Back-of-envelope, that Osceola event released about 10^19 Joules of energy*. The scale of these things is absolutely incredible.
According to my father, until around the time he was doing Geology at university (late 1960s), the consensus was that these kinds of events (and mass wasting more generally) were geologic processes that no longer happened (and hadn't really happened throughout the Holocene). I don't know the history in detail there, but it does seem true that only relatively recently we've had a real appreciation for how active Earth's geology still is.
* 4e15 cubic centimeters of material, 2 g per cc mix of rock and ice, mean elevation change 1000m
I grew up in this area... there are two tragedies that most people living in this area don't realize. One, before the war a good chunk of the region was populated by people of Japanese origin who farmed and never got their farms back after the war, and two, it is some of the richest farmland in the world - now covered with concrete tilt-up warehouses, highways, etc. Humanity is interesting.
I can’t fathom how we could think that, surely as long as plates move around and stone weathers this sort of geological events can happen?
They’re certainly not common on historical timescales, so the odds you’d find yourself sharing time (let alone space) with one are low, but what would have made them stop?
I learned recently (can't remember where, or how reliable) that plate tectonics did not create mountain ranges till carbon life had been around for awhile, because the carbon layers left behind are slippery (graphite) and allow one plate to slide over another plate. Prior to that, the plates simply pulverized each other.
anybody know if this is true?
I wonder can we put a kind of "earth turbine" to capture some of that energy? Maybe tap it somehow to not release all in one catastrophe and make it safer at the same time.
I was all excited to plan a rock hounding trip to the Himalayas. I even sent out the Sherpa bat signal (it’s a silhouette of me shaving a Himalayan yak), only to find out I’m eight hundred years too late.
But if you’re willing to travel to the Alps, here’s one from a couple of weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/16/huge-landslide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Mountain_(Wyoming)
>Between 50 and 48 million years ago a sheet of rock about 500 square miles (1,300 square kilometers) in area detached from the plateau south of the Beartooths and slid tens of kilometers to the southeast and south into the Bighorn and Absaroka Basins
Luckily events like this are geologically rare. A bigger risk would be tsunamis from underwater mountain landslides.
and I thought I was bad for missing the timezone and being an hour late to watch the ESA's Euclid launch. Besides, I was able to watch mine in replay.
Interesting, wonder if this Approx 1190 event had a global impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
Seems that ended in 1250, coincidence ??
But how does that compare to an Olympic swimming pool full of double decker omnibuses being dropped from the same height?
The earth receives about 1.74x10^17 watts from the sun, continuously. On Tsar Bomba released a little over 200PJ, setting off one per day would be around 2.3x10^12 watts.
In other words to equal the energy from the sun you would need to detonate on the order of 1 MILLION Tsar Bombas per day.
I was interested in what the mountain looked like, and found a whole page dedicated to it [0]. In the picture of the west side you can see the steep face. The altitude map also has an unusually large flat area to the west of the mountain.
The geology texts that predate plate tectonics are . . . interesting. They really didn't know where volcanoes and mountains came from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orogeny#History_of_the_concept
Then a storm comes in, more water, water is flowing filling cracks, pooling wherever it can, lightning strikes, the water trapped in and around some of the rocks very quickly heats up, turns to steam, and kaboom, you now have moving rock.
Presumably lightning strike erosion is a lot of energy over a short time compared to wind or water erosion which is much less energy but over much longer periods?
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016EGUGA..1815451H/abstra...
etc.
There are some high resolution nightside lighting storms from orbiting camera compilations on youtube that might impress just how much power zaps down in strikes.
In the morning, clear blue skies, and we climbed up to have a look. Was sadly not very dramatic, we were expecting chunks of rock blown off, but you could see that the sudden heat had created fresh fissures, and around what we thought was the ground zero of a strike, the surface of the rock had become friable for a few centimetres.
But water/ice is always going to be a dominant feature in rock wasting, those lightning cracks just give it easier ingress.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Deep-and-narrow-gorge-of...
This Nasa blog post has a lot of good pictures of the immediate area that helps with understanding the shapes of the mountains there. I initially didn't realize just how choked down the drainage got. It seems like many cirques are described as having narrow exits but rarely are they this narrow.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/2014/01...
Here's an earlier discussion related to this one: https://www.science.org/cms/asset/b7f5337c-0f34-4fb5-a907-61...
[1] https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2019/11/15/the-blackhawk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
The sand pile model: if one builds a pile of sand, dropping onto it a small number of grains at a time, individual grains will slide down the slope - but there's a critical angle at which any additional grains can trigger a catastrophic avalanche.
A wet pile of sand has a different angle of repose. Between the lubrication and the rather substantial weight of the water, that's how most mudslides happen.
Nothing is too big to fail in the business world either. Or at least nothing should be. If a business is that important to the economy but it can't keep itself afloat, something has gone horribly wrong on the business side, the government side, or both. Bailing out the business will probably not fix the underlying issues.
> The falling mountain top would have displaced up to 27 cubic kilometres of rock—roughly enough to bury the entirety of Manhattan to about the height of the Empire State Building.
It's paywalled then on but I assume it's also enough rock to bury Dubai to the height of Burj Khalifa.
Haha lol. These comparisons are always strange when I read them or see them in documentaries. "That's enough X to stretch all the way to the moon and back!"
In other words it's a lot. "No you don't understand! It's not just a lot! It's enough that if unraveled it could stretch around the Earth 10 times!!!"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/massive-peak-collaps...
