This is interesting to starving geologists and geophysicists, like me! (keep clicking on those ads!). In the US, a ton of lobbyist money was poured into redefining the word 'construction'. Now, construction is defined as 'putting the cherry on top', or pouring concrete for the reactor. All the bulldozing, excavation, drilling, tunneling, etc, can be done, before the first paperwork flies.
This, of course, greatly disappoints the 'loyal opposition', who relied on infinite amounts of courtroom logjams to block any hope of a nuclear plant. From one extreme to another! Should be fun....
ps. Ontario better get its act together and start doing something that resembles intelligent action, on building a new plant!
Showing posts with label faults. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faults. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Fault discovered beneath nuclear waste dump!
No, it isn't up at the Bruce! It's the poor, hard-hit Yucca-yucca site that the US has pinned so much hope on, merely because it's in the middle of all those old nuclear bomb sites.
They have had the difficult task of showing that the area is a perfect glass marble, and will remain pristine for a million years! Well, nothing and nobody is that perfect! I wonder how this will affect all those new nuclear plans....
They have had the difficult task of showing that the area is a perfect glass marble, and will remain pristine for a million years! Well, nothing and nobody is that perfect! I wonder how this will affect all those new nuclear plans....
North Channel DEM's
Here is the North Channel, which is the zone of water north of Manitoulin Island. It has the most fascinating geology, and once the election is over, I might delve into it.
You might notice that something big and nasty zooms into it, which is the whole reason it is there. Here is an angle shot.
Again, just like the Bruce, this is a most unstudied area.
You might notice that something big and nasty zooms into it, which is the whole reason it is there. Here is an angle shot.
Again, just like the Bruce, this is a most unstudied area.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Fault geology of Hamilton, Ontario
As I have mentioned previously, one really huge fault whips down through Toronto and Hamilton. Now it happens in my many travels and fishing trips, that the most dramatic scenery is associated with earthquakes. If you take the beautiful seacoast road down from San Francisco, you can see these marvelous terraced beaches. Each terrace has been created by a huge M9 earthquake! If we didn't have earthquakes, everything would be ground to a pulp, and be as boring as Toronto!
This fault appears to be most active at Hamilton, and the spectacular topography is a result.
Good old Hamiton is located at the west end of Lake Ontario. It is noted for its stinky steel mills, and less noted for the swamps everywhere. In fact, I was told these swamps are extremely deep, and have blocked decent railroad access for years.
I have been playing around with Digital Elevation Models (DEM's), and viewers. I was using 3DEM to great success. Here a shaded relief view of Hamilton.
That great big gash in the Niagara Escarpment is the Dundas Valley, which was also a major glacial lake drainage outlet, and affects the sediments in Lake Ontario for a great distance. Nobody has really wondered why it is there.
The real fun with 3DEM is taking oblique views. Here's one, shooting down the fault.
Now, don't you wonder about Hamilton? The view would be much more spectacular if we could remove the sediments. Then you would see something! We did a lot of geophysics out in the lake, where you can get an idea of the depths of the swamps.
Why do we even care about Hamilton? First off, the scenery is nice. Second, all those swamps are formed by an active fault, somewhat like sag ponds, but over a much longer time. They are doing a lot of building in those ponds, and I think it is somewhat dangerous.
The next big earthquake in that area will be a high-speed thrust, much like some of the more destructive earthquakes that hit Japan recently. The damage intensity will have a very narrow zone with a high Peak Ground Velocity (PGV). The deep swamps will amplify this ground motion 10 to 100 times. The damage will be incredible! This earthquake will blow out the electricity and natural gas for most of Southern Ontario.
Yet, we merrily go on, ignoring this threat, not doing the slightest little thing to mitigate the disaster. Such is the power of living memory! We remember Hurricane Hazel, because it happened, yet this earthquake has the same general odds of happening. Just hope your house is on solid ground!
This fault appears to be most active at Hamilton, and the spectacular topography is a result.
Good old Hamiton is located at the west end of Lake Ontario. It is noted for its stinky steel mills, and less noted for the swamps everywhere. In fact, I was told these swamps are extremely deep, and have blocked decent railroad access for years.
I have been playing around with Digital Elevation Models (DEM's), and viewers. I was using 3DEM to great success. Here a shaded relief view of Hamilton.
That great big gash in the Niagara Escarpment is the Dundas Valley, which was also a major glacial lake drainage outlet, and affects the sediments in Lake Ontario for a great distance. Nobody has really wondered why it is there.
The real fun with 3DEM is taking oblique views. Here's one, shooting down the fault.
Now, don't you wonder about Hamilton? The view would be much more spectacular if we could remove the sediments. Then you would see something! We did a lot of geophysics out in the lake, where you can get an idea of the depths of the swamps.
Why do we even care about Hamilton? First off, the scenery is nice. Second, all those swamps are formed by an active fault, somewhat like sag ponds, but over a much longer time. They are doing a lot of building in those ponds, and I think it is somewhat dangerous.
The next big earthquake in that area will be a high-speed thrust, much like some of the more destructive earthquakes that hit Japan recently. The damage intensity will have a very narrow zone with a high Peak Ground Velocity (PGV). The deep swamps will amplify this ground motion 10 to 100 times. The damage will be incredible! This earthquake will blow out the electricity and natural gas for most of Southern Ontario.
Yet, we merrily go on, ignoring this threat, not doing the slightest little thing to mitigate the disaster. Such is the power of living memory! We remember Hurricane Hazel, because it happened, yet this earthquake has the same general odds of happening. Just hope your house is on solid ground!
Friday, September 7, 2007
Geology of Bruce, Ontario
Since the cash has started to fly, I would open up the session by telling what I know about the site. I won't cite references because there aren't any! This is the most unstudied area I know. All information is safely hidden in-house.
I first became aware of the site, when I first joined the big company, 28 years ago. At the time, they were building a water intake tunnel, which was so leaky you had to wear a heavy raincoat to go into it. I was terrified, and never took up the opportunity to visit. To dig that tunnel, they had to use trainloads of grout, and they still ran into a huge cavern. Now there's a dog-leg in the tunnel, in order to go around it.
At the time I was taking stress measurements all over Ontario, and I always found high stresses and solid, tight rock. I could not believe there could be such an area where the rock was so bad, so I made a study of it. I wrote some of the results in Paleocollapse.
As such, I formed a hypothesis, which was testable:
Hypothesis One: The paleocollapse was caused by the dissolution of the deep salt beds under the limestones. There should be standard, solid limestone under the former salt beds.
