomness – but this is deceiving. Determinism actually works, but you have to know ALL the initial data and ALL the force actors to high precision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><b><span style="color: orange;">Well, what has all this got to do with the electric grid in the title?</span></b> In the United States there are really three quasi-independent power grids: The Eastern Interconnection for the entire eastern US to about the Kansas-Colorado border, the Western Interconnection from there to the Pacific coast… and the Texas grid. We always knew Texas would insist on being different. It may surprise you to know that these grids are the largest engineering structures ever built, and consist of thousands of energy sources from coal-fired power plants, to the huge Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dam hydro-electrical generators, feeding ultimately to billions of power outlets in our homes. These systems affect virtually every aspect of our day-to-day lives. If you are reading this, it means the grid is working.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">However, within each of these domains – and increasingly across their boundaries – a perturbation in one place will cascade across the rest of the network with usually unpredictable consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">While there are power generating stations everywhere throughout the three grids, there are powerful sources of irregularity in the entire system. Wind energy sources can drop suddenly, and the growing solar input systems are diurnal (they produce nothing at night), or a power plant may go offline for maintenance. Furthermore, a <b><i>Coronal Mass Ejection</i></b> (see <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%C2%A0http://jeffwynn.blogspot.com/2012/01/cme-events-how-they-affect-your-life.html"> <b><span style="color: cyan;">http://jeffwynn.blogspot.com/2012/01/cme-events-how-they-affect-your-life.html</span></b></a>) can send a huge bolus of charged particles at our planet. The Earth’s magnetic field is a pretty good defensive barrier, but it can be – and has been – beaten down to the ground. When that happens there are huge telluric currents set up – vast flows of electricity along the ground. When this hits a power substation it can cause huge shorts in the giant accumulators. If you’ve never seen a power transformer “pop”, then you are in for a spectacular surprise as long as you are not next to it. I’ve watched video of a tornado approaching Oklahoma City, and its approach is marked distinctly by bright flashes as these pole-top transformers explode.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">When a small transformer like this goes down, it blacks out a part of the network and is repairable within a few days at most. When a larger accumulator explodes in a power substation, it’s a different matter, and there will be huge surges of power coming in on the grid to try to compensate for its loss. Enough of these kinds of events and the instability they bring will cause vast areas to go down. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">The most famous of these events happened in the summer of 1965, when New York City was blacked out. Interestingly, there was a huge surge of births in the area precisely 9 months later. More recently, a <b><i>CME</i></b> shut down the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, when they experienced a huge and long-lasting blackout in the middle of winter. If electricity is your source of heat, this could be a life-threatening event. If you survive, your water pipes will freeze and burst, and you will have heck to pay when it warms up again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">When these surge-and-sag events happen, human operators jump in and try to stop the cascading failure from propagating. But they don’t always succeed, in part because the entire grid is fundamentally a non-linear system, sensitive to the tiniest things. In other words, we can’t predict ahead what is going to happen to our home power supply, because there are too many variables involved and we don’t understand the behavior of the system except in statistical ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">But the human and growing automation reasons for grid instability are perhaps the most interesting – and the least predictable. Thousands of induction motors in air conditioners can all surge at once and drag down (“brown out”) the entire system when a sudden heat wave hits California, or New York, or any other major collection of humanity. As more and more renewable energy sources come online, the points of failure and surge grow even further. Newer smart appliances just add to this mix because human control steadily diminishes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">It’s perhaps not really surprising, then, that Chinese military hackers have turned their attention to the North American power grid, and have persistently probed the computer control systems monitoring and adjusting against just these sorts of failures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Yes, chaos theory rules our world. Another way to say this is that our small part of the universe is chock full of nonlinear systems, including especially humans, and nonlinear systems are very hard to forecast.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">~~~~~</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">One final quote, this time from the famous mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace: <b><i><span style="color: magenta;">“An Intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it – an Intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis… for It, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to It’s eyes.”</span></i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">~~~~~</span></div>
</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-22424298803704386162013-04-01T19:06:00.000-07:002013-08-15T20:26:57.546-07:00Home Invasions and Practical Statistics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was awakened a few days ago around 4am by a thump downstairs. This
is about the time that the newspaper is delivered to our front porch, so
I rolled over and went back to sleep.<br />
<br />
But a thunk sound below my
bedroom at 1:30am a few days later was a different thing, and I got up
and did a systematic search of my 3-level house. In truth, I was pretty
sure the sound was a book falling off an unbalanced stack downstairs, or
perhaps even a weird dream. How I <u><i>did</i></u> that search speaks
more to my “weaponized” (NOT firearms) house and my background: I'm a
Taiho-Jutsu sensei. Of the Japanese martial arts, this one is sometimes
called “Jujitsu on steroids.”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: lime;"><i><b>Oh BOY! There may be a 1% chance I can USE this!</b></i></span><br />
<br />
But first, back to <span style="color: orange;"><b>home invasions</b></span>.
The expression alone conjures terrible images from lurid newspaper
reports. If you are only robbed and beaten up, you are fortunate. Home
invasion differs from a burglary in its violent intent, and this
distinction appears to be largely American. <br />
<br />
Home invasions are
real, if very rare. Statistics on these are notoriously hard to find, in
part because of different crime classifications in different
jurisdictions (in many places these are classified separately as
homicide, rape, kidnaping, etc.). However, the impact on the human
psyche is not unlike the impact of shark attacks. As in most of these
“news” events, the real killers are rarely mentioned:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>fishermen wantonly kill millions of sharks every year just for their fins; </li>
<li>handguns in the United States kill 1,130 times more people per year than lightning does, and </li>
<li>31,672 more people are killed by handguns in the United States each year than are killed by sharks. </li>
</ul>
To put things in perspective:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b>HANDGUN DEATHS</b></span>:<br />
In
2011, there were 8,583 murders in the United States committed with
handguns. However, there were 31,672 TOTAL handgun deaths - all the rest
(73%) were suicides, with the occasional handgun accident lumped in.
This is comparable to motor vehicle deaths in the US. <br />
<br />
<u><i><b>There is a message here</b></i></u>: having a handgun ready to blast someone in your home is statistically a far greater threat to <u><i>you</i></u> than the statistical chance of any possible safety it may offer. Read on.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b>SHARK ATTACK DEATHS</b></span>:<br />
There
were 118 reported shark attacks world-wide in 2011, with 17 fatalities.
There were 47 “unprovoked” shark attacks in the United States in 2012, <u><i>with just 1 fatality</i></u>.
You have to wonder about the “unprovoked” caveat: do a lot of people
“mess” with sharks? The vast majority of shark attacks occur in Florida.
