POSTMODERN PETROLOGY : ROCKS TOO YOUNG TO VOTE

In geology's long-lost golden age, students were taught that rocks are just ceramics that happen to have been made by  God.  Now, from the young island chain of Hawaii comes news of a  rock type far younger still,  that embodies deep time on a scale shallow enough to establish  a new foundation for the Anthropocene geological column:

An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record

Patricia L. Corcoran, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7, pcorcor@ uwo.ca; Charles J. Moore, Algalita Marine Research Institute, Long Beach, California, 90803-4601, USA; and Kelly Jazvac, Dept. of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7

published in the Journal of the Geological Society of America, reports on a new sort of conglomerate formed by the action of lava on plastic debris in shoreline sediments:

THE NORTHERN LIGHTS HAVE SEEN STRANGE SIGHTS

ANNALS OF SELF-REFERENCE : " THE FILM WORKS ITS MAGIC "

The denialati are not the only ones 

to suffer irony malfunctions:

WHO'S SUPPOSED  TO  DISENCHANT THE TV AUDIENCE ABOUT THE DISCONNECT

 BETWEEN  POLEMIC  FILM MAKING  

AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE ?

VISCOUNT MONCKTON'S CRAZY IVAN

THE  LORDS -A- LEAPING  SEASON  IS  UPON  US !
Viscount Mockton,  self-styled "hydrodynamics advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher," and "Chairman of the Blue Riband Commission on the Trans-Atlantic speed record"  has gone ballistic with a WUWT stemwinder entitled  The Economics of the Madhouse, in which he avers  the UK power grid may soon:

" Install 1.2  GW of  new nuclear  capacity  each  year   ( the equivalent of two nuclear submarines ).  But --  insanity upon insanity-- the low-spec civilian-grade reactors they are going to buy from Hitachi cost six times as much as the high-spec, military-grade Rolls Royce reactors in our Trident submarines."

This has left submariners chuckling silently but deeply,  as the largest extant marine propulsion reactors are rated under 200 megawatts thermal, and a very big, very fast sub gets enough steam from a sixty megawatt (.06 GW) pair to leap half out of the water as shown above.

No 600 megawatt propulsion reactors exist, and the .18 GW reactors that power carriers and other capital ships are physically too large to fit within a sub hull, a fact that soon impresses itself on technology S-2's to  Cold War  novelists obliged to  crawl around the engineering spaces in question.

My late coauthor must be smiling at Monckton's modest proposal, for while the thunder of  three quarters of a million shaft horsepower might scare the planckton and pop the ears of sonarmen for 20,000 leagues in all directions, it would provide  turns enough to scare the hell out of the craziest Ivan in the seven seas.

VISIT SUNNY SIBERIA , LAND OF HAIL AND METEORITES

Climate change adventure tourists and Siberiaks run for their lives as golf ball hail bombards the banks of the Ob:

PYRAMIDOLOGY IN THE PITCH PATCH

Have climate activists underestimated the enterprise of  

Calgary's  Tarsandinistas?

There is more to Canadian enthusiasm for  geoengineering than carbon taxation  anxiety or  a desire to embrace global warming to escape the region's  Goddawful winters. 

Besides hosting Earth's largest tar sand deposit, the giant  Athabasca field,  Alberta boasts the world's sourest gas wells, and is awash in the inevitable by-product of high-sulfur oil & gas production: more sulfur.

Even where glaciers have ground the  Canadian Shield flat as a flapjack,  Athabascans do not lack for ski hills. The face of the great white north is pimpled with giant yellow piles of elemental sulfur from  gas and bitumen oil production  

Albertans tired of trying to export into a glutted global brimstone market where among the first to hail  Paul Crutzen's proposal to boost stratospheric albedo with megaton injections of aerosols at high latitudes, for his call to solve the problem of Anthropocene climate change has led to a plenum of schemes for spraying sulfur aloft using everything from artillery and air tankers to balloon-borne fire hoses stretching to the  stratosphere.

By far the cheapest of all these dicey schemes uses what  Alberta has in abundance at an ideal latitude for emulating the cooling effect of volcanoes. Sulfur dioxide clouds are the basis of geoengineering 101, and the corporate Pharaohs of the  Pitch Patch  produce enough sulfur to pile up a  Great Pyramid a year for several dynasties to come.

All carbon taxation activists need to deter geoengineering research is to persuade the Tarsandinista elite that they can instead achieve profitable immortality the old fashioned way!

Egyptian tourism is tanking as global temperatures and Islamist tempers rise, but the brutal summer heat is setting the stage for a takeover of the  King Tut Tourism franchise by a cooler country.  Canada could reap  Pharaonic profits by renaming the  Athabasca River the Black Nile and erecting a theme park featuring tastefully tawny full-size sulfur replicas of every pyramid and temple from Giza to  Abu Simbel.

Sulfur concrete is a mature technology- just add sand to molten brimstone and pour  like popsicles into obelisk molds.  When sulfur Sphinxes and Memnonic colossi can be banged out for a pittance, why blow a million dollars on a few minutes of space tourism when the same money can turn you into an instant  Ozymandias?

What's not to like about a forty foot  statue of yourself gazing out for eternity over the awestruck heads of Canadian Disney-goers!

If  Northumbrian coal barons, ( and the odd Earl ) can enlist earth art in the service of their polemics , why not the Great White North?

STRANGE BREW AT THE AGU

Willard A. Watts,  Science Prohibitionist  extraordinaire
has brought the gimlet eye of climate skepticism to bear

on the beer supply of geophysics.
He writes from the Fall AGUmeeting:

"The poster sessions seemed to have doubled in size… it might have been due to the free beer provided by AGU:

IMAGINE THE WAILING IF HEARTLAND PROVIDED FREE  ALCOHOL AT THEIR  ICCC CONFERENCES AT SESSIONS"

Yet Watts uttered nary a wail as he ordered free drinks from the free bar at Heartland's first ICCC conference, nor did he and fellow WCTU ( Wassailing Coolista Temperance Union ) members cry in their beer as they bellied up to the free bar at Heartland's last ICCC conference, staged at that bastion of sobriety, 

                 The Mandalay Bay Casino on the Vegas  Strip

 So raise a glass of Yuletide cheer to Watts for AGU snapshots that testify the California drought has raised a powerful  thirst:

THE ICEBERG COMETH

HAVING SAILED THESE WATERS BEFORE, I'M SINCERELY FLATTERED BY WHAT FOLLOWS,  

WHERE can Tony Watts TURN WHEN TIM BALL RUNS OUT OF  Mein Kampf  quotes?  TRY  BOB TISDALE:

IF FANS OF Stalin & THE KAISER CRY GODWIN MIT UNS!, ADMIRAL BOB CAN TURN TO COMMODORE MUELLER'S vergeltungsflotte:

THREE CENTURIES OF HOGWASH