Over 28 years, I learned a lot, so now there is this:
Hypothesis Two: The salt beds and carbonates were laid on the soft hanging wall of the Grenville Front (megathrust). This eventually resulted in extensive fracturing, and the dissolution of the salts.
Both hypotheses can be tested by drilling a deep hole, which is now being done in-house. I just worry that all the results will be spun towards #1. They have to proceed, no matter what, because they have left no alternative. They hearings will conclude that they should proceed, on the proviso that if they find something politcally unacceptable, they will stop. No scientific criteria will be set.
For interest, look at the Google picture. All of the paleocollapse is below a cliff that runs NE, parallel to the Grenville Front. The area NE of the plant shows the sinkholes, and is exactly like an air photo I once saw that was done before the plant was built.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Deep Geology Thingie dishes out the cash
This article is what I've been waiting for! 100 thousand loonies have been handed out to people, to make the OJ-hearings a bit more exciting. I hope they do a good job!
As we all know, the Deep Geology Waste Respository (DGR, whatever!) is a big plan to spend all that money which has been building up, from the nuclear plants (a percentage is set aside for the garbage). This is generally a good thing, and I'm all for nuclear power, but technocrats are in charge of this money.
These people actually hate to be open, and face the public, so they'll have their lawyers do everything. The people getting the money will have more lawyers. The lawyers will get fancy sports cars. All the money, for and against, will go into the Bruce area, so they'll get new cars, as well.
Will there be any open, and worthwhile science? You can figure this out for yourselves!
As we all know, the Deep Geology Waste Respository (DGR, whatever!) is a big plan to spend all that money which has been building up, from the nuclear plants (a percentage is set aside for the garbage). This is generally a good thing, and I'm all for nuclear power, but technocrats are in charge of this money.
These people actually hate to be open, and face the public, so they'll have their lawyers do everything. The people getting the money will have more lawyers. The lawyers will get fancy sports cars. All the money, for and against, will go into the Bruce area, so they'll get new cars, as well.
Will there be any open, and worthwhile science? You can figure this out for yourselves!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Fault mechanisms boring story - II
If you recall, I left you asleep at the point of wonder why we have earthquakes at all in Eastern North America (ENA). Really, if the continent is one big massive piece of tombstone granite, then any stress-relieving earthquake should just carve a 'stress-hole' like boring a mine.
Once this giant Tim Hortons donut gets formed, the remaining rock arches around it, and leaves a perfectly stable structure, with an extinct fault in the middle. This doesn't happen on the plate margins, with all those plates sliding past each other, like those sliding number puzzles we had as kids. For the equivalent, we would need mountain ranges or visible fault sliding to keep the similar ENA earthquake hotspots going for a few million years.
Take a typical fault zone trying to grow up in ENA. It starts with a fractured weak spot, perhaps reactivated by the modern stress field. Eventually (perhaps), the shear stress builds up along a fracture, and the bath-tub feet let go! The fractured rock behaves exactly the same as in California or Peru.
But that's it! Our poor little earthquake has shot its load. The feet have lost their stress, and the surrounding rock has clamped up on our poor little fellow. He can't grow up...
That is, if our earthquake follows conventional thinking for ENA earthquakes. But no, our earthquake fault zone is smarter than that, it is following Harold's original thinking, which doesn't get into the university cartel, because they all got tenure!
Once our earthquake has caused its bump (like a Utah coalmine!), it looks around and sees what it has done, which is to freshly fracture a lot more rock. Its seismic effort hasn't gone into mountain building, or plate sliding, it's gone into fracture surface energy! The academics never thought of that!
But this isn't enough for Quakey (like that name?), in its battle against the implacable rock. Luckily, he's (she's?) under a big hunk of water, and water slowly flows into the new fractures. Now things are cooking! The water does all sorts of wonderful things. First, the water pressure reduces the normal stress on the faults and makes them more likely to slide again. Second, the water hydrofractures and extends existing tension cracks. Finally, the fresh water is corrosive and starts chewing at the adhesion points.
Quakey has become a growing entity, like the Blob that ate New York. So, under Hamilton, New Madrid, countless other ENA locations, we have growing things, which although not actually alive, can give a darn good account of themselves!
As Quakey grows, he can tap into more stress from the surrounding rock, just like we were excavating a new Utah coal mine (or an underground nuclear waste thingie!). He gives many signs of his growth, lots of little earthquakes, just like his bigger plate margin brothers. All the bathtub feet are working, and eventually there is a large, scale-limited earthquake. The process begins again for a bigger earthquake!
Quakey may start as a simple thrust fault along a pre-existing fracture, but soon suffers growing pains. The old fracture provides the water, but a simple thrust fault isn't enough to suck out all the stress from the surround rock. In order to avoid another stress lockup, he must start developing shear wings, which produce strike-slip earthquakes. When he eventually grows into a monster, he resembles the New Madrid fault system.
All the time, these zones are sending the signals to prove Harold is right, and the others are wrong, but the scientists and politicians are too cheap to provide the detailed seismic monitoring that is required. Only the Southern Ontario Seismic Network probably has sufficient horsepower and density, but the Hamilton zone is just a baby!
Everyday, these zones try to show themselves. They send typical 'fluid injection' earthquakes, they mix thrust and strike-slip mechanisms, and they only show up under bodies of water. But without monitoring, the world goes on arguing with Harold....
Once this giant Tim Hortons donut gets formed, the remaining rock arches around it, and leaves a perfectly stable structure, with an extinct fault in the middle. This doesn't happen on the plate margins, with all those plates sliding past each other, like those sliding number puzzles we had as kids. For the equivalent, we would need mountain ranges or visible fault sliding to keep the similar ENA earthquake hotspots going for a few million years.
Take a typical fault zone trying to grow up in ENA. It starts with a fractured weak spot, perhaps reactivated by the modern stress field. Eventually (perhaps), the shear stress builds up along a fracture, and the bath-tub feet let go! The fractured rock behaves exactly the same as in California or Peru.
But that's it! Our poor little earthquake has shot its load. The feet have lost their stress, and the surrounding rock has clamped up on our poor little fellow. He can't grow up...
That is, if our earthquake follows conventional thinking for ENA earthquakes. But no, our earthquake fault zone is smarter than that, it is following Harold's original thinking, which doesn't get into the university cartel, because they all got tenure!
Once our earthquake has caused its bump (like a Utah coalmine!), it looks around and sees what it has done, which is to freshly fracture a lot more rock. Its seismic effort hasn't gone into mountain building, or plate sliding, it's gone into fracture surface energy! The academics never thought of that!
