A massive "ice tsunami" devastates Canadian homes

Add this to the list of things I had no idea were possible, but are.  Via io9 and the Winnipeg Free Press:

According to provincial Emergency Measures Organization officials, seven permanent homes were literally crushed by the ice that rose up within minutes from Lake Dauphin around suppertime Friday, pushed by north winds gusting up to 60 kilometres an hour.

Doug Davis had just taken a shower and was about to sit on his couch and relax at his home along Ochre Beach on Friday night.

Then he heard the ice coming.

“All of a sudden,” said Davis’s wife, Elaine, “that was it.”

Within the next five minutes, a wall of ice rose from the lake, so powerful that it plowed though the Davis’s two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway.

This is a rather amazing and terrifying natural phenomenon.  Be sure to check out the video on io9 of a smaller but similar event that happened in Minnesota last week.

Update: Check out the videos on this site of the Minnesota ice flows.  Eerie.

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Simulate your own beheading with VR technology!

It’s about time that technology has reached the point where I can experience a virtual beheading!  Via Boing Boing:

Disunion is a guillotine simulator that uses the Oculus Rift VR headset to bring you a realistic experience of being beheaded (this experience is enhanced by a strategic neck-chop!). It was created in two days at the Exile game jam by Erkki Trummal, Andre Berlemont and Morten Brunbjerg, who clearly enjoy making people feel like they’ve had their heads lopped off just a little too much.

It looks like we’re finally achieving the dystopian future… of the year 2000.

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Losing One’s Head: A Frustrating Search for the ‘Truth’ about Decapitation

This is a tale I wanted to tell on this Tumblr and, fortuitously, The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice did the research and got to the facts of this morbid tale:

I have often heard a story retold about a man who attended the execution of his friend during the French Revolution. Seconds after the guillotine fell, the man retrieved the severed head and asked it a series of questions in order to determine whether or not it was possible to retain consciousness after decapitation. Through a system of blinking, the victim allegedly communicated his message back to his friend. The ending to this story changes according to the whims of the narrator… or perhaps the number of drinks he or she has consumed by that time.

I wondered: was this the 18th-century equivalent to an urban legend? Or could there, in fact, be a degree of truth in this ghastly tale?

In other words, if you lose your head, will you know it?  It turns out that there were a number of people who studied this ghastly possibility in a variety of experiments right at the guillotine!

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Why Shark Embryos Eat Each Other Up in Utero

Ah, science!  Constantly finding the answers to questions that I’d rather not have known were questions in the first place!

Via Discovery News:

Shark embryos cannibalize their littermates in the womb, with the largest embryo eating all but one of its siblings.

Now, researchers know why: It’s part of a struggle for paternity in utero, where babies of different fathers compete to be born.

It is fascinating research, but I probably could have gone my whole life without knowing that sharks eat each other in the womb. ;-)

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The mine that ate a lake

I don’t want to dwell too much on man-made disasters on this Tumblr, but today Boing Boing shared a video of the 1980 Lake Peigneur salt mine collapse, in which an oil drilling operation accidentally poked through into a salt mine, causing the entire lake to drain in a swirling vortex of doom:

After monday’s Feature by Tim Herrernan, earlier today Mark shared another amazing to watch mine collapse. It got me thinking about Lake Peigneur. The story is amazing but oh so familiar, a wayward oil company makes an error and mistakenly drains a lake into a salt mine. It is incredible and you can watch!

Such disasters are an amazing testament to the forces that can arise in moving water even from seemingly small disturbances: if I heard the video correctly, the drill bit was 14 inches across, but the ensuing vortex swallowed up the oil rig, barges, and pretty much everything else around it.

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The Door to Hell: Darvasa

Sometimes I learn things from FAILBlog other than the numerous ways that people can do stupid things that result in painful injury to their junk. Case in point: they recently mentioned the long-running hazard known quaintly as “The Door to Hell,” located in Darvasa, Ahal Province, Turkmenistan. 

(The name fits.  Via Wikipedia.)

Lying in the midst of the Karakum Desert near the small village Darvasa, the doorway was inadvertently opened in 1971 by Soviet geologists.  The geologists discovered a large deposit of natural gas at the site, and began exploratory drilling to assess the quality of the find.  Soon after work began, however, the ground collapsed under the drilling rig and camp, creating a crater some 230 feet wide and 66 feet deep; fortunately nobody was killed in the accident.

The collapse made the site unsuitable for gas extraction, as it was now freely seeping from the ground.  Because the quiet release of natural gas could be a deadly hazard to the people of the region, the geologists decided to burn it off. They set the hole on fire, expecting it to burn itself out of fuel in a few days.

Now, some 42 years later, it is still burning.

The Daily Mail had an article on The Door to Hell in 2010 which is worth looking at due to the pictures and video; it is hard to appreciate, even with the photo above, how massive this fiery hole is.

