Arquivo para a ‘Oceanografia’ Categoria
Natural disasters and society
09
Dec
Although science still has difficulties in predicting natural
catastrophes, unpredictability is a major current theme for several fields of study, human action on which the problem of these catastrophes can be expanded must be rethought.
It’s not just about interfering with earthquakes, asteroid routes, weather problems and changes in the planet’s magnetic field, the problem is the social dimension that each catastrophe can take, like the Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma, which does not have fatal victims, but the problem of air quality, the displacement of families, the loss of family income, among others, what worries us is the possibility of a social catastrophe, at the moment, the government there declares that the volcano can go to sleep.
The Semeru catastrophe in Indonesia, which counted 34 dead until yesterday, and whose predictability was not possible is a fatality, but the tsunami in Fukushima in 2011 that affected an atomic plant and made an entire region uninhabitable has the human recklessness of building plants in disaster-prone areas warns of a serious and long-standing problem: the nuclear plants, the millions of liters of water used to cool the now inactive but radioactive plant, was dumped into the sea.
European countries are the ones that most use nuclear power plants, and a fossil fuel supply crisis, mostly coming from Russia, is a related problem, which aggravates the social danger even more. Looking at the map (figure) we also notice that many plants they are on the waterfront and the risk of tsunamis is even more serious, Fukushima taught.
In the world, 17% of the energy used is nuclear, 40% is still coal, the oldest fuel typical of the first industrial revolution, fossil (oil) is 40%, hydraulic and wind power is only 2% with a forecast of 3% for 2024 , a growth too small to be considered an effort that could reveal a change of scenario, of course there are associated economic interests.
The serious problem of nuclear power plants, which can themselves have accidents like the one at Chernobyl, cannot be underestimated the serious problem of some natural catastrophe that could affect the power plant’s problems, with huge social losses (generally only economic , which are associated of course) that a disaster could cause.
In the world, there are 440 plants in operation and 23 under construction, Europe has 207 plants and 7 under construction, the map shows the huge number by the sea, in inhabited regions and subject to earthquakes (tectonic faults for example), after the Europe follows North America with 123 plants, Japan, China and Korea with 82 and 7 under construction.
Natural disasters occur, Germany decided that it will not install new reactors and that the current ones will be deactivated after their useful life (32 years in your case), Turkey also abandoned the idea of building its first plant, in the opposite direction Brazil after the inauguration of Angra-2 (located by the sea) is already discussing Angra-3.
A complete social conscience must also foresee serious problems that a nuclear catastrophe could cause, and the consequences would be harsh for humanity.
Volcanoes and Possibilities of Earthquakes
24
Nov
In addition to the civilizing crisis, the forces of nature 
seem to be more awake than usual, the volcano on the islands of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, a territory of Spain, arouses great interest in the volume of lava that I expect to arrive close in two months and without give signs of truce.
The earthquakes, the number of mouths opened by the volcano (there are now 5), the seriousness of the situation on the island which, despite being confined, has not been carried out any large-volume evacuation, have sparked debates even in the scientific world, the last one is about an earthquake of depth 3.4 or 34 km that happened these days, because the smaller depth would indicate new lava mouths and a greater risk for some abrupt change in the structure of the island which is composed of faults in its interior and large cliffs. depressions towards the sea.
There are several active earthquakes, some are of the Strambolian type, they are volcanoes with explosive eruptions such as emission of essentially effusive lava, and ejection of ash and gases such as sulfur, in incandescent lavas, also launching volcanic rock bombs that are launched from tens to hundreds of meters high, the Cumbre Vieja de La Palma volcano is of this type, in addition to attracting more attention, it is actually more dangerous, due to the terrain where lava can reach, the gases and, in some cases, the deformation of the terrain.
They are linked to the earthquakes that are a result of the Earth’s plate movements, and the biggest concern is not this island located in the Atlantic Ocean, but because it may be a small-scale representation of what can happen on a larger scale in the Pacific Ocean where there is a great circle of fire, name given to a large planetary junction of regions of volcanoes and quite frequent earthquakes and where the possibility of a Big One, a large earthquake from the San Andres fault on the American plate, is speculated.
The real possibility in La Palma is a small tsunami near the island, the consequences would no doubt be devastating, would it be large earthquakes in the circle of fire, or the eruption of large volcanoes like the Yellowstone Volcanic Chair, the Hawaiian Kilauea volcano on which they exist. just sensational speculations.