One human death to several million shark deaths is a very
unsportsmanlike ratio, IMHO.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b>LIGHTNING DEATHS</b></span>:<br />
There
were 28 Lightning fatalities in the United States in 2012, and some
24,000 lightning deaths worldwide. Again, you have to wonder at the
disparity in the statistics, as the US represents 6% of the world
population. There are many possible reasons, including regions like the
Pacific Northwest where lightning is a very rare thing, or perhaps
people live in flimsier houses elsewhere. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: orange;"><b>Back again to home invasions. Are you at risk of one?</b></span>
A pattern of dealing in illegal and “recreational” drugs will
dramatically increase your potential likelihood for being targeted.
Living in Anacostia, Maryland, or south Chicago will also dramatically
increase your risk, but this is probably no surprise to anyone in the
US.<br />
<br />
What can you do about it?<br />
<br />
<u><b>A HANDGUN IN THE HOME</b></u>:<br />
The
reality here is dramatically different than what the National Rifle
Association would have you believe. If a woman carries a handgun, <span style="color: orange;"><u><i><b>there is an 80% statistical likelihood that it will be used against HER</b></i></u></span>:
in other words, she will be either shot with her own weapon, or
pistol-whipped with it. That’s a pretty large statistical number -
basically it is a high probability.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;"><u><i>Another take-away</i></u>: don't carry a pistol in your handbag.</span><br />
<br />
If you’ve ever been to a gun-range, the following observation will be obvious:<br />
It
takes slow, calm focus and concentration to hit a human target at 5
meters (16 feet) distance. Imagine trying to do that in the dark, when
charged with adrenaline, and both the shooter and the target are moving.<br />
<br />
There
is a video on YouTube where a traffic stop ends with a perp jumping out
of a stolen car and firing several shots at the police officer. The
dashboard cam shows that the officer then proceeds to fire at least 12
rounds at the perp, who is running <u><i>in a straight line</i></u> towards the nearby forest. NOT ONE BULLET ON EITHER SIDE HIT ITS TARGET. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: orange;"><i><b>In a home invasion situation, a handgun is an excellent means to poke holes in your house</b></i></span> - and probably several neighboring houses at the same time. It will likely NOT protect you.<br />
<u><br /></u><b><u>IS THERE A BETTER ALTERNATIVE</u>?</b> <span style="color: red;"><i><b>YES</b></i></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>Actually,
there are several. There are two excellent and inexpensive tools for
this, in fact, and used together they are pretty effective: <span style="color: orange;"><b>The first is a cell-phone</b></span> that has been charging near your bed. USE IT. Call 911 and the entire conversation will be recorded. </li>
<li><span style="color: orange;"><b>The second tool is a Mag-Light</b></span>. This has a steel shaft, and a six-C-cell version is the <b><i>sine qua non</i></b>,
if hard to find. Held on your shoulder, it can be used to both
momentarily blind an attacker in the dark and strike a devastating blow.
It works like an ASP baton, but it is significantly heavier.</li>
<li><span style="color: orange;"><b>There is also a Taser</b></span>,
if you can afford one (and the necessary training that goes with it). A
Taser has been shown to be nearly 100% effective in disabling a
targeted human being <u><i>for up to several minutes after a single zap</i></u>.
There is at least one case, however, where a very angry man fired
weapons at police and nearby civilians continuously after taking 42
separate bullet "hits" to his body. Only the 43rd bullet, which severed
his upper spine, stopped his murderous rampage. So much for handguns - the N.R.A. loses the facts war yet again.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: orange;"><b>So...should you then search for the invader and pound him?</b></span> </span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><u>NO!</u></span> Searching for the invader in your home, no matter HOW many stripes you have on your black belt, is statistically stupid - tactically, medically, and legally</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">*</span></span></i>. <br />
<br />
Instead,
with the cell phone in one hand, you can provide your address to the
911 Operator, and then maintain a running recording of what you see -
perhaps including the only court-defensible and relevant description of
any intruder that you might encounter. <span style="color: orange;">Your objective, however, is to <i><b>GET SAFELY TO YOUR FRONT DOOR, UNLOCK IT FOR THE POLICE, AND THEN GET OUT</b></i>.</span><br />
<br />
Leave
it to the professionals to deal with the intruder. They can use a Taser
(far more disabling than a handgun), pepper spray (which you would only
inflict yourself with if you tried to use it without some training and
experience), and a handgun if absolutely necessary.<br />
<br />
Then stand back and watch. Use your phone to video the "perp walk" for your family, friends, and local TV station.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;">*</span><b> Stupid Tactically, Medically, and Legally:</b></span><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="color: red;"></span>First,
compare yourself against a trained pair of completely awake and alert
police officers. You lose majorly in this comparison. </li>
<li>Second,
a significant number of people, inexperienced in using a handgun in
complex circumstances, end up injuring themselves with their own weapon
(3rd degree burns, lacerated hands, even self-inflicted gunshot
wounds). </li>
<li>Third, unless you have an unlimited bank account, you
should expect that ANY use of a firearm on another human being - for
whatever reason - will require hiring an attorney, and then months of
court appearances (and thinking about them, which will dramatically reduce your quality of life). </li>
</ol>
~~~~~</div>
AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-83518993950916538972012-06-02T20:50:00.000-07:002012-06-02T20:50:24.137-07:00Snowball Earth - the Faint Young Sun Paradox<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s a detective story for you, and it doesn’t involve a murder.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Astronomers studying young stars like ours have realized that as a Main Sequence star evolves over time, the inner core becomes denser and the fusion rate of hydrogen to helium increases. In other words, our own Sun must have grown brighter and brighter during its first 5 billion years of existence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Careful astrometric studies have even placed some numbers on this: the energy output of the Sun 2 billion years ago is inferred to be about 70% - 85% of what it is today. This would not be enough to warm the Earth above the freezing point of water. The Earth 2 billion years ago should have been a frozen ice-ball, like Mars today. Mars is more distant from the Sun than Earth is and correspondingly cooler.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a problem with this conclusion, however: it doesn’t agree with ancient evidence gleaned from geology. There are sedimentary rocks in South Africa with ripple-marks and mud-cracks. These rocks are derived from volcanic ash - and therefor easily dated at about 2 billion years old. Other rocks dated at 2.7 billion years ago show fossilized rain-drop imprints. I have personally handled ripple marks and pillow-lavas (lava that is fast-quenched in water) dated at about 1.7 billion years ago in southern Venezuela. Ancient stromatolytes - blue-green algal clumps and mats - have been found in rocks over 3 billion years old in Australia.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The evidence is everywhere: the atmosphere may have been different, but there was liquid water on the Earth’s surface as far back as we can test.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What gives? The arguments used to explain this so-called “Faint Young Sun Paradox” fall into three main groups:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
