The VC Bar


Have fun and don’t forget to tip the barman 😉

1,773 thoughts on “The VC Bar

  1. Grims has given some weird signals. The weather was fair past 24 hours. Not much of the signal was registered in IMO tables. What could have been the cause?

    28.04.2020 09:27:41 64.483 -17.463 6.5 km 0.5 99.0 12.6 km NW of Grímsfjall
    28.04.2020 02:24:07 64.502 -17.347 2.7 km 0.8 99.0 11.4 km NNW of Grímsfjall
    27.04.2020 20:19:13 64.427 -17.202 3.6 km 0.2 99.0 4.2 km NE of Grímsfjall
    27.04.2020 20:18:47 64.444 -17.167 1.9 km 0.5 99.0 6.7 km NE of Grímsfjall
    27.04.2020 20:18:42 64.429 -17.215 5.0 km 0.2 99.0 3.9 km NE of Grímsfjall

      • Yes, rockfall and or snow/ice melting is plausible. Yesterday this type of signal occured once more.
        I saw some pictures from the area. I had no idea cliffs up there are that exposed.

  2. “At the moment radioactivity generates about 30TW in the earth.”
    Thanks Albert! I’ve long wondered about the Earth’s internal heat generation.

  3. Interesting….

    “Here we use a recently developed trajectory modelling approach7 that is designed to isolate secular tectonic motions from the daily GNSS time series to show that the 2010 Maule, Chile (moment magnitude 8.8) and 2011 Tohoku-oki, Japan (moment magnitude 9.0) earthquakes were preceded by reversals of 4–8 millimetres in surface displacement that lasted several months and spanned thousands of kilometres. Modelling of the surface displacement reversal that occurred before the Tohoku-oki earthquake suggests an initial slow slip followed by a sudden pulldown of the Philippine Sea slab so rapid that it caused a viscoelastic rebound across the whole of Japan.”

  4. Latest England excess deaths (delayed data)

    And projected to date for UK as tweeted by Chris Giles Economic Editor at The Financial Times

    For a total of 48,500 excess UK deaths projected by yesterday.

    • Which fits with Actuarial Projection.

      Continuous Mortality Investigation
      Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

      Our analysis suggests that there could have been in the range of 38,000 to 45,000 cumulative excess registered deaths in England & Wales by 27 April 2020; and applying the same method to the PHE figure for UK deaths suggests 41,000 to 48,000 excess registered deaths in the UK.

      These calculations are sensitive to the assumed relationship between the PHE and CMI figures, particularly for the “later” period in Table 3. The calculations do not allow for deaths which may have occurred by 27 April 2020 but were not reported by then.

      There is currently an average delay of 3-4 days in registering a death so registered by 27th April captures actual total up to about 23rd. Adding in likely deaths up to today puts it in line with the Chris Giles estimate.

  5. To fellow readers, just a reminder that the massive quake which devastated the minoan empire has struck again in Crete ( less the 1 mag ). Virus or no virus , nature and volcanonism goes on.

  6. Good run at Pahala, including 3.3 and 3.2. The quake at 10:09:09 might be the shallowest in the area that I can remember.

    2020-05-04 15:51:59 2 34.2
    2020-05-04 15:23:06 2 36.9
    2020-05-04 14:46:16 2.2 34.5
    2020-05-04 13:00:40 2 32.1
    2020-05-04 12:23:29 2.5 30.2
    2020-05-04 12:09:58 2.2 31.7
    2020-05-04 12:05:04 2.1 32.3
    2020-05-04 12:03:18 2.1 31.1
    2020-05-04 11:50:19 3.3 31.8
    2020-05-04 11:46:15 3.2 32.6
    2020-05-04 11:45:14 2.6 32.6
    2020-05-04 11:11:55 2 33.8
    2020-05-04 10:24:42 1.9 34.7
    2020-05-04 10:09:09 1.8 27.9
    2020-05-04 10:05:29 2.2 32.1
    2020-05-04 09:19:02 2.2 35.1
    2020-05-04 07:02:32 2 32.4

  7. Flaming Hot Cheetos and Orange Tick Tack Volcano. Pretty much what it would do to my stomach.. flame or not.

    • Thank you for that link.

      Happens I’ve been trying to counter claims by a black-hole denialist that there’s only two massive bodies in system. He cannot see that the very different ‘years’ of the two visible stars means there’s a three-body scenario with a lot of non-luminous mass…

      • NOTE: Not an astro guy.

        It would seem to me that the Doppler measurements of the two stars should make that stand out like a sore thumb.

