Guest post by David Middleton
I didn’t realize this was “Apocalypse Week”….
Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
With an eruption brewing, it may be the only way to prevent the extinction of the human race.
17 August 2017
Lying beneath the tranquil settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US lies an enormous magma chamber. It’s responsible for the geysers and hot springs that define the area, but for scientists at Nasa, it’s also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilisation as we know it: a potential supervolcano.
Following an article we published about supervolcanoes last month, a group of Nasa researchers got in touch to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat – and what could be done about it.
“I was a member of the Nasa Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for Nasa to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology. “I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”
[…]
Notes to the Beeb:
- It’s NASA, not Nasa.
- Civilization has a “z” in it.
- Yellowstone is a supervolcano, not a potential supervolcano.
If “the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat,” does this mean we can stop fretting about Gorebal Warming and the Sixth Mass Extinction? Is NASA really moving on to actual threats to the planet? Well, not threats to the planet… The planet has handled supervolcanoes, asteroids and comets quite well over its 4.5 billion year lifespan.
I’ll rephrase the question: Is NASA actually taking on genuine threats to humanity? Or at least threats to these United States? Let’s return to the article and find out…
READ MORE:
- Would a supervolcano wipe us out?
- The greatest threats to humanity as we know it
- The atomic bomb too big to use
There are around 20 known supervolcanoes on Earth, with major eruptions occurring on average once every 100,000 years. One of the greatest threats an eruption may pose is thought to be starvation, with a prolonged volcanic winter potentially prohibiting civilisation from having enough food for the current population. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that food reserves worldwide would last 74 days.
[…]
That’s “funny.” One of the “solutions” proposed for Gorebal Warming is geoengineering a volcanic winter by pumping sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere. Maybe we just need to ramp up GHG emissions now, so that when Yellowstone does pop off another Ultra-Plinian eruption, Earth will be warm enough to handle a volcanic winter. A more pertinent concern is how we’ll handle having much of our nation covered with volcanic ash…
As bad as the eruption and lava flows would be, the tephra deposition would be even worse.
From Mastin et al., 2014: “Table 3. Average, Maximum, and Minimum Deposit Thicknesses at Selected Cities, From Simulations Illustrated in Figures 6-8a”
| City | Distance km | Longitude | Latitude | Thickness (mm) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average | Minimum | Maximum | ||||
|
||||||
| Albuquerque | 1091 | −106.61 | 35.111 | 24.9 | 4.1 | 73.9 |
| Atlanta | 2556 | −84.387 | 33.748 | 3.1 | 0.5 | 6.5 |
| Austin | 1942 | −97.743 | 30.267 | 2 | 0.1 | 4.2 |
| Billings | 227 | −108.501 | 45.783 | 1429.5 | 1028.7 | 1785.6 |
| Boise | 452 | −116.215 | 43.619 | 144.8 | 26.9 | 347.9 |
| Calgary | 777 | −114.058 | 51.045 | 32.8 | 1.8 | 68.2 |
| Casper | 391 | −106.313 | 42.867 | 516.9 | 325.9 | 844.3 |
| Cheyenne | 600 | −104.82 | 41.14 | 152.9 | 96.3 | 274.4 |
| Chicago | 1887 | −87.63 | 41.877 | 14.9 | 5.5 | 29.4 |
| Denver | 700 | −104.985 | 39.737 | 98.1 | 63.6 | 131.9 |
| Des Moines | 1420 | −93.609 | 41.601 | 40 | 19.9 | 59.6 |
| Fargo | 1111 | −96.789 | 46.877 | 57.7 | 22.9 | 78.6 |
| Flagstaff | 1028 | −111.639 | 35.201 | 16.3 | 0 | 50.6 |
| Kansas City | 1454 | −94.621 | 39.114 | 31.7 | 7 | 57.2 |
| Knoxville | 2455 | −83.92 | 35.96 | 4.3 | 1.2 | 10.5 |
| Lincoln | 1211 | −96.682 | 40.807 | 52.9 | 22.6 | 88.5 |
| Little Rock | 1905 | −92.289 | 34.746 | 8.4 | 1.6 | 25.2 |
| Los Angeles | 1323 | −118.244 | 34.052 | 5.2 | 0 | 27 |
| Miami | 3453 | −80.226 | 25.788 | 0.5 | 0 | 1.7 |
| Minneapolis | 1374 | −93.267 | 44.983 | 39.2 | 23.2 | 53.5 |
| Missoula | 375 | −114.019 | 46.86 | 240.6 | 48 | 474.4 |
| Mobile | 2508 | −88.043 | 30.694 | 1.8 | 0.1 | 3.9 |
| New York | 3025 | −74.004 | 40.714 | 2.5 | 1.4 | 3.7 |
| Portland | 950 | −122.676 | 45.523 | 8.3 | 0 | 30.6 |
