Skip to main content

Continent separated from Britain in a day

It seems that Europe was washed away from Britain in less than a day, by massive floods washing down past Dover.

The finding has emerged from an advanced sonar survey of the bed of the Channel that revealed huge scour marks, deep bowls and piles of rock that could have been created only by a giant torrent of water. [...] “In places this valley is more than seven miles wide and 170ft deep, with vertical sides. Its nearest geological parallels are found not on earth but in the monumental flood terrains of the planet Mars”

Well... that explains some odd things about Englanders... (-:

The flood is pictured as “sudden biblical-style catastrophe” but as I remember things, that would take up something like a year & involve the entire planet. Too ambitious, this was “only” a mile-high glacier stretching from Scotland to Denmark, although to locals the catastrophe would seem pretty overwhelming.

The wash-down of molten ice-cap/glacier would have taken “less than a day”, making it conceptually smaller than the breach(es) of Lake Missoula which made the Channelled Scablands in Washington, but probably larger than Lake Ohio.

Mind you, ‘smaller” here might mean only a few cubic kilometers of flow. In a day. A video camera at any of these sites would have been good value.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.