But this isn't enough for Quakey (like that name?), in its battle against the implacable rock. Luckily, he's (she's?) under a big hunk of water, and water slowly flows into the new fractures. Now things are cooking! The water does all sorts of wonderful things. First, the water pressure reduces the normal stress on the faults and makes them more likely to slide again. Second, the water hydrofractures and extends existing tension cracks. Finally, the fresh water is corrosive and starts chewing at the adhesion points.
Quakey has become a growing entity, like the Blob that ate New York. So, under Hamilton, New Madrid, countless other ENA locations, we have growing things, which although not actually alive, can give a darn good account of themselves!
As Quakey grows, he can tap into more stress from the surrounding rock, just like we were excavating a new Utah coal mine (or an underground nuclear waste thingie!). He gives many signs of his growth, lots of little earthquakes, just like his bigger plate margin brothers. All the bathtub feet are working, and eventually there is a large, scale-limited earthquake. The process begins again for a bigger earthquake!
Quakey may start as a simple thrust fault along a pre-existing fracture, but soon suffers growing pains. The old fracture provides the water, but a simple thrust fault isn't enough to suck out all the stress from the surround rock. In order to avoid another stress lockup, he must start developing shear wings, which produce strike-slip earthquakes. When he eventually grows into a monster, he resembles the New Madrid fault system.
All the time, these zones are sending the signals to prove Harold is right, and the others are wrong, but the scientists and politicians are too cheap to provide the detailed seismic monitoring that is required. Only the Southern Ontario Seismic Network probably has sufficient horsepower and density, but the Hamilton zone is just a baby!
Everyday, these zones try to show themselves. They send typical 'fluid injection' earthquakes, they mix thrust and strike-slip mechanisms, and they only show up under bodies of water. But without monitoring, the world goes on arguing with Harold....
Thursday, August 16, 2007
My fault: boring story part 2
Earthquakes remain boring to us, who live in a fool's paradise. Those, who have recently been whacked, have other worries.
We saw how the crystal grains are little feet on the bathtub, but how does this work up to Peruvian scale? Think of a giant pile of sand, housed in one of those roadside giant boob-huts (is this just an Ontario inside joke?). You are hanging on the rafters, watching a stream of sand fall on the pile. As you watch, you see a pattern of little slides and shifts, and sometimes a bigger slide. The sand is at its angle of repose.
Now, you lower yourself upside down, using your spidey web, with the sand stream reducing as you get closer. As you focus your spidey-vision on the sand, you still see the same pattern of many little slides, and larger ones. In fact, by just looking at the pattern, you can't tell how far away you are, from the sand.
You get closer and closer to the sand. At this time, you switch on the incredible shrinking ray, so you get tinier. Still, the pattern remains the same. Finally, when the sand grains start to look like giant boulders, the pattern breaks, but each boulder is following some simple laws of physics.
In fact, we like to model little blocks because it's fun! And it has some lessons for us, mainly that a tiny movement in one place can trigger a larger movement quite far away.
But back to the pile of sand. We see that the pattern of sand failures is self-similar on all scales, but with a big BUT! That is, the self-similarity only holds between two size scales: that of the whole sand pile, and the size of the individual sand grain.
The concept of two limiting scales really screws up a lot of earthquake people, but I suppose they'll figure it out one day. :) We aren't too sure what the largest scale is (somewhere around a few thousand km), but we do know it varies for each earthquake mechanism. What I find amazing is how small the scale can get. We find that rock bursts in mines behave almost exactly the same as earthquakes, and that rock in a testing machine also shows classical earthquake behaviour to the grain scale. So, I'm fairly confident to state that power law (self similarity) holds from the micro to the mega earthquakes.
So if the entire side of Peru is one big foot in the bathtub, it is composed of smaller feet, which are in turn compose of even smaller feet, down to the tiniest grain. At various times, each foot slips on the bathtub. If you are carefully monitoring the feet with seismometers, you see lots of little slips setting up for a bigger foot. In fact, very roughly, you need about 10 little feet to completely slip, for a foot ten times bigger.
After millions of slips, the biggest one decides to go. It is your biggest foot that does most of the damage, and uplifts the mountains. Those little guys are just a necessary side-show. Is the M8 earthquake in Peru the biggest foot? Most likely not, since that area is know for M9's.
In Ontario, what is our biggest foot? It's probably the dimension of the Hamilton Fault zone, which might be around M6.5. When will that foot drop? The next boring story will concentrate on the need for a continuous operating mechanism to keep the feet slipping.
We saw how the crystal grains are little feet on the bathtub, but how does this work up to Peruvian scale? Think of a giant pile of sand, housed in one of those roadside giant boob-huts (is this just an Ontario inside joke?). You are hanging on the rafters, watching a stream of sand fall on the pile. As you watch, you see a pattern of little slides and shifts, and sometimes a bigger slide. The sand is at its angle of repose.
Now, you lower yourself upside down, using your spidey web, with the sand stream reducing as you get closer. As you focus your spidey-vision on the sand, you still see the same pattern of many little slides, and larger ones. In fact, by just looking at the pattern, you can't tell how far away you are, from the sand.
You get closer and closer to the sand. At this time, you switch on the incredible shrinking ray, so you get tinier. Still, the pattern remains the same. Finally, when the sand grains start to look like giant boulders, the pattern breaks, but each boulder is following some simple laws of physics.
In fact, we like to model little blocks because it's fun! And it has some lessons for us, mainly that a tiny movement in one place can trigger a larger movement quite far away.
But back to the pile of sand. We see that the pattern of sand failures is self-similar on all scales, but with a big BUT! That is, the self-similarity only holds between two size scales: that of the whole sand pile, and the size of the individual sand grain.
The concept of two limiting scales really screws up a lot of earthquake people, but I suppose they'll figure it out one day. :) We aren't too sure what the largest scale is (somewhere around a few thousand km), but we do know it varies for each earthquake mechanism. What I find amazing is how small the scale can get. We find that rock bursts in mines behave almost exactly the same as earthquakes, and that rock in a testing machine also shows classical earthquake behaviour to the grain scale. So, I'm fairly confident to state that power law (self similarity) holds from the micro to the mega earthquakes.
So if the entire side of Peru is one big foot in the bathtub, it is composed of smaller feet, which are in turn compose of even smaller feet, down to the tiniest grain. At various times, each foot slips on the bathtub. If you are carefully monitoring the feet with seismometers, you see lots of little slips setting up for a bigger foot. In fact, very roughly, you need about 10 little feet to completely slip, for a foot ten times bigger.
After millions of slips, the biggest one decides to go. It is your biggest foot that does most of the damage, and uplifts the mountains. Those little guys are just a necessary side-show. Is the M8 earthquake in Peru the biggest foot? Most likely not, since that area is know for M9's.