- The young Earth may still have had a lot of residual heat left over from potential energy accumulated during the accretion process. However, the surface of the Earth would have equilibrated quickly with energy received from the Sun, and the existence of solid cratons back at least 3.4 billion years ago argues for a solid crust. Energy released from the Earth’s interior has actually ramped up with the onset of mantle convection and plate tectonics, now thought to have started about 2.5 billion years ago.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
- The Earth’s atmosphere retained heat more efficiently than it does now - for instance, by containing more greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Sufficient nitrogen can also act as a greenhouse gas under a phenomena called nitrogen broadening. There are a few questionable gas inclusions in ancient rocks, but scientists argue over how pristine the gasses in these inclusions actually are - or if they have diffused (either into the rock or out) over time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
- The Earth’s albedo, or surface reflectance, was lower in the past. Lower surface albedo could have been due to less continental area (more dark, absorbing ocean), or perhaps by the lack of biologically induced cloud condensation nuclei. How would you ever obtain evidence for something like cloud cover 2.5 billions years ago, however?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are other suggested explanations out there. One is the modulating effect of a stronger Solar Wind in Archean times (i.e., greater than 2.5 billion years ago). Another is that due to orbital mechanics and tidal effects, the Earth’s orbit was once closer to the Sun.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This last explanation is treated skeptically by most astronomers because of some bad science propagated in several books by Immanuel Velikovsky a generation ago. The Earth-Moon distance varies depending on where the Moon is in its orbit. Lunar laser ranging experiments show that in general the Moon is receding from the Earth at a rate just under 4 centimeters per year. This is due to tidal energy being transferred to the earth (and converted to heat) via the seas, and the deformation of the Earth’s crust along with the tides. It is a logical step to infer that the Earth’s orbit around the Sun could increase for the same reason over time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a major problem with all these theories: with time, the evidence for anything becomes increasingly fragmentary, increasingly suspect. It’s like a Cold Case murder - only 2.5 billion years cold.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Scientists are clever folk, however - and they keep thinking, keep looking for other ideas. Recently some of them have gone back to the fossil imprints of ancient rain-drops onto volcanic ash, and have conducted comparison experiments to estimate the density of the Earth’s ancient atmosphere. There are many variables to deal with, however, including how big will rain drops be, and how much moisture was in the volcanic ash? Careful calibration has at least allowed scientists to put a range on the ancient Earth’s atmosphere: it was between 50% and 105% as dense as it is today. This immediately calls into question the greenhouse gas argument.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We also know from other geological evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere began to fill with freed-up oxygen around 2.5 billion years ago. Rounded pyrite grains found in ancient South African sandstones, which could not have occurred in the presence of oxygen, is one proof of this. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_oxygenation_event"><b><span style="color: cyan;">Great Oxygenation Event</span></b></a> came at the expense of methane and carbon dioxide, which biological processes were already starting to sequester in the form of carbon accumulating in the bottoms of ancient swamps. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You recently drove your car to the grocery store using gasoline - some of that sequestered carbon. That same trip thus released more of a greenhouse gas to the Earth’s atmosphere.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so the Earth grows hotter and hotter...<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
~~~~~</div>
</div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-26718931357182497982012-03-16T17:00:00.013-07:002012-03-16T17:00:00.091-07:00Heat Flow<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">How are the other planets like - and unlike - our Earth? To answer that very fundamental question, at the dawn of the Space Age my friend and fellow USGS scientist Gene Shoemaker founded the Branch of Astrogeology in Flagstaff, Arizona. He and his many fellow scientists there have figured a LOT out about the other planets by using data and imagery provided by NASA.<br />
<br />
<br />
Q:<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">I am told that the core of the earth is as big as the moon and as hot as the surface of the sun, and that the mantle is pretty darn hot too...</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;"><br />
</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Why doesn't all of this heat transfer, move through, conduct up through the crust so that the surface of the earth would at least be very warm to the touch?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;"><br />
</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">peter h</span></b><br />
<div><br />
</div><div>A:</div><div><div>The Earth's core is not quite as large as the Moon - it's about 70% of the Moon's radius using evidence accumulated from the seismic tomography studies over the past half century or so. <b><i><span style="color: #f1c232;">Think: earthquakes send sound waves downwards, and sophisticated calculations convert the refracted waves and their arrival times into an image of the Mantle and the Outer Core and the Inner Core.</span></i></b> No one has ever measured the Core's temperature directly, of course, but laboratory high-pressure experiments, along with theoretical calculations, suggest that the temperature may be in the 5,400C/9,800F range - pretty close to the surface temperature of the Sun.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Actually the Core's heat DOES transfer outwards, and in some pretty spectacular ways: parts of the Earth's crust (Kamchatka, for instance) are moving as much as 8 cm/3 inches per year under the convective force of that heat trying to escape. <b><i><span style="color: #f1c232;">Think: this crustal movement is analogous to the skin moving on the surface of a pot of cooking Cream of Wheat.</span></i></b> This is the reason we are seeing those monstrous earthquakes off the coast of Chile, Japan, and in Haiti. The fact that heat escapes from the core is also manifested in the hundreds of volcanoes we see, for instance, all around the Pacific Ring of Fire. The continental crust rides up and over the down-going (denser) oceanic crust, which melts as it goes deeper and gets hotter, and the lighter water-and-gas-saturated components work their way upward through that continental crust to give us things like Mount St Helens. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Heat flow is actually a venerable (old and respected) field of geoscience. There are specialists who study heat flow all their professional lives - you have to put sensors deep in wells and block the fluids from convecting in order to get accurate numbers. There are places like Battle Mountain, Nevada, where the heat flow - the amount of heat escaping through a square meter of the surface - is several times higher than it is, on average, elsewhere on the Earth's crust. Another manifestation of that heat flow is the fact that no matter where you are on the Earth's surface, you can go down in a mine a few tens of meters/yards, and the temperature will almost always be about 55 degrees F (12 degrees C). It could be 122F/50C on the surface, and it will still be that cool at depth. It could be 'way below freezing on the surface in the Arctic, and it will STILL be 55F/12C at a drill-able depth. As you go much deeper, perhaps 4,000m/12,000 feet deep in some of the South African gold mines, the temperature gets hotter and hotter the deeper you go. A friend told me that in one South African gold mine, the temperature at the rock face at those depths can be 140F/60C. The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Why isn't the crust hot to the touch? For the same reason that a cinder-block wall is good insulation against the heat of the day-time sun. Rock is just not thermally conductive like a metal is - it's usually a pretty good insulator, in fact. For this reason, when the heat can't easily get out by <b><i><span style="color: #cc0000;">conduction</span></i></b>, it gets out by <b><i><span style="color: #a64d79;">convection</span></i></b>, but at a much slower rate. Think of that pot of Cream of Wheat again - that's convective heat transfer going on. On the global scale of the Earth's crust, this is the same thing as continental drift... which gives us huge subduction earthquakes and volcanoes. </div></div><div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~</div></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-78427552109527303842012-03-14T18:11:00.002-07:002012-03-22T21:49:48.613-07:00Sea Level Rise<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
