Tourner autour du pot

Tourner autour du pot don't move be good boy

Why are there continent-sized 'blobs' in the deep Earth?They're among the largest physical structures on the planet – an...
23/07/2022

Why are there continent-sized 'blobs' in the deep Earth?

They're among the largest physical structures on the planet – and they're a total mystery.
I
In a strange corner of our solar system live two alien blobs.

With sprawling, amorphous bodies the size of continents, these oddities are thought to spend their time lying in wait for their food to rain down upon them – then simply absorbing it.

But their natural habitat is, if anything, even more unusual than their diet. It could be described as "rocky" – all around, there are exotic minerals in unknown shades and forms. Otherwise it's fairly barren, except for a glittering sea in the far distance – one so large, it holds as much water as all of Earth's oceans put together.

Every day the "weather" is the same: a balmy 1827C (3321F), with some areas of high pressure – equivalent to around 1.3 million times the amount at the Earth's surface. In this crushing environment, atoms become warped and even the most familiar materials start to behave in eccentric ways – rock is flexible like plastic, while oxygen acts like a metal.

But this blistering wonderland is no extra-terrestrial planet – and the blobs aren't strictly wildlife. It is, in fact, the Earth itself – just very, very deep underground.

In particular, the setting in question is the lower mantle – the layer of rock that sits just above Earth's centre, the core. This mostly-solid mass is another world, a place that's swirled and flecked with a kaleidoscope of crystals, from diamonds – there are around a quadrillion tonnes of them in the mantle in total – to minerals so elusive, they don't exist on the surface.

The massive volcano that scientists can't findIt was the biggest eruption for 700 years but scientists still can't find ...
21/07/2022

The massive volcano that scientists can't find

It was the biggest eruption for 700 years but scientists still can't find the volcano responsible.

It was 10 October 1465 – the day of the hotly anticipated wedding of King Alfonso II of Naples. He was set to marry the sophisticated Ippolita Maria Sforza, a noblewoman from Milan, in a lavish ceremony. As she entered the city, the crowds gasped. Before them was a sight so strange and beautiful, it was like nothing they had ever seen before.

Alas, they weren’t staring at the bride to be – they were looking up at the sky. Though it was the middle of the day, the Sun had turned a deep azure, plunging the city into eerie darkness. Rumours began to spread – was it a solar eclipse? As the early dusk lingered on, others suggested it could be a consequence of the weather. After all, they’d had a particularly wet autumn and some claimed they had seen a thick, humid fog rise up into the sky.

This was just the beginning. In the months that followed, European weather went haywire. In Germany, it rained so heavily that corpses surfaced in cemeteries. In the town of Thorn, Poland, the inhabitants took to travelling the streets by boat. In the unrelenting rain, the castle cellars of Teutonic knights were flooded and whole villages were swept away.

Four years later, Europe was hit by a mini ice age. Fish froze in their ponds. Trees failed to blossom and grass didn’t grow. In Bologna, Italy, heavy snow forced locals to travel with their horses and carriages along the frozen waterways.

Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcanoWith an eruption brewing, it may be the only way to prevent the e...
19/07/2022

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.

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.”

Would a supervolcano eruption wipe us out?Throughout our planet’s history, massive volcanic eruptions have devastated li...
17/07/2022

Would a supervolcano eruption wipe us out?

Throughout our planet’s history, massive volcanic eruptions have devastated life. Could one bring an end to human civilisation?

In the Bay of Naples, Europe's most notorious giant is showing signs of reawakening from its long slumber.

Campi Flegrei, a name that aptly translates as "burning fields", is a supervolcano. It consists of a vast and complex network of underground chambers that formed hundreds of thousands of years ago, stretching from the outskirts of Naples to underneath the Mediterranean Sea. About half a million people live in Campi Flegrei's seven-mile-long caldera, which was formed by vast eruptions 200,000, 39,000, 35,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The past 500 years have been fairly peaceful ones for Campi Flegrei. There have been no eruptions at all since 1538, and that was a comparatively small event that resulted in the formation of the "New Mountain", Monte Nuovo. But recent events suggest that this period of quiescence may be coming to an end.

How Taipei discovered an active volcano on its doorstepWhen Taiwan's capital discovered an active volcano on its doorste...
15/07/2022

How Taipei discovered an active volcano on its doorstep

When Taiwan's capital discovered an active volcano on its doorstep, it found itself hastily setting up a system to monitor it for dangerous signs.

Steam billows from cracks in rocks stained a sickly yellow-green. Pools of cloudy water bubble like a pan on the boil. The sharp stench of sulphur laces the air.

This smouldering moonscape is Xiaoyoukeng, an impressive collection of steam vents in Yangmingshan National Park, an 11,000-hectare (42 sq-mile) expanse of hiking trails lying within Taipei's city limits.

Xiaoyoukeng is the best place to get up close to the park's geothermal activity – it is pitted with fumaroles (natural vents in the Earth's surface that allow gases to escape like steam from a kettle's spout) and hot springs, some just a metre (39in) or so from the paths.

For decades, most residents of the Taiwanese capital simply thought they were lucky to have such a striking national park on their doorstep. Geologists knew about the Datun (sometimes spelt Tatun) Volcano Group, a body of around 20 peaks, in the park, but they largely thought that the fumaroles and hot springs were simply remnants of its fiery past. With no historical records of an eruption, the accepted view was that the group was extinct and no longer posed a risk.

Why the US military is listening to shrimpMilitary sonar can have a serious effect on some ocean animals. Could natural ...
08/07/2022

Why the US military is listening to shrimp

Military sonar can have a serious effect on some ocean animals. Could natural noises produced by sealife be used to locate undersea threats?

Whale skeletons stand guard around the coastline of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, a stark reminder of the damaging effects of military sonar. Sonar from ships and submarines is thought to be one of the contributing factors to whale strandings, confusing the whales' own sonar and casuing them to beach themselves on the shore.

This whale-unfriendly technology, however, may soon have a rival. Lori Adornato, a project manager at US military research agency Darpa, believes we could detect submarines by paying more attention to natural sound than blasting out pulses of sonar.

"At the moment we treat all this natural sound as background noise, or interference, which we try to remove," says Adornato. "Why don't we take advantage of these sounds, see if we can find a signal?"

What if the internet was run by women?Our online experience would be very different without men in charge, but it wouldn...
04/07/2022

What if the internet was run by women?

Our online experience would be very different without men in charge, but it wouldn't necessarily be a utopia.

It was a sputtering start (the system crashed before Kline's full message of "Login" could be transmitted) but both sides cheered: it was the first time two computers had communicated virtually. And it marked the birth of what would become the internet.

Back then it was called the Arpanet – a communications system conceived by the US Department of Defense to allow information to be shared between computers on a network. Some fifty years on, the internet has matured from an experimental military infancy consisting of just four computers into a civilian and commercial adulthood that forms a vast global cyberspace.

Address

проспект Правди, 47
Kyiv
04208

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Tourner autour du pot posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category