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Merged 8.8 quake in Sendai, Japan

Travis said:
Man if that reactor does meltdown it will be a huge blow to efforts to get us off of coal and oil power.
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So much for saying they had several hours of back up battery capable cooling. It would seem that has not been sufficient.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Not exactly. A cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kg which I believe is about 200 pounds more than a ton.
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Well, you silly Americans keep referring to a tonne as a "metric ton" which might be the cause of the confusion. :p

The metric system for length, volume and mass was deliberately related and based on water, hence why a mililitre (cubic centimeter) of water weighs a gram, a litre (cubic decimeter) weighs a kilogram, and a kilolitre (cubic meter) weighs a tonne.

The correlation isn't exact but is pretty close for fresh water at 4 degrees C, and close enough for practical purposes (at 20 degrees C 1 litre of water weighs 0.9971kg).

This may come as a surprise to people who don't use the metric system, but in countries where the metric system is used this is quite common knowledge - something we learn in school as little kids.

It's actually quite useful for determining a very rough ballpark figure for all sorts of things that are predominantly made up of water such as bottles of milk, softdrink bottles, etc.
 
My thoughts about this whole thing are "poor Japan" and "nature is scary".

The physics that allows a quake like that to do so much damage is insane. Very humbling for us humans.
 
Travis said:
Man if that reactor does meltdown it will be a huge blow to efforts to get us off of coal and oil power.
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It will be a setback. Possibly a big one.

But the math and science will always be in our favor. They always have been. On a municipal or national scale, wind and solar aren't options. Fossil fuels are dirty and carbon intensive. Nuclear is king of the hill, all we need is to get people to look up and see it.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Define 'meaningful'.
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Well at 25 degrees C a cubic meter of pure water weighs 997.044kg whereas a cubic meter of sea water weighs 1,021.98kg. A difference of 24.936kg or around 2.5%. It's a meaningful difference for precise scientific calculations, but when discussing, in general terms, the momentum of a Tsunami wave, it's insignificant.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
OMFSM, they just showed a car floating in the tsunami and it's wiper blades were operating. I know people must have been in lots of those vehicles, but that's the second one I've seen that clearly had people in it when the wave hit. The other one was moving and the video showed the wave overtaking it.
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I think I just watched the same clip. There was a driver trying to reverse and turn out of trouble, unfortunately the road was running parallel to the oncoming wavefront. I'm hoping somehow the driver made it out alive.

Compus
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
That would mean the entire Earth's crust slipped over the axis wouldn't it? I don't think that is the scenario.
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Just reverse your thinking. The axis moved not the crust. Similar result were reported in 2005. The Earth slowed its rotation by a 1/12 of a second
 
Please keep your posts civil/polite, on topic and address the argument vs attack the arguer.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Locknar
 
BenBurch said:
As a result salt water ships on the Great Lakes behave very differently in various sea states than they would in the media they were designed for.
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I hadn't thought of that.

I know the sound of the surf is different between fresh and saltwater because of the density. The waves break differently too.
 
Travis said:
Actually the problem at Chernobyl was that they couldn't lower the control rods fast enough.
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Not true. When they eventually tried to the scram the reactor, the rods halted without fully entering the reactor as they should have. It's not that they didn't lower fast enough, it's that there was already damage inside the reactor, because of the way it had been operated to that point. Damage that prevented the rods from full penetration. The rest is history.
 
MG1962 said:
Just reverse your thinking. The axis moved not the crust. Similar result were reported in 2005. The Earth slowed its rotation by a 1/12 of a second
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Please MG, give us credit. No one, myself or WC as well I'm sure, think the crust slipped. I was trying to make a joke about his semantics. Clearly I failed.
 
Luckily I am in Canada with my son who is Japanese. My family in Japan are alright. My son's grandparents are in Tochigi and closest to the epicenter. They've had their power knocked out, but are otherwise alright. I can't believe the images I am seeing on TV. Even compared to Thailand and Indonesia, the scale of the tsunami is just frightening. It was terrible seeing people in cars trying to flee as the deluge of water and debri approached them, but the worst was seeing people atop buildings that were just swept away.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Please MG, give us credit. No one, myself or WC as well I'm sure, think the crust slipped. I was trying to make a joke about his semantics. Clearly I failed.
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Thats alright I am a retard when it comes to humour on the internet. So you were really up against it from the start
 
gumboot said:
I can't believe the footage of the Tsunamis. It's just incredible. Horrific, terrifying, and incredible. I think one of the most disturbing I saw was a tide of black water, littered with debris, slowly swallowing what looked like farmland. As with the earlier footage I saw of waves coming ashore, what I think is most chilling is how it doesn't actually look that dangerous. It's just some slow-moving water, right? And then it hits something solid, and just keeps going, and carries the solid thing with it, be it a car, a bridge, or an entire building. And it just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. Entire suburbs barely seem to slow it down.
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I don't remember if it was you or someone else who said earlier in the thread that you hadn't really seen any footage of tsunamis before. If it was you, maybe you should check out the videos from the 2004 tsunami. There were 4-5 different videos that I just couldn't stop watching back then. They're not as easy to find now, but this one has clips from the two most horrifying videos I saw.

You can skip to around 2:18 if you want to get right into it.

I still have only seen a couple of videos from the recent tsunami in Japan, so I don't know how it compares to Indonesia 2004. Maybe there are even more extreme videos from Japan.
 
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