The Cellar - Quake/Tsunami

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- - Quake/Tsunami (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=24704)

Hey, tw, this headline is for you.

My birth-father, half-sister, cousin and his family, and several musicians I've worked with are in Japan right now. Still waiting to hear from them all.

I wonder what will happen next week

I just saw this in Popular Science:

Quote:

Biggest Full Moon in 19 Years Almost Certainly Won't Cause a Huge Natural Disaster
On March 19th, the moon will be closer--and thus bigger--than it's been in two decades
http://cellar.org/images/00023.jpg
On March 19th, the moon will be closer to Earth than it's been since 1992. The full moon that night will appear about 14 percent larger and significantly brighter than usual, but despite the brightness, the supermoon has a dark side. Supermoons have been linked to massive natural disasters in the past, from earthquakes to floods--but that connection is typically touted by astrologists. Astronomers and scientists, with typical drollness, say a catastrophe is unlikely.
March 19th marks this year's lunar perigee, the point in the moon's orbit at which it is closest to Earth. It's the moon's elliptical orbit that's responsible for the differences in distance between the moon and Earth (the opposite, the point at which the moon is farthest from the Earth, is called the lunar apogee). This month's perigee will leave the moon, saysSteve Owens at Dark Sky Diary, about 8 percent closer to Earth than usual, and about 2 percent closer to Earth than the average lunar perigee. In fact, it'll be the closest positioning since 1992.
Past supermoons have coincided with natural disasters--the Indonesian earthquake in 2005, Australian flooding in 1954--but scientists note that those are unrelated, more likely than not. Says John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey: "A lot of studies have been done on this kind of thing by USGS scientists and others. They haven't found anything significant at all." The tides will pull a bit higher, but earthquakes are almost completely unaffected and volcanoes are not likely to show unusual behavior. John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said "Practically speaking, you'll never see any effect of lunar perigee. It's somewhere between 'It has no effect' and 'It's so small you don't see any effect.'"
Besides, it's still 2011. Everyone knows there won't be any world-ending catastrophes until next year, right?

Quote:

Originally Posted by glatt (Post 716154)

Hey, tw, this headline is for you.

Great minds think alike; that was my first thought, too.

wow, the video from CNN (et al.) is just incredible and horrific.

I feel betrayed by Bill O'Reilly's repeated assertions that the "tide goes in, tide goes out" and that there is "never a miscommunication."

The reactors are designed so that in the event of earthquake or similar, boron control rods automatically drop in to the core and absorb excess neutrons, ending the nuclear reaction. The problem now is remaining heat, which the cooling system is *supposed* to deal with.
It isn't going to go Chernobyl, but it might be a bit of a Three Mile Island. Still not pretty.

I have several friends in Japan, mostly in Nagoya and one in Tokyo, but they have all touched base.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZenGum (Post 716268)

It isn't going to go Chernobyl, but it might be a bit of a Three Mile Island. Still not pretty.

Due to insufficient information, one of the five reactors is starting to sound more and more like Three Mile Island. Apparently at least one meter of the boron rods are above water. And some melting has already occured inside that reactor core.

Viewing some numbers. The first quakes was 7.1. About 47 more quakes followed in those three days. Then an 8.9 quake happened. Since the big one, I counted another 190 earthquakes in the Sendai region.

Some great pic, video, and NOAA graphics>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...eath-toll.html

I cannot get my head around the scale of this thing... heart-breaking.

I agree. The scale of it was huge and as it came into the west coast, I was worried for my brother in Anchorage, but it lost oomph after went past southern Alaska, islands and BC. phew

This seems a bit ghoulish to me:

http://i.imgur.com/hOsmm.jpg