Nuclear Talent 'Decays'

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What's the half-life of nuclear talent in Canada? Our best hope would be to put some decent talent on the radioactive waste issue, but we are really screwing that up! Our attempt for underground waste disposal up at Bruce will be a worse disaster than the Maples.

Seismic Noise

I just love this graph. If you installed the most super-sensitive super-broadband seismometer on the cold hard crust, you still come up with this problem of low-level noise. This is the equivalent of sticking your head on the earth and hearing the ocean! Because that's exactly what you hear! You can see all the various sources of this 'earth murmur' on the figure.

July SRL - Crustal Tomography

I just love this stuff! Every few years they gather up all the data from seismometers all over North America, and calculate the velocities directly under each seismometer. They do this with the signals of the earthquakes in the upper figure. The final picture can be also considered as the temperature of the crust at various depth slices.

Looking at the bottom figure, we see a big hunk of the crust is relatively cold. This is most likely the original craton, with cold, deep roots. As I have said before, the continents are made of the floating fuzz of silicon dioxide, which has come out of the rest of the molten rock, much like the head on a beer. Over the many tectonic cycles, this stuff has been squooshed together.

Note Ontario, it's not that cold and old. I find the pattern quite interesting, and wonder about it. If this is true, then it has some implications for seismic hazard.