In Ontario, what is our biggest foot? It's probably the dimension of the Hamilton Fault zone, which might be around M6.5. When will that foot drop? The next boring story will concentrate on the need for a continuous operating mechanism to keep the feet slipping.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Fault rupture boring story
It's fun on the dock, fishing. All my intellectual energy is totally drained from me, especially if I'm cut off from civilization for a long time. I'm back for a couple of days, and thought it's time for another boring story. This one is about fault mechanics, which I think is the most misunderstood subject of all time (it helps to have a rock mechanics background!).
The whole reason we have earthquakes is because of a simple little physical phenomenon that we observe when we have a shower in a cheap hotel, while forgetting to put in the rubber bathmat.
One minute our feet are firmly on the tub, stuck like glue. The next second, we do one little thing, and swoosh! If we are lucky, the clingy plastic shower curtain has saved us.
This is the most dramatic demonstration that I know, showing the difference between static and dynamic friction. I've done some more details in Fault Friction.
Wet, fractured rock behaves almost the same throughout the world, and this is the stuff of earthquakes! Without a difference, in wet rock, between static and dynamic friction, we would be without most earthquakes (those extremely deep earthquakes are a bizarre exception, but who cares about them?)
So all earthquakes start with a single crystal (grain) of rock (mineral), rubbing against another. There is shear stress, which is a force trying to slide the grains past each other, and there is the normal stress, which is the force jamming them together. At the very tiny point of contact, the minerals (quartz, most likely), are cold-welded, making a very strong adhesion bond.
The shear stress attempts to break these bonds, by inducing tiny molecular earthquakes. Studies show that if we bake these things so that there is no water, then new bonds are formed as quickly as old ones are broken. Thus, the resistance to slipping remains a constant value.
Thus, good old water is need for some action! If we sprinkle in some water, then two very interesting things happen. Firstly, we do not have stability at the near-failure point, because the water acts to eat away at the adhesion points. This little thing, called stress corrosion, is one of the best, totally unappreciated discoveries from the giant money-sucking pit, called the AECL Underground Research Laboratory (URL) (RIP). (Thanktheloard for massive gov't pork!)
Secondly, once the adhesion bonds start to break, they are covered in little water molecules, just like the other potential contact points. When a new adhesion contact wants to form, there's that nasty water gunking things up!
So now it takes some time to form some new bonds, time that the slippery feet (or mineral grains) don't have if there is a big following force (like gravity, or the San Andreas!). The sliding surface starts to zoom, and we have dynamic friction.
As you fall asleep, you may wonder what bathtub feet, and mineral grains have to do with a big old fault. The answer lies in self-similarity and Power Law. Much like a ratty old US bridge, everything can be represented as tiny little feet slipping, over and over again, combining into larger and larger feet, until the whole shebang blows! But those details are in the next boring story!
The whole reason we have earthquakes is because of a simple little physical phenomenon that we observe when we have a shower in a cheap hotel, while forgetting to put in the rubber bathmat.
One minute our feet are firmly on the tub, stuck like glue. The next second, we do one little thing, and swoosh! If we are lucky, the clingy plastic shower curtain has saved us.
This is the most dramatic demonstration that I know, showing the difference between static and dynamic friction. I've done some more details in Fault Friction.
Wet, fractured rock behaves almost the same throughout the world, and this is the stuff of earthquakes! Without a difference, in wet rock, between static and dynamic friction, we would be without most earthquakes (those extremely deep earthquakes are a bizarre exception, but who cares about them?)
So all earthquakes start with a single crystal (grain) of rock (mineral), rubbing against another. There is shear stress, which is a force trying to slide the grains past each other, and there is the normal stress, which is the force jamming them together. At the very tiny point of contact, the minerals (quartz, most likely), are cold-welded, making a very strong adhesion bond.
The shear stress attempts to break these bonds, by inducing tiny molecular earthquakes. Studies show that if we bake these things so that there is no water, then new bonds are formed as quickly as old ones are broken. Thus, the resistance to slipping remains a constant value.
Thus, good old water is need for some action! If we sprinkle in some water, then two very interesting things happen. Firstly, we do not have stability at the near-failure point, because the water acts to eat away at the adhesion points. This little thing, called stress corrosion, is one of the best, totally unappreciated discoveries from the giant money-sucking pit, called the AECL Underground Research Laboratory (URL) (RIP). (Thanktheloard for massive gov't pork!)
Secondly, once the adhesion bonds start to break, they are covered in little water molecules, just like the other potential contact points. When a new adhesion contact wants to form, there's that nasty water gunking things up!
So now it takes some time to form some new bonds, time that the slippery feet (or mineral grains) don't have if there is a big following force (like gravity, or the San Andreas!). The sliding surface starts to zoom, and we have dynamic friction.
As you fall asleep, you may wonder what bathtub feet, and mineral grains have to do with a big old fault. The answer lies in self-similarity and Power Law. Much like a ratty old US bridge, everything can be represented as tiny little feet slipping, over and over again, combining into larger and larger feet, until the whole shebang blows! But those details are in the next boring story!
Monday, July 9, 2007
Megathrust Fault Basement Geology of Ontario
In case anybody was asking, I had a great weekend fishing. I caught some large bass on a very tiny hook, and they spit it out when I raised them. For those serious about fishing, never raise the fish out of the water, always slip a net underneath.
I was asked to clarify my geology ramblings over the last few posts. I hesitate to do this because of the implications, but what the hey! I express this in the form of a Wikipedia article, but I could never submit this, since it contains original thought (a big no-no!), and references which cannot be easily verified (behind the paywall). If this had been a real Wiki article, I would have extensively wikified it with links.
The megathrust fault geology of Ontario
There are two types of megathrusts in this world: a downward megathrust such as the big subduction zone near Vancouver, and an upward megathrust that is involved in mountain building.
Before 1.1 billion years ago, most of southern Ontario did not exist. It was a big deep ocean, with a bottom of cold oceanic crust. At that time, the cold oceanic crust began to sink, and the ocean started to converge, creating many subduction zones. Much like modern-day Japan, these subduction zones created volcanic island arcs, but still the ocean converged, and continents were starting to collide, much like Indian and Asia.
The first island arc complex collided with the cold core of North America (Archean). Huge megathrusts formed, creating a linear mountain range, as seen in the Rockies today. The heat and pressure, melded the rock together into a solid mass (metamorphism), and there was sufficient time before the next island arc collided, creating weak 'cold joints' between each episode.
These cold-joint megathrusts are clearly visible in deep seismic reflection data. The leading one is the Grenville Front (GF) fault, the middle one is the Central Metasedimentary (CM) fault, and the third is the Elzevir (EL) fault.