The consequences in La Palma are still unknown, but the volcano is still active and rather than calming down, these days were one of big explosions and strong earthquakes.
Volcanoes, between science and superstitions
28
Sep
The volcano in the Canary Islands, which has been burning for
more than a week, and for the time being just increasing the volume and quantity of glowing lavas have raised questions and fears, not everything is really right, volcanologists and geologists have no forecast for the volcano to cool down and not all superstitions came only from prophecies and apocalyptics.
The possibility of a megatsunami, starting from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean has more volcanoes and earthquakes in the so-called circle of fire (photo) than the Atlantic was studied after the Indonesia tsunami that gained notoriety, but it was Japan, which affected the Fukushima Plant the most amazing.
The warning came not from superstitious, but from British researchers in a 2001 article (Ward & Day, 2002), the article gained notoriety for directly citing the Canary Islands (see photo above), and was published in the scientific journal Yearbook of Science and Technology , carried out other studies in cases that have already happened, such as the 1st. April 1946 in the Aleutian Islands where there was a landslide similar to the one off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
Cited that the largest land displacement, which caused megatsunami, was the landslide in 1929 due to an earthquake in Newfoundland National Park, Canada, on the Burin peninsula, which reached the coast of Scotland and Holland, but only was noticed because of fragments that were deposited on the coasts of these countries.
The article carried out experiments by computer simulation, which shows that the efficiency of tsunami generation increases with the speed and volume of the landslide, and made a simulation precisely with the Cumbre Vieja volcano (fig. 3 above), on the island of La Palma (one of the Gran Canary Islands), and wrote verbatim: “continuous and recent movements of the flanks of a number of oceanic island volcanoes including Kilauea in Hawaii and Cumbre Vieja in La Palma in the Canary Islands are possibilities that these can break [the flanks] during an eruption in the not-too-distant future” (Ward & Day, 2001).
T he volume has increased since last Sunday (19/09) and one of the flanks opened, but it did not collapse and the lavas had not reached the sea until the present day yesterday.
We had other volcanoes during the year, in Italy Etna, in Russia the Ebeko volcano in the Kuril Islands and in Iceland the Fagradalsfjall, but these do not pose any danger, in the case of Iceland there was a period of interruption of air traffic in the region.
Other volcanoes in the world have manifested this year, in Africa the Nyiragongo in early June, in Indonesia the Sinabung in early March, in Guatemala the Fire Volcano, but the eruption has already ceased, there are others around the world, active volcanoes ( but not in eruption) there are more than a thousand altogether, Brazil is far from the tectonic plates that, in addition to volcanoes, cause earthquakes.
For a few hours the Cumbre Vieja Volcano stopped spouting lava, but it returned, whether the duration and volume of material will be sufficient for a tsunami depends on the intensity and duration, neither volcanologists nor geologists who follow the volcano can say with certainty.
Ward, N. and Day, Simon. Suboceanic Landslides. Steven Yearbook of Science and Technology,
Ward, N. and Day, Simon. (2001). Suboceanic Landslides. Steven Yearbook of Science and Technology, McGraw-Hill, Available in: ward&day.pdf (ucsc.edu)
God-Homo and the possibility of eternity
04
Jun
The human pretension of reaching heaven is older than one
thinks, Homo God is the well-written and well-done update of this story of the man in search of “heaven” here on earth, paradise lost has already given several essays and books, the idea of a close God cherishes many people.
Says Harari, the most dignified update of this narrative that empires, corporations, accumulation and wealth since the deification of the Pharaohs and Roman emperors, are the narratives that in writing: “writing also made it easier for humans to believe in existence of these fictional entities because it has inhabited people to experience reality through meditation and abstract symbols” (Harari, p. 171).
While he believes that religions have cooperated ethically, he claims that “religions have the irritating tendency to turn factual statements into ethical judgments, thereby creating a great deal of confusion and obscuring what should be very simple debates.” (p. 202).
The interpretations of Morin, Sloterdijk and Chul Han go in the opposite direction, Morin starts from the complexity: “The world becomes more and more a whole. Each part of the world is, more and more, part of the world and the world as a whole”, Sloterdijk will explore in “Critique of cynical reason” the ideology as “false conscience”, as a distorted view, and therefore, false , of reality, and for this reason criticizes contemporary humanism.
