Oklahoma M4.2 earthquake - into the Enid Breach

Into the breach.  This earthquake was strongly felt by experienced people, so it may be a thrust.

It has the pattern that I would expect for a thrust - intense and a small area.  All in all, the mechanism is growing nicely.  I still have no idea as to why the Enid Breach exists, I think there may be two megathrusts that have run together.  The oil companies know, since they have the records, the rest of us have to guess.

Update:  Still no solution, but this was followed by an M3.5 on the lower thrust.

And the intensity map shows a thrust.

We won't get a solution for this one, too small.  But the reports should be of 'explosions' if I can find any.  The big thrusts may be finally coming in.  We must wait for the fault plane solutions.

Update2:  On the other hand the M3.8 near Prague had a strike-slip pattern.

But it did some windows, so it is probably shallow.  This is getting quite close to M5.6 and may be in a stress ring.

No discounts or solutions today, it's Sunday.
On Monday, still no solution.

The Hydrogen Economy

That title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because that is the title of a very old book.  But today, the great Toyota has parted the curtain on a hydrogen fuel cell car.

On the other side of the battle is Tesla, with their government billions to make lithium ion batteries.  It's funny because Toyota and Tesla are bedmates on the electric motor running these things.  The main physics here is energy density, and power to weight ratio.

If the battery keeps improving at its current rate, then I think it will win.  It just needs 'lightning bolt' charging.  A big problem is the lack of any standard for charging stations, but electricity is standard.  :).  Both the car and the charging station need the big super-capacitor batteries, since only a trickle can come from the power lines.

Hydrogen has the problem of making and transporting it, although the filling stations are standard.  For a car, it is quite safe because of rapid venting, but make note of the fact that all our explosions at nuclear plants are with the hydrogen tanks.  This is nasty stuff on the large scale.  As far as energy density, etc, this new car is as good as you get.  The tank is already huge, and the pressure is at the max.  There will be no improvement, except maybe the efficiency of the fuel cell.  If oil keeps dropping like a rock, hydrogen can be generated from it, and all the carbon-dioxide can be used for clean fracking.

I'm really going to bet on batteries, but I'll probably be dead before the winner is clear.  :)  Put your money in electric motors, since these improvements benefit both methods.  Go warm super-conductors!

Texas secret police move in on Irving earthquake injection

It was an embarrassment, even though there were no fancy houses.  Hasn't been an earthquake since Tuesday, I'm guessing it has stopped.  These things are caused by the huge price for disposing of frack waste, so the injecting people mixed in a bit for their cousin.  Normally, they are injecting deep salt water from standard oil well operations.

It would be so nice for Science to know what the Texas secret police are actually doing.  I have postulated that there is a slight chemical difference between deep salt water and frack waste, and if you addressed this, then you wouldn't have earthquakes.  By keeping it secret, as in Azle, now here, you are eliminating this possibility.

I'm always happy to be in a position where nobody listens to me.  :)  I don't have the Cassandra Curse, since I don't really care...

ps.  However, it is a bit sad that this will never be resolved.  There's no pay for journalists, and all the scientists are being muzzled by their PR departments.  :(

Update:  New M3.4 south of Dallas.  Somebody is playing whack-a-mole with the secret police.  :)

Costco Bad Meat

Last week I bought a case of lamb rack from Costco.  We've done this before, we freeze it and it lasts 6 months.  It was great for the summer.  Nothing better for the bbq.

This case had some spilled blood on the bottom, and slight odour.  No problem I thought, a small leak and the racks are packed in double plastic.  I froze them all.

Today I thawed 2 racks.  OMG!!! Heaven Help My Nose!  This makes the third time I've experienced bad meat.  I now have the most powerful deodorizers working.  As bad as when the dog was skunked.  I phoned them, and I would think Costco would be a bit more sensitive to bad meat.  I can't believe I have the only case, and I've got to bring in all the rest of the racks tomorrow.  A case costs $266.

My nose is still burning, and I hope I can eat dinner.  Really, I should get a free Advent calendar or something.  :)  Pooey on you, Costco!

ps. I'm taking it back today.  Frozen, you can still smell it.  Although I'll warn them, I hope they let it thaw.  :)

The Next Ice Age - Part 2

So we got the general picture, that after the Mesozoic, the continents drifted apart and the oceans became more efficient heat pumps.  As well, the large carbon-water cycle stopped pumping out.  It got colder and colder, and not at all friendly to dinosaurs.  At some perfect separation, perhaps exactly equal for the Atlantic and Pacific, the Earth could completely freeze over again.  Something to think about in a few million years.

