This is the site to check.  

Why this is a big deal.

Why this is a big deal–the naked perspective.

Why this is a big deal–Al’s journal.

Background about the Earth’s atmosphere–Wiki.

High resolution recent CO2 and temperature variation.

CO2 variation over geological time.

The skeptical science perspective.

Given the feed back mechanisms within the climatic system we, all of humanity,  are destined to live in interesting times.  I am very concerned about this situation.

When all else fails, read The Stanford Daily.

I hope you are enjoying the spring.  Apologies for the lack of blog activity.  Geophysics is on fire!

This has been an extra activity overload for me lately.  7-day work weeks are the  new normal now.

However, in goofing off, I found this original dedication of Geologist’s Day on the internets.  This was probably the best cultural thing that happened on Earth during March 31st, 1966.

If you are looking at that thinking; there cannot possibly be anything cooler…..wait, check out this stamp from the USSR.

Oh yeah, active and passive geophysical methods, airborne and ground acquisitions systems, start the t-shirt presses.  This stamp has them all.

You must be thinking; there cannot possibly be anything cooler…..wait, how about a 1964 ballet called “The Geologists”.   Yes, Nikolai Karentnikov wrote a ballet called “The Geologists”, possibly the GREATEST BALLET EVER WRITTEN, (given no one has written a ballet titled “The Geophysicists”).  Check the link to wiki for details.  I have never found a sound track from this ballet.

There you have it, Geologist’s Day original announcement, a ballet sound track to search the internets for,  and possibly the coolest stamp ever made.  Truly we live in the best of all times in the best of all possible worlds.

Happy April!

A nice on-line text book can be found here.

Brief review by Victorian Resources Online.

Radiometrics–OpenEI (Open Energy Info) site.

Half page summary–Geoscience Australia.  Even administrators might understand this.

RBG combinations of normally collected data channels from (where else) Australia.

IAEA guideline PDF.  Useful.

 

 

 

 

In reviewing electromagnetic noise sources I watched some very cool videos from the International Space Station.  I have no idea what goes on up there, but I like this stuff.  Change that electron density!  Flux it up Earth System!  Enjoy.  You might want to turn off your sounds–there is no sound in space!

These are the best I think

Moon rise + aurora.

Need music?  Here you go.  Many of these repeat the same sequences, but I enjoyed them all.

 

 

Yesterday was Jackie Robinson’s birthday.  You might have noticed that the google doodle was in his honor.  He mattered and made a difference.  His career in baseball is well known, but his role in changing attitudes with the segregated US Army during World War II is less well known.  Check his wiki page under Military career for details.

While growing up I knew people who were associated with units fighting with the 761st Tank Battalion.  This unit was called the “Black Panthers” and at the tip of the spear in terrible fighting under George Patton.  Imagine the desperation of children charging, 20 or 30 at a time, with panzerfausts as a distraction so that 88mm anti-tank guns could destroy Allied tanks, as a measure of the terrible scene these men were in the middle of.  A memory of this is recounted here.  The 761st Tank Battalion is described here.   Despite everything he did later in his life,  I have always associated Jackie Robinson with the 761st.

The youtube video below describes the unit.   You can feel the emotion of these men throughout.  The tankers were tough

It was a pleasure to see google honor this great man.  I hope next year you also join me in celebrating his birthday.

This site is useful http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/software/ but somewhat dated (includes FORTRAN source code).  Earthquake seismology is really complicated.

Not for general use; but interesting. http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/jiggle/

Enjoy.

Hey, I heard there was an election.  How did that work out I was away.

I just discovered Crain’s Petrophysical Handbook.  Here is the URL.

Wow.  Very, very cool.

Wow.

I have been following some of the very major financial news pieces lately.  Twenty years ago, any of these would have burned the institutions involved to the ground, but today such events seem unending and out of control.  Like someone watching a giant forest fire and for a moment focusing on this tree or that tree in the chaos of the fire storm, here are a few of the financial scandals in no particular order.

Money laundering in the South Pacific and New Zealand?  You betcha: Here is a brief piece.

