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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Ed the Volcano

Everyone here is talking about the volcano.

There are even a few fairly good jokes running around the internet:
"It was the dying wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes should be spread all over Europe."

I'm not sure, but I think on the Grand Coolness Scale of Science, volcanoes have to be second or first. Neck and neck with dinosaurs, at least. Maybe not every kid wants to be a volcanologist when he grows up, but at least there still are some volcanoes.

For our small but interesting "All Scientists are at Least Slightly Crazy" file, I remember watching a nature show on tv when I was a kid that featured a segment in which a pair of geologists in Hawaii went out onto an active lava flow (that looked none too steady underfoot to me), holding a sheet of corrugated roofing material as a heat shield and with nothing more than asbestos gloves on, scooping lava samples into an empty coffee can with the claw end of a hammer. I couldn't decide at the time if it made me want to march right out and become a volcanologist, or if it put me off going to Hawaii for the rest of my life.

As Dale Price pointed out on FB a few minutes ago, it seems that the journalists of the world have grown weary of typing out "Eyjafjallajokull". I suppose it is better for print/net writers. Imagine being the guy in front of the camera trying to pronounce it.

2 comments:

  1. Dear HJMW
    Dincher know the prosaic truth?
    The eruption's all due to Global warming
    Which is driven by overpopulation
    Which is driven by The POPE
    (despite anglosphere rank-and-file catholics, even some bishops? having seen the light).
    So down withe Pope and save the planet.

    Sound daft?

    3 weeks ago class of educated
    adults, all happily included tsanamis (Pacific) and earthquakes(Haiti) in manmade GW.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I read the other day (no citation; forgot where I read it) the official US gummint reference to Eyjafjallajokull is now "E15". There are 16 letters in Eyjafjallajokull. The first one is "E". Ergo, E15.

    I liked that.

    (And I would have thought that a Star Trek afficionado would have been a vulcanologist almost by definition.)

    Cheers,

    -John-

    ReplyDelete

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