Note the perfect parallelism, as with most mountain ranges. Soon the oceanic convergence stopped, and the mountain ranges cooled down, eroded, and sunk. There may have been some backsliding collapse, which further weakened the main megathrusts. The basement rock was almost ground flat, but there remained very significant topography (Grand Canyon scale), at the megathrusts.
Eventually, the basement rock cooled so much that it went below sea level. Shallow seas made extensive deposits, as the basement deflated. The sediments made flat layers for the most part, except over the megathrusts, where they had some difficulty. The continued sedimentation solidified the rock, but the rock over the weak megathrusts continued to fracture and slide, forming faults.
At some point in the past, we Ontario residents were lucky that the deep Moho once again heated up, lifting Ontario into the position we now enjoy. This probably happened during the last mass convergence of the continents, just before the Atlantic separation. This uplift once again disturbed the megathrusts, and weakened the Paleozoic rock above.
Of course, we cannot forget the last few million years of ice sheets, and damage they did to the already fractured rock. The basement rock sunk under the ice load, and is still uplifting in parts, but the general trend is for the rock to be sinking again over the last 50 million years.
Now, each one of these megathrusts has the following generic cross-section:
This can be seen on the available seismic sections, except for the GF fault, which only barely appears on the Lake Erie lines.
The first map shows the maximum disturbance zones, which can be easily traced by long linears in shorelines, and rock topography. Along these lines lie most of our earthquake zones, oil and gas zones, and zones of smashed Palezoic rock. In between these lines are the the zones of solid rock, and high horizontal stresses.
These fault zones have severe implications on the seismic hazard of nuclear facilities located on them, as well as deep geological waste repositories. More effort should be undertaken to properly map these megathrusts, mainly by processing the available seismic data in Lake Huron.
I was asked to clarify my geology ramblings over the last few posts. I hesitate to do this because of the implications, but what the hey! I express this in the form of a Wikipedia article, but I could never submit this, since it contains original thought (a big no-no!), and references which cannot be easily verified (behind the paywall). If this had been a real Wiki article, I would have extensively wikified it with links.
The megathrust fault geology of Ontario
There are two types of megathrusts in this world: a downward megathrust such as the big subduction zone near Vancouver, and an upward megathrust that is involved in mountain building.
Before 1.1 billion years ago, most of southern Ontario did not exist. It was a big deep ocean, with a bottom of cold oceanic crust. At that time, the cold oceanic crust began to sink, and the ocean started to converge, creating many subduction zones. Much like modern-day Japan, these subduction zones created volcanic island arcs, but still the ocean converged, and continents were starting to collide, much like Indian and Asia.
The first island arc complex collided with the cold core of North America (Archean). Huge megathrusts formed, creating a linear mountain range, as seen in the Rockies today. The heat and pressure, melded the rock together into a solid mass (metamorphism), and there was sufficient time before the next island arc collided, creating weak 'cold joints' between each episode.
These cold-joint megathrusts are clearly visible in deep seismic reflection data. The leading one is the Grenville Front (GF) fault, the middle one is the Central Metasedimentary (CM) fault, and the third is the Elzevir (EL) fault.
Note the perfect parallelism, as with most mountain ranges. Soon the oceanic convergence stopped, and the mountain ranges cooled down, eroded, and sunk. There may have been some backsliding collapse, which further weakened the main megathrusts. The basement rock was almost ground flat, but there remained very significant topography (Grand Canyon scale), at the megathrusts.Eventually, the basement rock cooled so much that it went below sea level. Shallow seas made extensive deposits, as the basement deflated. The sediments made flat layers for the most part, except over the megathrusts, where they had some difficulty. The continued sedimentation solidified the rock, but the rock over the weak megathrusts continued to fracture and slide, forming faults.
At some point in the past, we Ontario residents were lucky that the deep Moho once again heated up, lifting Ontario into the position we now enjoy. This probably happened during the last mass convergence of the continents, just before the Atlantic separation. This uplift once again disturbed the megathrusts, and weakened the Paleozoic rock above.
Of course, we cannot forget the last few million years of ice sheets, and damage they did to the already fractured rock. The basement rock sunk under the ice load, and is still uplifting in parts, but the general trend is for the rock to be sinking again over the last 50 million years.
Now, each one of these megathrusts has the following generic cross-section:
This can be seen on the available seismic sections, except for the GF fault, which only barely appears on the Lake Erie lines.The first map shows the maximum disturbance zones, which can be easily traced by long linears in shorelines, and rock topography. Along these lines lie most of our earthquake zones, oil and gas zones, and zones of smashed Palezoic rock. In between these lines are the the zones of solid rock, and high horizontal stresses.
These fault zones have severe implications on the seismic hazard of nuclear facilities located on them, as well as deep geological waste repositories. More effort should be undertaken to properly map these megathrusts, mainly by processing the available seismic data in Lake Huron.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Story of El
I am really, really getting fish-deprived. I've got to update my fishing licence and actually catch something! I just had my formal-formal last day at the office, handed in my Blackberry, and all my badges. Since I am hereditary-depressive, I've got to watch these things and down some calmy-pills. That's why I won't get really involved in the mud-fest of the DGT (even though there's lots of money!). That's depressing!!
Today we have a nice fishing story of the youngest of the 3 sisters of Ontario, the beautiful El. Like all her sisters, she started life as a fiery island arc, blasting away the primitive life, as well as giving vital nutrients. She was born in the proto-proto-Atlantic, but one day she woke up to see the looming ugly old continent before her.
Just like a Toronto street racer and a concrete divider, she smashed up against the continent, and her life as a fun-loving island arc was over. Her weak remains were squeezed like toothpaste up into a giant mountain range. As with all things, she was ground down by time, covered by the poop of marine creatures, and fell out of all living memory.
That is, until the intrepid bargain-basement seismic squad found proof of her existence under Lake Ontario. The paper is "Deep structure beneath Lake Ontario: crustal scale Grenville subdivision", and I don't know where the heck this one is hiding behind the paywall.
There's El, called the ugly name of EFBZ in this figure. Naturally, El is much prettier in cross-section.
Note the beautiful straight lines of her footwall, and the sensuous curves of her hanging wall! Even all mooshed up, El is a thing of beauty!
Now the sad thing about El is that she never gets any credit. She mucks up the Paleozoic and caused earthquakes, just like her middle sister CM, but the limestone people say its all them! Down in the States, they blame big earthquakes on the Clarendon-Linden fault system, which is all kettle-scum!
Poor El. Here is a seismic section showing what merry havoc she is wreaking on the flat-lying billiard tables.
Yes folks, the story of El is a tragedy...
