geoff_morphini wrote: 
good on you.. alignment of headlights planets or some such guff... but people stayed home in Spain?? wtf?

 geoff_morphini wrote: 
hey!!  that's painful. You are quoting Boris! He's the bloke who said there were no deaths from Etna, well, I mean .. sod it.. you know, "civilian deaths", you know, hit by a PF while ironing or something.

Very nice bloke btw, works at the Etna observatory and a regular participant on the eruptions blog.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Bruce, sorry I haven't participated in this thread more.  I'm hit or miss here.  It was nice to see this pop up on the RAFT.

Etna is about the strangest volcano in the world (except for carbonatite volcanoes).  It's a cinder cone, a shield volcano, and, has acted like a stratovolcano in the past.

Spanish earthquake

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8508047/Earthquake-hits-southern-Spain-eight-dead.html

Relatively small event, M 5.1, but, buildings not designed for shaking. 

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/c0003c5s/us/usc0003c5s_ciim.jpg

To add to the confusion, a now deceased Italian seismologist predicted, in 1915, that there would be a catastrophic earthquake today...in Italy.  Apparently people in Spain had stayed home because of the notoriety of this prediction http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8504936/Italians-evacuate-Rome-over-big-one-fears.html   I'm going to go on record to predict he was wrong.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Well, there have been a few deaths, but not many for a volcano that erupts so frequently and is surrounded by so many people http://boris.vulcanoetna.com/ETNA_andman2.html

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 
ha. .. the chances of being caught by an eruption are remote to say the least. That footnote is true, btw, nobody has ever been killed by an eruption of Etna. You are much more luckyEDIT: likely, grief, to die from not taking the pop quiz than you are from a supervolcano.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 

Andy and I were watching a programme last night about a volcanic super eruption in the Greek islands (no doubt I've got the term wrong but that was the gist).  I was a bit thougtful to be honest given our proximity to a smoking volcano in a couple of weeks time.  I also got told off for not paying enough attention to the tv because I'd forgotten about the pop quiz.

this thread seems to be fizzing out... which is a pity..

FWIW Etna* has just started erupting again, pretty small scale but if we are lucky we might get to some pretty spectacular fireworks. If the Hobiejoes are lucky they'll see the glow to the south as Stromboli puffs away quietly to the west. By lucky I mean another paroxysm as they are pretty short-lived, usually just 12 hours or less.

* nobody has been killed in the making of this product.

 beamends wrote: 
  My geography/geology teacher trained in the fifties and said that they had to basically start from scratch in the late sixties/seventies.
 
And that just about sums up BBC vs C4 .   ITV were going to make a doc, but when they asked Katie "Jordan" Price what she thought about the Honshu Tsunami, she asked if it was that new sushi place in Romford.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
Surprising that!

There's two documentaries I've seen about the Japan Quake, one on Channel 4 (4OD) and one on BBC (iPlayer), the BBC one is the more technical of the two, but the Channel 4 one has more dramatic film. Both quote the same figures as above, but from different sources, so there appears to be agreement about what happened. I hadn't realised just how well Japan is wired up for earthquakes, something like 4,000 seismometers and stuff, or that small earthquakes are verging on being a constant background noise. Or that Tokyo is only, on average, 2m above sea level..........

 oldviolin wrote: 
Extremely - it shows that as late as 1965 tectonics is still only a tentative theory.
 
The picture is coming together then, sea-floor spreading and paleomagnetism, the Pacific "ring of fire", convection cells in the solid mantle &tc, but not quite reaching the idea of subduction zones at convergent plate margins.
 
I saw a documentary last night that suggested as the tension caused by the westwards and downward movement of the Pacific plate under Japan was released, the east coast of Honshu sprang eastwards by an incredible 4 metres and dropped by a metre, exacerbating the effect of the tsunami.
 

interesting

 callum wrote: 
For sure, some would er.. "pop" but a lot would ride it out. Look at the videos of the tsunami hitting. It is not a short steep wave but a surge. It picks up all the light moveable stuff first and the 40' containers and buildings last. I cetainly think the idea is worth testing. It's effectively just an airbag for a worst-case scenario, a last resort, not a first line of defence. The alternative is not sitting high and dry in a sturdy building or on a mountaintop cause it is too late for that. No, the alternative is probably clinging to your kitchen table as the 40' containers come hurtling towards you.  Once you are caught in the middle of all that, you don't have a chance. A suitably designed zorb might just give you the chance to get out of there first.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
I know what you meant and were talking about, but I was commenting on the photo's showing all those shipping containers stacked up could become something useful after all that death and destruction. Turning the negative into a positive.

 GeneP59 wrote: 
I rather meant that the idea of not just a tsunami hitting your town, but one that was hurling 40 foot long steel containers at you as it did so was actually, really, horrifying and not some ironic use of the word.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
Now all they have to do is build some good foundations and weld 3 cross and a couple high and you've got a lovely and sturdy basis for a home capable of withstanding just about anything. A good use of resources from a bad situation.

 callum wrote: 
Or worse, shipping containers. Horrifying.
 

 
 

 Painted_Turtle wrote: 
You'd just get crushed against something - imagine being in that between a bunch of cars that got swept up.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
LOL

Now if we could just invent a quick way to pick them all up after they ride the tsunami wave back out to sea....

I have just had a brainwave.

The perfect lifesaving device for a tsunami:



All you have to do it attach it up to a fast inflating device (gas or something) and bob's yer uncle.
or.. after a bit of googling, the Japanese version is even better: