Mount St. Helens Eruption Baffles Scientists 381
jurt1235 writes "Mount St. Helens, which started erupting 15 months ago, is still erupting. The weird part is, by now every 3 seconds 10 cubic yards of lava is coming out of the volcano but scientists cannot determine from where it is coming anymore. From the article: 'The volume is greater than anything that could be standing in a narrow 3-mile pipe. That suggests resupply from greater depths, which normally would generate certain gases and deep earthquakes. Neither is being detected.'"
Be aware of the facts, always. (Score:4, Interesting)
It really bugs me, actually, that these "scientists" we so admire may be geniuses, or they might just be grant-hunters. I know I always look for the best income for the least amount of work.
I study oil and gold extraction (I blog about gold mines, too) and I am amazed at how often scientists are proven wrong. I know that it is heretical to say that on slashdot (I was blasted about it earlier this morning on this very forum), but we as a society seem to have too much faith in scientific research finding facts that turn out to be just plain wrong.
What else have these same scientists theorized that may not be true? Is oil possibly a renewable resource (meaning there is near unlimited amounts deeper within the earth waiting to bubble up)? Is it possible to battle the build-up of CO2, or is much of it coming out of the earth and not manmade? How much of the global climate is an effect of heat expelled from inside our crust, and how much is from "eroding" atmosphere?
I rarely thank AP writers for their research, but in this case I have to. I'm glad the spotlight is being shined on the fallacies that come out of the mouths of scientists looking for more research dollars (on the backs of the taxpayers). I believe we DO need to carry out research -- not publicly funded -- but I also think we need to evaluate how much of what they discover is really factual enough to base wars, regulations and restrictions on. I understand that science is constantly finding new theories to fix their old ones, and I have no problem with continued research -- just as long as I don't pay for it involuntarily and as long as no one makes laws and restrictions based on non-facts. That doesn't seem to be the case, though.
Volcano Cam (Score:5, Interesting)
if they get the camera up again you can watch it...
Or ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Available volume? (Score:1, Interesting)
-Jeffrey
Reminds me of an old Japanese Tale I Once Read (Score:5, Interesting)
Once there was a village in the country. The people were happy. The village was nice. In general things were pretty good. Then one day a man in the village discovered a deep dark hole just outside of the village. He yelled into it and was surprised that his voice did not echo back. He called a few others who also wondered at the discovery. Soon it was decided that the hole should be inspected further and people gathered the tools to do so. The first test was to yell "hello" as lous as possible and listen for an echo carefully. This failed. The next test was to throw a stone into the hole and listen for it to hit the bottom. This was done, but no sound was ever heard. The next test was to drop something more substantial into the hole and listen for it to hit bottom. Again, nothing was heard. More tests followed until...
It was decided that the hole was the perfect place for the village's rubbish to be disposed of. Day after day, week after week and year after year, they continued to throw their litter into the hole. Until one day many many years later, the man who discovered the hole heard a voice call from above just outside his home, "Hellllo". He was startled but ignored it. The next day he heard another voice calling followed by a small stone hitting the ground near him. It was then that he realized what had happened and wished he'd never found the hole outside of the village.
---
Now, I could simply make some flip statement about him having found Bob Goatse... but instead I'll make the point that perhaps the endless flow of lava is coming from the Earth's future where all of our waste is miraculously disposed of through some kind of wormhole...
10 cubic yards every 3 seconds? That comes to... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article indicates that this has been happening at this pace for 15 months... so roughly 635 days. That makes 182,880,000 total cubic yards of lava.
With that much lava, you could cover a typical city block (1/4 mile by 1/4 mile according to my estimates?) 1417 feet (432 meters) deep. That's almost as tall as the Sears Tower (including the antennas), and taller than the Empire State Building. So fill one of them up with lava. That's enough lava for me
For this amount of lava to have come out of the "narrow 3 mile pipe" they mention in the article (assuming it doesn't get refilled and it's perfectly cylindrical), the pipe would need to be 178 feet in diameter... is that "narrow"? Dunno... I'm not a geologist
Re:See folks... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:See folks... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not?
It's a legitimate question. And really think about it, instead of just posting the first answer that comes to mind. For example, you might want to take a look at the Reformation and what that was all about.