Today we have a nice fishing story of the youngest of the 3 sisters of Ontario, the beautiful El. Like all her sisters, she started life as a fiery island arc, blasting away the primitive life, as well as giving vital nutrients. She was born in the proto-proto-Atlantic, but one day she woke up to see the looming ugly old continent before her.
Just like a Toronto street racer and a concrete divider, she smashed up against the continent, and her life as a fun-loving island arc was over. Her weak remains were squeezed like toothpaste up into a giant mountain range. As with all things, she was ground down by time, covered by the poop of marine creatures, and fell out of all living memory.
That is, until the intrepid bargain-basement seismic squad found proof of her existence under Lake Ontario. The paper is "Deep structure beneath Lake Ontario: crustal scale Grenville subdivision", and I don't know where the heck this one is hiding behind the paywall.
There's El, called the ugly name of EFBZ in this figure. Naturally, El is much prettier in cross-section.
Note the beautiful straight lines of her footwall, and the sensuous curves of her hanging wall! Even all mooshed up, El is a thing of beauty!Now the sad thing about El is that she never gets any credit. She mucks up the Paleozoic and caused earthquakes, just like her middle sister CM, but the limestone people say its all them! Down in the States, they blame big earthquakes on the Clarendon-Linden fault system, which is all kettle-scum!
Poor El. Here is a seismic section showing what merry havoc she is wreaking on the flat-lying billiard tables.
Yes folks, the story of El is a tragedy...
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Catching a Whopper
As mentioned earlier in Seismic Fishing, we found the grand-daddy of all data fishing holes, in the tape vaults of Texas. Besides nailing down the deep crustal structure of Ontario, we found the biggest fish of all: a giant Precambrian clastic basin right under Lake Erie! 
This is the index map of the paper. We are only considering the little piece in the box, although there is a ton more data around the rest of the lakes. Note the tentative location of the other two sisters. The Grenville front is waaaay out in Lake Huron which will make the DGT panel happy. Sister #1 (Elzevir) conveniently stops at the limestones, but this paper shows that Sister #2 has a merry old time crashing right through!
Here's the seismic section.
The section shows what a mess it makes of the Paleozoic. The box marked II is the basin, which is quite large! At least the oil companies knew it was a drilling target, they don't make the 'pancake' assumption. The paper goes on to recontruct how this could happen, mainly by having a giant mountain ranges, which then collapses under its own weight.
And that's all she wrote...
Lake Erie was always a weird lake for us. It's very shallow, and during a cold winter (which we don't get anymore!), it can freeze right over. Once, we wanted to put in a giant underwater power cable to the States. We eventually found out that the winter ice smashes together like plate-tectonic subduction and forms giant pressure ridges, which can gouge huge trenches in the lake mud. That would mean the cable would have to be deeply buried (too expensive!), even though all those natural gas well-heads also keep getting ripped out (but nobody talks about that!). As well, the cables would have to be DC, and we couldn't find conductive earth for a grounding mat in case of a cable break. Without good grounding, a DC cable fault would turn every cow in the region into instant hamburger!
Enough old-man digression! It is generally assumed by the Paleozoic people (including oil and gas types), that the Precambrian granites (metamorphics), are flat-lying, featureless, and solid (like a rock!). The basement rock forms a solid plate for the pancake sedimentary layers, and has nothing to do with the location of oil, gas, and earthquakes. Our discovery shocked them, and they rushed to drill at the new targets.
The paper for today is "Seismic images of a tectonic subdivision of the Grenville Orogen beneath Lakes Ontario and Erie". Available behind the paywall.
This is the index map of the paper. We are only considering the little piece in the box, although there is a ton more data around the rest of the lakes. Note the tentative location of the other two sisters. The Grenville front is waaaay out in Lake Huron which will make the DGT panel happy. Sister #1 (Elzevir) conveniently stops at the limestones, but this paper shows that Sister #2 has a merry old time crashing right through!Here's the seismic section.
The section shows what a mess it makes of the Paleozoic. The box marked II is the basin, which is quite large! At least the oil companies knew it was a drilling target, they don't make the 'pancake' assumption. The paper goes on to recontruct how this could happen, mainly by having a giant mountain ranges, which then collapses under its own weight.And that's all she wrote...
Friday, June 29, 2007
Seismic Fishing
Throughout my long scientific career (now ended!), nothing got me more excited than pulling up a big 'fish' of new data. I've always regarded science as fishing on the edge of great ocean, and once in a while, pulling out something interesting (didn't somebody else think of that first?).
My very best fishing story was around the 80-90 decade boundary. We were looking for new nuclear sites, and this time, we actually had some money! (unlike the cheapies today!). We had heard rumours of 'sunken treasure', old seismic data, and we were looking for it. (This story has lots of credits to people who are smarter than me, yada, yada).
It turns out that at one time, the Michigan Basin was a really hot place to explore for oil. This attracted the 'spec data' seismic boats, who are the true high-rollers of the sea. They gather data on spec, and sell it to the highest bidder. The big boats came in up the St. Lawrence Seaway, and went out the same way. On the way out, they decided to trail their kilometers of equipment and 'shoot' Lakes Erie and Ontario.
This was in 1971, and 1985. The 1971 survey was done with Marine Vibroseis, which I still don't know how exactly it works, but these records went deep, right to the Moho! The 1985 survey was shot with conventional big airguns, which scare the fishies to death, and is very controversial now.
Well, these crazy guys just processed the first couple of seconds, and saw to their horror, there was just a thin crust of 'good' layered sedimentary rock, on top of a horrible swirly mess of granites. These sections got out into the wild, and were declared worthless by other scientists. The poor guys sent them down to their cavernous storage libraries.
Then we came along with our pockets jingling with coins. One of our experts noted that the data continued beyond their cut-off point, and might be good. We went down to Austin, Texas and looked at the tapes. It was amazing that they had saved everything, and it was all still readable! To cut this ramble short, they fell over themselves giving us a real cheap deal to process the data (in the hope they could sell the details!), mainly because we only required 'relative data', not accurate enough to actually sink an oil well.
Those gorgeous records showed magnificent structure right down to the Moho! Many papers were written, and we got an excellent view of the deep crustal structure under Ontario. Most of my subsequent endeavours (and windmill charges!) were guided by this. As expected, the 'pancake rock' (sedimentary) guys continue to ignore this.
Another day, and I'll dig up some of the sections.
My very best fishing story was around the 80-90 decade boundary. We were looking for new nuclear sites, and this time, we actually had some money! (unlike the cheapies today!). We had heard rumours of 'sunken treasure', old seismic data, and we were looking for it. (This story has lots of credits to people who are smarter than me, yada, yada).