| Raleigh | 2884 | −78.639 | 35.772 | 2.7 | 0.8 | 4.5 |
| Rapid City | 593 | −103.231 | 44.08 | 208.3 | 168.2 | 330.2 |
| St. Louis | 1819 | −90.199 | 38.627 | 15.3 | 3 | 32.5 |
| Salt Lake City | 419 | −111.891 | 40.761 | 247.9 | 124.9 | 408.3 |
| San Francisco | 1229 | −122.419 | 37.775 | 8.5 | 0 | 44.7 |
| Seattle | 966 | −122.332 | 47.606 | 9.2 | 0 | 41.2 |
| Toronto | 2498 | −79.383 | 43.653 | 3.7 | 2 | 6.2 |
| Washington DC | 2855 | −77.036 | 38.907 | 2.9 | 1.3 | 4.4 |
| Winnipeg | 1188 | −97.137 | 49.899 | 37.9 | 14.3 | 59.1 |
A Plinian or Ultra-Plinian eruption of Yellowstone would be really bad.
So… How does NASA plan to save us from this? Back to the Beeb:
When Nasa scientists came to consider the problem, they found that the most logical solution could simply be to cool a supervolcano down. A volcano the size of Yellowstone is essentially a gigantic heat generator, equivalent to six industrial power plants. Yellowstone currently leaks about 60-70% of the heat coming up from below into the atmosphere, via water which seeps into the magma chamber through cracks. The remainder builds up inside the magma, enabling it to dissolve more and more volatile gases and surrounding rocks. Once this heat reaches a certain threshold, then an explosive eruption is inevitable.
But if more of the heat could be extracted, then the supervolcano would never erupt. Nasa estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer could be achieved from its magma chamber, Yellowstone would no longer pose a threat. The only question is how?
[…]
Instead Nasa have conceived a very different plan. They believe the most viable solution could be to drill up to 10km down into the supervolcano, and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 350C (662F), thus slowly day by day extracting heat from the volcano. And while such a project would come at an estimated cost of around $3.46bn (£2.69bn), it comes with an enticing catch which could convince politicians to make the investment.
“Yellowstone currently leaks around 6GW in heat,” Wilcox says. “Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10/kWh. You would have to give the geothermal companies incentives to drill somewhat deeper and use hotter water than they usually would, but you would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years. And the long-term benefit is that you prevent a future supervolcano eruption which would devastate humanity.”
[…]
Sounds like a win-win! Save humanity from both Yellowstone and from solar power!
So… What’s the catch?
But drilling into a supervolcano does not come without certain risks. Namely triggering the eruption you’re intending to prevent.
“The most important thing with this is to do no harm,” Wilcox says. “If you drill into the top of the magma chamber and try and cool it from there, this would be very risky. This could make the cap over the magma chamber more brittle and prone to fracture. And you might trigger the release of harmful volatile gases in the magma at the top of the chamber which would otherwise not be released.”
So… NASA proposes to drill these geothermal wells under the magma chamber and extract the heat from below. Sounds like they need to hire the world’s best “deep core drillers”… Again…
Instead, the idea is to drill in from the supervolcano from the lower sides, starting outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park, and extracting the heat from the underside of the magma chamber. “This way you’re preventing the heat coming up from below from ever reaching the top of the chamber which is where the real threat arises,” Wilcox says.
However those who instigate such a project will never see it to completion, or even have an idea whether it might be successful within their lifetime. Cooling Yellowstone in this manner would happen at a rate of one metre a year, taking of the order of tens of thousands of years until just cold rock was left. Although Yellowstone’s magma chamber would not need to be frozen solid to reach the point where it no longer posed a threat, there would be no guarantee that the endeavour would ultimately be successful for at least hundreds and possibly thousands of years.
[…]
Such a plan could be potentially applied to every active supervolcano on the planet, and Nasa’s scientists are hoping that their blueprints will encourage more practical scientific discussion and debate for tackling the threat.