For now, we live on an Earth that is cooling on the multi-million year timescale.  At some point, a few million years ago, we started continental glaciation, the true Ice Age.  As I have said, the oldest evidence is 2.5 million years old, but I'll bet they keep finding older evidence.  The ice advances have a tendency to erase the evidence of older advances.

Technically, we are now in the Ice Age, but that term is reserved for ice advance.  During that time, we have sheets kilometres thick over poor Toronto.  But the tropics don't give a shit.  They go on with their happy life, drinking Pina Coladas.

During the height of the Global Warming Induced Panic, I made fun of their use of unending exponential positive feedback.  If carbon dioxide really would be like that, we'd be a baked husk a long time ago.  The melting of the Arctic is not positive feedback, because the place is so good at radiating heat out into Space.

But there is one positive feedback cycle that is invoked during an Ice Age.  It is the most dangerous of all, except for one little saving grace of physics.  But first things first.  Even though we are slowly freezing to death, as the heat pump proceeds to be more efficient, there are these 10,000 year cycles of Scotch on the Rocks.

Here's what happens:  The Polar Highlands are at their top elevation, with breathtaking views.  All of a sudden, the N-S heat pipe (ocean currents) takes a chaotic hissy fit, perhaps something every few thousand years.  This is something that is magnificent in Chaos Theory.  For example, if you have the Chaotic Whirling Balls on your desk, you will notice a long-term pattern, and suddenly the whole thing stops and does something else.  Our Magnetic Dynamo, in the Upper Core, does the same thing, when the Earth's Magnetic Field suddenly stops and reverses.  Apparently, a big snooze for mankind.

But this oceanic reversal is no big snooze.  The Pole become cold, and snow doesn't melt in the summer.  Now is the summer of our discontent.  :)  This is exponential feedback, since the Poles are now white, and solar input is cut down.  The snow builds, and oceans drop.  The ocean currents are really screwed.  The whole Trade Winds Mechanism shuts down.  Ice builds up.

You and I would not be talking if that was all she wrote.  Kilometres of ice push down the continents like a sponge ball.  Yahoo!  The ocean floods in, and the ice warms due to the lower elevation.  Warmth is restored and we have our average cold winters.  This is called an Interglacial, and sometimes it really swings the other way.  Toronto becomes Florida!  But not now, sheesh.

So, during Interglacials, we have the oceanic reverse, but it doesn't turn into continental glaciation because the continents are down.  This most likely happened during the Little Ice Age.  We might have more of those, we might have warm periods, but no Ice Age.  Don't buy electric blanket stocks!

Appendix:  As a thought experiment, think of a planet that is pure uniform water.  And think of a planet that is pure uniform continent.  What are the circulation patterns?  Lots of examples in Outer Space.

Appendix2:  Note the continents turn the heat pump N-S.

The Next Ice Age - Part 1

Now that nobody is mentioning that Global Warming thing, I am worried that someone will start the anxiety all over again by 'predicting' a coming Ice Age.  They will make a killing buying up futures in electric blanket stocks.  Did you notice that the famous Dr. S. didn't even mention GW when he was arrested at the pipeline protest?  Truly a dead subject, not even the tricky semantic change to Climate Change can rescue it.

I was never against GW per say, but always said that it had no physics.  This is what we have suffered for years in the earthquake biz -- people finding 'patterns' that had no physics.  For some reason GW got away with this for a while.  These 'pattern matchings', like stock market predictions, always eventually come to tears.

So what is going on?  Dr. Roy Spencer quietly plots the black-body radiation of the earth.  This is good physics since it is immediately how we would tell the temperature of a planet some distance in space.

I just wanted to note the overwhelming influence of oceanic current disruption.  As we know from physics, water convection is the most powerful heat pump we have.  For the earth, ocean currents pump heat from the warm wet tropics to the cold dry poles.  Water vapour is a very efficient thermal blanket for the earth, as anybody who has gone camping knows.  Watch out for those clear nights when you freeze your toes off!  The Earth can't shed heat in the Trade Winds Belt, it has to radiate it up North and down South.

So, N-S ocean currents have good physics, but are they steady?  I'm pretty sure the Gulf Stream had a heart attack during the Little Ice Age.  That's when the Vikings who were colonizing Greenland got frozen out.  And lets think about the start of my favourite Mesozoic, when all the continents were jammed together.  The earth got stinking hot, and the large carbon-water cycle pumped out the juice.