It turns out that at one time, the Michigan Basin was a really hot place to explore for oil. This attracted the 'spec data' seismic boats, who are the true high-rollers of the sea. They gather data on spec, and sell it to the highest bidder. The big boats came in up the St. Lawrence Seaway, and went out the same way. On the way out, they decided to trail their kilometers of equipment and 'shoot' Lakes Erie and Ontario.
This was in 1971, and 1985. The 1971 survey was done with Marine Vibroseis, which I still don't know how exactly it works, but these records went deep, right to the Moho! The 1985 survey was shot with conventional big airguns, which scare the fishies to death, and is very controversial now.
Well, these crazy guys just processed the first couple of seconds, and saw to their horror, there was just a thin crust of 'good' layered sedimentary rock, on top of a horrible swirly mess of granites. These sections got out into the wild, and were declared worthless by other scientists. The poor guys sent them down to their cavernous storage libraries.
Then we came along with our pockets jingling with coins. One of our experts noted that the data continued beyond their cut-off point, and might be good. We went down to Austin, Texas and looked at the tapes. It was amazing that they had saved everything, and it was all still readable! To cut this ramble short, they fell over themselves giving us a real cheap deal to process the data (in the hope they could sell the details!), mainly because we only required 'relative data', not accurate enough to actually sink an oil well.
Those gorgeous records showed magnificent structure right down to the Moho! Many papers were written, and we got an excellent view of the deep crustal structure under Ontario. Most of my subsequent endeavours (and windmill charges!) were guided by this. As expected, the 'pancake rock' (sedimentary) guys continue to ignore this.
Another day, and I'll dig up some of the sections.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Swamp Gas
With all my canoe tripping, the thing I like most doing is gliding through a swamp. There's something about these fantastic carbon sinks that goes back into ancient geology. You dip the paddle, and glorious methane bubbles up. The biggest fish are also in the swamp, the really large largemouth squeeze into impossibly shallow water, just to get a chance at those millions of frogs!
When I first entered the workforce, I got hold of this almost magical (like Harry Potter!) map. It was an old topo sheet, but it showed the old gas seeps, and farmer wells in the area. You know that there were no big companies drilling here. Most likely, farmers noticed the killed vegetation, and the bubbles, and sunk in a pipe to light the farm. I scanned part of the map here.
You can see (Click on it!) all the gas wells around Binbrook, the heart of darkness (for major seismicity) in this area. When gas bubbles up, it means that fluids are moving deep in the earth, and this is significant for earthquakes. You don't see this gas towards Niagara Falls. In fact, we blasted two huge tunnels (and another on the way!) without encountering any gas. In the lake, the geophysics shows plenty of gas 'pockmarks' where the gas has blasted the soft 'loonshit'. No gas in Toronto, where this megafault hanging wall runs through the city, mainly because the sediments get thin, and not too much in the way of gas-generating oily shale. We did encounter some gas in a borehole at the old Lakeview generating station, and it nearly blew somebody's head off when he snapped off the cap!
The presence or absence of gas and oil is an indication of the general openness of the rock (permeability). You're not getting any gas through my magnificent rock up on the north shore of the lake! Another story will tell my musings on the causes and how deep fluid flow is the ultimate driving force, projecting a fairly significant earthquake threat (seismic hazard ) to the whole Golden Horseshoe.
When I first entered the workforce, I got hold of this almost magical (like Harry Potter!) map. It was an old topo sheet, but it showed the old gas seeps, and farmer wells in the area. You know that there were no big companies drilling here. Most likely, farmers noticed the killed vegetation, and the bubbles, and sunk in a pipe to light the farm. I scanned part of the map here.
You can see (Click on it!) all the gas wells around Binbrook, the heart of darkness (for major seismicity) in this area. When gas bubbles up, it means that fluids are moving deep in the earth, and this is significant for earthquakes. You don't see this gas towards Niagara Falls. In fact, we blasted two huge tunnels (and another on the way!) without encountering any gas. In the lake, the geophysics shows plenty of gas 'pockmarks' where the gas has blasted the soft 'loonshit'. No gas in Toronto, where this megafault hanging wall runs through the city, mainly because the sediments get thin, and not too much in the way of gas-generating oily shale. We did encounter some gas in a borehole at the old Lakeview generating station, and it nearly blew somebody's head off when he snapped off the cap!The presence or absence of gas and oil is an indication of the general openness of the rock (permeability). You're not getting any gas through my magnificent rock up on the north shore of the lake! Another story will tell my musings on the causes and how deep fluid flow is the ultimate driving force, projecting a fairly significant earthquake threat (seismic hazard ) to the whole Golden Horseshoe.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
La Rouge - Part Deux
This weekend marked the start of the Bass Season. For all the spring, the mother fishies have attended their nests. At the marina, we could see a stationary double whirlpool, as some very large bass, deep below, was fanning her eggs. I celebrated by actually buying worms, but we only caught nasty little rock bass. When I catch a largemouth, I let it go, and it never goes after my hook again. I only catch the visiting tourists!
Back to my story. Here I was, convinced that as long as I had nice tight, highly stressed rock, I wouldn't have any big old faults for many miles. But Rouge Valley was a puzzle. The only hope I had was that tons of 'glacial shove' features had been mapped there before, but we couldn't dismiss this big sucker. Here it is (I think):
Fortunately, people were taking this seriously and I had some money at my disposal. I configured this a big scientific endeavour where everything would be published (behind the paywall!). We had geologists map the whole valley. Nearly all features were classic ice shove, except one. We mapped that feature, and got the strike and dip. As you can see, the cliff side of the river is inaccessible, but the fault could be traced over the river to the nice flat side.
There, we laid out 6 boreholes that were going to be drilled down to my favourite limestone marker bed, that I felt in my bones would be as flat as a billiard table. The wildcat drilling began! People who can get access to the papers can read all the gory details, but the big fault petered out, and underneath all the holes was our glorious marker bed, as flat as the day it was made!
Still, it was amazing how deep the glacial damage had gone, and it clarified a lot of geological observations for me. All throughout Southern Ontario are these insidious clay zones, right in the middle of solid rock. The drillers hate them, because if they hit one when they're hung over, it can suddenly clog the water flow and blow the whole dang thing up! (Drillers are hung over a lot!).
As well, the foundation of the CN tower was full of these clay zones and mashed up rock. I am now convinced that nearly all the surface sedimentary rock in southern Ontario can be mushed up to a depth of 20-30 m, which makes it almost impossible to come to some tectonic conclusion by just stumbling over a surface fault. All the more fun for geophysics!
