Weather Underground

[cronus]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... nderground

Weather Underground

In the fall of 2011, students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in anticipation of a football game between the Sooners and the Texas A. & M. Aggies. The plan was to see if the students could, by reading the instruments, detect the rumble of eighty-two thousand fans cheering for a touchdown. “To see if they can figure out if a signal is a passing train or a cheering crowd—that’s much more interesting for them than discussing data in theory,” Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics, told me.

(continued)

[JimC]

It's actually important in seismological studies, not just a bit of fun for students; they need to be able to detect and eliminate such man-made signals to keep the actual earthquake data pure...

[pErvinalia]

Whether underground or not, this is just silly.

[cronus]

It's actually important in seismological studies, not just a bit of fun for students; they need to be able to detect and eliminate such man-made signals to keep the actual earthquake data pure...

....eight years later and the geologists won't be the same breed.

[piscator]

Back in The Day, I witnessed a 4th of July cast shot at the Illinois Creek mine in Galena, Alaska - about 800 tons of amfo and a little octol for just that right note of brisance, shot in a wave from front to back. A shot that big with a duration that long has to be permitted by the USDOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Russians and Chinese and everyone else who listens will hear it in several spectra. They'll know approximately (almost exactly )what it is without being told, but they like to keep their machines dialed in, and a known seismic/electromagnetic source of a certain amplitude and duration at a precise location helps keep the calibrations tight.


I've counseled my brother's 20ish sons to major in geology - I can't think of a course of study that builds better or more well-rounded technocrats - but 2 are children who will probably make fine insurance salesmen, and the youngest is at Ole Miss, his state's medicine and law school...

[mistermack]

I've counseled my brother's 20ish sons

Woweee.


Is he a mormon?

[pErvinalia]

You better not get a laugh outta that! I turned down that little gem yesterday..

[mistermack]

You better not get a laugh outta that! I turned down that little gem yesterday..

Yeh yeh yeh sure you did.

[piscator]

I've counseled my brother's 20ish sons

Woweee.


Is he a mormon?

No, but he'd slap the shit out of you.
And while we're on the subject of slapping the shit out of you, how's your mom?

[mistermack]

I've counseled my brother's 20ish sons

Woweee.


Is he a mormon?

No, but he'd slap the shit out of you.
And while we're on the subject of slapping the shit out of you, how's your mom?

He probably would. In the fantasy world that you inhabit.

[Brian Peacock]

William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I don't like the weather underground. I don't like any meteorological resistance groups!

[laklak]

Underground weather doesn't bother me much; I'm just not the burrowing type.

[cronus]

I don't like the weather underground. I don't like any meteorological resistance groups!

Taken together with a special equation no one knows yet and a CO2 market would soon emerge. Could pretend to have one has a place-holder until the day? Keep the purist mathematicians away from the game?

[JimC]

Actually, I'm an impure mathematician...