tsunami
gregladen | September 28, 2017When the big tsunami hit Japan in 2011, many objects were washed out to sea. This flotsam provided for a giant "rafting event." A rafting event is when animals, plants, etc. float across an otherwise uncrossable body of water and end up alive on the other side. With this particular event, I don't think very many terrestrial life forms crossed the Pacific, but a lot of littoral -- shore dwelling and near shore -- animals and plants did.
Even though the Pacific ocean is one big puddle and you would think that any organism anywhere in it could just go to any other part of the ocean, like in the…
oracknows | April 6, 2013It's very clear that many antivaccinationists hate autistic children. The language they use to describe them makes that very clear. Such children are "damaged" (by vaccines, of course); the parents' real children were "stolen" from them (by vaccines); they are "toxic" (from vaccines); the "light left their eyes" (due to vaccines). Autism is an "epidemic," a "tsunami," even a "holocaust," with "denial" of that "holocaust" being equivalent to Holocaust denial. All of this likens autism to a horror on par with these calamities, and paints vaccines as the instrument of annihilation of…
catdynamics | March 28, 2011"How to Survive from Tsunami" by Murata et al, is vol 32 of the Advanced Series on Ocean Engineering from World Scientific Books
Chapter 2 has the introductory phenomenology and basic physics, and the how-to-survive bit.
In view of recent events, WorldSci is putting it up on their website for free:
Knowledge for Tsunami Survival (pdf)
Obviously WorldSci would be grateful if you became interested enough to buy the whole book...(ToC pdf)
- it actually looks quite interesting.
gregladen | March 19, 2011One day I was walking along a path dedicated to philosophers in Kyoto, Japan, with my friend Hitomi. It was interesting that there even was a path dedicated to philosophers. It made me think deeply about paths, which at the time was the subject of my PhD Thesis. Suddenly, earning a Doctorate of Philosophy with a specialization in Paths made sense. But that feeling wore off quickly enough when we something rather unusual unexpectedly appeared in the sky.
First, we heard it. A thump thump thump sound. Then we noticed other people looking up and in one direction, so we looked too. We…
stoat | March 18, 2011It is all explained here "in a calm rational scientific manner".
Refs
* Japan nuclear threat: The tsunami is the bigger tragedy By David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, Cambridge University
* Pakistan miners feared dead - for anyone who thought that coal was safe.
* Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power - George Monbiot
* Jurrassic Park is a triumph for dino theme parks: Build more dinosaur theme parks now!
* JEB on some back-of-the-envelope calculations of radiation risk
lborkowski | March 18, 2011In the early hours of March 11th, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck northern Japan, and a massive tsunami followed. More than 5,000 people are dead and almost 10,000 are missing. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, and those living near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have been told to evacuate - while a small crew of brave workers remains nearby to try and avert catastrophic meltdown.
Here in the US, our budget debates highlight differing opinions about how much we want our government to do for us. The stories we tell ourselves make a virtue of self-sufficiency, and we highlight…
stoat | March 16, 2011How about this for misleading tripe from the Grauniad:
Yup, according to them the reactor has killed 4277 people. Or at least, that is what it looks like. Of course, you could also argue that they are trying to claim that the reactors have made the Nikkei go up 5.68%, but no-one would believe that.
Incidentally, the NYT has some good disaster porn.
[Updates: for a non-panic-stricken view of Tokyo, JEB is worth reading. For some quiet discussion of nuclear power, Brian has the good taste to ref me, and to remind us of some discussions from 2005. Meanwhile, the Japanese appear to be reduced to…
stoat | March 16, 2011If you believe in a good, kind, etc God then [[problem of evil]] is to explain away the various obvious features of the world at variance with this belief. People always succeed in doing so, because they want to. A good trick with any form of human badness is to invoke Free Will: obviously God doesn't want you to be naughty, but he couldn't very well stop you, could he? But things like death-dealing earthquakes and the accompanying tsunamis are a bit more of a puzzler. However, in a rather daring and novel piece of theology I heard at Thought for the Day, 15 March 2011 the Revd Dr David…
stoat | March 15, 2011 Nukes in Japan are going off like badly-racked champagne bottles, and the only thing fiercer than the radiation levels is the press circus (I liked that as a sort of simile-thingy, but actually at the moment the radiation levels aren't desperately fierce). How do you folks without blogs manage to bottle up your excitement without writing stuff? Perhaps you actually talk to people, how last-century. Anyway, taking advantage of a brief surge of SB uptime (still dunno what is going on, some people don't see any problem, but it was down for me all last night):
Some people are using the disaster…
sastyk | March 14, 2011"He'll never catch up!" the Sicilian cried. "Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does."
..."Inconceivable!" the Sicilian cried.
The Spaniard whirled on him. "Stop saying that word!" It was inconceivable that anyone could follow us, but when we looked behind, there was the man in black. It was inconceivable that anyone could sail as fast as we could sail, and yet he gained on us. Now this too is inconceivable, but look - look" and the Spaniard pointed down through the night. "See how he rises."