        • As in so many other fields, such a ‘True Believer’ (‘TB’) will not, Not, NOT be swayed by contrary evidence, however over-whelming…

          Been a few years, but I was thrown off a previously civil EziBoard-era forum for daring to ask a purblind AGW-Denialist what evidence he *would* accept.

          Entire Greenland ice-cap sloughing, perhaps ??

          It spawned a bar-brawl. Although I’d kept my cool, the Mod apologetically barred me rather than the Perps, as too many were sponsors…

    • Thanks, Albert. Do you think the Black Hole ‘photograph’ project will take a look at this one in the near future?

    • The astounding part…


  8. Anybody having an issue with the seismometers at HVO? I see all them stuck at 23:36 on the 7th.

    • That is remarkably understated.

      Also, it showed, but did not seem to mention the ‘ghost forests’ created when coastal strip elevated by the locked subduction zone suddenly found itself a metre or five lower. Just in time for the first tsunami to come rolling in…

    • Actually, my admonition is don’t “be” there. If you can live there and manage to not be there when things go nuts, that’s fine. Just remember you are going to have a LOT of competition while trying to get out of the way. (and not a whole lot of time to do so)

      Moving to a more geologically secure location is actually the wisest move.

      • For those who plan to evacuate UP their building to escape the waves… that’s fine, but you are going to be there for quite a time until help (or supplies) arrive… providing your building can withstand the waves.

        • Hi, Lurk! Glad to see You are still on the planet…… When Florida Man hits the news i always think of You… Sending Smiles across the Miles, motsfo

          • Which makes us wonder: if there is such a thing as Florida Man, can we also define Alaska Woman? I envisage a little old lady with a rifle facing off a big bear..


    Albert do you remeber Steven Callahans incredible castaway in 1982?
    South of the canary islands his sailboat collapsed and sank and she took refuge his inflatable life raft.
    Callahan was at mercy of wind and seacurrents alone in his little raft thousands of miles from land.

    Steven Callahan survived for 78 days out to sea, living on mahi mahi ( dorado fish ) and seagulls that he speared. Freshwater he got from two solar saltwater – stills
    Constantly thirsty and hungry and in hands of seacurrents and winds… but he surivived.
    He was picked uo in west indies after 78 days to sea.
    Still his inflatable cocoon travelled over 40 kilometers every day, without engine.

    “In addition to the little ecosystem developing around my raft, I am constantly surrounded by a display of natural wonders. The acrobatic dorados perform beneath ballets of fluffy white clouds. The clouds glide across the sky until they join at the horizon to form whirling, flaming sunsets that are slowly doused by nightfall. Then, as if the sun had suddenly crashed, thousands of glistening galaxies are flung out into deep black night. There is no bigger sky country than the sea. But I cannot enjoy the incredible beauty around me. It lies beyond my grasp, taunting me. Knowing it can be stolen from me at any time, by a Dorado or shark attack or by a deflating raft, I cannot relax and appreciate it. It is beauty surrounded by ugly fear. I write in my log that it is a view of heaven from a seat in hell.”

    It was a really wet, really salty and really ugly situation he was in…
    And he coud have gotten stuck for years there if he was on the circulating currents in Sargasso Ocean never bringing him to land.

    • The open tropical seas are also very barren…Im supprised how many fishes he caught.
      The tropical deep ocean are the largest desert on earth, you cannot drink seawater
      and there is hardly any fish to eat and no shade outside the raft.
      Steven Callahan became an invisible dot… in an endless expanse of blue.

      • IIRC, other ‘castaways’ who survived the first week or so plus eg Thor Heyerdahl remarked that their craft gradually became a ‘truck stop’ for wildlife. Small fishes took to shoaling in the shade, weed grew, attracted small crustaceans, shrimp etc and more fish. Predators showed up, an entire micro-ecology developed…

        Combined with slopes generating ‘overturn’, this is why sea-mounts, with von Kármán vortex street, fringing reef or atoll cap, may have a thriving biome compared to the surrounding waters.

  10. To Albert regarding ‘Alaskan Woman’: You are thinking about my Daughter in Law who slammed a glass door into the snout of a bear on her porch as she was between the bear and the kids…. Gun was too far away. 🙂

      • Or conversely, not a lot of People ..
        just kidding..
        When I was in Anchorage a few years back, there was a
        bear attack just outside of town. Here in my part of NE Oregon we have black bear, wolves,cougars,and deer lots of deer..So when the wild comes calling you have to be aware of this, Oh I forgot Turkeys. My little Maltipoo hates them. but won’t go off the deck to bark.

        • Black bears get into stuff but rarely attack people.California has about the same animals as Oregon, maybe more snakes and lizards because it is hotter.