In fact, when the continents are perfectly separated and arranged, we may get super-efficient N-S convection, and we have Snowball Earth.  Let's not think about that, shall we?

(I'll probably continue this, long articles get to me.)

LInux - Mount After Network

Linux sucks, Linux is great.  Such a mixed feeling.  On my bleeding edge machine, I deserve what I get.  And all of a sudden, a perfectly good mount in /etc/fstab doesn't work.  It adds insult to injury by taking minutes to boot.

This was hair-ripping time!  I looked everywhere and all I could find was a cifs mount for directories that are already on samba.  My directory was to be shared over samba.  I hate it when Linux decides it knows best.

For Debian, I finally found that there is an if-up.d directory in /etc/network.  This sucker is only invoked after the network is up, and if you have network-manager, it comes up very late indeed.

So, nano a file, I called 'aftermount'.  Here it is.

#!/bin/sh
#mount after network up
mount /dev/sdb1 /disk4
/etc/init.d/smbd restart
/etc/init.d/nmbd restart

I put a religious empty line at the end.  This is run after the network.  After you create file, you have to run 'invoke-rc.d aftermount start >/dev/null', everything while root, or do the sudo thing.  Also chmod a+x aftermount to make it executable.

Then the stupid thing works.  (I write these things for myself in a year).

Irving, Texas earthquakes

I'm just noting these earthquakes because they have a very high felt intensity for their magnitude.  This is probably due to the fact it is lowland and the events may be shallow.  I looked it up and it is all industrial, so no Azle-type weenies.  The events are misslocated because there are no seismometers near there, but if they had decent coverage, the events would converge to one spot.  Just let it go, people.  :)  This is as big as they go....

M4.0 earthquake Oklahoma

Very boring, I know.  No fault plane solution, the USGS is getting slack.  It would be strike-slip up there anyway.  Everything is just bubbling along while we wait for real earthquakes.

Update:  Yeah USGS!  Strike-slip normal which is indicating a lightning bolt zigzag for the thrust.  This might mean why everything is so slow it's killing me!

Update2:  new M4.2 in the upper zone.  I'm guessing this will be about the same mechanism.

Now discounted to M3.7 longitudinal extension.  All these little mechanisms, just like a rock testing machine, but nothing coming together.  See you next year, big guy.

Update3:  Might as well just keep tacking to this post.  Another M4.0 that may be discounted. Yeah, down to M3.6, strike-slip normal.

Note to Fracking Protesters

It's getting quite heated in the US.  This is seen as a local neighbourhood issue in the quiet countryside, and people are going to jail.  But this is not a local issue, people!  Fracking itself is scrupulously clean, in fact they are just washing the dirty, oily shale, and carting everything away.

I do not want to dip into horrible US politics, but this is a national issue.  They are fracking with water because it is cheaper.  If they were fracking with propane then you would have to let them, without protests.  The main issue is that the fracking waste is uncontrolled, and zooms across the state border.  There, any sleazy operator can do with it what they will.  It's in their interest to let it leak on the roads, or inject it into leaky wells.  Or go to Oklahoma, where anything goes.

So, you protesters have to raise the cost of using water in fracking.  This is done by finding out who is the big guy distributing and refining the product and embarrass them for using 'dirty oil'.  After all, this is being done for Canada and the oil sands, and that's nothing compared to the fracking waste.

Sooner or later, Oklahoma is going to have a really big earthquake.  That will rattle the whole Midwest.  Is it just an OK issue?

*This is my last word on the subject, protester people.

**Final word on the protesting aspect (too much depressing politics), with which I have engaged heavily on g+.  As always, I shall continue to make fun of injection earthquakes.  :)

Extra reading:  “America did not do it right, so let’s do it right here. If we found it was impossible to frack in the UK because, say, there are lots of faults in the rocks, that would come out.”

Additional thought:  We went through this 30 years ago in Ontario with toxic waste.  Basically, if used engine oil was uncontrolled, it was hauled away in a leaky truck.  I remember following one of those on the Trans Canada.  :(  If it is registered at the source, then they recycle the engine oil.  All toxic waste must be registered at the source, and slated for licensed treatment or disposal.  My greatest fear is that if a giant earthquake closes OK, then this stuff goes to worse places.