Here is a piece about a four year investigation into silver manipulation price manipulation that will fail(?), with a discussion of Financial Times article that broke the story, and the Fed Gold audit.

Trillions hidden far far offshore; you betcha: how many trillions?  Enjoy this:

How about $250 billion (that is billion–with a b) in illegal offshore financial transactions?  Nothing to see here people; still interested (me too):  Here is the link.   A story about the recently awakened UK/US response (prepare to be underwhelmed) can be found here.

Last but not least, the anchor of the financial world, Libor, turns out to be a cartel run, organized fraud.  Spiegel’s story can be found here.  Libor is explained here by Wiki.

Wow: Are we having fun yet?

I have recently been reviewing pure seismology lately.  As part of this activity I’ve been covering the detection of nuclear tests and Geophysical MASINT related resources.   On a tangent I’ve also been fascinated by sound and recent advances into understanding infrasonic sound, especially with respect to sound propagation and detection.   Here are some resources and observations.

Tomorrow is Hiroshima day, I hope you think deeply about the event.

As stated in this wiki page: “Geophysical MASINT is a branch of Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) that involves phenomena transmitted through the earth (ground, water, atmosphere) and man made structures including emitted or reflected sounds, pressure waves, vibrations, and magnetic field or ionosphere disturbances“

An excellent review of seismic detection of nuclear explosions can be found at this, and this, and this site.  The first two are PDFs, the third link is an html chapter from IRIS.  Detection of mines explosions in Asia using seismic data PDF can be found at this site.

Infrasound detection of mine explosions PDF can be found here.  BGS analysis of seismic data related to mine explosions can be found here.  Excellent work from MSU regarding northeastern Asia can be found here.

The DTRA verification database can be found at this location.

IASPEI Ground Truth (GT) reference events can be found here.

NORSAR Engineering Database (CTBT and Nuclear Test Monitoring) can be found here.

Autocorrelation methodology is presented briefly here.  Some NTS work is presented here by LLNL and UNV.

An infrasound database (searchable with location and time parameters) can be found at this site.  Infrasound related to animals and earthquake detection can be found here.  Some research related to psychological reactions of humans to infrasound can be found here.  The excellent Wiki review of the perception of infrasound can be found here.  Cornell University infrasound web site (their Elephant Listening Project) can be found here.

The youtube videos below show some shock waves related to volcanic explosions.   These would all produce significant infrasound.

Tomorrow is Hiroshima day and as usual I find myself meditating on this event.

As a younger man I talked to some people who had been involved in WWII in the Pacific.  One man who was a supervisor for my geophysical work decades ago had flown a transport plane into Japan with the United States negotiating team before the war ended.  He was just a young person from no-where USA and was an expert transport pilot.

After landing at the Japanese airfield (the war had not ended yet) he thought it would be fun to “hitchhike into town”.  He was soon surrounded by Japanese, fascinated by an American pilot standing free before them,  many of whom were pointing up and saying “You fly B-29?”.  He repeatedly said, hoping for the best in an increasingly dicey situation, “No I fly an air transport… carries food…medicine.”.   He quickly hastened back to the airfield and sat under the wing of his plane until the negotiating team returned.   After the war ended he spent time flying out POWs, from remote strips to hospitals.  The physical condition of these men, women and children, shocked and sickened him.  Many died on his plane during transport to hospitals.

He had flown in the war for so long at some point the bureaucracy decided he needed to be “certified” to fly  by taking a test.  He flew to Tokyo and was assigned a tester.  He was asked to fly out into Tokyo bay and fly his two engine transport aircraft lower, lower, lower, and lower.  When it seemed there was no more lower possible  the tester reached over and turned off the right engine and said “now fly back and land”.  That was the test.  He told me they were flying below the level of docked aircraft carrier flight decks.  Some test. I got to know him well and he was a tremendous mentor; I still recall things he said to me about many things.  He did not consider himself a hero, saying, as so many of the greatest generations have said to me, the heroes were the ones who never came back.

This is an exact copy of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is at the British War Museum in London.