One of the more startling side effects of Climate Change is sea level rise. (Yes both are very real, and the only partially unanswered question is how much of it you and I as human beings have caused ourselves.) There is a loud scientific cat-fight going on about sea level rise - and another equally loud one as to whether climate change is the reason for the increasingly violent weather extremes we've been seeing. These recent extremes include multi-year droughts in Texas and the Southwest, EF-4 tornadoes in the Midwest in March, monster hurricanes in the East Coast and similar typhoons in the western Pacific, etc. Oh: One of the more obvious pieces of data is that nine of the hottest ten years on record historically have been in the past decade: <b><i>in this century. </i></b><br />
<br />
For some people there is a growing realization that sea level rise can have some rather direct personal consequences. As in property-loss. As in losing your entire country.<br />
<br />
Q:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: lime;"><b>Sorry for the rather twisted syntax here, but my kids are interested to know whether about </b><b>250,000 years ago Virginia's Atlantic coast was generally farther east or west of today's </b><b>coastline. In other words, was more of what is now Virginia covered by the Atlantic ocean then </b><b>than today? Thanks for any help or direction you can provide.</b></span><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Mike M.</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
A:<br />
<br />
Good question - you have smart kids to even think about this - and a firm number here is hard to pin down precisely. The following link will give you an image of seawater high-and-low stands over the past 900,000 years: <b><span style="color: cyan;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif</span></b><br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCTndNYmsh2RirXsCnAh7ijy4qtesu5ceoxeAGDfxckathxMr1worMo2jpbGzLdJOpJ0_Gt1ZHVN0O-kYSW0vf1mHJvZKZyaAUwi9TW2ykbc92took62xPbk8Rl5ZhZSCo0eMl6MeNLM/s1600/Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCTndNYmsh2RirXsCnAh7ijy4qtesu5ceoxeAGDfxckathxMr1worMo2jpbGzLdJOpJ0_Gt1ZHVN0O-kYSW0vf1mHJvZKZyaAUwi9TW2ykbc92took62xPbk8Rl5ZhZSCo0eMl6MeNLM/s1600/Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif" width="320" /></a></div><b><br />
</b><br />
<br />
The short answer is that 250,000 years ago there was substantially more of Virginia than there is today: the coastline went much farther east than it does now.<br />
<br />
I know relatively little of Virginia's coast and offshore topography except for the (probably exposed then) Smith Shoals, where I dragged an electrical geophysical streamer behind a ship not so many years ago looking for titanium-bearing placer sands. All I remember was days of 5-meter (15-foot) seas and a long-term case of seasickness. Only 4 people of a ship's compliment of 19 even bothered to go for lunch or dinner. The data were good, though.<br />
<br />
To put things in perspective, just 17,000 years ago the northern Florida coastline was about 50 kilometers farther east than where it is today. In a Gulf Coast estuary I've seen side-scan records that show a beach berm 6 meters below modern sea-level - and when it was tested with a vibracore, there were burned seashells in the sample.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: magenta;"><i>Translation:</i> They saw and drilled a paleo-indian campsite that is now 20 feet below modern sea-level.</span></b><br />
<br />
What is interesting to me in that chart is not so much the cyclic nature of sea-level stands, but the fact that the most recent sea-level stand is the highest. THAT tells me two things:<br />
1. The Virginia coast today has the least land area in the past million or so years, and...<br />
2. At current generation of CO<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span> (historically this was around 280 ppm in our atmosphere; it is now closing in on 400 ppm), it means that Virginia is about to lose even more land to the sea as Antarctica and the Greenland ice cap melt - which appears to be accelerating vis-a-vis their state even 50 years ago.<br />
<br />
So... don't look for long-term investment on beach-front property.<br />
<br />
<b><u>FOLLOW-UP:</u></b><br />
<b><u><br />
</u></b><br />
Q:<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Was it because the atmosphere was colder and there was more sea ice than now?</span></b><br />
<br />
A:<br />
Seawater stands were lower then because monstrously huge glaciers covering most of the northern hemisphere were greatly expanded and tied up so much surface water. In Norway the glaciers were 3 kilometers (two miles) thick. And yes, that means colder (as an average) by many degrees C everywhere.<br />
<br />
Q:<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Were ALL the seas lower?</span></b><br />
<br />
A:<br />
Yes. There are tectonic movements - for instance, Scandinavia has been and still is rebounding many meters (about 1 cm/year) since the "ice monster" glacial cover melted - and these sea level changes are 'relatively' persistent. Ports have had to be repeatedly relocated in Scandinavia because of this. In most of the rest of the world, however, sea level is creeping <b><i><u>up</u></i></b>. Also, seawater seeks its level worldwide - like if a flood inundates a city, the water gets everywhere quickly. Tides and large storms (typhoons, hurricanes) will temporarily raise local sea level, but it will always re-equilibrate to provide a "Mean Low Water". This is a legal term used to define edges of seafront property - I was once threatened as part of a USGS survey team in Alaska because of a drunk property owner not understanding this. MLW is what is now starting to change as the glaciers melt ever more rapidly, and huge chunks of the Ross Ice Shelf break off and float away from Antarctica. I suspect sea level rise will soon (if not already) match or overmatch the isostatic rebound in Scandinavia. Low-lying places like Tuvalo and the Seychelles are already actually witnessing the frightening loss of their entire countries! Because of tides and storms, it takes a lot of recording over many years to be certain of the actual sea level rise.<br />
<br />
Q:<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">What about on the west coast?</span></b><br />
<br />
A:<br />
<br />
Same - all sealevels rise at the same time. The latest world-wide data says the water is moving up about 3.1 mm per year (EOS, 6 December 2011). That's an inch every 8 years, 16 inches a century. Another recent paper (EOS, 8 November 2011) points out that the huge groundwater depletion going on all around the world is increasing river flows... and adding to the sea-level rise. The Washington Post (22 March 2012) reports that a new long-range military assessment is predicting water wars this century - <span style="color: magenta;"><b><i>nations</i></b><i><b> going to war over water rights!</b></i></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~</div><br />
