Fieldwork and the Great British Summer

 fieldwork, global warming, Staffordshire  Comments Off
Jul 262009
 

It’s raining again. This is this morning’s rain radar image from raintoday.co.uk

The Great British Summer - www.raintoday.co.uk

The Great British Summer - www.raintoday.co.uk

You are not going to get the Great British public believing in global warming until we start getting those Mediterranean summers that we were promised.

This week I went into the field and got absolutely soaked, despite having some expensive waterproof clothing. Torrential rain plus high humidity and a strenuous terrain including a fast flowing stream combined rainwater, riverwater and sweat to make one sodden geologist.

This is typical British geological fieldwork. In areas of soft mudrocks there is very little rock exposure and what little there is tends to be in stream sections where the river maintains a fresh exposure. Fieldwork therefore involves struggling up and down valleys, crossing and recrossing rivers and usually getting wet from above, below and inside the waterproofs. The exposure, when one finds some is typically uninspiring black mudstone with the occasional sandstone.
Namurian mudstone

You can now see why we send our students overseas to map.

Having said all that, it was a grand day out. It made a great change from working in the office. I really enjoyed been outside again. There was some minor folding …

Folded Namurian

Folded Namurian


and the occasional fossil …
Dunbarella bivalve

Dunbarella bivalve


Note: I’m being deliberately vague about the location of this Staffordshire valley as it is in part of a nature reserve not open to the public. It was visited with the the reserve warden.

 Posted by hypocentre at 11:22

Salt of the Earth

 geology, global warming  5 Responses »
Feb 082009
 

salt_mining_winsfordImage Source: Winsford Salt Mine

With Britain facing its coldest winter for 27 years, the UK is running short of a geological resource that is largely overlooked – rock salt.

Almost all of the UK’s halite (or rock salt) comes from a single salt mine, Winsford, in Cheshire operated by Salt Union. Normally, Winsford can supply up to 100,000 tonnes a week, but with its reserves near exhausted , it can only provide about 30,000 tonnes from mining operations.

Some local authorities are having to prioritise what roads to grit, others are using table salt rather than rock salt. The UK is urgently importing rock salt from Spain, Tunisia and Italy as the cold weather continues.

Rock salt used to have only limited uses, adding more salt to weak salt brines which are evaporated for table salt, and salt licks for cattle. It was only in the 1950s when rock salt was started to be used to grit roads that production really took off.

Rock salt use is highly variable and it ironic that after a string of warm winters (and the promise of global warming) the Winsford mine has been diversifying in order to survive. It has two contrasting uses for the huge underground caverns that it creates. One end of the former mineworkings are used to store archive records. The dry, temperature controlled conditions are ideal for storing paper documents including the National Archive. The other end of the mine is being used to store hazardous waste.

winsford_waste_storageImage Source: Minosus

 Posted by hypocentre at 15:00

Global Warming To Make Large Earthquakes Disappear By 2035

 damned lies, Earthquakes, global warming, lies, statistics  5 Responses »
Jan 012009
 

quakes1940

Global warming will make large earthquakes are disappear by 2035. That’s grabbed your attention now hasn’t it? The graph above shows the number of earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above each year since 1940 [source USGS] together with moving averages over 5 year and 15 year spans and the linear regression line for the 15 year moving average. It clearly shows a decline in large earthquakes. If this trend was to continue there would be no large earthquakes above magnitude 7 by 2035.

I’m often asked at public talks if global warming is increasing the number of earthquakes – so let’s plot the NASA GISS Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly and its linear regression on an inverted scale.

quakes1940climate1

See, the regression lines are practically identical. Global warming is causing large earthquakes to disappear.

OK, for the absence of any doubt, all of the above is complete bollocks. There is no causality between earthquakes and global climate change.

I have just been having a bit of fun with excel. Although the data is real, I have been highly selective. It shows that by being selective with one’s data and playing very fast and loose with statistics one can ‘correlate’ pretty much anything.

If we look at the full earthquake dataset going back to 1900 we can see that the recent ‘decline’ in big ‘quakes is just part of a long term random variation.

quakes1900

 Posted by hypocentre at 15:24

The reason it is called a floodplain is because …

 flooding, global warming  Comments Off
Jul 242007
 

… it floods!

I am getting increasingly annoyed about the bleating that is currently going on in the flooding in the UK. There is a reason it is called a floodplain and people who choose to live on them should expect it. It is very easy to find out if a property is at risk – the environment agency has a very good website with interactive maps. I’ve recently bought a new house, and it is close to a river but I’ve made damn sure it is not a risk of flooding (OK, I’ve got some specialist knowledge but it really isn’t that difficult). I deleted many from my shortlist of suitable houses precisely because of the likelihood of flooding. The general public in these areas if flooded blame failure of ‘flood defences’ yet those that are not flooded claim that they are ‘lucky’, not saved by flood defences. The weather, like terrorists, only has to be ‘lucky’ once. It is simply not possible to protect all of the people, all of the time – unless we stop building on floodplains.

But what really gets my goat is the local government politicians trying to pass the buck on to national government. Sure national government has some failings (I’ll come on to them in a moment) but for the likes of councillors in Hull to claim “whenever we have needed help from central government to improve things, we have been neglected” [The Guardian] is a bit rich. The response surely has to be “who the hell gave the planning permission to build there in the first place?” More than 90% of Hull is built below sea level with large housing estates on marsh land. It has to be the planning authorities that are largely to blame for the consequences. In most of the flooding TV footage I’ve seen the houses have been new builds (and those that haven’t been like in Stratford-upon-Avon are the ‘usual suspects’ and have been flooded many times).

OK, national government is not blameless either and we are finding out that the government is offering £14m of aid to flood-hit areas while drawing up plans to axe hundreds of jobs at the Environment Agency, which is responsible for flood defences [The Guardian]. Government ministers were warned three years ago about failing flood defences [The Guardian].

Is there a solution? Well the simple one is to stop building on floodplains and if it means that we have to rethink our attitudes to building on ‘greenbelt’ and redesignating floodplains as ‘bluebelt’, so be it. Yet government ministers insist that they will continue to build on floodplains [The Guardian]
- it hardly inspires confidence.

I’ll end this rant on the delicious irony that those of us with four-by-fours have been able to get a lot of places that those with eco-friendly cars haven’t in this ‘global climate change’ induced event.

 Posted by hypocentre at 22:46
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