The man in black was,…
sastyk | March 14, 2011As things unfold, there will be more to say about the terrible situation in Japan and its effects in the both the present and the future, but for now, Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh in her super financial analyst extraordinaire identity, and nuclear safety expert...is there anything she can't do?) of The Automatic Earth has done a superb review of what we know, what we don't know and the consequences we can anticipate. Very, very important! The comments at The Oil Drum are also often quite valuable. I think particularly useful is her evidence that this was not an unpredictable "black swan"…
eklemetti | March 30, 2010Map showing the location of submarine volcano Marsili, near the Italian coast. Image from INGV.
The subject of submarine volcanism near Italy has come up before here on Eruptions but now it has made the jump into the worldwide media after some claims made by Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).
The long and short of what I can tell from the articles is that Marsili, a submarine volcano in the Tyrrhenian Sea, could be a threat to create a significant tsunami that would hit Italy (amongst other Mediterranean countries). The volcano lies only 150…
grrlscientist | March 1, 2010tags: Wailea, Maui, Hawaii, tsunami, nature, environment, image of the day
Image: Ron Barranco, Wailea, Maui, Hawaii [larger view]
One of my friends lived on Hawaii in 2008, where his uncle still resides. His uncle emailed two images to my friend the morning after the tsunami, which were snapped from his lanai. My friend shared these images with his friends, and he also gave me permission to share them here with all of you.
Image: Ron Barranco, Wailea, Maui, Hawaii [larger view]
eklemetti | November 3, 2009There have been a number of articles floating around the popular press for the last week that I thought I would touch on briefly ... always fun to decipher the real news from the hype.
Active fumaroles on Datun Mountain in Taipei.
An article out of the Taipei Times suggests that the city of Taipei in Taiwan is in great peril from Datun Mountain/volcano. The volcano, which was previously thought to have erupted ~200,000 years ago is now thought to have erupted only 5,000 years ago. That 195,000 years really does make a difference in terms of worrying about potential future eruptions, but there…
eklemetti | September 30, 2009The big geology news right now is the M8 earthquake in American Samoa that generated a killer tsunami (which made it all the way to the Bay Area in California).
Mammoth Mountain in California's Long Valley region.
In more benign, volcano-related news:
The aviation alert level at Redoubt in the Alaska has been returned to Green/Normal, which means that for all intents-and-purposes, the eruption that started earlier this year is over. The new dome totals ~91 million cubic yards of lava, slowly adding back to the north side of the volcano.
Eruptions reader Doug C. pointed out to me that there…
eklemetti | April 21, 2009Well, after lamenting the slow volcano news, things are beginning to pick up again. Beyond the news of a potential increase in activity at Anak Krakatau, there are a few other newsworthy bits that have come up:
Mt. Kerinci in Indonesia
Mt. Kerinci in Indonesia is showing signs of eruption. The volcano is the highest mountain on the island of Sumatra, reaching 3,800 m / 12,400 feet and last erupted in March 2008. Its volcanic activity is marked by small (VEI of ash and tephra. Currently, the volcano is experiencing increased tremors and minor explosions that rained ash on a tea plantation on…
eklemetti | April 9, 2009Tambora, Indonesia
There are big eruptions, then there are big eruptions. On April 10, 1815, Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, produced one of the largest eruptions in human history. This eruption produced what became known as the "year without a summer" after the volcanic aerosols from the eruption produced some of the coldest summers in many parts of the world. The Tambora eruption in 1815 was a VEI 7, on a scale that goes to, well, 7*, putting it in a class of some of the largest and most violent eruptions imaginable - and I, for one, can hardly imagine what might happen if an eruption of…
eklemetti | March 19, 2009This falls under the category of "when it rains, it pours". A M7.9 earthquake struck today in the Tongan arc. It doesn't appear to be related to the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai eruption as it occurred a few hundred kilometers to the SSE of the volcano (remember folks, correlation does not mean causation). The earthquake looks like it was relatively shallow in the crust - ~10 km. All these events will definitely make life even more complicated for the people on Nuku'alofa (Tongatapu), but no word of damage/effects on the Tongan island. A tsunami advisory was also issued for Hawai'i and other…
eklemetti | October 27, 2008Sorry about the dearth of posts. It has been a busy week here in Davis and I've been a little distracted by the upcoming election. Combined with the relative lack of volcano news this week, the posting has been lackluster.
However, that being said, I will try to make up for some of it by starting my Volcano Profiles series that will bide the time between volcano news. I start with a volcano that was suggested by Eruptions reader Thomas Donlon: Rabaul.
VOLCANO PROFILE: RABAUL
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Location:Â Papau New Guinea
Height: 688 m
Geophysical location:Â Boundary of Australian plate and Pacific plate…
eklemetti | September 25, 2008
This might not be directly related to a volcanic eruption, but it has been picked up by a lot of news sources, so I thought I'd give it a mention. A report from researchers at University of Texas hypothesize that some very large coral boulders (up to 10 meters tall) that can be found on the shores of Tongatapu are, in fact, tsunami deposits. That is news enough, but they go on to say that the tsunami could have been volcanically triggered (i.e., started by an eruption or volcanic landslide). The corals are ~122,000 years old and a soil has formed on the corals, so the event was likely…