</div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-32649671881182590712012-02-03T21:47:00.001-08:002012-02-03T21:48:15.334-08:00Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plate Tectonics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
Yes, they <b><i>ARE</i></b> connected.<br />
<br />
With two notable exceptions, volcanoes are associated with (a) tectonic plates splitting apart (Iceland and east central Africa come to mind) or (b) tectonic plates that are coming together (the Pacific Ring of Fire comes to mind). In the former case, magma is simply rising into an opening gap between crustal plates that are being pulled apart - like the mid-Atlantic Ridge. In the latter case, an over-ridden oceanic plate, loaded with water and chemical sediments, heats up as it goes deeper into an increasingly-hotter-with-depth mantle. Something called partial melting takes place: the lighter materials like silica and water and CO2 segregate from the down-going slab and float up - Mount St Helens in the Pacific Cascades, Sheveluch in Russian Kamchatka, and Mount Fuji in Japan are examples of these.<br />
<br />
The notable exceptions are the volcanoes of the Hawai'ian Islands in the middle of the Pacific oceanic plate, and Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. The generally accepted understanding for their existence is that a "hot spot" in the Mantle feeds up through a moving crust (the Pacific plate) and creates a string of volcanoes. In the Hawai'ian chain, the oldest are in the northwest, and the youngest are in the southeast on the Big Island. There's even a new one, called Loihi, that is forming on the ocean floor even farther southeast of the Big Island.<br />
<br />
When we talk about moving tectonic plates, it's hard to come up with a reference point that everything is moving with respect to... Certainly the North American continent is moving westward over the Pacific and subsidiary plates, but Kamchatka is moving southeast over the same plate(s). If in fact there IS a "hot spot" in the middle of the Pacific plate - perhaps <i><u>that</u></i> is the one non-moving reference point on this entire planet.<br />
<br />
Q:<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">With the increased recent activity around the "ring of fire", New Zealand, Japan and Gulf of California, is there an increased risk for earthquake in other areas of the ring of fire?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Thank you</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">David H</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
A:<br />
Geologic events never happen according to a regular clock - sometimes things are quiet around the Ring of Fire, sometimes several events happen in relatively close succession. There is no recognized relation between the huge Tohoku earthquake in Japan and the much earlier Christchurch, New Zealand event - they are too far apart in both space and time. THAT said, there have been several cases observed where a large earthquake has "lit up" distant volcanic or earthquake-prone areas. The large Denali fault earthquake of November 2002 apparently triggered swarms of small earthquake in Yellowstone, for instance. Nothing big happened, but there were a cluster of small earthquakes that correlate closely with the p-wave of the Denali event passing through.<br />
<br />
The likelihood of other earthquakes around the Ring of Fire correlates much more closely with the rate of subduction - how fast the continental plate is over-riding and "smothering" the oceanic plate. This rate is much higher off the coast of Kamchatka, in eastern Russia for instance (about 8 cm/year), than the collision rate of the Pacific Northwest (moving only about 2.5 cm/year). For this reason the volcanoes in Kamchatka are historically much more active than those in the Cascades. In the 10 years that I've been receiving daily volcanic notices about Kamchatka, I'm at a loss to think of a time when a volcano in Kamchatka was <i><u>not</u></i> erupting. Whereas in the last century, here in the Pacific Northwest, we've only had Mount Lassen erupt (1915-17), then Mount St Helens in (1980-86).<br />
<br />
<i><u>Any</u></i> plate motion will translate into earthquakes - the plates are scraping past each other - and the subduction (over-riding plate) earthquakes can be real doozies.<br />
<br />
Slower tectonics translates to a quieter life: fewer earthquakes, fewer volcanoes.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-54225775739161273872012-02-01T20:46:00.000-08:002012-02-01T20:46:49.477-08:00Nuke it!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
While I was serving as the chief scientist for volcano hazards of the US Geological Survey, Mount St Helens chose that time to erupt (October 1, 2004). At the time I was also still volunteering to answer questions for Ask-a-Geologist. Perhaps because of my calling at the time, I received not one but two AAG queries that went something like this (I couldn't find them in the archives or I would quote directly):<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: lime;">Why can't you drop an atom bomb on <Mount St Helens> to stop it from erupting?</span></b><br />
<br />
A variant on this suggestion is to use a nuclear device to <i><u>trigger</u></i> a pending eruption at a time of your choosing.<br />
<br />
There are several problems with this approach:<br />
A. Highly radioactive debris scattered widely over a populated area.<br />
B. You would need to get the device <i><u>under</u></i> the ground to <i><u>open</u></i> the ground.<br />
C. The inherent energy of most volcanoes is far larger than any nuclear devices built by man.<br />
<br />
"A" is, I hope, obvious. Nearly as many people died of radiation poisoning after the Hiroshima uranium bomb was dropped than died of the immediate blast itself. Half-lives for things like the unstable isotopes of strontium and cesium are looooong - thousands of years - and they are poisonous the whole time they are decaying. Plutonium is, gram for gram, far more deadly than botulinum toxin.<br />
<br />
"B" is basic physics. A small stick of dynamite will blow OPEN a standing safe by over-pressuring it, but a cluster of dynamite sticks taped to the outside and detonated may or may not crush a safe door down onto the inner contents of the safe. Despite what you may have seen on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, safes don't blow up nicely.<br />
<br />
<b><i><u>Translation:</u></i></b> you will need a very big, very expensive drill to place the nuclear device at a strategic place. Assuming it was powerful enough, that is.<br />
<br />
When you come down to the many trade-offs, it's far easier to just (1) monitor the volcano, and (2) evacuate people when it's restive behavior starts accelerating and the seismometers start going ape on you.<br />
<br />
"C" is just a numbers game. The Hiroshima uranium bomb and the Nagasaki plutonium bomb had estimated explosive yields between 12,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT. For you metric nerds out there, a metric ton of TNT equivalent is a bit over 4 gigajoules. Mount St Helens' 1980 eruption was a VEI = 5 level blast. That's short for Volcano Explosivity Index, and a VEI 5 is about 10 times bigger than a VEI = 4; the values are approximate, and approximately logarithmic. The 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens released the equivalent of 20 <b><i><u>million</u></i></b> tons of TNT. That's between 1,000 and 30,000 times more energy released than the Hiroshima atom bomb.<br />
<br />
The eruption of Yellowstone supervolcano about 640,000 years ago has been estimated as a VEI = 8 event, or 1000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption. That's between 1,000,000 and 30,000,000 times the power of a Hiroshima bomb.<br />
<br />
<b><i><u>Translation:</u></i></b> a nuclear device is to a VEI 5 volcanic eruption, as a fly doing push-ups is to you doing push-ups. I may be exaggerating a bit with the fly, but you get the point. Volcanoes are BIG. That's why no one has ever seriously considered engineering around a volcanic eruption. Just get out of the way if you can.<br />
<br />
If you want to open a can of spinach, ya gots ta squeeze it, to quote Popeye. No sissy atom bombs.<br />
<br />
~~~~~<br />
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-63277667127866170802012-01-26T21:13:00.001-08:002012-01-26T21:13:09.903-08:00Deformation and GPS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
