Posts

February 21, 2013

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2:13 PM | Putting the Russian meteorite in perspective

Friday morning, a large meteor entered the atmosphere over the southern Ural area of Russia, detonating with enough force to shatter windows in nearby towns and injure over 1000 people. Preliminary estimates suggest an impactor traveling at 15 to 20 km/s, and weighing 8000 to 10,000 tons, exploding at an altitude of 20-30 km with the force of a nuclear weapon. These are hard numbers to wrap

September 09, 2011

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9:28 AM | The National Hurricane Center's Y2K bug

The following is the current forecast discussion for Hurricane Katia. Note the last line:ZCZC MIATCDAT2 ALLTTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM HURRICANE KATIA DISCUSSION NUMBER 45NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL122011500 AM AST FRI SEP 09 2011 THE CLOUD PATTERN CONTINUES WELL ORGANIZED AND IN FACT A DRIFTINGBUOY NEAR THE CENTER OF THE HURRICANE RECENTLY REPORTED A MINIMUMPRESSURE OF 968 MB. THE

June 15, 2011

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11:56 AM | One hundred major impacts: part two: the deep ocean

A few months ago, I guaranteed the readership of the Lounge that none of them would be killed by a meteorite impact. In laying out the estimates that allowed me to do this, I took an equal area map and bombarded it with one hundred 400m projectiles. Objects of this size hit the Earth about once every 100,000 years, and are locally devastating but globally insignificant, so this seemed like a

March 14, 2011

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11:42 AM | Japan disaster

I've been away for a long weekend, and haven't been keeping up with the news. Other people have, though.Highly Allochthonous has a roundup on the Earthquake.See links therein for details.Jeff, the Arms Control Wonk, was in japan visiting the reprocessing facility at the time of the quake, and has decent information on the state of the reactors.Geoblogger Evy's dad is a nuclear engineer, so she

January 03, 2011

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11:47 AM | Queensland floods

There is currently a large flood event happening in East-central Queensland, on both sides of the dividing range. Figure 1. flood status of Queensland rivers. Source.Inland, the northern tributaries of the Darling River. are flooding, while on the coast the Fitzroy River is due to peak in Wednesday. Like most floods, these were caused by large amounts of rain. In many areas, 100-year flood

October 08, 2010

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1:29 PM | A few thoughts on the Hungarian Red Sludge disaster

The news has been showing pictures of an environmental catastrophe in Hungary, where a huge spill of toxic sludge from an alumina processing plant has killed several people and lots of fish. I am not an expert on alumina refining, but I’m going to take an educated guess at what happened here using geochemical first principles.Aluminum is mined from bauxite, which contains lots of aluminum

October 06, 2010

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11:58 AM | Astronomical risk calculation

One of the greatest challenges facing media saturated democracies is the inability to correctly gauge the relative importance of catastrophic, visually impressive, rare events vs. common incremental ones. Here are some examples:If, dear reader, you happen to die in transit, I personally guarantee that you won’t be killed in an airplane blown up by terrorists. The overwhelming odds are that you