Another final, final word:  This is big money.  I think the difference between being responsible, and 'wild west' is a million dollars a hole (1 significant digit).  The externalities (unpaid cost to society) are ten times that.  Forget insecticide, carbon, all that other stuff, this is the issue of the moment.  (Fin!)

Dallas M3.3 earthquake - walks like a duck

They were pretty ruthless in chopping down the well for Azle, now it looks like fracking waste again near Dallas.  Oh well, they have a seismologist now.  This is coming up quite fast, so he better get a move on.

ps.  There must be a huge amount of fracking waste building up for them to try this.  I can imagine acres of trucks.  Uncontrolled water fracking has led to this, and it pushes up the price for disposal astronomically.  A bit like cocaine piling up at the Mexican border.  Since the waste is uncontrolled, this leads to 'underground' activity.  In the future, we'll be surprised where this stuff ends up.  :)

More extra reading:  According to accountability project estimates, companies along the east coast can save more than $500,000 by transporting 4,150 cubic feet of waste solids to Ohio rather than dispose of them at local site specializing in radioactive material.

Update:  More little earthquakes.  They are claiming that it is just fracking.  I doubt it.  Texas has this big black veil over all these operations.

Update2:  They must have introduced fracking waste like Azle.  Nice news story.

Uber is not a race to the bottom

Today, a famous Toronto newspaper columnist tore into Uber, based on the fact that the founder is an obnoxious pirk.  They all are, down there, and we need some of those in Toronto.  I mean, we have Conrad, but he's kind of useless.

Now, columnists really are in a race to the bottom, as we see here.  His economic analysis is based on the pre- Industrial Revolution cottage industry.  Taxi drivers in Toronto are like that, since all the medallions are held by Conrads.

As I have mentioned to my good buddy, John Tory, Uber is a 'free-rider' in two things:  insurance, and congestion charges.  But I don't think they are any worse than the typical Toronto business, single person car commuter, who has a free (tax-deductible) downtown parking spot.

I foresee the day when we all are forced to have a provincial sealed gps unit, probably run by the insurance industry.  Congestion charges will be automatically forwarded to the City for transit.  Uber will pay just like everyone else, but their quality is controlled by reviews and choice.  Thus, if you really want to be picked up by a high-rated BMW, then you choose to wait for another minute or two.  And the driver can choose not to pick up a notorious drunk puker.  You have no choice and no reviews for taxi drivers, who pick you up in a barfy car with broken seats.

I just did this because my daughter used Uber while visiting in Palo Alto.  It was great service, totally safe for a single woman.

Pouring Fracking Waste on the Road - New York State

Reference

So, the next time you're behind that brine truck, trying to get through that snow storm, think of the glorious stuff you are breathing.  I'm sure it's worth at least a pack or ciggies or two.

So, now I've found a worse way to dispose of frack waste than injecting in Oklahoma.  I was always joking to people that they can't just dump it into the local creek, because that would instantly kill everything, and somebody might get it on YouTube.  Just pour it onto the road, who will know?

I was looking this stuff up, because one of my wild correspondents was claiming they were going to inject it into the Attica salt wells that once caused a giant earthquake.  Her friend went to jail trying to stop this, and I would find it very interesting, but we'd really have to wait for the seismicity.  Unless they inject it directly into these brine salt wells, and instantly suck it up again for the roads.  :)

So, everybody in New York State, start checking your hair samples for exotic isotopes and such.  I mean, your employer is going to use hair samples for cocaine use, just add some extra tests to the list.

Now, in Ontario, I'm sure they are using just good old Windsor salt, and not importing the exotic stuff from NY, or maybe they are?

Update:  They've probably stopped pouring it on the roads by now.  I did find that they weren't going to inject it into leaky salt caverns, but they want to store propane there.  That's fine, they do it with natural gas, and it's pretty obvious if it blows out.  So, if you want to protest fracking, go for the waste.  :)

M4.3 earthquake Alabama

That's completely out of the blue.  I have no idea whatsoever on that one, and it's too early in the morning to look up historic seismicity.  Would be funny if there were any injection around there.  There is no focal plane solution.

Whoa!  Dying a discount death, now M3.8  One person felt it.  Sucks when you have no seismometers.

Addition:  Strike-slip with a normal component.  Nobody felt it, yet they have a solution, so I would guess this is quite deep, mid-crust, totally 100% organic.