In 2010, the President of Turkmenistan ordered that the hole be closed so that it doesn’t cause problems with other natural gas sites to be developed in the region.  No action has been taken so far, however, leaving Hell’s Gate inconveniently open for the time being.

(A 2010 photograph of The Door by Tormod Sandtorv, via Wikimedia Commons.)

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Today is the 101-year anniversary of the biggest disaster caused by hubris and unwarranted faith in technology.  Little more needs to be said than this.

pbsthisdayinhistory:

 April 15, 1912: The Titanic Sinks

On this day in 1912, the RMS Titanic sank into the Atlantic Ocean after hitting an an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. 

Around 11:40 p.m. on April 14, the ship hit an iceberg, but didn’t fully sink until 2:20 a.m. on April 15. This catastrophic event led to the death of more than 1,500 passengers. 

The Titanic had departed from Southampton, England five days prior and was on her way to New York City.

Learn more about the Titanic with PBS’ Titanic collection. 

Photos (top to bottom): The Titanic, view from the S.S. Carpathia of the iceberg that sank the Titanic (Library of Congress).

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April 10, 1815: Mount Tambora blows up

Today is the 198th anniversary of the largest volcanic event of the past 1800 years, the deadly eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.

There are relatively few written accounts of the event, in part because of the lack of fast communication in those days but also largely in part because so few people survived in the shadow of the volcano.

On my regular blog I look at eyewitness descriptions of the eruption and its devastating effect on the surrounding region. The eruption of Tambora is a troubling reminder of the powerful forces that lie sleeping within the Earth.

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When resonance kills: the Angers Bridge

Some of the simplest physical concepts carry hidden within them potentially horrific implications.  Consider the idea of resonance.  Mechanical systems have natural frequencies of oscillation; for example, the strings of a guitar are each designed and adjusted to have their own preferred frequency of vibration.  Normally we let these systems vibrate freely, but if we apply a force to them at a frequency matching that of one of their natural vibrational modes, the amplitude of vibration increases dramatically: we have matched the resonant frequency.  The most obvious example of this is a playground swing: by pumping our legs and arms at the right time, we can build up a huge oscillation from nothing.

Suspension bridges also have their own natural modes of vibration, and this has led in the past to deadly consequences.  Soldiers marching in step produce a strong driving force, and if their pace matches a resonance of the bridge, they can produce a tremendous oscillation that can bring down the structure.

One of the earliest examples of this was the 1831 collapse of the Broughton Suspension Bridge in England.  On April 12 of that year, a detachment of 74 men were returning to barracks over the bridge.  Marching four abreast, they noticed the bridge swaying in time with their motion; by the time the first of them had reached the other end, they heard “a sound resembling an irregular discharge of firearms.” One of the iron columns supporting the suspension chains had snapped, causing that end of the bridge to collapse, dropping 40 men into the river.  None were killed, but several were severely injured.

(The Broughton Bridge rebuilt, in 1883, via Wikipedia.)

It was immediately recognized that the regular march step of the soldiers had contributed to the collapse, and soon afterwards the British Army ordered that soldiers should break step while crossing a bridge.  This, however, was not enough to prevent another more disastrous collapse, this time in France.

(The Anger Bridge, before its collapse. Via Wikipedia.)

On April 16, 1850, a battalion of French soldiers were crossing the Anger Bridge during a severe thunderstorm that had already caused the bridge to sway back and forth.  Though the soldiers knew to break step in crossing, the severe motion of the structure caused the soldiers to adjust their gait to stay standing: in essence, the oscillation of the bridge inadvertently forced the soldiers to match its motion.  At a point when 483 soldiers and 4 others were on the bridge, an upstream anchoring cable broke with a sound like “a badly done volley from a firing squad.” 

226 people died when they were cast into the river.  More would have died if not for the rescue efforts of the locals and fellow soldiers.

(The Angers Bridge, after the collapse.  From Wikipedia.)

It should be noted that neither the Angers Bridge nor the Broughton Bridge collapsed entirely due to the actions of the soldiers.  Both bridges were determined to have maintenance and engineering problems that made collapse inevitable; the marching exacerbated existing weaknesses.

The Angers Bridge tragedy had significant implications: France abandoned the use of suspension bridges for two decades afterwards.  Awareness of the possible dangers led to more rigorous inspection regimes on future construction, as well.

It is hard to imagine such a simple act as walking having such dire consequences.  However, little actions, working in unison, can great powerful forces under the right — or in these cases wrong — circumstances.

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This Giant New Tarantula Has an Eight-Inch Leg Span

Scientists are finding new species all the time, but it’s kinda infrequent that it turns out to be a really, really big effing spider!  Via Smithsonian:

According to the scientists, the new spider, whose legs span up to 8 inches, usually lives in “bark peels, naturally occurring tree hollows and, at times, found under rocks, decaying trees and in cracks in brick walls; however during the monsoonal period they display a tendency to enter human dwellings that border forested areas.” Because nothing makes the monsoons more fun than having a face-sized tarantula hiding in your house.

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