We get a LOT of questions about volcanoes, including how to Know if they'll Blow. There are a number of ways we can track magma movement at depth, including deformation and "LP's" - long-period seismic tremor that is indicative of fluid movement. At late stages of unrest, we will start seeing "VT's" - short-period volcanic tremor that is indicative of shallow rock-breaking - and increases in CO2 and H2S gases. There is at least the possibility that we can detect early movement of magma at 30 - 40 km depths using magnetotelluric systems, but so far there hasn't been funding to try this. As I write this, deformation reaches out the longest time ahead of all these detection systems to give us warning of an impending eruption.<br />
<br />
The term "deformation" is used by specialists in ground movement in the geosciences; these guys themselves are called "geodesists". Geodesists measure movement as a component of strain along an active fault, to try to get a sense of the energy accumulating that could lead to an earthquake. Deformation is used in volcanology to look for - and then track - inflation in a volcanic edifice. Deformation is done in several ways:<br />
<br />
<ol><li>By <b><u>surveying</u></b> the ground with high precision. This has been done at Yellowstone since the mid-1920's, and those early data have helped us get a much better sense of how the huge caldera moves and breathes. </li>
<li>By deploying <b><u>tiltmeters</u></b>. Originally these were long tubes of water laid out over the ground. If the ground under the flank of a volcano started tilting, it would show up in amplified movement of water in vertical tubes at the end of the long tube. Modern tiltmeters are ultra-sensitive cylinders placed in a vertical hole in the volcanic rock, then packed in with sand. The signal from these devices and all the following systems is generally telemetered back to a recording and monitoring system. </li>
<li>By using <b><u>radar satellites</u></b> - this is called <b>InSAR</b> for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar. If two images can be captured over the same volcano, they can be used to make interferograms. These are colored, Moire patterns - generated with enormous mathematical calculations to geometrically correct and ratio each pixel to another, called "rubber sheeting" - that will show inflation over the surface of a volcano and its environs. Each rainbow-colored ring-set represents one radar wavelength (typically 5 - 15 centimeters) of uplift. These often form a bulls-eye centered over an inflating volcano or deflating caldera, and I've seen several gorgeous examples at Ngiragongo volcano, in Central Africa; at Pavlof, Akutan, Okmok, Shishaldin, and many other volcanoes in the Aleutians, and at Mauna Loa and Kilauea volcanoes in Hawai'i. </li>
<li><b><u>Gravity level-lines</u></b>. This is like survey leveling, but is done by making repeat measurements with a gravity meter over a line of stations every six months or so. All other things (including the water table) being equal, an inflating volcano will show up as a decrease in the gravity field - the gravimeter is being moved farther away from the Earth's center, and the pull of gravity falls off as (1/radius distance squared). I did this to monitor magma moving into the Harrat Rahat volcanic field east of Madinah al-Munawarrah ("Medina") in Saudi Arabia. Seismic telemetry also showed small earthquakes associated with this magma movement at the same time. The events died out by 1995, causing a lot of people to breathe a collective sigh of relief, but this kind of one-again-off-again restive behavior is not at all unusual for a volcano.</li>
<li><b><u>Telemetered GPS</u></b>. These use the same GPS satellites you and I utilize in our cars or when hiking, but the precision measurements made by geodesists (the formal name for the deformation guys) are made using different signals from the same satellites.</li>
<li>We also instrument volcanoes with sensitive analog, and ultra-sensitive broadband seismic sensors. Some of these data are telemetered, some are recorded and just stored in the instrument box on a small hard-drive until retrieval the following summer. That is, unless bears decide to play ball with one. One over-winter seismic network campaign at Katmai in Alaska found 5 of 11 very expensive stations had been trashed by bears before they could get back and retrieve them. </li>
</ol>GPS is a fascinating field, and applies far beyond the earth sciences. A brief run-down might be useful here.<br />
<br />
The Global Positioning System was first envisioned by DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense - during the 1980's. Navigation at that time was complex and difficult, and getting any sort of location precision over vast distances including oceans was very important to some people. Like, the people targeting ballistic missiles, for instance.<br />
<br />
In the late 1980's I worked in the Venezuelan jungle, where our main form of navigation was using 1:250,000-scale airborne radar (SLAR) maps. These were assembled by flight strips - and it was not unusual to find splice errors as large as 3 kilometers. Basically that means I could be standing on a rock - and half of the rock was 2 miles along the strip edge from the other half of the rock. I have been on a helicopter traveling for an hour over trackless forest using a half-meter-sized roadmap of the country (except there are no roads in the jungle) and crudely-penciled lines with the azimuth and distance for the site we wanted to visit. If that helicopter's fuel line had a single bug in it, we would have dropped down into the trees. Even assuming we had survived such a crash (the incident statistics gave me a 50% chance of this), how would you call in a rescue helicopter? How in the world would you tell them where you <i><u>were?!?</u></i><br />
<br />
I first began using a GPS device in the early 1990's in Saudi Arabia. In the northern reaches of the country there is a vast plain that is dead flat for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Some of our guys had accidentally strayed across the Iraqi border because there is no way to know where the line arbitrarily drawn by the British a century earlier actually was. The first GPS units were incredibly slow, the size of a Betty Crocker cookbook, and didn't always work - but the <i><u>idea</u></i> fascinated me. With a radio, <i><u>I could then precisely tell people where I was. </u></i><br />
<i><u><br />
</u></i><br />
Since then, hand-held GPS devices have shriveled to matchbox sizes, strap to your wrist, and have maps <u style="font-style: italic;">built in.</u> You can <i><u>program</u></i> them, collect precise tracks... the list of bells and whistles goes on and on.<br />
<br />
But how do they work? What actually is out (or up) there?<br />
<br />
The American GPS constellation has at any given time about 24 active satellites and a few loitering spares, and each one transmits a very faint signal on two freqs - digital signal for hand held use and another digital carrier that is used for precision location acquisition - I'm talking <i>centimeter-size</i> precision here. BOTH frequencies are encrypted... they belong to the military, and for a long time the signals were deliberately "fuzzed" - this was called Selective Availability, or SA for short. If you had the key and a certain type of book-sized device, you could get very precise locations - within 10's of meters. But DOD didn't want someone else using those signals to pop an artillery round on top of one of their military outposts. Even to this day, if you try to use a receiver and go faster than a commercial airliner (as in: a ballistic missile) it won't work. It has a built-in fail-safe.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, the rest of the world has become incredibly dependent on the GPS constellation. I could never summarize adequately all the ways and places where it is used right now.<br />
<br />
If you are surveying - or trying to see if two points on the opposite sides of a volcano are moving apart from other (uh-oh), then you need great precision. It can now be as good as a bit over a centimeter horizontally and 2-3 centimeters vertically. In part this difference in precision is because for horizontal solutions you can subtract the atmosphere effect from two different near-horizon satellites - and triangulate better. For vertical elevations, you have only satellites in one direction (not beneath your receiver).<br />