[…]
It’s “meter,” not metre and there’s no “u” in endeavor… And such a plan might not cool the magma chamber at all…
The lower part of the magma chamber is about 10 miles deep. The magma reservoir goes down to the top of the mantle (~30 miles deep). The deepest geothermal well drilled to date, only goes down a bit over 3 miles.
Iceland is drilling the world’s deepest geothermal well
By Kesavan Unnikrishnan Jan 22, 2017 in Technology
Iceland is digging world’s deepest geothermal borehole into the heart of a volcano at a depth of 3.10 miles (5 km) to tap renewable energy. The extreme pressure and heat at such depths could derive 30 to 50 MW of electricity from one geothermal well.
[…]
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/iceland-is-drilling-the-world-s-hottest-geothermal-well/article/484178#ixzz4q6rLq5Xs
10 miles is 52,800 feet. The deepest well ever drilled for any reason, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, only went down 40,230 feet. Prior to this, the deepest well was the 31,441 feet deep Lone Star Producing Co. 1–27 Bertha Rogers well in Washita County, Oklahoma. In a note of totally unrelated trivia: Lone Star Producing became Enserch Exploration, my first employer in the oil “bidness.” The Bertha Rogers TD’ed (reached total depth) in molten sulfur. Enserch’s executives all had sulfur paperweights from the Bertha Rogers.
While I am happy to find out that at least some folks at NASA are actually considering genuine threats to this nation and the other people on this planet… Their proposed solution to the supervolcano threat appears to be straight out of Fantasy Land.
Note: Yes, I know the BBC is British and that we are “two peoples separated by a common language.” I just like poking fun at the way they misspell so many words.
Reference
[1] Mastin L. G. Van Eaton A. R. Lowenstern J. B. (2014). Modeling ash fall distribution from a Yellowstone supereruption. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 15, 3459–3475.
Further Reading
[1] Kummer, Larry (2017). Geologists warn us about dangerous volcanoes. Will we spend pennies for warnings? Watts Up With That?
It looks like they get their ideas from cheezy SYFY channel disaster flicks. Any plan sounds good after a few cold ones, suspending Scientific and Engineering practices makes it a slam dunk. What could possibly go wrong? Phreatic eruption anyone?
Leaving arguments about spelling aside, I am now getting seriously alarmed about what is going on in the minds of the people who came up with this notion. Apart from the issue of drilling the actual borehole (which is probably not possible on current technology), isn’t the release of the energy itself (buying for a moment into the fantasy we could do it) going to add something more than a mere six power stations worth of the heat we are supposed to be avoiding?
Also, a mere detail, but the most destructive paroxysm of the Krakatau eruption took place precisely when the by then empty magma chamber filled up with water. So now dumping water into a caldera is suddenly a great idea? Have I missed something or am I just more stupid that I thought?
In the movie Armageddon, Jason Isaacs (a British actor) played NASA’s top rocket scientist, Ronald Quincy… How would he have spelled NASA? NASA or Nasa?
Regarding the hazards of poring water onto magma and risking a phreatic eruption, NASA’s cunning plan is to inject the water from below the magma chamber. This minimizes the eruption risk. I just don’t think they put much thought into how deep they would have to drill or what might be underneath the magma chamber.
David
Just how deep would you realistically have to go to get underneath the magma chamber of a caldera type volcano? Is it even possible to calculate where exactly this would be ?
If you can’t answer this question I suspect no one truthfully could.
I don’t think humans could ever drill enough boreholes and remove enough heat to overcome magma welling up from below. Even though the article already mentioned needing thousands of years to accomplish this, it still sounds as if they’re modeling this as a static system, which it’s not (now where have we heard that before?) And by static in this case I don’t mean that nothing moves, only that all time-dependent actions remain constant, which doesn’t happen in the real world either. Why do you think Mother Nature is so stingy with straight lines in the landscape?
Or if the magma chamber actually has a discernable bottom! It might just as well gradually diffuse into a mushy migmatite or network of conduits that are still under a lot of pressure and at temperatures that will make drilling steel behave like spaghetti.
Moderately Cross of East Anglia
Not as stupid as me mate. I poured boiling water onto some Caustic Soda I had poured down the drain.
I’m still in the doghouse until the ceiling is clean. I dread to think what pouring cold water into a magma chamber would result in, but I ain’t cleaning up the mess. Not enough Marigolds in the world for that job.
Just a quick maybe unscientific thought ,surely this magma under Yellowstone,must be connected with the earth’s(hot) core somehow for it to be there ?be it either directly , or via a fault or fissure of some kind ,or would wthe ‘bottom’of it be as deep as the earth’s core ,i believe the th[ckness of the ‘crust’ varies at different points on the globe .
