It’s a holiday week, so I figured I’d take a holiday from serious bidness and do something fun. What’s more fun than poking fun at the media for getting things terribly wrong? I take apart three YouTube clips, two of them from august names in the informing-the-public trade, and compose a poem to help them remember an important fact about cinder cones. Enjoy!
Dec 27 2012
New at Rosetta Stones: I Laugh Heartily at Media Errors and Compose a Geopoem
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3 comments
Karen Locke
December 27, 2012 at 9:22 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
What bugs me in all of them is that they discount or dismiss the lava flows that come from the cone’s base. (Although they did show some of it in the first video.) If the cinder cone had just done the cinders-and-ash thing, the town might have been dug out and become re-habitable. But the thick, viscous, aa lava was what engulfed the town.
rq
December 27, 2012 at 11:45 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
See? This is where I can claim ignorance and just plain not know which parts I should be laughing at (because I would dearly, dearly love to laugh!). Especially when Karen says something about aa flows and… Well, I know I read a bit about them, but Dana, you still haven’t told me everything (I know, I know, own responsibility, yadda yadda yadda, but you always present it so much better /whine), and… Well, the article I sent you said it was strange for cinder cones to have lava coming out the sides, and you tell me it’s not, but you haven’t yet told me why!!!
So I’ll laugh on your behalf, but it’s that confused I’m-laughing-because-everyone-else-is-but-I-don’t-get-the-joke kind of laugh… ;) (Ok mostly I’m just whinging because volcanos and all that. The last cartoon was funny.)
lyle
December 27, 2012 at 3:43 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
The media seems to be in the grip of the song where you gonna go when the volcano blows by Jimmy Buffet, and thinks all the things suggested in the song are going to happen in the short term. Of course its all part of the issue of keeping the difference between geologic time and human time. For example in geologic time Long Valley in Ca will go off again, but in human time it is unlikely. Or to be more threatening talk about Toba on Sumatra which apparently was the biggest eruption in the last at least 100k years. The media think that geologic time is about the same as human time. One of the ways to correct this is to get ahold of the USGS publication where they went down the Colorado River 100 years after Powell and tried to duplicate his photos. Most where unchanged, but a few had been affected by flash floods. Of course if you want to do a scare say that Vulcan’s Throne at Tuweep will erupt again and produce a 1000 foot high lava dam in the mid grand canyon, drying up Las Vegas.
Of course talking about that and how it appears that the sediments deposited by that lake are scarce, suggests that in a few hundred years (after we have all left the scene) Lakes Mead and Powell will be reclaimed by nature. Mother Nature in the form of erosion eventually wins everywhere as the forces that push things up die out.
Go to tuweep on Google Earth and look around its very interesting (also steep canyon walls like 3000 feet to the river there) Some day I want to take the jeep trip from Kanab to see it but as it is a long way on bad roads I want someone else to do the driving and have the satellite phone.