More:  Epicentre felt it as intensity 2, here is the housing stock, so now I'm putting the earthquake at 30 km depth.  Sheesh!  :)

Steel Roofs No Good for the Upcoming Canadian Ice Age*

I had my favourite contractor in to look at the ripped out vinyl piece.  I was panicking that the whole thing was rotten after 15 years, but it was extremely cold and windy, so I think a frozen goose hit it.  :)  The rest looks good, and I found a lot of replacement pieces under the crawl space.  My roof needs replacing, it's heavy shingle that has lasted over 20 years, and he was shocked, since the average roof lasts 12 years or so.

So I was thinking steel, and he said they are taking them down.  When they just nail them over an existing roof, they don't fix the venting and such.  As well, those cute snow stops are useless in Canada, once the snow is higher than them.

I was thinking of that as a geotechnical engineer; the snow stops create a uniform discontinuity for sliding.  So you can have a heck of an avalanche.  People with the steel roofs are afraid to leave their house.

The asphalt-gravel top roof offers uniform friction.  Once again, the whole thing is about fractal roughness, like earthquakes, and the difference between Oklahoma and Arkansas.  :)

*no ice age, just 'That 70's Show'

Turning Toronto into Palo Alto

Now that I'm on the inside with the new mayor (hey, I sent him a g+ note!), we need a grand vision for the city.  He's already for Uberx, which is the service for under-employed youth.  Some nasty people want to fight it, like France fights Walmart.  As mentioned in the previous post, you can't miss too many of these technological booms until you're totally out of it.

All the brightest people from UofT go to Palo Alto for their start-ups, and Stanford MBA's.  They will go on and lead the 'Next Big Thing', which I think will be 3d printing.  Now, you just can't go all Japanese, like Ontario wants to and centrally plan the NBT, that leads to disaster.  No, you have to go gently, gently into the night.

Ontario is burdened by the fact they have to spread their largess.  Good grief, who wants to go Waterloo?  And solar cells in the snow belt?  They are probably already under 3m of snow, and need nuclear electricity to warm them.  :)

We have to catch the nbt  in Toronto.  For instance, printing a shirt, as my friend mentioned.  You just can't print it as if you were using a sewing machine.  No, you have to visualize a shirt being ultra-compressed into a brick, micro-print that using resin and a starch separator, and then throw into a washing machine.  Voila, seamless shirt!  That takes intense, creative brainpower, like me, but younger.  :)

What we have against us is horrible weather, and tight-fisted bankers who would rather bet all on house speculation.  We have theatre and gay hipsters.  I would propose expanding the underground to include underground parks where you can listen to guitar, or something, and pick up your Amazon purchases.  Retail is going down, and we could use that space.  As well, the demand for bureaucratic office space is going to tube.

For the money bit, we can use excess taxes from condo speculation, and import some Californians to throw it around a bit.  Canadians would want some politically-correct committee that has Olivia Chow on it.  Yuck!  Especially since the nbt might be 3d printed porn girls or boys.  :)

If we do it right, we'll out-Palo the Alto.  Wouldn't that be great?

ps. this is my all-time worst read article.  Everybody in the world hates Toronto!

Japan and Europe Under the Waves

Here is one of my rails against Grand Stupidities.  The inspiration comes from the news that Japan is in recession (and Europe, too).  The news out of Europe is that they are crucifying their last remaining brilliant person, who shall soon be in California.  :)

The entire world is in an economic funk right now because we are between technological booms.  I shall outline some of the major booms.  A true wealth-producing innovation benefits the producer and the consumer of cheaper goods that improve life.

Colonization - Europe did big on this, getting cheap beaver hats.

Steel - Railway and steam, big for Europe and NA.

Oil and Interstates with cars - big for NA and Germany with the autobahns.

Fixed computer boom - starting from the 60's and on-going.  Nearly all export benefits to the US, with Japan producing some.  Productivity is finally improving in Canada with the decimation of the bureaucracy, resulting in high youth unemployment.  No improvement in Japan and Europe, and the US is just getting chip cards.  :)

Shipping and World Trade:  Containers were the big technology, and free trade the big political shift.  China did big here, it was like finding a huge cheap iron ore deposit in the era of steel.  Only this was underpaid labour.  In the early days, Japan and Europe did well with intricate mechanicals, such as small cars and VCR's.  Later years J&E did not benefit due to protectionism.  NA had the big cheap consumer items boom with Walmart and Dollarama importing containers directly from China.  Now China is big with Aliexpress, and people can import their own cheap Chinese goods.