The magma chamber is in the upper crust, the magma reservoir is in the lower crust and the “hot spot” is due to a mantle plume. All of this is well above the core.
I ‘ll be perfectly happy if we all settle on an imaginary threat and solution that don’t involve undermining all of modern human society.
The deal killer is coolant management challenges.
1 Where to get sufficient water?
2 If not circulated out, water use is astronomical.
3 If not circulated out you are building a huge steam driven bomb
4 If circulated out, how do you cool down the coolant?
2 NASA is expert in the astronomical.
No, NASA stands for: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
They are a federal contracts administration agency for aircraft and spacecraft.
DARPA is another although they are military (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency)
The idea sounds goofy to me, but I would have thought they would heat exchange from the 600+ temps to a secondary steam loop at managible pressure and temp.
Geothermal is the only “renewable” (not really) energy that is dispatchable and very desirable.
Unfortunately , practical geothermal is not found at very many places. There was talk awhile back of tappping into the heat available everywhere underground, but very deep and not as hot. Have’nt heard anything since then, so perhaps it is not practical.
The problem with using the passive geothermal gradient, is that you have to drill pretty deep to reach a sufficiently high temperature.
http://geothermaleducation.org/GEOpresentation/images/img030.jpg
Oil wells are in the 5,000 ft plus range, many much deeper.
Pumping water down and getting steam back up (in a constant loop) produces the steam to run a turbine.
Geothermal power plants generally need temperatures of 240 to 300 °C. With a typical geothermal gradient, these temperatures are found at depths of 10-12 km (30-40,000 feet).
http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Terms/g/geothermal_gradient.aspx
Indonesia has 26 viable geothermal sites at last count, based on current technology.
Crispin,
can I have some of your Air miles please.
Do they still have a mud volcano linked to drilling?
There are a number of working plants in Iceland, and I remember hearing about a few in CA.
The sites where it is practical are few, but they do exist.
Besides the problem that David listed above, there’s also the fact that the area around Yellowstone is not heavily populated, so not too many users for the electricity being generated.
Believe it or not Iceland is an exporter of bananas grown in green houses heated with geothermal.
RAH
Now that’s hysterical. My jaw hit the deck at that one.
I wonder what the branding is like.
HotScot I guess they used to export them but now they just grow them for domestic consumption. Can’t compete anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_production_in_Iceland
RAH
That’s a real shame, I would love to boast I had eaten and Icelandic banana.
Green heads exploding across the planet!
HVDC lines should do the trick, like the Pacific DC Intertie
One was working in Switzerland but it was shut down after earthquake activity (minor) was noticed.
They would turn the heat into electricity.
It’s still going to end up in the atmosphere.
Very little heat winds up in the atmosphere…
http://geo-energy.org/images/basics_clip_image002_0003.jpg
This is so last century. The new binary geothermal power plants is the way to go.
..Very little heat winds up in the atmosphere…….
That’s odd. It doesn’t seem to fit with the thermodynamics lectures I remember. Where does it go, then?
Water is pumped into the geothermal source through an injection well. This boils the water. Steam is delivered to the turbine via a production well. The steam condenses as it cools. The condensed water flows into a cooling tank, where most of it gets re-injected. Some water vapor does get vented to the atmosphere, but this is not particularly hot by this time.
The heat source stays in the ground.
Dodgy…I would assume the correct answer is that it gets turned into work in the form of electricity.
rip
Astonishing that the human race is still so reliant on boiling water.
My countryman (James Watt) from my wife’s home town (Greenock) must be very proud.
But isn’t it about time we moved on?
Nope, we will keep boiling/condensing the most plentiful working fluid we have.
We tried other types but the the greenies keep complaining…ammonia, CFC’s, etc.
But, if the energy is transported from underground to above ground machines that subsequently convert the energy from thermal to mechanical to electrical back to mechanical (or maybe right back into thermal) won’t every conversion dump the lost energy as heat into the atmosphere, where it eventually gets lost to space?
It would seem to me that we are cooling the earth by stealing the subterranean heat and dumping it into space (as we use it along the way).
@ur momisugly David Middleton,
The steam condensers dump the heat …where?
rocketscientist
I stumbled on this site the other day https://www.lppfusion.com
And I know, fusion is like climate change, it’s always 10 years away.
But at least these guys seem to have moved away from the enduring reliance on steam to generate everything.
