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Environmental News

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by tochatihu, Oct 22, 2015.

  1. Trollbait

    Trollbait It's a D&D thing

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    It isn't running, otherwise the shot would be of him walking on that conveyor belt. Other images had logs, but the guy gives better scale, and that isn't the biggest.. A top fed one can take in large stumps with roots. It is also used for construction waste, and can grind the nails and screws.

    Back to the storm waste. Some of the trees and branches will just pushed off the road to rot on public lands. Some will go to a power plant if the transport cost isn't high. Most will end up as mulch, compost, or fire wood.
     
  2. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Reminds me of:


    Bob Wilson
     
  3. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    'wood' ya have it any other way?

    .
     
  4. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Mercury in fish. Food-chain amplification. Such a bother. Here see

    Experimental evidence for recovery of mercury-contaminated fish populations | Nature

    Where recovery was rapid after mercury additions stopped. It may be mostly of interest to academia nuts, because most of these problems arise where bottom sediments contain lots of Hg and pesky bacteria churn them up. But it is time for these mercurial research groups to examine historical changes of Hg in marine top-predator human foods (eg tuna and swordfish). Continental offloading of Hg is way down. Is it working?
     
  5. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Tonga volcanic eruption was bad enough that we still don't know how bad it was in local damage. Satellite sensors say it has only 2% of sulfur dioxide compared to 1991 Pinatubo, so global climate effects will be very small.

    Barometric pressure waves were detected worldwide. One hectopascal, about what can be reliably detected with consumer grade (cheap) piezoresistive chips. Somebody in Euro saw 2.5 hPa. Interestingly while Pinatubo was larger it erupted over time and did not make stronger barometric pressure waves. Just spread over longer time.
     
  6. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    looked like a nuke
     
  7. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Volcano top was about 150 meters below sea surface I think. At that spot a lot of mass, steam and energy promptly appeared. Water and some island bits were firmly instructed to move aside.

    I think all such things will look similar. Thermonuclear emits additional distinctive forms of energy.

    Besides atmospheric pressure wave, the ocean pressure wave must have been large. Bad day to be a whale, a dolphin or a 'dolphin' on submarine.
     
  8. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    The first pass (northeast bound on this continent) was 0.03-0.04 in-hg at my house, or 1-1.3 hPa. 0.02 in-hg at the family farm very far from the coast.
    upload_2022-1-18_17-58-4.png
    upload_2022-1-18_18-1-53.png

    Second pass (southwest bound) possibly as much as 0.02 in-hg at both, but noisy and indistinct, thus uncertain. Humans have too much ability to find desired patterns in white noise, so one would need to average together or correlate the readings of many stations to determine if the signal is really there, or is just human imagination.
    This one likely created and held a very large volume of very hot water, 200 C (390 F) at 150 meters underwater, or hotter down deeper, kept liquid by the pressure of the depths. Then, like a geyser eruption, as the density above reduces slightly from expanding hot water or even some frothing bubbles of minor boiling, at some point the pressure is no longer quite enough to keep that deep water from boiling. Some boils to steam, more water mass above is displaced, pressure drops a bit more, and suddenly a lot more deep but uncorked hot water flashes to steam in a runaway 'explosion'.

    If a (simple wild-assed guess) cubic kilometer of extremely hot water suddenly flashes into very many cubic kilometers of steam, it pushes away a huge amount of atmosphere that was occupying that space moments earlier. We see a big pressure wave and mushroom cloud.

    With a peak well above water level, Pinatubo didn't have anywhere near as much hot water to flash all at once.
     
  9. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    they reported that it was the loudest natural event in over a hundred years, and more powerful than a nuke
     
  10. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    There really are a lot of cheapo (apologies to @fuzzy1) barometers logging time-stamped data now. This would be a fun event to 'citizen science' and visualize the wave rolling over several continents.

    Serious weather stations have about 30 times better pressure resolution. But it is costly.

    One hPa pressure increase is equivalent to moving 11 meters deeper into the atmosphere IIRC.
     
    fuzzy1 likes this.
  11. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    "A thicker-than-expected blanket of five to 10 centimetres (two to four inches) of ash had accumulated on the main island Tongatapu's runway, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. It expected the runway to be clear soon."

    Some news sites indicate runway has been cleared. Anyway it will be soon. About 2700 meters long -> a lot of sweeping.
     
  12. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Global Peace Dividend initiative
    The Appeal

    OK this is entirely unlikely to happen, but that should not deter discussing it.
     
  13. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    john lennon had a similar hope, then they shot him.

    it is a nice idea, but who is gonna convince russia, china, nk, etc?

    'war is over, if you want it'
     
  14. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  15. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    because of our political system, less money actually get spent on weapons than china and russia

    we do buy a lot of hammers and toilet seats though :D
     
  16. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Those examples may have already been debunked, but you believe US is wasteful in this area - that's the important thing.

    This is 'the appeal':
    "We have a simple proposal for humankind: the governments of all UN member-states should negotiate a joint reduction of their military expenditure by 2% every year for five years."

    So a wastefully spending country could -2% with less capability loss than other countries would suffer. Sounds like a winner.
     
  17. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Examples here, from a higher level than 'citizen science', showing 4 passages of the wave:
    https://twitter.com/akrherz
    Iowa Environmental Mesonet

    But it would be nice for citizen-level enthusiasts to make use of the far larger installed base of amateur instruments, and covering the other countries and continents too. Some decent signal processing applied to very large numbers of local sampling stations should partially make up for their lower resolution.
     
  18. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    "... very large numbers of local sampling stations should partially make up for their lower resolution." I wouldn't say it quite that way. Their resolution is 'we don't care'. Their timing accuracy (after assembly) is what would visualize the wave. @fuzzy1 and thousands of others who've bought few hundred$ weather stations with few$ measurement chips have few opportunities to assemble their results for events that are gee-whiz-bang. Here is one 'case study'.
     
  19. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    For those with internal clocks synced daily through NTP time servers, as I believe mine are, it seems the drift between syncs ought not be large enough to excessively smear and hide the wave signals. Though longer recording intervals could mean many stations undersampling and missing the signal.

    While the first pass of the wave is clearly visible even on low resolution instruments, I'd be trying to find how many passages could be detected as the fading wave repeatedly circles the globe. Herzmann (linked above) has already illustrated 4 passes across the U.S. While it should quickly become too weak to be picked up on any single low-res station, I wanted to remind folks that with lots and lots of samples (and meeting certain other conditions), signal processing can bring out events much smaller than the minimum resolution of the individual sample(r)s. But the deeper one tries to look, the more samples are required, in an N^2 proportion for some much simpler stuff I used to do.
     
    #1639 fuzzy1, Jan 20, 2022
    Last edited: Jan 20, 2022
  20. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i agree, but the stars don't. with ukraine in the offing, just another excuse to spend more