Source of reduced carbon in Earth's mantle (Score:5, Interesting)
Two difficulties with that. One is that the Moon is supposed to have formed from a collision with a Mars-sized body over 4 billion years ago. That collision is believed to have melted everything down to a 1000 km. The other is that the mantle has abundant oxygen and heat, and plate tectonics says it is in convective motion mixing up the different layers (although very slowly) -- one would think all the carbon is now CO2 or CaCO3 or something by now.
However, there is still the matter of diamonds, which are not believed to be dead dinosaurs (diamonds are aged 1 billion years or more, typically) -- they had to have originated in the upper mantle (about 100 km down) and had to have been brought to the surface rapidly (to avoid reversion to graphite, although you get graphite pseudomorphs of diamond -- clumps of graphite shaped like diamond crystals which were probably diamonds brought up too slowly so they reverted to the stable graphite form). While diamonds are rare, and the Kiberlite pipe eruptions that brought them up are rare and maybe date only to an earier geologic epoch, there has to be something to produce reduced carbon down below.
J F Kenney and his Russian associates believe that starting with FeO, CaCO3 and H2O (stuff not hard to find in the mantle owing to limestone and water being subducted down and Fe being brought up by mantle convection) you can end up with CH4 plus higher chain hydrocarbons. The argument is that about 100 km down is the only place methane, octane, and above can form is that the thermodynamics works at those temps and pressures and that the thermodynamics don't work for turning plant/algae material into oil in the traditional "oil window" of about 1-2 miles down.
So, there you have it -- oil is created from the same place an process as engagement ring stones, not only does oil not come from dead dinosaurs but from rocks instead (although the subducted CaCO3 could have its origins in biology of reef building), but that oil is not latent solar energy (in the form of sequestered biomass) but that oil is in reality geothermal energy (geologic raw materials brought together by heat-driven mantle convection and endothermic reactions driven by mantle heat).
If oil is really geothermal instead of solar in origin, one could consider and advanced technological culture with the capability of somehow using the environment of 100 km down as a natural resource, and of establishing a closed-cycle renewable geothermal based energy economy based on -- oil! One could sequester CO2 deep below and get back reduced carbon, all driven by geothermal power, which has its origins in natural radioactive decay along with the latent heat of fusion of iron in the core.
I mean think about it. A lot of the speculation about advanced energy cultures for the far future look outward into space and of tapping the vast resource of solar energy on the Earth surface, in Earth orbit, and beyond -- think Dyson sphere. Has anyone speculated, either in popular science writing or science fiction, about an advanced energy culture fully utilizing the energy resource within a planet?
You may say drilling or tunneling 10 km is stretching it not to imagine 100 km? But who is to say drill. Some MIT dude suggested using a million tons of molton iron (some grant proposal) to melt and sink its way all the way to the core to carry some kind of probe to find out "what is down there." Who is to say that some related scheme may be able to both bring materials down to the mantle (say CO2) and bring back materials (oil and gas) in a closed loop? I am not saying it is practical with today's technology, but it is not anything violating
Re:Be aware of the facts, always. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that is what the parent poster was really getting at. Some of these theories get to be dogmatic and the adherents to them are no more responsive to corrections in their thinking than Religious Fanatics clinging to their bibles.
Relation to the 1980 blast (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if this "too large" amount of lava could have anything to do with the blast in 1980? The blast must have caused some change in the way this vulcanoe works.
I guess the lack of earthquakes does disprove this idea if the rigedity below St. Helens is correctly estimated.
Anyhow I think this is very interesting, this is something I will try to keep myself updated on by studying articles in the geophysics library (I haven't found the articles of the magazines found there "online for free" so far).
As also mentioned in other comments geophysics do know astonishingly little about what is actually going on beneath the crust. Geophysics is a "young science" and there is a lot of new interesting studies and theories coming out all the time, but still none of them doesn't give a decent explanation of everything that is going on that we can detect.
From Ohm's Law to the NEC (Score:3, Interesting)
How about Hooke's law on deformation of structural elements when external forces are applied to them, leading to legal requirements for civil engineers? Or the statistic observation on heating of electrical conductors from electrical currents, and on physiological effects of electricity on the human heart leading to the National Electrical Code?
Both physical laws are empirical and claimed as observations, and have limited applicability: Hookes Law about proportional deformation under load is only good until the loaded structure breaks down; likewise, the expectation of constant resistance or current-carrying capability breaks once the cable or connector has heated up enough to cause metallurgical changes in the material. Yet both are fundaments for important and long-lasting regulations.