Direct fusion to electricity supply must be a more worthwhile route to explore than just building another steam engine.
Every Watt of power removed from the system, will eventually end up in the atmosphere –
Take Davids diagram –
1. Heat is lost as it circulates through the plant; conduction/radiation/convection.
2. Heat lost in cooling tower (clue in the name); Latent heat of evaporation/convection.
3. Heat is lost as work –
3.1 Electricity transports the energy to a place of work where it results in heat… lost to atmosphere.
3.2 Direct Heat Uses (heating up stuff) … lost to atmosphere.
Why exactly does our “Space Exploration Agency” have its fingers in this? Seems to me that considering the enormity of the cosmos and their mission to explore it they wouldn’t have the time or funding to be worrying about volcanoes on Planet Earth. Or have they lost sight of their mission and need new management to get them back on track and focused on their mission of Space Exploration?
Great question.
They “lost sight of their mission” during the 8 years of Obama, and beginning even before that. An entrenched bureaucracy takes years to purge, even in a technical activity. It only begins with “new management.” Be patient. NASA is but one of a myriad of agencies needing reform. Look to attrition via aging as a potentially optimum timeline given civil service inertia.
This observation comes to you from an engineer who spent a career in the belly of the beast in a former life.
I remember NASA getting involved in “Muslim out-reach programs” during Obama’s tenure.
Somehow religious diversity is important for orbital mechanics.
Doesn’t everything revolve about islam?
Do I need a s(n)arc tag?
SteveT
Well, they had the paper and pencils and they weren’t doing any space stuff. So, ya know…?
“Why exactly does our “Space Exploration Agency” have its fingers in this?”
Maybe “Space” was misspelled “Spacey” in the authorization act?
In past there were plans to drill in the Mohorowicz layer, so nothing new.
Andrija Mohorovicic (1857 – 1936) was a Croatian meteorologist and seismologist. He is best known for the eponymous Mohorovicic discontinuity .
AKA the Moho.
http://www.earthscrust.org.au/science/historic/img/moho.gif
Before I read this I was thinking of my college English class, and how I got a low grade for spelling “behavior” “behaviour.” But professor, the dictionary says chiefly British, not exclusively British. Maybe I having a father who was British prefer the look of the look of the “U.”
Tom Trevor
You had me, right until the last sentence.
🙂
A British usage expert (name forgotten) who generally approved of America’s simplified spelling ruefully noted that it would be a rare Englishman who would accept the loss of the richness of “savour.”
Don’t these guys watch Doctor Who? The Daleks nearly destroyed the Earth by drilling like this!
You’re forgetting the spider lady that laid her eggs at Earth’s core and was letting them out. No bubbling lava, mantle or iron to be seen!
Beep…. not Blob or Bob?
Hans-Georg
Beeb dear chap.
Abbreviation’ish, well sort of, or an almost acronym’ish term for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). And to really confuse you, Auntie as well.
Although ‘Beeb’ and ‘Auntie’ might be considered just affectionate nicknames.
Nevertheless, socialist, climate change apologists so Blob, perhaps, but Bob is reserved for our national builder.
Do you want a realistic plan to deal with a supervolcano? –Trigger the eruption sooner than nature has scheduled it. This means that more than likely it will be smaller and less destructive, and by knowing when the eruption will happen you can evacuate those in danger and store up enough food ahead of time to carry the current population through the lean years. You might even be able to pay for the entire effort without using any government money by selling “ringside” seats to the eruption…
Douglas Cohen
A bit like a pimple though. Squeeze it prematurely and your likely to end up with a boil on your nose.
More like a closed container of, say, water being heated by natural forces, getting hotter and hotter until it explodes. Cut a hole in it ahead of time, and the explosion will be smaller.
The other minor little issue I can think of is what material NASA thinks will work to drill magma. Steel, IIRC, tends to go all smooshy at that temperature, and I doubt any current material would retain sufficient strength to use as drill pipe.
They aren’t planning on drilling into the magma. Just close to it.
Tom Halla
Carbon composites, as used in F1 brake technology, amongst other high temperature conditions.
The Space Shuttle used these for brakes as well.
Carbon/carbon material is what you are referring to. It maintains tensile properties to 2000°C (3631 °F) Carbon fibers held within a carbon matrix. Made by pyrolizing (burning the crap out of) the epoxy matrix until its only carbon (requires several reinfusion and pyrolization cycles).