          • More concerned about rattlesnakes than bears. especially up in the rimrock.
            When I lived on the coast we had a garbage can raiding sow bear in our neighborhood. she had two cubs who were helping mommy raid the garbage.
            Kept our under lock and key, the state live trapped them with some effort. Seems they were gourmands -no roadkilled deer -they wanted beef. finally got’em into the trailer with a 1/4 beef and
            a side of apples..
            She was tagged and knew the drill.
            “Home, Jeeves.” and they went back to the Elk river drainage..


    Albert look at this!
    Looks like Hawaiis Pūhāhonu volcano had magma at 1700 degrees C
    Archean hot magma

    ”Chemical analysis of rock collected from the volcano revealed a higher concentration of an olivine mineral called forsterite than we’ve ever seen in a Hawaiian volcano. This mineral indicates magma on the higher end of the temperature. calculations, the magma clocked in at 1,703 degrees Celsius (3,097 degrees Fahrenheit) – hotter than any other Hawaiian basalt ”


    Hawaii is the clearest and bluest ocean on the planet. Its in the center of the ”North Pacific Gyre” very there is hardly any nutrients at all.
    Clear and Blue lacking plankton and nutrients.

    The surface layer of the Hawaii North Pacific gyre has very clear waters with hardly any nutrients.
    The extraordinary clarity of these waters allows sunlight to penetrate deep into the water column and support photosynthesis below 100 meters in the water column.

    The visibility in Hawaii are very good extremely good. Liquid saphire it really is. But its also a ”watery desert”
    Dive visibility in Hawaii can be 80 meters or even more.

    This is the atolls north of Kauai

  13. This is real speed, NOT slowed down
    Its absoutley crazy, continetal summer
    supercell thunderstorms are the most prolific lightning producers on Earth. The updrafts are very strong in souch storms. This is the most spectacular thunderstorm video on youtube

    • The ‘real speed’ sections are impressive. The ‘time-lapse’ sections are terrifying…

      My Mum’s Mum was terrified of thunderstorms, as they looked and sounded too much like her wartime gunfire, bombing etc. Mum determined us kids should not be trained such. When autumn storms began, she’d unplug the TV’s power and VHF down-feed, haul back the curtains and have us time the flash-to-bang intervals. Yes, five ‘mississippis’ to the mile !!

      There are several excellent sites for real-time monitoring of lightning strikes.

      FWIW, the back-ground RF hum from the global total has been identified as a fair ‘thermometer’. Yes, it rises and falls cyclically, but trend is upwards. IIRC, it tracks CO2….

      • Spent a goodly portion of my life on the ground and aviation dodging Thunderstorms. fondly remember diving into a ditch off of the family Model A John Deere-pulling a set of spike harrows and a storm came up didn’t make to the shed-no chance, so I shut down dove into a ditch hunkered down, and waited for it to pass, For a while it was FLASH! BANG! the Tractor was tallish with the harrows a nice grounding so I got as far away and low as possible.. Got good and soaked too -they don’t call’em “gully warshers”for nothing .(Note pronunciation).

        • May have mentioned this before…

          My wife was in hospital (again) when a humongous strike hit the ridge-line conductor on lower adjacent building.

          All the perched sea-birds ( Lesser Black-back Gulls AKA ‘Flying Beach Rats’) were stunned. They slid down the shallow roof, rolled over the gutters, fell two stories to surrounding paths & lawn.

          Un-maintained power went off for that ‘zone’ of site. A zillion car, fire and instrument alarms began squawking.

          The first birds to recover decided it was smorgasbord time, began pecking at the rest…

  14. 2 unusual earthquakes happened yesterday at Kilauea, unusual because they were very long, with a gradual onset, low frequencies and one was double-peaked. They happened at 2:33-2:37 and 17:03-17:08 UTC. Some observations:

    Thinking that they would be similar, I compared the strongest event to the LP earthquakes that happened on April 21, to find that there are actually some differences.

    April 21 events had lower frequencies, mostly below 5 hertzs (classifying as LP), had spikes, and while coming from the summit of Kilauea they were deeper (registered in TRAD seismometer on Mauna Loa).

    Yesterday’s, May 25, had low frequency but not enough to classify as an LP, lacks spikes and was very shallow (not registered in TRAD), in fact both seem to come right from Halema’uma’u, so probably related to the shallow Halema’uma’u reservoir or the hydrothermal system.

    Captures of both eq types:

      • The duration suggest this isn’t rock. A frequency of 5 Hz is a wavelength of around 1 km in rock, or 300 meters in water. The 300 meters rings a bell since that is around the size of the lake, isn’t it? How about a fumarole explosion under the lake?