<br />
GPS signals all use the same frequency, but the signals are encoded to separate the satellites. Both transmitted signals from each are encoded, so you can't use one for a ballistic missile guidance system unless you own the codes. As I said, above a certain aircraft speed, GPS won't work.<br />
<br />
Well, the Russians certainly didn't want to be dependent on something that the Americans could fuzz - or even turn off. So despite their crushing economic difficulties, they turned the best Russian minds onto building their own constellation. This is called GLONASS, and the signal is not encoded, the energy transmitted is greater, so the signal-to-noise ratio is 5 times or 15 db better. Because of this, the <i><u>signal penetrates tree canopy</u></i>, so I could use it in the jungle! Woo-HOO! The GLONASS system also uses 3 different frequencies, so you can reduce ambiguities and calculate better differential atmospheric corrections.<br />
<br />
These GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) are so precise that they routinely calculate and correct for relativistic effects! There are also huge atmosphere effects that must be compensated for - dense air masses here and and ionized layers there. GLONASS even works on new American and European hand-held devices when the GPS signals are poor due to a poor view of the constellation - if you've ever been in steep canyons in Utah or New York City, you will know what I mean here.<br />
<br />
Not to be outdone, the European Union is now experimenting with their own GNSS (Global Navigation System) called GALILEO. This is a purely civilian system with three frequencies, and is scheduled to come online in 2015 - they are testing 2 satellites in orbit right now.<br />
<br />
For the same reasons, the Chinese have started their own COMPASS satellite GNSS system, and it likewise is coming on line rapidly - there are 6 satellites in orbit already, and thee would have been more if a recent Russian rocket system hadn't crashed. Not to be left behind, the American version of GNSS - the only one that should technically be called "GPS", is being upgraded.<br />
<br />
All four of these GNSS systems use L-band frequencies to resolve ambiguities and increase precision - and penetrate the ionosphere. What does L-band mean? Look at your personal GPS system and the smallest dimension on it will give you an idea of the wavelength for L-band.<br />
<br />
The navigation problem is more than just triangulation - three satellites near the horizon would serve for this; two would give you two possible location solutions, three would mean only one possible solution. But there are four unknowns, since you are measuring how long a stretch of space and air that your signal must travel. The precision of your timing thus becomes utterly critical, the speed of light being so huge (300,000 km/second), and hand-held GNSS devices cannot carry $100,000 maser clocks. Thus, you must use a 4th satellite to help solve for the 4th unknown: 3 for position, 1 for a clock reference for your receiver<br />
<br />
There are a few more complications. You really need to use a reference ground station to get really good differential distance calculations - to do good back-corrections for the changing satellite orbits, the complex and varying atmosphere, snow cover, etc... However, during the Tohoku earthquake in early 2011, <i><u>all of Japan</u></i> jerked eastward, so geodesists couldn't see the whole shift with really great precision because their reference station <i><u>also</u></i> moved.<br />
<br />
So how does this help volcanologists? As I said earlier, if two telemetered GNSS receivers are moving away from each other, and there is a volcano in between them (this is happening right now with Mauna Loa, the largest volcano on Earth), then you are being given a warning that <i><u>something</u></i> is coming.<br />
<br />
In 1989 we didn't have such a warning before Redoubt volcano in Cook Inlet of Alaska erupted. A KLM Boeing 747 flew right into the ash cloud - and lost all four engines in rapid succession. I've got a recording of the captain's voice as she tries to guide her flight crew in Dutch and talk with flight control in Anchorage in English. Her voice rises steadily a full octave before she finally yelled "Anchorage we have lost all four engines, <i><u><b>we are in a fall</b></u></i>. We can use all the help you can offer." They managed to restart two of the engines, and made a rough landing at Anchorage International airport. No lives were lost - but the repairs to that Boeing 747 cost $80 million.<br />
<br />
To put that in perspective, when I served as chief scientist for volcano hazards for the US Geological Survey, <i><u>my entire science team budget was less than $20 million</u></i>.<br />
<br />
There was another interesting GNSS application that you will find fascinating - I sure did. When Mount St Helens erupted on 1 October, 2004, we had just a week of accelerating seismic racket on our network beforehand for a warning. The extrusion was first seen on October 12 - and by pure luck I got the first photo of the new "spine" from a helicopter orbiting the steaming and fractured Crater Glacier. The dacite extrusion - 700 degrees C at where it was coming up from the talus slope at its base - came out like a tube of squeezed gray toothpaste. It resembled the back of a whale, so that became its name: The Whale. It moved south through crumbling talus and ice until it hit the remaining south rim of the 1980 eruption. The geodesists wondered when it actually <u><i>reached</i></u> the wall - When Did The Whale Hit the Wall? A check of a GPS station on the other side, on the outside south slope of the volcano, answered the question. On November 17, 2004, that station suddenly started moving south. Was it an effect of snow on the antenna? No, because the only direction it moved was <u><i>south</i></u> - by about 10 cm. The entire crater wall was shoved southward by 4 inches.<br />
<br />
I'll never forget the elation of scientists using GPS technology to answer a real question about an erupting volcano. But GNSS systems provide us more than just answers to our scientific curiosity.<br />
<br />
In 2006 a sharp-eyed geodesist in Anchorage, Alaska, was routinely checking data from several GPS units installed on Augustine volcano in the middle of Cook Inlet, south of Anchorage. This had erupted in 1979 and nearly killed David Johnston, one of our brightest young geologists who <i><u>was</u></i> later killed during the 1980 lateral blast, the opening eruption salvo of Mount St Helens.<br />
<br />
In August 2006 this geodesist noticed some differential movement apart - the first subtle inflation was starting - and notified the Scientist-in-Charge. A close checking and monitoring effort was triggered - and sure enough, the signal was real, showing above all the background noise - and it was continuing. Federal and State Emergency entities, along with the FAA, were put on notice. In Late December the first VT's started appearing on the seismometers. As they accelerated in frequency and amplitude, the USGS issued a warning: an eruption is imminent in hours or days. One day later, on January 16, 2007, Augustine erupted, and dusted Anchorage with ash. International flights were cancelled or re-routed for three days - but not a single aircraft was damaged, not a single life was lost.<br />
<br />
Yeah! This stuff <i><u><b>works!</b></u></i><br />
<br />
~~~~~<br />
</div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3329273366428980610.post-67071070543312704742012-01-25T17:00:00.000-08:002012-01-26T21:11:54.942-08:00How do You Know if a Volcano is Going to Erupt?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
As Ask-a-Geologist volunteers, we often get some really interesting questions. At least <b><i><u>I </u></i></b>call them interesting, anyway, because they open great doors to an interesting geology explanation. One such question follows.<br />
<br />
