New at Rosetta Stones: Potential Disasters!

You’re all in the mood for some mayhem, right? Head on over to Rosetta Stones and check out the fine selection of fine potential geology-related disasters I’ve chosen for you. Included:

  • The reason why even evil dictators need geologists
  • The definitive answer as to whether Yellowstone is about to kill us all right now
  • And ten volcanoes that should leave you in a cold sweat.

Enjoy!

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New at Rosetta Stones: Potential Disasters!
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10 thoughts on “New at Rosetta Stones: Potential Disasters!

  1. rq
    1

    Oh man, that dam!
    I wonder whether, once it breaks (because let’s face it…), it will be used as a modern-day flood story: christians rejoicing that all those ebil mooslems have been washed away by the hand of god (and any way you spin it, because Hussain disobeyed the bible ‘don’t build your foundation on sand’ etc., just means god was misleading him all the way and serves them all right). Would the religious fanatics also see it as a sign from god that maybe they should refrain from this world domination bit? Or would they see it as a token of their zeal, that only the pure survive to purify the rest of the world, and god’s just helping them out a bit…?
    And no volcanoes in my country. :( From the Top-10 article:

    The island of Iwo Jima is about twenty metres higher than it was in 1945 due to a growing magma chamber underneath. The beach where the American forces landed in 1945 is now 17 meters above the ocean surface.

    Honestly, all I can do is make giant googly eyes at those numbers.

  2. 2

    Actually in the US there is another volcanic center that is more likley to have an eruption, Long Valley in Ca. Since the area includes the Mono Craters and the Mammoth Mountain area. The Mono Craters have erupted within the last 1000 years or less. There has been venting of carbon dioxide in the Mammoth Mountain area that killed trees. In addition 3 ski patrollers fell into a fumarole on mammoth mountain and were killed by Carbon Dioxide fumes. Hot Creek which used to be a swimming place has also been closed due to increased geothermal activity. Here is the USGS summary of Hazards:http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/long_valley/long_valley_geo_hist_18.html. Eruptions have occured more recently here than Yellowstone.

  3. 4

    The crazy thing about so many of these disasters-to-be: the warnings will be ignored. And then, when it happens, it’ll be a big surprise. And over the next couple months people will point out that, in fact, it was no surprise at all – just poor leadership and bad management and no disaster preparedness.

    I worked on a couple of disaster preparedness (for computer-related disasters) projects and was generally horrified. You’d get things like “we have a backup data center and we can be operational in 1 hr” and someone had to ask the question about “if we’re talking about an earthquake, how are the IT staffers going to get from X to Y while the entire city of ${big city} is trying to head the same direction?” After a couple such projects, I was done – it’s hard to be an optimist.

    I remember one night, back in those years, when I had had too much to drink* and I had an epiphany. Fuelled by tequila, it hung on the edge of my mind, shining like revelation. And it was: humans just aren’t very good at most of what we do.

    (* actually, it was probably just right. I was horribly fucked up but survived and was capable of having goofy ideas. So: edge of the razorblade win!)

  4. 5

    Re: Iwo Jima – 25 meter tsunami!?

    The seawall by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor was 10M high, and was overtopped by 13m high waters. I don’t think anyone plans for 25m tsunamis. It does make me question the wisdom of building nuclear reactors where they might someday be half submerged, as an overall rule. Don’t build them on fault lines, or on volcanoes: check!

    When you talk about a 25m tsunami hitting Hong Kong, there is no disaster plan. Any tourists on Lantau island would have front row seats. Ugh, what a horrifying thought: there’d be this 6 story high buddha watching over the disaster with an impassive peaceful stupid fucking buddhist face of stone.

  5. 6

    Actually you tumbled on a very old problem. In Rival Rails a tale is told of when the Santa Fe wanted to build up Temucla Canyon to get to San Bernadio from San Diego. The engineer in charge sent someone up the valley to see how high the pine cones went (because pines did not grow on the surrounding hills, figuring they would tell how high floods had been. However when the chief engineer found out the results which were quite high, he said that such floods were preposterous, and build the railroad lower. A couple of years later mother nature showed him by having a flood come up to nearly where the pine cones indicated.

  6. 8

    Dana, I have an example of the need to pay attention to the geologists. Or in this case, even a stray archeologist can tell you what you needed to know.

    They decided to build a new warehouse next to the archeology lab where I worked. As construction began several of us told various people, including the chief of the health and safety division (who agreed with us, since his office was nearby and he new what the drainage in the area was like), that most of the west side of campus, including several large parking lots, drained across that area, because it used to be a small creek that fed into the larger creek behind the lab.

    The thing is, in San Antonio drainage is an ISSUE. We rarely get rainy days. We get what are described as “toad stranglers” or “turd floaters,” i.e. rains of 1-5 inches are fairly common. Rains of 10-20 inches have happened at least 4 times in the 28 years I’ve lived here. All of that on either limestone or very dense clay.

    So, having ignored what everyone was telling them, and apparently not having consulted either a geologist or even a civil engineer (at least a competent one), they built their warehouse. The first thing they filled it with was new mattresses for the new dorms then under construction.

    Do I need to tell you what happened? If “life finds a way” so does water.

  7. 10

    As for the volcanos, the Iwo Jima volcano is kind of scary. Twenty-eight meters in, what? 70 years or so? That is… That is enormous. That is not going to just go away, is it?

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