Interestingly when carbon/carbon pads are used against a carbon/carbon rotor disc they are too grippy and produce far to much braking force, requiring the calipers to pulse like anti-lock brakes. The resulting heat is dissipated in the visible spectrum as a series of bright flashing light pulses (like a strobe light). There are several videos on line showing motorcycles performing these light shows.
Excellent heat conductor as well. Which is why it works so well in brakes.
But, it doesn’t have good fracture toughness, so it probably wouldn’t be a good candidate for a rock drill head.
“But, it doesn’t have good fracture toughness, so it probably wouldn’t be a good candidate for a rock drill head.”
Not in itself, but allied to other materials it has the ability to transfer enormous torque, through light weights, to a drill tip of a more fracture resistant material.
The good thing about carbon composites is that they can be designed to perform specific tasks very efficiently, e.g. whilst F1 carbon brake disks and pads are used for braking, carbon suspension elements are used for an entirely different purpose and perform in an entirely different way.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of the ability of composites.
Nice to see the spelling highlighted. Civilisation depends on understanding each other.
A metre is a unit of length. A meter is a device for indicating something like voltage or the BS Quotient in some comments.
I will take advice on how to spell when the instructors learn to put ‘ly’ on adjectives.
Just a few of the long list of how much we really are divided by a common language in the context of automobiles/car and general tool terminology:
What we call the hood is called the bonnet in Britian. What the British call the hood is what we call the Convertible top.
Our battery is their accumulator
Our glove compartment is their cubby or cubby box.
Our firewall is their bulkhead
Our trunk is their boot.
Our transmission is their gearbox
Our generator is their dynamo
Our truck is their lorry
Our fender is their wing.
Our muffler is their silencer
Our idle is their tick over
Our wrench is their spanner
Our Phillips head screw driver is their cross head screw
Our shock absorber is their damper
Our gasoline is their petrol
Our rocker panels are their sills
It goes on and on.
The reason the British drink warm beer is because their refrigerator are made by Lucas (An inside joke for anyone that ever owned a Triumph automobile. God help you if you had double Stromberg carbs to keep synchronized.)
RAH
Our fag is their gay.
Similarities if one exercises the imagination, only slightly.
RAH
“God help you if you had double Stromberg carbs to keep synchronized.”
Once, on a Triumph Dolomite 1750. Never again. Godawful rubber diaphragm that kept splitting and couldn’t hold a steady vacuum when it was new anyway.
SU’s on a nice A series was my carb of choice.
Webers, ideally, but they didn’t work well on the Dolly either.
Thanks RAH, that has an almost poetic meter, …. er…metre?
RAH: “God help you if you had double Stromberg carbs to keep synchronized.”
My ’72 Lotus Elan had dual Strombergs. After I overhauled them, I had no problems. For the US market only, there was the “Stromberg bump” in the hood (bonnet) as Lotus used Webers in all other markets. I had more problems with Girling than either Lucas or Stromberg.
As a friend with a Lotus Europa once said: “English cars promote family values. Dad needs to stay home and work on them every Saturday so he gets to be with the kids”
P.S: I’m driving a Westfield now. It’s the best of both worlds, a sporting Brit chassis and reliable Japanese drive train.
” their refrigerator are made by Lucas”
Ah, good old Joseph Lucas, known to the British motorcycle fraternity as ‘the Prince of Darkness’ as a result of the performance of his lighting equipment.
You’ve never lived until you’ve got half way round a corner at eighty MPH and then had all the lights go out because the dipswitch has just shorted.
“RAH August 18, 2017 at 3:01 pm
Our shock absorber is their damper”
This is wrong too, from an engineering perspective. A shock absorber is the spring. The damper is commonly called a shock absorber.
Should it not be N.A.S.A. ? what ever happened to periods?
Acronyms rarely have periods — monthly or otherwise.
Periods used to be the standard, but modern usage says that capitalization is sufficient.
MarkW,
I don’t recollect ever seeing “RA.D.A.R” or “FOR.TRAN.”
Typically, if the letters are pronounced (U.S.), it gets periods. If it’s pronounced as a word (NAZI), it does not.
Missing periods! Very alarming? Or perhaps it is only that an entity experiencing a sufficient period of maturation might suffer loss of its periodic capacity and cease having periods.
John Bell
Environmental initiative. Saving money on ink.
The Beeb spells it Nasa for the same reason, online it saves electrons.
There seems to be a trend toward a “down style” in acronyms. E.g., “COBOL is now usually “Cobol.” But not all acronyms can be safely down-styled this way: e.g., “APL” and “PL/1.” They would make the reader do a double-take if downsized.