        • There has been a brief drumbeat swarm overnight, HVO locates it at 8-13 km deep, these happened a few times in 2019 but I hadn’t noticed that the events making them up are LPs. Here is the strongest part of the sequence:

          It reminds of the April 21 earthquakes I had just mentioned, probably same origin, at ~10 km depth it is probably related to some magma conduit process.

          It is clearly different from Monday’s (May 25) earthquakes which were much more shallow and may have been due to steam, water, degassing or similar.

  15. Albert are you Impressived by Hawaiis Punahonu?
    It was 150 000 km3 thats more than twice the size of Mauna Loa.
    Its freaking 270 Kilometers wide!
    Chemical analysis of the basalts suggest they formed at over 1700 C thats hotter than liquid titanium.
    Maybe Hawaii is able to produce Komatite? after all the youngest Komaties are 90 million years old.
    Punahonu formed when the Hawaiian hotspot had a major heat sourge from the depths.

    Hawaiian Hotspot is undergoing another boost in productivity and output now since the Pleistocene began
    maybe a New Punahonu will form of Kilauea?
    Hawaii Hotspot is heating up again

    • 1700 C magma in a Hawaii magma chamber! ( 3100 f )
      Albert what temperature did Punahonu erupt at?

      DustDevil! how hot was the erupting lavas at that old volcano?
      If the deep magma chamber is at over 1700 degrees C
      The lava was ?

      • Some magmas of Mauna Loa have been at a temperature of 1670 ºC in the mantle so it was probably not that diferent from what we have now, the hotspot may have been a bit stronger back then but the main reason why Puhahonu grew so big was that there was a single chain of volcanoes back then so that volcanoes grew further away from each other.

        • It was mentioned in the Puhahonu article, but I don’t think there is an openly avaliable version of that study.

    • Albert
      This is impressive stuff
      And very warm indeed

      Whats your opinion
      Can Hawaii make Komatite If its really in souch a pulse in strenght?

    • I always had this personal hunch the universe is a good deal older than the research so far implies. Thanks to Jeff Parsons at the Metro, my hunch is now scientifically proven. 🙂

    • Interesting article, I’ve been wondering about this possibility for a while, as all tropical eruptions with significant stratospheric injections in the postwar period have been followed by el niño episodes in the following winter (Agung, El Chichon, Pinatubo). Three episodes are not enough to provide statistical evidence, but is certainly an interesting association. Krakatoa doesn’t fit however, it may have been too late in the summer season to have the same effect.

  16. A month ago a a new paper about the volcanic eruptions in early XII century has been published, suggesting a cluster of large eruptions in the wake of the Hekla 1104 eruptions, that caused serious climate disruptions in 1108-1110.

    I remember that Albert discussed the anomalies in ice core data around that period both in his Heckla 1104 and Millennium volcanoes articles, I’d really like to read your take on this. I apologize if it has already been posted, but I haven’t been able to read all the comments lately.

    • If the reason you can’t read all the comments is in the mobile formatting, there is a solution in

      I found the Nature article quite thin. You don’t really need a smoking gun if you already have both the smoke and the gun. I would argue that Hekla 1104 actually erupted in 1108. In the ice cores, there is a spike around this period but it is not particularly strong. The Eldgja eruption, non-explosive and at Iceland, left just as much sulfate in Antarctica, and there was more sulfate from the 1171 eruption. Yes, there may well have been a tropical eruption around 1109, and there may have been more than one eruption in the north, but it doesn’t add up to something bigger than an Pinatubo – a 1 in 50 year event. The fact that there is excess sulfate in Greenland over several years could be due to the icelandic ‘sand winters’: after a major eruption, winter winds blow the ejecta around causing sand storms. That lasts until the vegetation returns.

      • Thank you Albert!

        My issue with comments is not incorrect visualization but lack of time caused by covid19-related disruptions to family life (school closures mainly). Thanks for the tip anyway. 🙂

        About the paper, I wasn’t persuaded by their arguments as well. If the Hekla eruption had really happened in 1104 we should see it in the Greenland record. I didn’t know about sand winters, could it explain the 1110 spike that seems even larger than the initial one?
        This would leave us with two large eruptions in 1108 (Hekla and Asama) and maybe a southern one immediately after. Still a lot of activity in a very short period, which could explain the climate impact.

        P.S. Campi is continuing its slow and steady increase in activity, in case you are interested in some ingv material written in Italian feel free to ask.