Internet and Wireless - Both software and hardware.  Had the brief telecoms fibre optics boom, but that was their last hurrah.  J+E protected fixed lines and lost out.  Finland did okay for a while.  Big benefactors were other third world countries who skipped land lines, but didn't do anything with that.  It is still nearly impossible to get a visa to visit India if you are a Canadian in California.  I'm running around for this this morning.  California was the big winner here.  Amazon and Uberx are the big new wealth creators here.

Next boom

Whatever it is, you know J&E will miss out.  I'm predicting that it is 3-d printers.  Soon there will be giant centres like Google data centres of 3d printers making 3d printers.  Manufacturing will go local.  China will lose here.  NA will win big.  Europe would do better if they hadn't lost all their brains to California.

*J&E are losing because of the lack of immigration of fresh brains.  They are going through a uniform ageing cycle which is certain death.

ps. I was thinking that Europe should have protected that guy by having a young powerful woman stand up and say "I made him wear that shirt, it was the cleanest one he had!"  Trouble is that they don't have powerful women, which is probably the main issue.  :(

Kansas earthquake - M4.2 -- The Unzippering

That earthquake is probably misslocated a bit, since they don't have seismometers up there.  It's strike-slip, and right beside the 4.8.  This is following the pattern of the OK M5.6, so we should expect something soon.  That was before I started following these things, but you can view a time-lapse of the events.

Update:  Downsized to M3.8 because it is one of those longitudinal tension cracks on a thrust.  That NW line must be another thrust, which is offset from the OK thrust.  Weird.

The classical Arkansas pattern is to match earthquakes on the shear and thrust, with the thrusts being slightly smaller.  So it's now up to the shear....

Update2:  Holy Cow, I was just thinking that the mystery gap might be caused by an offset thrust.  As well, the Kansas events should be shallower.  New instruments might tell us that.  We'll for sure when we get the pure thrust events, but they have to be above 4.

Update3:  M3.7 just happened Nov18 up there.  Only mentioned it because my blog spiked through the roof.  Do Kansans read more?

M4.8 earthquake in the Oklahoma Monster Mash

Holy cow, just as I was relegating all this to the Scrap Heap of History, the biggest one yet crashes the party.

A perfect strike-slip on the upper shear fault.

This one would hurt.  Remember that with the size of these faults, there's no physics that would stop an M 6 or 7 from suddenly popping up.  It all depends on the fractal smoothness of the system.

I highly recommend doing what OK is doing, stopping the injection right at the epicentre 'without implying anything'.  This calms the public and has all the effect of closing the barn door after the M4.8 horse has bolted.  :)

Although this has happened over the border and thus is a Kansas earthquake, the underlying mechanism doesn't give a rat's ass about that.  I consider it to be all Oklahoma.

This was strike-slip.  I believe that a thrust at this level would pack twice the punch.

Update:  Phew.  From the news, I believe this earthquake can be relegated to "Completely Ignored and Laughed At."

Update2:  Bluff City (pop. 3) has called in an Intensity 7.  This is 'Bricks Down' people, or "I'm too drunk to stand."  As usual, the TV stations will not get out there.  Reconsidered in the light of day, down to 6.

Update3:  Structural damage.

:)

Update4:  Yeah, totally forgotten - fish wrap, just like the first M5.6.  This zone is following the pattern of that first quake, so you never know.  And that 6 will be forgotten as well.

The Coming US Earthquake Shock

I'm shelving my new book.  It'll go right beside 'Peak Oil' and 'The Hockey Stick'.  In as lurid a style as possible, I laid out the consequences of a New New Madrid in Oklahoma, and its effect on cheap oil.  It was good as these things go, but I decided I couldn't keep a straight face on the talk shows.  I don't have the talent of Al Gore!

It would have sold well in Europe, where they they like to sit with their lakes of wine, dead economy, and make fun of the US.  We Canadians would be too cold to read anything.

Perhaps the book will float again if we get those M5 thrust earthquakes, but by then everybody and their dog will be putting out a book.  :(

Addition:  I was brought to this sad state of affairs by realizing that the mechanism was growing too slowly and matching the glacial pace of politicians.  I mean, if a Great White Shark moves into the beach, it can munch a few people and create a great movie before the politicians do something.  If the tiny baby version moved in and started shaving armpits, they would probably do something before it grew big.

Today I read that they shut down the injection well near the M4.3 Cushing earthquake "without it implying anything'.  That means they'll shut down wells for any M4.3.  We'll never get to a 7 with that!  Blah.