… if down-styled.”
Does one suppose that the USGS (which has been studying and closely monitoring Yellowstone for these many years) is aware of any of this? Why has it not suggested this “engineering” project, which would last for millenia? Perhaps because even to the untrained eye it is plainly ludicrous? I smell nothing more than a cynical foray into potential fresh streams of public revenue. The WH needs to inform the NASA administrator to get a grip.
Besides isn’t NASA supposed to be working on an expedition to Mars? You’d think that would keep them busy enough.
It might make sense to build a geothermal power plant at Yellowstone. But… The National Park Service and every environmental group in the world would probably oppose it.
“The National Park Service and every environmental group in the world WOULD oppose it.”
There. Fixed it for ya.
The Mars thing is just a “get out of town”thing in case the unlimited energy idea blows up in their face.
Sorry to be picky but your Notes to the Beeb are rude.
The Brits do things differently and American’s don’t own the English language. Us deniers are supposed to be the good guys, so take the high road and respect that they have their own ways.
Remember when people could take a little gentle ribbing? And finding offense wasn’t a spectator sport? Good times…
Maybe I should have put this at the beginning instead of the end of the post:
Of course, then someone would take offense at the use of the word “misspell”.
If I have to say I’m being sarcastic, it takes all the fun out of being sarcastic.
I’d say you were being “facetious” (deliberately silly) rather than “sarcastic” (cutting, slighting).
Could I be sarcastically facetious? Clearly, my sarcasm was intentionally silly… 😎
Reasonable Skeptic
“Us deniers are supposed to be the good guys”?
We deniers!
“Us deniers” is so ‘street’ dahling.
For goodness sake!
With that English spelling quirk, I thought he meant U.S. deniers… 😉
“It used to be the Queen’s English. But it’s become a stock company, and we own most the shares.”
Twain
There are hundreds of technical problems with the idea of drilling a well close to the magma chamber. I will discuss a couple of them.
Oil and gas wells are drilled into sediment or rock in locations where there is oil and gas. Oil and gas can only exist (over geological time) when the temperature is below certain values. Otherwise, the oil converts first to natural gas and then the natural gas breaks down into simpler compounds. Therefore, the technology for drilling ultra-deep wells is developed with temperatures where gas and oil can exist in mind. The oil and gas industry consider temperatures above 200 degree C as “ultra high temperature” wells and there are very few of those. I’m not aware of any commercial oil and gas wells that are even 250 degree C.
An deep well that is being drilled below a vertical depth of 30,000 feet takes a long time to drill because a large volume of rock must be removed. The top of the well is very large. The well gets “slimmer” as the depth gets deeper and more casing is set. Each casing must be smaller than the one before as it is lowered through the existing casing in the well. A deep exploratory oil or gas well drilled below 30,000 feet using conventional drilling technology can easily cost $50 to $100 million dollars or more. The well uses a large amount of steel, cement and expensive equipment and fluids to drill.
No one has technology to drill a well as deep and as “hot” as the ones NASA is talking about. It would require the development of different materials for the drill string and bit that can handle stress at higher temperatures. It would require different drilling “fluids”. Therefore, any cost estimate of NASA is not close to realistic.
Next, no one knows how many wells it would take. The idea I think would be to drill several wells as “injectors” and inject high pressure water into some wells. Other wells would “drain” this high pressure water and it would be circulated back to the surface as high pressure steam. Who knows if something like this could even be made to work at those depths and temperatures? Nor how many wells would be needed to “inject” water in order to cool the magma chamber. I would think it would take hundreds of wells to do this kind of thing if it worked at all. Each well costing hundreds of millions of dollars or perhaps even billions of dollars given it would likely require some kind of exotic materials to drill a well and “complete” it at such temperatures and pressures.
Bob G
Great post, but the blog is now a spelling bee.
Come on in, it’s fun, Friday night (well here in the UK) a few brews and a bit of mischief.
Seismic triggering of eruptions in the far field
Take care when ‘fracking’ about near a potential eruption.
David — Your concept illustration shows circulation of water(?) through rock strata from an injection well to the producing well. This would necessitate treating of this water for dissolved solids, (salts, sulfur, etc) in the heat recovery process. A multiple single well circulation system would likely fare better where a heat transfer liquid medium would be employed. Larger wellbores would likely be used to allow higher circulation rates of the fluid. The big hangup from my first look into the scheme would be the inherent geological instability and its effect on trying to operate deep wells. Here’s a link to an article on the typical earthquake swarming phenomena that occurs in and around Yellowstone. Not the type of environment conducive to well integrity.
http://www.newsweek.com/yellowstone-supervolcano-earthquake-swarm-update-eruption-risk-629272
And here’s another article which touches on the mechanism of the earthquakes, which would be a death sentence to any well in the vicinity of the event.
