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The 40,000-Mile Volcano
- hvo 11y agoAbsolutely amazing!!!
- jonclayton 11y agoWay cool indeed. And this is my first comment.....
- SeanDav 11y ago> "Way cool indeed. And this is my first comment....." Welcome to HN. Please read the Guidelines and FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html HN is one of the very best news forums out there and we always welcome new people. Just a friendly tip: In general avoid comments that do not add value to a discussion and short replies of a few words. People here reward thoughtful replies. Typically your type of comment would be downvoted, but since you are very new, hopefully people will not downvote you this time!
- cmsmith 11y ago>It turned out that all of those eruptions, from the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, took place from January to June. The cause, she proposed, is Earth’s slightly elliptical orbit around the sun. That changes the strength of the sun’s gravitational pull on Earth during the year and, as a result, the magnitude of the tides that squeeze the planet. I felt fairly informed amount about underwater geology, but the idea that the crust down there is so delicate that solar tides can cause eruptions was new to me.
- arethuza 11y agoWon't tides effect all parts of the earth not just the crust?
- civilian 11y agoOf course, but it's the crust that has seismic events that can be triggered from subtle changes.
- steffenfrost 11y agoYeah, that is bizarre. How much do these volcanoes contribute to ocean acidification and over what time scales?
- guelo 11y agoIf the cycle is that the melting glaciers cause the volcanoes to stop which causes an ice age, then human global warming melting should cause the volcanoes to cool down even more. So there's a chance the planet will rescue us from ourselves.
- wdmeldon 11y agoOh thank god. I was worried I'd have to change my consumption habits.
- ams6110 11y agoThere are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- saalweachter 11y agoSo the sea level changes involved with the last ice age were around 400 feet, and we'd probably need a similar change in sea level to see a similar impact on undersea volcanoes right now. The smaller hiccup with that rescue plan is that we don't really want to see sea levels go up 100+ feet; even if that "fixes" global warming, that was one of the consequences of global warming we were trying to avoid. The larger hiccup is that the undersea volcanoes may not be contributing enough CO2 that even if they stopped completely it may not have a significant impact on our trajectory, and even if they were a large enough contributor, we may not have enough ice left to raise the sea levels enough to significantly affect their output.
- andrewtbham 11y agoOne interesting aspect of the article.. for HN crowd. >Now, scientists have inaugurated a major new effort. Off the West Coast, they have wired up a highly active ridge with hundreds of sensors and cameras, as well as cables that flash the readings to shore. The ocean observatory is to operate for at least a quarter century, replacing sporadic glimpses with continuous scrutiny. This month, the surge of data is hitting the Internet.
- IanDrake 11y ago>“It’s a whole new perspective on how the Earth works,” said Daniel J. Fornari, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Mass. It's really interesting to see a scientist say that we don't really know how Earth works. I thought the debate was over.
- jofer 11y agoNo geologist would ever (or likely will ever) say that we "really know how the Earth works". I say this as a geologist, and I can't imagine any other geologist disagreeing. The natural sciences are incredibly complex. You're not dealing with nice simple interactions, and we can't run experiments on the time, spatial, or energy scales needed to directly test hypotheses in the way you would in an experimental science. Instead, we observe. We try to understand the present to understand the past and the past to understand the present. When you're observing an uncontrolled system, it's very tough to isolate one variable from another. Geology is often accused of not being "quantitative enough". What people don't realize is that the quantitative part is usually stupidly easy. It's choosing the right physics to model that's hard. We usually don't fully understand exactly which physical process are at work.
- HCIdivision17 11y agoNicely put. This how I always think about economics: we've got plenty of numbers and models, but meaningfully large experiments are are to design without risking a lot of livelihoods. Science is brutal at scale, and I'm ever impressed with the techniques to make sense of the noise.
- JackFr 11y agoNext thing, your going to do is tell me that climate models are speculative. But you can't fool me -- I know that geologists are bought and paid for by the oil companies.
- mturmon 11y agoI read a recent article in Science, summarized here (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6252/1032.short http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6252/1032.short), on tomographic analysis of Earth's mantle using data recovered during large earthquakes. The large plumes that, for example, create volcanic islands like Hawaii turn out to be ~600km wide, and extend to ~3000 km below the surface. It was not known previously how deep these plumes go. Many thought they were much smaller and shallower. It's in some sense surprising that even basic facts like this are the current frontier.
- tegansnyder 11y agoOOI has a pretty neat data portal for those interested at: https://ooinet.oceanobservatories.org/ https://ooinet.oceanobservatories.org/
- clarkmoody 11y ago> Though long enough to circle the moon more than six times Why do journalists do this? Also, why is everyone missing this? Ocean levels fall sharply in such bitterly cold periods as water is tied up in massive continental ice sheets. In a paper, she proposed that the reduced pressure on the ridges might let them erupt far more frequently. As a result, more carbon dioxide would spew into the ocean and, eventually, into the atmosphere, trapping more heat and warming the planet. In short, according to this hypothesis, the ice sheets would eventually grow large enough to initiate their own destruction, refilling the oceans. It was a radical idea that has stirred debate.
- cvarjas 11y ago> Why do journalists do this? I agree, this doesn't really help convey the size of the number. It assumes readers know the circumference of the Moon, when the size relative to Earth would be more useful.
- slavik81 11y agoThe number 40,000 stood out to me because the Earth is roughly 40,000 kilometres in circumference. Of course, this is 40,000 miles, so it's roughly 1.6x the circumference of the Earth. I don't really know what the circumference of the moon is. Or, at least I didn't. Combine the facts above with the ones in the article, and you discover the circumference of the moon is roughly 1/4 that of the Earth.
- cvarjas 11y agoNice, same thought process here.
- WaltPurvis 11y ago>> Though long enough to circle the moon more than six times >Why do journalists do this? Good question. You see stuff like this all the time. "That's three trillion gallons of water, or enough water to fill up five million Olympic-sized swimming pools." As if people can somehow visualize five million swimming pools any better than three trillion gallons. Drives me bonkers.
- gambiting 11y ago" With extreme care, humans and robots have measured temperatures as high as 780 degrees." Degrees of what?? The article is read worldwide and it could be using literally any temperature scale. Anyone has any idea?
- nl 11y agoLava typically liquefies at ~700°C, and 780°F is only 415°C, so I guess that is in Celsius.