Chul Han penetrates the human soul by diagnosing the lack of completion, the search for efficiency and the inability to die, in a figurative sense, but which is also the search for eternity, for what remains and that each postponed conclusion would lead to it.
The divine fantasy of making man also eternal was in the expression of Jesus, divine human and divine man, the Deus-homo that Harari, as a good Jew, finds it difficult to believe.
In the passage where Jesus begins to “open the verb” in Mk 3:20 they said that “He is possessed by an evil spirit” and that even his family was rebuking him, He will answer that they are his family (his friends ) those who hear the word of God and live them, to say that they are only capable of living the ethics and human conduct of Love for the Other are in fact his family.
God-Homo invites us to live this reality already here on earth, without ceasing to have problems.
HARARI, Yuval Noah. (2016) Homo Deus: uma breve história do amanhã. Trad. Paulo Geiger. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Civilization crisis and death
05
Nov
Returning to Pablo Picasso’s thought that the worst loss of life is
not dying, but dying while we live is the one that best explains the civilizing state, even those who owe fraternity, dialogue, the planet as a common home seems hopeless and therefore tired , not that tiredness of the Society of Tiredness that is also a crisis, but that of those who have failed to find what unites, the positive and the true.
To speak of the post-truth, the sophistry is pre-Socratic, and the public lie has also been conveyed by newspapers and television channels, according to the political side they take, in the end everyone agrees that if you are not on the politically correct side, it is not true, so we remain in relativism and dualism, even those who preach against it, Edgar Morin is right is a crisis of thought, and Peter Sloterdijk is also “not a favorable time for thinking”, it is easier to take a side, although there are mistakes and successes on several sides, because there are only two.
I saw on Instagram that two very popular videos are of a young artist who makes puppets with skeletons, birds and funeral figures and another of a girl whose hair was decorated like a cemetery (figure above), it is a sad reality the post-Goths seem to dominate youthful fantasy.
In a BBC report on October 31, poor banker Muhammad Yunus stated: “We need to redesign the system by guaranteeing a new economy of three zeros: zero poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions. And we know how to do it. The problem is that we are very lazy and we are very comfortable in the system we have, we don’t want to leave our comfort zone ”, is a new thinking may not work, but without a doubt people, the poor and the planet need answers, the old ones create more polarization and misunderstandings, in addition to post-truths, in this case with a new meaning, from an ideological point of view they were once true, today they are post-true.
There are situations and I think that the planet itself can react, an aortic reaction, the inorganic one over the organic one, after all we came from the dust, from some chemical reaction and certainly if we don’t change the route we will go back to the dust, not that life’s fatality physical personal death, but dying in life.
The question that remains is whether this reaction from the inorganic planet could change something in the human organic, your mind, your being, for something better.
A large iceberg separates from Antarctica
24
Jul
One of the top ten came from Antarctica, the icy continent of the South Pole, 
to the point where this continent could change its geography by losing one end, said Adrian Luckman, a professor at the University of Swansea and principal investigator of the Midas Project, which monitors his platform since 2014.
According Luckman “the iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict,” and added that this ice island, “may continue to be assembled in a single piece, but is more likely to separate into fragments.
Some of the ice can continue in the area for decades and parts of the iceberg can float north and into warmer watert“the iceberg weighs more than one trillion tons, and measures 5,800 square kilometers (an area that is, for example, four times bigger than the city of São Paulo or equivalent to the Brazilian Federal District), has been released from the ice shelf Larsen C of Antarctica, between On 10 and 12 July 2017, according to researchers from Universities of Swansea and Aberystwyth, Wales, and the British Antartic Research Institute (BAS).
The Midas project website does not state that Whether due to global warming, this “scientific” proof is a bit more complex.
The event, although something similar happened in 2013, makes unquestionable global warming and the consequences that can be devastating over the years if we continue in climatic imbalances, such as the fires recorded in Europe and cold in southern Latin America, As we did last week.
It is good to remember that the Trump administration unilaterally broke the climate agreements, and despite all pressure, especially the European, remains reluctant against the evidence that we must make the planet sustainable, and that we can move towards a huge climatic catastrophe with consequences In the life of the whole planet.h.