  17. Humour:
    “When they said I had an urgent photo-shoot at Segara Anak, I should have expected it would be VR…”

    This is ”Volcano Mountains Crater – Lake Segara Anak” by alexantropov1986, a budget model from CGT.

    PoserPro just laughed when I tried to import its ~14 MB FBX mesh. I applied the hi-res texture and height maps to a square ground-plane, dialled displacement up to 20 in ”Advanced” and rendered with Superfly…

    Took some iteration to get lighting, subdivision and displacement sorta right. Care ”Simple” displacement has lower limit than ”Advanced”.

    • Apologies: Iterating to get a nice render, I accidentally exaggerated vertical scaling. Precise topography seems hard to come by, but much googling suggests lake surface is ~2000 m elevation. with ‘some’ seasonal fluctuation. The ‘old’ cone towering above Eastern rim of caldera summits at 3726 m, so ~1700 m above lake. Which Google Maps reckons is ~4500 m NW/SE (~L/R on render) width at shoreline. Caldera rim diameter ~6000 m on same axis…

      If you can quote better data for this caldera’s size, or a link to accessible digital topography for the surrounds to extend the render, I’d be very grateful.

      Sorry, I still can’t figure why my image insertion did not work…

      • Got ~30 metre resolution ~7 MB zipped GeoTIFF model of ~3/4 Lombok for ~$5_Can from Novlum. Am now playing with several *free* DEM visualisation programs, specifically 3DEM & MicroDEM…

  18. Our modern civilization is very dangerous and destructive

    The whole mankind should stand trail
    For crimes against the natural world
    For crimes against the biological world

  19. Glenn Rivers, I must apologize missing your comment, I have sent a letter to the geological surveys and awaiting their response.
    The caldera I spoke of is Chalpatan and it is an extremely poorly researched volcano but I know it is over 1.2 million years old. There is no data on the composition on the other volcanoes that I know of. I might or might not break up with this volcano depending on what IGEPN says to me. I can’t find anything else and the volcano is stuck in limbo right now. I can’t see any spectrograms to discern any fluid motion within the volcano. It seems like a fruitless endeavor to find more information at this point.

  20. Danish TV2 Lorry reported that 35 billion litres of waste water, including raw sewage, has flowed from Copenhagen into the strait between 2014 and 2018.
    Every year Denmark pours 35 billion tons of untreated human sweage water in the Baltic Sea. Been going on for many years now apparently. This is very weird and competely new information for me. Why is this even allowed in Scandinavia?
    They cannot treat their sewage?

    Not strange then why our ocean is so overfertilized and sick.
    The algae blooms is out of controll.
    Baltic Sea is the worlds most overfertilized ocean. Visibility in Baltic Sea is also one of the lowest of all seas.
    35 billion tons every year is terrible

    Danish mischief!
    They come with agiculture,
    they come with fertilizer
    they come with sewage
    Polluting, breaking, hacking, burning

    Denmark destroys the Baltic sea
    Destroyers, polluters and usurpers,
    CURSE THEM!!!!!

    • Can be incredibly difficult to clean up legacy systems, more if adequate provision for storms, thaw-floods etc.

      UK’s long-vile Mersey Basin required a vast, new ‘interceptor sewer’ network, plus over-sized treatment plants. Liverpool’s big water-front treatment facility was mostly hidden below ground level in an old dock. Further up the coast, at Southport, the sprawling ‘pond farm’ had to be discreetly sited behind levees and a bird-marsh…

      IIRC, there are also tidal factors. The Mersey Basin & Coast have BIG tides. Snag is those often washed back a lot of what had just washed out. The Baltic’s shallow sill and island ‘maze’ means that the hydrology resembles the Black Sea, in that there is scant, often seasonal stirring of the further depths. Much is oxygen-depleted, if not anoxic, hence the frequent discovery of remarkably preserved archaeological artefacts…

      Another issue is the Baltic’s post-glacial isostatic rebound. IIRC, the shallow Gulf of Bothnia is ‘neck & neck’ with Hudson Bay, close to 8mm annual rise, 300~400 metres to go, but slowing…

      Tied to this is the Baltic’s vast watershed, its rivers delivering vast amounts of organics & minerals, especially during Spring thaw. These meet more saline conditions, ‘fog out’…

      ‘Plowshare’ a deep, deep channel through sill & maze ? Non-starter. (*)
      Mitigate / Intercept a zillion local discharge points ? Non-runner.
      Install wind-powered ‘bubblers’ to aerate / oxygenate the stagnant depths ?? Expensive…

      *) A BIG bypass tunnel would work, but require a mega-project akin to Kiel Canal or proposed Gibraltar Barrage…

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