How do you know if a volcano is going to erupt or not? Are volcanoes predictable? Predictability is an important thing for humankind. If you are being shot at - by an errant asteroid (like Tunguska, 1908), a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, a tsunami, or a volcano - there's some consolation if you can at least predict the event. A warning siren would be nice. This may give you enough time to collect the kids, the dog, the family photo albums, and Aunt Dottie's genealogy list - and beat it out of Dodge.<br />
<br />
For the record, we can predict this much:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>Asteroid impact: Something that would destroy a continent, up to 30 years' warning.</li>
<li>Asteroid impact: a "city buster" 30 to 50 meters in diameter, which could obliterate Washington, DC in seconds: hours of warning - if at all. These are very hard to detect because they are so small. They are so destructive because of the 25,000 km/hour speeds and phenomenal kinetic energy this translates into.</li>
<li>Hurricane: a week's warning that it is forming, moving towards you... and a day or two warning that you are about to get badly hammered.</li>
<li>Tornado: hours max, and perhaps as little as 5 minutes' warning in the Midwest of the United States. And this is with the most advanced Doppler Radar network on the planet.</li>
<li>Earthquake: no warning - they are still unpredictable. You can at least know if you are in an earthquake hazard zone, and in some parts of California, you can get an actual percentage likelihood that you will get hammered in the next 30 years.</li>
<li>Tsunami: if you are in Hawai'i and the tsunami is triggered in Chile, then up to 9 hours warning. If you are in Indonesia and the tsunami is triggered by your personal subduction fault, then you get less than 20 minutes warning. Then it becomes: how fast can you run, and how far is it to the nearest high-point? The mayor of Minamisanriku, Japan, had less time than this to get to the communications tower on top of the town hall after the great Tohoku earthquake hit. Wave after wave swept over and gutted the multi-story, steel-framed building, killing all still inside - but he survived with scars on his hands from hanging onto the steel tower. Most people growing up around the Pacific Rim or Indonesian Archipelago are taught this warning from earliest childhood: if the ground shakes, run to high ground as fast as you can. </li>
<li>Volcanoes: As much as 6 - 10 months' warning before an eruption - but many of the restive events that trigger warnings end up with a "fizzle" - it goes quiet again. For this reason, the warnings are graded, advanced in stages: Yellow, Orange, Red. If there is going to be a violent eruption, then deformation, gas, and seismic monitoring networks (if installed beforehand) can warn you with "days to weeks", and then as the signals ramp up, with "hours to days" timing, but the magnitude of the eruption is still very difficult to estimate - and with that, its consequences. The destruction of Armero, Colombia, happened about 45 minutes after the first phone-call from up the canyon towards Nevado del Ruiz volcano saying that something "sounding like 10 diesel locomotives" was passing and moving in the direction of Armero. The mayor told people not to worry. The Catholic Bishop told people to go to the cathedral for protection. But NO one can outrun a Lahar. Only the foundations of the cathedral survive. There is an elaborate acoustic flow monitor system down-stream and west of Mount Rainier in Washington State. School children routinely have evacuation drills - they must run a mile to a bridge over a busy highway to get to higher ground. They have just 45 minutes from hearing the first automated siren.</li>
</ul><br />
Q:<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #274e13;">How do you know if a volcano is extinct or going to erupt again?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #274e13;">Rylee from Mrs. King’s class.</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
A:<br />
The 169 volcanoes in the United States and its territories are classified by USGS volcanologists as Very High Threat, High Threat, Moderate Threat, Low Threat, and Very Low Threat. There are 18 volcanoes classified as Very High Threat.<br />
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These categories were developed after many years of careful mapping, dating, and analysis. They are based on a number of criteria, including the history of the volcano - such as how recently did it erupt? How many times has it erupted in the past 10,000 years? How far out do old eruptive products reach? How many human beings are now exposed to danger in these areas if there is another eruption? Each volcano is sort of like people or bears: they each have their own unique "personalities". Some, like Kilauea volcano in Hawai'i are mostly effusive: they tend to flow lava with little explosive behavior. Others have a long and violent eruptive history, like Yellowstone. 640,000 years ago Yellowstone erupted and laid out a blanket of ash - that ash is over 20 meters (66 feet) thick hear Colorado Springs, CO - over 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away from the volcano! I have personally pulled a camel's tooth out of the base of that off-white-colored deposit (called the Pearlette Ash Formation) where it had smothered all living things under it.<br />
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NO one can outrun a 20-meter-thick blanket of ash that reaches out and covers a continent.<br />
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A key point here is that the volcanoes and their eruption products must be age-dated. They must also be carefully mapped to see how far the eruptions reached in the past. It's pretty safe to say that if a volcano hasn't erupted in 10,000 years it's PROBABLY dormant. However, Mount St Helens last erupted in 2004-2006, and before that in 1980-1986. Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has been erupting continuously since 1982, so it's pretty safe to say that these two are DEFINITELY going to erupt again. Those are the two extremes, but a volcano called Four Peaks in Alaska erupted in 2006 after being dormant for many thousands of years... so even apparently dormant volcanoes can surprise us with little or warning - and the warning comes only if they are instrumented. Would YOU spent ~$100,000 to instrument a volcano that last erupted perhaps 10,000 years ago? Something in between Mount St Helens and Four Peaks would be Mt. Edgecumbe near Sitka, Alaska. It hasn't erupted in at least 5,000 years, so it's hard to say if it's extinct or not.<br />
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What have we done to protect the American people - and to prevent a volcanic eruption from becoming a volcanic crisis? We have put seismometers and telemetered GPS instruments on almost all of the most dangerous volcanoes. Cleveland volcano in the remote Aleutian Chain (which erupts frequently) is an exception. It has not been instrumented yet because we don't have enough funding to do so - but we watch it daily from satellites. Also, there are no towns nearby, so it was given a relatively low priority. Dangerous volcanoes close to human population centers are all instrumented in some way or another as of this year (2011). This way we will ALMOST always be able to provide some warning, even if only a few days.<br />
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When Mount St Helens erupted on October 1, 2004, we had about a week's warning from suddenly increasing micro-earthquake activity. As far as our records show, it was dead silent the day before the first volcano-tectonic earthquakes started (I was standing on the 1980-86 Dome just two months earlier). As a result, the Johnston Ridge Observatory five miles away was evacuated in time and no one was hurt. JRO was named for David Johnston, one of our PhD volcanologists who was killed by the 1980 eruption - when it erupted catastrophically while he was monitoring it. That won't happen again as long as we can keep doing our job protecting the American people.<br />
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We are, after all, the United States Geological Survey. Without funding, however, even the most dedicated scientists on the planet are helpless.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>AskTheGeologisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06354833219992420022noreply@blogger.com0