Update:  The M4.8 earthquake was the Monster's response to my indifference.  I'm sorry....

Update2:  The northern section is ramping up as fast as Arkansas.  The book might be saved if they deny the sharks in the water.  :)

Seasonal Summary of Earthquakes in Southern Ontario

This is from the Southern Ontario Seismic Network (SOSN) that I helped out with at one time.  It's probably the best seismic network east of California.  Combined with all the deep seismic reflection data, it has helped formulate my ideas of what is happening here and in the States.

Note the very tight association with water.  Basically, no water, no earthquakes, with some exceptions.  The stuff around Buffalo and Windsor is a result of heavy salt injections.  The instability of Georgian Bay has only come out recently with new seismometers.  It defines the geology for the Bruce Black Hole, but that's another story.  :)

We've got our deep Precambrian mountain roots, formed from the accretion of island arcs.  This has given us the banding of megathrusts that go right down to Texas.  All the oil companies down there have imaged these things, but like the Bruce Hearings Panel, they have chosen to ostrichify.  :)

Ice Ages - What happened in the tropics?

In the North, we all know about the Ice Age.  We generally agree that about 2 million years ago we started the Pleistocene Epoch.  I'm not totally convinced that the day before this was all sunshine and roses, since subsequent glaciations would have removed all evidence.  I'm fairly convinced this is tied in with Plate Tectonics and big earthquakes, since that is what I do.  :)

So, at 60 million years ago, we were still warm enough to have a few dinosaurs roaming around, and then everything got colder as the continents separated.  Remember that at 150 million years ago, the continents were having a big party, and tons of CO2 and water vapour were being baked out by the thermal insulation.

So, if you want to talk about Climate Change, look at the temperature change from the Mesozoic to now.  Straight down the tubes, baby.  If we raised a dinosaur now, it would want to go right back into its egg!

So, you wouldn't have noticed a big change on Day 1 of the Pleistocene.  We do know that our wonderful Trade Wind System had a shit-fit.  It actually reversed and died.  This killed the Gulf Stream, which is the only thing that keeps us and Europe talking.  The North had nothing better to do than freeze up.  What caused the cycles?

As I've stated, the Friendly God belief is thus:  There is no unstable earth process that will wipe us out.  Everything has a balance.

Now the hard-core, no God version:  The Universe is controlled by Blind Chance.  There are no unstable processes that will wipe us out, because they would have been triggered in the past, thus rendering things moot.  A little shift in the Cosmic Dice, and we wouldn't be here, like millions of other planets.

But really, everything we see now has been triggered in the past.  So, the Ice Age Advance has a balancing force, or we'd all be under ice, and Google wouldn't be sinking barges.  :)  To me, the main force is Isostatic Response, which sinks all the continents under kilometres of ice, below sea level.  Try to build up ice cubes with that!  Once the ocean level goes super-high, the Trade Winds start up their happiness.

I'm not extrapolating any more, but the continents are still down, and we've got a while to go in this inter-glacial.  As with the others, we can expect Florida weather in Toronto, but not in my lifetime (rats).  So, take all this 'New Ice Age' talk with a Scotch on the Rocks.  :)

Oklahoma M4.1 earthquake

I only consider the M4+'s because they have a mechanics solution.  The other stuff is just 'breathing'.  So, here it is right on the main shear plane, and I need a fault plane solution of strike-slip to confirm it.  But, nooooo they don't have a solution!  Have they fallen asleep?  Too much surfing in California?  Pooey.

Update:  Rats, still no solution.  I even sent a nice note, but you know how they love me.  :(

Update2:  I guess they aren't doing solutions any more, because I'm showing them up.  :)  Anyway, this earthquake started the whole organism twitching.

More on earth dials

Previous post

I'm still adding dials before I play.  I am convinced that oceanic currents are an independent factor, on a 10,000 year cycle, and they are intimately associated with continental aggregation. Look at this

In the short years I've been looking at it, there have been minor variations with large consequences, such as no hurricanes, more typhoons, etc.  The picture is of air currents, but they have no staying power, it's the ocean heat transport that drives them.  We also know the 7 year El Nino cycle, but there must be other cycles.  My dial would just indicate the efficiency of heat transport from the equator to the north (south for Australians).