The climate issue heats up
19
Jun
The various mobilizations around the world meeting on
climate issues in Paris at the end of the year, now had the official entry of Pope Francisco with a specific encyclical touching the water problem.
Tomás Insua, one of the co-founders of MCGC (Global Catholic Movement for Climate) of Argentina said on receiving the encyclical the hands of the Pope “to Francisco joked that we are competing with his encyclical. The endorsement of it to our work is very important to encourage awareness in Catholic circles globally as well as in order to get more signatures. ”
The climate conference has endorsement of respected UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), and the path that is going through and the disclosure that has been going on, will be the largest climate summit with official participation from Copenhagen in 2009.
One of the goals of organizers and entities organizers in Ecology defense is to limit the rise of global warming by up to 2 ° C, ie, pre-industrial levels, as many scientists warning that current levels are problematic.
The realization of the Climate Conference will be between November 30 and December 11, 2015 and promises
Six lessons of wisdom from technology
20
Jan
New technologies (or projects) require new way of thinking
The Bloodhound SSC project is expected to be the first land vehicle to break the barrier of the 1,000 mph (1,609 km / h), his biggest problem was reinventing the wheel, it is not the oldest invention, but how to design the fastest wheels in the world , able to remain stable and at supersonic speed and with limited financial resources?
According to the BBC technology, engineer Mark Chapman, “after hitting his head for four months,” understood that should use the new technologies of “new way,” said he, “What is unprecedented is the way we apply the technologies.”
Forming opinion from the evidence, not one’s own ideas
Geophysicist Steven Jacobsen at Northwestern University in the United States, among many other geophysical believed that the Earth’s water originated in comets.
But to study in depth the rocks as a way that scientists use to analyze the passage of time, he found water inside the ringwoodita in results January 2014 a mineral found in the Earth’s mantle, then found that the water is within the planets.
It takes more perspiration than inspiration
Yes it takes hard work, that understood the neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Cornell University in New York who wanted to develop a new prosthesis to heal assist the blind, and thought only in the organs and not in information and their code in the brain.
So found a key element when decoded the project to decipher the code that transmits information between the eyes and the brain, neuroscientist reveals: “When I realized that, could not eat, could not sleep All I wanted was to work.” , the transmission of information was important more than the mechanisms.
Tomorrow we continue, but we must “not have ready answers”, “have the chance” that some call the conspiracy of the universe or God’s Will, and finally wisdom is something indefinable for it, even these six lessons are questionable too.
Terremoto no Japão
07
Dec
Nesta manhã de sexta (noite no Japão), um terremoto com magnitude preliminar de 7,3, 
conforme o Serviço Geológico dos EUA informoj, mas acrescentando que não havia risco de tsunamis generalizados, embora haja um alerta no Japão.
O tremor atingiu é próximo da área que o devastador terremoto seguido por tsunami em março do ano passado, além do risco nuclear ele matou cerca de 20 mil pessoas e desencadeou uma grande crise nuclear do mundo em 25 anos na usina de Fukushima, com este modelo de energia sendo questionado no mundo todo.
Google Sea View
28
Sep
Uma versão subaquática do Google View já está em demonstração, o projeto foi uma parceria da uma do Google, o Laboratório de Ecossistemas Aquáticos da Universidade de Queensland e uma empresa multinacional de seguros Catlin Group.
Entre outras utilidades, o projeto que é chamado Catlin Seaview Survey, tem o objetivo saber sobre o estado dos recifes a partir desta pesquisa panorâmica, documento o fundo do mar em fotos e vídeos, uma das fontes é uma reportagem na New Scientist.
Uma curiosidade, foi um membro da Comunidade Google Earth, intitulado de Bzoltan da Hungria, ele postou uma animação no tempo simulando a subida do mar de 1 a 100 metros, o quanto isto afetaria cidades como Nova York, Sydney, Tokyo e Hong Kong entre outras, basta clickar no botão play e controlar o regulador de tempo.
Apesar de inúmeras críticas, de ter um dos seus membros preso no Brasil em virtude de postar vídeo das eleições (as barbaridades da TV mal são controladas), a empresa presta um importante serviço, claro que ainda serão necessárias muitas mudanças e melhoras, por exemplo, em seus mecanismos de buscas, mas o serviço prestado ao saber é grande.
A noosfera progride, todo futuro é melhor que o passado de pouca difusão do conhecimento e de obscuridade.
