Monday, April 19, 2010

Wow!!!


Awesome pic of the icelandic volcano, courtesy APOD.
Posted by Rahul Tyagi at 1:15 AM
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5 comments:

  1. GarimaApril 19, 2010 at 9:05 AM

    WOW!!!!! from me too.... :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AshishApril 20, 2010 at 12:03 AM

    was watching a discovery programme few days back. It was about a volcano in Indonesia. It said that last time time volcano erupted sometime in mid-1980s it threw out huge amount of dust and ash. soon within 2-3 weeks this dispersed in entire earth's upper atmosphere. Amount was so huge that for next 2-3 years earth's average temperature was lower than expected by 0.1 degree due to reflection of sun's heat in space by dust/ash particles. [Any idea how this global average temperature is calculated?]
    Could this be mother earth's solution for global warming? ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rahul TyagiApril 20, 2010 at 1:40 AM

    That is actually pretty common (on the geological timescale, that is). Before Chicxulub crater was found, one of the leading hypotheses for K-T extinction (death of dinosaurs..) was that it happened because of the huge volcanic activity at the Deccan traps (that produced the Deccan plateau). This volcanic activity obscured the sun throughout the earth and led to a mini-ice age which led to the extinction.

    I don't really know how they estimate the mean global temperature, but perhaps it can't be all that difficult because we have thousands of datapoints all over the globe. Assimilating that data into one number without having any geographical biases is a statistical problem that someone must've solved. Or, I might be completely wrong, and they perhaps do something completely different.

    and no, no mother earth around.. :P and even if it is, global warming isn't a "problem" for her. it is a problem for us. :)

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  4. AshishApril 20, 2010 at 3:07 AM

    that's true. mother earth was only sarcastically mentioned.
    Thousands of species have come and gone just because they could not change as per changing atmosphere. Now humans have evolved so much that they can look far back into the past and prepare for such planet scale disasters, unlike previous known species (again, disaster for us; but just a different mood/season/temporary phenomenon for mother earth)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rahul TyagiApril 20, 2010 at 10:42 AM

    yep... I was also joking about the mother earth part. Agree entirely with what you said (except the "humans have evolved so much" part).

    ReplyDelete

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