I am also convinced that this shuts down during ice ages.  Although I have studied ice ages extensively, I can find no good ideas of what the equator was doing at the time.  I suspect it was extra hot.  I know it was at least tropical, and did not cool down significantly or all our warm-water critters would be dead.  So, I'm really eliminating a major solar cycle.  If the sun goes down, it must go up, and we're still here.  :)

Update:  More research shows controversy and conflicting evidence on the tropics during the ice age.  The oceans remained warm, but the highlands were cold and there was no Sahara dust in South America.  To me, this implies the whole Equator to Poles system stopped, which is what I expect.  The recovery mechanism was that the ocean level went down 120m which probably made the equator soil and water really hot, and everything started up again.  (Thank Goodness).  There is also the fact of isostatic response which sinks the highlands in Canada and makes them warmer.

Google barges sink

Article

I just had to put the final note on this, since they were such a big mystery a while back.  And I was watching Titanic again.  I only like the beginning with the technical arrogance.  :)

So, these things are headed for the scrap heap.  Perhaps Google could make them self driving?

Nevada Earthquake Sequence - Natural Fluid Injection

My inbox has been flooded with these earthquakes.  I had set my trigger to M4.0 in the US, just to catch the next OK significant earthquake, but it's all this Nevada crap.

That's a 10 km square.  Apparently these things are quite common in the region, always topping in a few weeks with some M5's.  The dimensions limit the magnitude.  I've come to the conclusion that such swarms are always the result of water bursting through a barrier.  The small size is an indicator.  As well, if they had decent seismometer coverage, and looked carefully, they would find identical couplets which are characteristic of fluid flow.  I doubt the coverage is any good here.

I want real Earth Dials for Christmas

Inspiration

I wrote about this thought experiment a long time ago.  Now I have added a lot more.  Since climate guys have no imagination, they can skip this.  :)

So, we have a real earth, and since it is our earth, we have a number of dials we can twiddle.  All of these dials have spun for real over geological time.

Carbon

Climate guys don't appreciate that most of our earth's carbon has been swallowed by plate tectonics.  Every once in a while, it all comes back, at a million times stronger than anything we can do.  It's fun spinning this dial.

Water

As well, a huge amount of water is down there with the carbon.  It likes to come up with the carbon dioxide, but you can spin these things separately.

Continental Separation

The continents come together or fling apart at a spin this dial.

Solar Ouput

This doesn't do much except freeze us.  There must be a limit to dialing it up, or we'd be dead a long time ago.  I think it's cheating to spin this one.  :)

That's all  I can think of right now.  Next will be the fun of turning those dials up and down.

Oh yeah, for Christmas I want to leave the thought experiment, and get real ones.  :)  Look out for high-speed continents!

Plate Tectonics Revolution - Ocean plates are ropes

Reference

Now this evidence is somewhat dodgy, because those plates are under water, but this would be something in the staid plate tectonics world.  After all, nothing has happened since '63 - oh what a night!

Seriously, it was quite a struggle for a while, whether we have subduction pull, or ridge push, and this might put the kabosh on the argument.  But does it?  Hot oceanic plates float, and cold ones sink.  The hot plates could still slide off a high ridge like butter on a Teflon pan.  Who knows if these floppy ropes can even hold a tension for a pull?

I think they just slide along, with no strength, compression or tension.  When they get cold, they just sink back into the goop, taking a lot of water and sediments with them, which makes lots of frothy granite.  What barfs up, goes down, and comes up again.  :)

New Alaska Armpit Earthquake - M4.6

This is the site of my failed extrapolation.  Like the climate guys, a two point projection only gets you so far.  But this one was a bit weird.

A thrust aimed right towards Whitehorse.  Bet they felt that!

Update from Whitehorse.

Whitehorse (Canada) (162 km N from epicenter)(no details): It sounded like a big jet flying over my house, that is what woke me up originally and then I felt my bed moving and the rumbling sensation I've felt before with other earthquakes and I realized what it was. (via EMSC)
Carcross (Canada) (108 km NE from epicenter)(no details): I didn't know if I imagined it or not.... (via EMSC)
Whitehorse, Yukon / MMI IV (Light shaking): Was in the office by myself. Noticed the computer monitor vibrating and checked my glass of water, it was moving. Just thought about leaving the building when it stopped. It didn't last long, maybe a 10 - 15 seconds
Whitehorse / MMI III (Weak shaking)
Juneau, AK 99801 / MMI IV (Light shaking): Sitting watching morning news husband and I felt like shaking--immediately knew it was an earthquake!