Back to my story. Here I was, convinced that as long as I had nice tight, highly stressed rock, I wouldn't have any big old faults for many miles. But Rouge Valley was a puzzle. The only hope I had was that tons of 'glacial shove' features had been mapped there before, but we couldn't dismiss this big sucker. Here it is (I think):
Fortunately, people were taking this seriously and I had some money at my disposal. I configured this a big scientific endeavour where everything would be published (behind the paywall!). We had geologists map the whole valley. Nearly all features were classic ice shove, except one. We mapped that feature, and got the strike and dip. As you can see, the cliff side of the river is inaccessible, but the fault could be traced over the river to the nice flat side.There, we laid out 6 boreholes that were going to be drilled down to my favourite limestone marker bed, that I felt in my bones would be as flat as a billiard table. The wildcat drilling began! People who can get access to the papers can read all the gory details, but the big fault petered out, and underneath all the holes was our glorious marker bed, as flat as the day it was made!
Still, it was amazing how deep the glacial damage had gone, and it clarified a lot of geological observations for me. All throughout Southern Ontario are these insidious clay zones, right in the middle of solid rock. The drillers hate them, because if they hit one when they're hung over, it can suddenly clog the water flow and blow the whole dang thing up! (Drillers are hung over a lot!).
As well, the foundation of the CN tower was full of these clay zones and mashed up rock. I am now convinced that nearly all the surface sedimentary rock in southern Ontario can be mushed up to a depth of 20-30 m, which makes it almost impossible to come to some tectonic conclusion by just stumbling over a surface fault. All the more fun for geophysics!
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Claptrap Society
On the dock I've got everything running, the fishing rod, the boat, and the dock itself. I was born (in engineering!) to believe that all systems should have a high engineering margin, which is the distance from failure, under normal conditions. When I was running computer systems, that meant a light normal load, about 10% of capacity.
Earthquakes and fault systems aren't like that. They are always close to failure, although they are quite a mixed up lot. That means something is always failing on the San Andreas. It follows a Power Law. For earthquakes, almost all the seismic energy, general destruction, and displacement is expended during the largest earthquakes that can happen on that system. For most plate margins, these are the monster quakes, with a magnitude over 9! Popular conception is that the little quakes somehow 'relieve' the stress for the monsters, but the truth is that these guys are just setting up for the big one.
When I was with the old Ontario Hydro, we were a monopoly, unanswerable to anyone. We put a high weight on reliability, lots of redundancy, and emergency capacity. We overbuilt everything! Finally, people bitched about the enormous cost of reliability (25% wasted, blah blah!!), and that was the end of that.
The giant techno-bureaucracies that control our lives have drained all their intellectual capital over the years (all the bright guys have left!). The natural state is to let everything drift to the claptrap level, which follows: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". You see this in the news with Quebec bridges and NASA. They have drifted to Power Law! What you never hear about are the smaller earthquakes, because they clean up immediately and shut up about them. Apparently, the claptrap Russian computers failed all the time, and they usually did a system-wide boot which cleared it up. On the shuttle, there are tons of little failures. For our electricity grid, local blackouts happen all the time, and you don't even want to know what I know! The Quebec guys didn't even respond to the news of falling concrete, because it happened all the time!
All the damage comes with the big earthquakes. A nation-wide blackout. Blowing up the space shuttle. Losing the Space Station. A collapsed bridge. Blackberry communications lost. With the San Andreas, we can study it all the time and we know it's Power Law. With the claptrap organizations, they always just say: it can never happen again!
Earthquakes and fault systems aren't like that. They are always close to failure, although they are quite a mixed up lot. That means something is always failing on the San Andreas. It follows a Power Law. For earthquakes, almost all the seismic energy, general destruction, and displacement is expended during the largest earthquakes that can happen on that system. For most plate margins, these are the monster quakes, with a magnitude over 9! Popular conception is that the little quakes somehow 'relieve' the stress for the monsters, but the truth is that these guys are just setting up for the big one.
When I was with the old Ontario Hydro, we were a monopoly, unanswerable to anyone. We put a high weight on reliability, lots of redundancy, and emergency capacity. We overbuilt everything! Finally, people bitched about the enormous cost of reliability (25% wasted, blah blah!!), and that was the end of that.
The giant techno-bureaucracies that control our lives have drained all their intellectual capital over the years (all the bright guys have left!). The natural state is to let everything drift to the claptrap level, which follows: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". You see this in the news with Quebec bridges and NASA. They have drifted to Power Law! What you never hear about are the smaller earthquakes, because they clean up immediately and shut up about them. Apparently, the claptrap Russian computers failed all the time, and they usually did a system-wide boot which cleared it up. On the shuttle, there are tons of little failures. For our electricity grid, local blackouts happen all the time, and you don't even want to know what I know! The Quebec guys didn't even respond to the news of falling concrete, because it happened all the time!
All the damage comes with the big earthquakes. A nation-wide blackout. Blowing up the space shuttle. Losing the Space Station. A collapsed bridge. Blackberry communications lost. With the San Andreas, we can study it all the time and we know it's Power Law. With the claptrap organizations, they always just say: it can never happen again!
Saturday, June 9, 2007
A Stitch in Time
In my younger days, I was greatly perplexed by the structure of the rocks around the lake. One day, I thought that I would map the rock structures all around, and look for good fishing spots, as well.
Here's a picture of the swirly mess we call cottage country (courtesy of Google Maps).
Although it all seems horribly swirly, there is a persistent joint set (NW and NE), with faults to go along. The cliffs of the lake are where the joint sets are widely spaced, and the opposite for the very deep valleys. There are lots of quartz dikes in the same directions.
About a billion years ago, this whole area was a colliding Himalaya zone. These rocks were buried, and stitched together with the super-glue of melted intrusives. That's why it is so stable. And yet there is this very ancient joint set that may have been there from the very beginning of time (for the rocks, that is).
You stand on these rocks, your mind clears, and you float above a universe where a million years is just an eye blink. You stand on the very roots of existence.
Here's a picture of the swirly mess we call cottage country (courtesy of Google Maps).
Although it all seems horribly swirly, there is a persistent joint set (NW and NE), with faults to go along. The cliffs of the lake are where the joint sets are widely spaced, and the opposite for the very deep valleys. There are lots of quartz dikes in the same directions.
About a billion years ago, this whole area was a colliding Himalaya zone. These rocks were buried, and stitched together with the super-glue of melted intrusives. That's why it is so stable. And yet there is this very ancient joint set that may have been there from the very beginning of time (for the rocks, that is).
You stand on these rocks, your mind clears, and you float above a universe where a million years is just an eye blink. You stand on the very roots of existence.
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