Another man I knew, a physicist, had been on an observation B-29 when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped.  The details of this attack are shown in the youtube video below and are horrific.  This American physicist was responsible for monitoring instruments that were dropped by parachute around the Hiroshima site before the bomb was dropped.  Radio measurements were received by him as the instruments floated down.  In one of these instruments, which would float slowly down and then land intact on the ground,  he and his colleagues from Los Alamos had written, in English and Japanese, a note to a Japanese physicist they had known before the war had started.  This Japanese physicist had studied with several physicists working in the Los Alamos lab and was sometimes recalled in private conversations during the Manhattan project.  The note was a personal plea and stated that the Japanese had to press for immediate surrender and expressed their wish that this physicist make the strongest possible case to his colleagues.  They knew this man would be asked to report on what had happened and would be given the instruments to examine.  I have never read this account in any history book.

Within the first four months after the bombing, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima.

This shows constraints to power sharing between regional electrical networks in the US. An integrated network is much more stable than a series of unconnected grids.

I followed the news of the massive electrical power outages in India with much interest beginning Monday morning.  I have some interaction with people in the electrical power transmission area and it’s an important activity.  The complexity of the networks and dedication of those involved is amazing.  Here are some reports of the outage (now the largest in human history) and some resources.

So what happened?  India has a weak and unstable national electric grid.  Most major corporations have essentially detached from it, this form of local-only power generation is called captive power, for the national grid this results in a less stable situation. For details check this link.   Bottom line “India has missed every capacity addition target since 1951.” Wow.     The population of India in 2011 was 1,241,491,960 according to the World Bank.

Ready for the details?  Take a deep breath and plow through these links.

An up to date account can be found here at the TelegraphIndia.com site.

CNN has some amazing images of what happens to a densely populated urban society when the electricity goes away.  Here is the link, be sure to look at the images, they are unreal.  The last one I found truly sad.  Plan Z in areas suffering electrical power outages is portable electrical generators for families, captive power generation at the lowest level, all burning gasoline. Chaos follows.

The Huffpost jumps in here with a perspective.  This starts to compare this outage with others, such as the 2005 Indonesian power outage, which affected 100 million people.

LA Times account is here; let the shirk fest begin!  This account describes some of the finger pointing that will continue until people are distracted from this event.  There was already an official committee formed on Monday to study what happened.  Reuters report is here. 

The Times of India has an interesting account, be sure to read the comments, they are as interesting as anything on the web.   The Kashmir Monitor account can be found here and has some interesting details regarding frequency stability problems in this region of the India grid.

Here are some details about frequency of power transmission and the Indian electrical system (Wiki).

Wiki comes through again (and again and again) with an updated list of power outages, including the Indian outage at this URL.  The 2003 NE US (55 million) and 1965 NE US (30 million) power outages make this list.

In the United States the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has a  leadership role in documenting and protecting our electrical power transmission capability and topology.  I encourage you to review this site; there are some interesting things within.    The industrial affiliate group involved in this activity is the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI).   This shows some of the topology of the lower 48 US grid.

National grid maps can be found at the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI) web site.

Bravo, you have the basics of electrical grids, how they work, and what went wrong in India covered.  How much electrical power does the United States use daily?  In 2006 this was 11.13 billion KWh per day.   That’s a lot of electrons.

If you would like to review what electricity is, the California Energy Commission has a fun web site.  Here is the main link, here is the section about electricity.   Need a more serious review?  Wiki has you covered–here is the section about electricity, a great read.

An integrated, national grid that is modern, closely monitored, and expertly run is a key necessity of any industrial society.  The benefits of a national grid to the US are thoroughly presented in this PDF. Surprisingly, there are other opinions.  I have heard individuals express the opinion that electrical power should not be shared by states, (captive power on steroids and the end of our industrial society), however, such a radical opinion is unusual.

An amazing thing is that you are also full of electrons!  Well not literally full, but you get the idea, you have a lot of them.  Following this logic, you have approximately 1.80 x 10^28 electrons in your body right now; I salute them all.