The volcanoe that ate Australia

That was the actual title of the SMH story. I'm not quite sure how a volcano "eats" a continent, but it makes for a colourful simile.



Ok, so the story:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/the-volcano-that-ate-australia/2006/06/29/1151174333917.html

This is pretty cool this made it in the news actually. Its fairly widely known that this LIP (large igneous province) existed across the top end. It does equal a hell of a lot of lava.

A similar sized field (the Siberian Traps in, you guessed it, Siberia) poured out an equal amount at about 252Myr (million years ago) - about the same time as the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. This was THE largest extinction ever, with 96% of all life going extinct. Life barely made it through this one. It probably wasn't just the volcanoes, though, it seems that meteorites+volcanoes are the loosing combination.

When the dinosaurs went extinct 65Myr ago, there was also a massive amount of volcanism going on in the Deccan Traps, in India. Then a meteorite hit what is now Mexico. The rest is Hollywood history. Of course, everyone (and I use that term loosely) knows that a meteorite killed the dinosaurs, not everyone (?!) knows that the volcanism going on at the time probably weakened the biosphere first.

So what effect could the "Darwin" Traps have had? Well, it depends on their age. Life was experimenting fairly energetically at the time (how about another leg here? No? Oh well, lets hope those trilobites turn out). So there was a lot of dying going on. An extinction due to volcanism at 500-515Ma is plausible, but how plausible depends on the exact ages of the volcanics, which I haven't seen. This is probably the only thing worth bitching about in the article. Would it kill em to say where this work was published? Other than that, its pretty accurate.

How bad things got would also depend on the world at the time. Here's what the world looked like in the Cambrian.



Australia of course is shunted off to the side. But massive volcanism in Australia would have affected a lot of the shallow ocean, so again, its intriging....

I'm with-holding judgement till I see the paper. I'll be back.

movie physics

Ok, I just found this one:

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Its probably a little overly sceptical for me in some places (a lot whining about the lack of chaos effect in the simulations in "The Day after tomorrow" - which I think are unjustified, but that's for another time).

The thing that struck my attention was the the winner for the prize: "Worst Movie Physics. Ever."

Of course it was The Core. My wife won't let me see this because she know I will complain about the physics the whole way through it. Its a good thing someone else has already visited this topic and saved me a lot of work. The analysis is here:

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/core.html

Enjoy.

Even if you're not a cat person

... You gotta respect this.

One 7kg tabby. Without claws. Up against a 200kg black bear.

The results speak for themselves.



I'm sure this is an important factor in natural selection. I'm just not sure how.

Meanwhile Canadian National Parks officials are recommending tourists do not attempt to claw black bears eyes out.

If Wild. E Coyote can do it

Ever seen that Roadrunner episode where Wild E. Coyote somehow (?) manages to dig his way through the Earth (and its metallic core) and ends up China? Well, if anyone can work out how to do that for real, we can totally make it worth your while.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/heart-of-gold-well-never-see/2006/06/27/1151174201694.html

Two million billion tonnes of gold. Sitting in the core. Thats 2x10^6 x 10^9 (where ^ means to the power of). That's 2000000000000000 tonnes. This would send goldmark broke. It would also send the price of gold plummeting if it were extractable, its one of those catch-22's.

I guess this makes Prof. Bernie Wood & co. golden boys? (Sorry. Had to be done).

Makes you wonder if there is any chance of getting down there. I know of at least one guy who has given this some serious thought:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/faculty/stevenson/coremission/index.html

Dave Stevenson, who is originally a kiwi, now at Caltech in California, has suggested a way to do it. It involves hijacking all the world's iron refineries for a year, melting all the iron, and letting it plummet to the bottom of the mantle. Odd thing is, it seems to work. That much iron would crack the rock it sits in (the density difference generates excess pressure - and the rest, well, you ever put a sealed tin can in a campfire? Yeah. Bake beans everywhere).
So if can figure out a way to ride a wave of molten iron to the core, then you can get to the gold. Then you'd have to get it back out....

Well, that seems in the too-hard basket right now. But it some places, there are "cores" just sitting around for the taking. The whole asteroid belt was originally "planetesimals" - embryos of planets that never quite made it. They did start forming cores, though - all the iron meteorites we find on Earth are remnants of the cores of these planetary fetuses. (/Embryos. Whatever). So there is a good chance that there are 'gold-rich' embryo's floating around out there, waiting for us to snatch up. Like this one:



Now we just need a loan of a space shuttle.. preferably one with no foam.
Find out more about why an asteroid is shaped like a dumbell here:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/May00/Arecibo.Kleopatra.deb.html