Thursday Throughput: Tonga Volcano Edition
A P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over an area of Tonga that shows the heavy ash fall from the recent volcanic eruption within the Tongan Islands. 5 Squadron crew work on board whilst flying overhead to provide vital information to send back to MFAT and various other government agencies. Photo by NZ Defence Force, CC BY 4.0
[ThTh1] Two weeks ago, the Hunga Tonga volcano exploded. It was the largest volcanic eruption since Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
Tonga's Hunga Tonga volcano just had one of the most violent volcano eruptions ever captured on satellite. pic.twitter.com/M2D2j52gNn
— US StormWatch (@US_Stormwatch) January 15, 2022
I love that video because it really conveys the sheer violence of what happened. The resultant tsunami reached as a far a Japan and the Americas, which enough force to cause at least a couple of drowning deaths. Friends in New Zealand told me they heard the eruption 1000 miles away. The pressure wave was detected around the globe, possibly circling it twice. Even now, two weeks later, it’s not clear just how much damage was done to Tonga because communications to that island country were so badly disrupted. Initial reports and satellite images show many homes destroyed, thick layers of ash covering much of the islands and devastating effects of the tsunami.
Pinatubo’s eruption famously dropped the temperature of the planet almost half a degree due to the sulfur dioxide spewed into the atmosphere. While Hunga Tonga will have a similar affect on the South Pacific, the ocean absorbed most of the sulfur dioxide, so the effect will be much smaller. Overall, however, this is looking to be the most violent geological event in a generation.
It could have been much worse. When Krakatoa exploded in 1883, it killed 36,000 people and caused a half a degree drop in global temperatures. When Mount Tambora exploded in 1815, it caused “the Year Without a Summer”, with major famines all over Europe. The same mountain may have produced the worst year in history — 536 AD, when a volcanic event dropped the temperature of the Earth 2.5 degrees causing mass starvation and leading to the collapse of empires.
The planet upon which we tread is a lot calmer than it used to be. But it is still capable of unleashing unimaginable fury upon us. At present, there’s nothing we can do about it. But perhaps it would behoove us to be prepared if a volcano gets really grumpy.
[ThTh2] Is there a lake of liquid water under Mars’ South Pole? The answer appears to be a solid maaaaaybeee.
[ThTh3] Yet another famous scientific result may be a data artifact. In this case, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I don’t know a lot about this field, but I’m going to say this result is clearly wrong.
[ThTh4] Oooh. Pretty pretty astrophotography!
Tonight I captured a shot I've been trying to get for about seven years. Finally conditions & timings this evening were *perfect*.
Here's the rising full Moon, Belt of Venus and a huge murmuration over the Somerset Levels, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon.#astrophotography pic.twitter.com/0QoyzK8CGS
— Will Gater (@willgater) January 17, 2022
[ThTh5] James Webb has reached the LaGrange point, where it will operate for the next decade. Now the work really begins.
[ThTh6] Does the Epstein-Barr virus cause MS? Maybe.
[ThTh7] What happens if a star wanders too close to a black hole? This.
Explanations here.
[ThTh8] Some of the COVID skeptics are reviving the idea that Sweden adopted a looser approach to COVID and this was superior to the rest of the world’s approach. As evidence of this, they point to Sweden’s very low death rate in 2021. One problem? Sweden abandoned the “let er’ rip” course in early 2021, setting mass vaccination, masking and social distancing as their new policies. And, shocker, their death rate fell to matching those of their neighboring Scandinavian countries.
[ThTh9] Would we better off letting Omicron rip? Virologist Angela Rasmussen tears that claim apart.
[ThTh10] Human genome mapping may be seeing the sharpest price drop in history. Maybe Gattaca isn’t that far off.
[ThTh11] Preliminary but intriguing results suggest we may be able to detect a gravitational wave background from pulsar timing experiments. Pulsar are one of the most precise clocks in the universe.
ThTh9: Some preliminary work suggesting that many of the worst symptoms of Covid and long Covid are because the virus somehow activates some of the endogenous retrovirus material we all carry around in our DNA. Trying to read the material, I am reminded of a remark a medical researcher made to me years ago, after the human genome was first sequenced: “And in 50 years, maybe we’ll have a pretty good idea of how the sack of protein chemistry humans are actually works. Not sooner.”Report
I’m a programmer for a living. And for the last few years, I’ve been working with software that was first created in the late 90s.
So I’m more a programmer-archeologist (to steal from Vernor Vinge) , as much of my job is taking the incredible mess of decades of evolving code to figure out what the heck went wrong when I tried to add something new — or tried to fix something broken, which then broke something else — and end up spelunking my way back two decades to undocumented code doing a job it clearly had been adapted into doing. I’ve had to fix things that broke because of low-level library patches, where the original thing only worked because it was built on something broken!
I suspect that every living organism out there is a tangled mess of, metaphorically, undocumented spaghetti code where some things only work because other things are broken, plenty of stuff is just bugs waiting for the right trigger, and everything is a barely cobbled together mess where even the simplest seeming change might melt the whole mass into a pile of access violations as it tries to turn you into a puddle of goo.
“We were trying to fix the gene we thought triggered early hair loss in men, and it turns out they now have elf ears and grew a sixth finger” kind of stuff.Report
Mother nature is already doing lots of “simplest changes” all the time.
It won’t be easy and there will be intended results, but the alternative is to keep letting the blind, remorseless, psychopath that is mother nature do this for us.
Covid is one of her inventions.Report
More engineering than science, but Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency have signed an agreement to participate in the fast-neutron sodium-cooled nuclear power plant that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett say they will build in southwest Wyoming.Report
Lots of advantages to sodium cooled reactors.Report
What is the “Belt of Venus”?Report
an improvement on the Girdle of Pluto?Report
So, what, they are both strap-ons?Report
*slowly backs awayReport
Coward
😉Report
ThTh5: This paragraph is what jumped out at me from a summary of the next steps for the Webb Telescope. A star that is barely visible to the naked eye, and only in the darkest areas on the globe, is “too bright” for the telescope to look at once fully focused.
Report