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/627941/yellowstone-supervolcano-montana-earthquake-july-6-2017
“A spokesperson for USGS said: “The location and focal mechanism solution of this earthquake are consistent with right-lateral faulting in association with faults of the Lewis and Clark line, a prominent zone of strike-slip, dip slip and oblique slip faulting trending east-southeast from northern Idaho to east of Helena, Montana, southeast of this earthquake.””
Lots of homework here to define the geology at depth where wells would be drilled in an inherently unstable environment.
This a NASA ‘pie in the sky’ (or perhaps ‘pounding money down a rat hole’) concept. Of course the seismology of the Yellowstone caldera would be problematic for any deep well boring/casing!
The Beeb used the concept to stimulate more dooms day ‘viewers’ and David highlighted the ludicrous nature of both the NASA concept and the Beeb’s alarmism!
RE: “Lots of homework here to define the geology at depth where wells would be drilled in an inherently unstable environment.” No. Do not waste more taxpayer money on this ‘drill under the caldera’ fantasy.
Yup! It is like fusion energy, only much worse. In 100 years it will still be 100 years away.
There are a multitude of reasons why the idea of drilling geothermal wells under Yellowstone’s magma chamber makes me think of the movie Armageddon. 😅
It doesn’t have to “work” to be worth it. If we can pull it off, we get a huge supply to cheap power and if it only delays an eruption by 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years, then that’s 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 extra years to think of a better solution.
AND … it’s RENEWABLE!
Sounds like they want to create something like the EPA mine spill , only much worse !!!!!
Dennis
“Sounds like they want to create something like the EPA mine spill , only much worse !!!!!”
Sounds like they want to create another EPA, which is worse than worse!
Why is the author upset by the fact that the BBC uses UK English spelling?
Still angry about that ‘taxation without representation’ thing, I suspect. And them burning the White House. That was rude.
Hell, I’m angry about taxation *with* representation.
I forgot to mention that one of my ancestors, Arthur Middleton of South Carolina, signed the Declaration of Independence. So… the Family Feud, goes back a couple of centuries… 😝
I’ve been a Yank traveling in Scotland a few times. I found that they generally “like” us because we kicked England’s butt and got away with it. 🙂 Though I did think it a bit strange that a pub in Inverness had Jack Daniel’s on tap.
Why do you think that the “author” is upset? Did it ever occur to you that he might just be a sarcastic smart ass?
David Middleton
You? Sarcastic?
Never.
Hey David! That’ll teach you to be clever and funny!
I would have thought the references to Armageddon might have been a pretty good clue that this post was infused with sarcastic humor… like all of my other posts… 😉
John Harmsworth
You cad. How dare you make those accusations of Mr. Middleton.
Pistols at dawn Sir!
As a former petroleum engineer, studying the problems (and there will be thousands) associated with developing this into a workable project would fun squared. BUT, the whole concept is dumb. The minuscule amount of heat removed, compared to what mother nature is generating and what would be further generated by whatever triggers a catastrophic event boggles the mind.
Oh c’mon! Just stop at the end of your first sentence. For once, there should be a gravy train for the engineers!
The language is called English. I think the people who live in England and speak the Queen’s English might say that we colonials are the ones who are misspelling words.
Indeed, dumbing down language phonetically just erases the origins of the word for people who can’t comprehend silent letters and how preceding letters change the following letters
It’s called lowering the bar.
I read somewhere that the “u” in words like “honor,” etc. was not in English originally, but was added by linguists and lexicographers who thought that because the words came from French they should retain the French spelling. So we Americans are the true originalists in this instance. (I believe there are other instances where British English has evolved (especially in pronunciation) and ours hasn’t, thereby staying truer to its roots.)
Masybe evrerbody hath ben mispelling woords!
John 3:16 in the (old) King’s English
Tyndale Bible (1534) John 3:16 For God so loveth the worlde yt he hath geven his only sonne that none that beleve in him shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.
Gunga Din
Excellent!
And so the English language evolves and grows.
Who needs Esperanto?
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If you want the ferry to come, strike the gong.
Perfect.