Hi everyone. I wrote this thing before SNL did its now-famous George Washington sketch about how ludicrous the U.S. system of weights & measures is - so since that sketch just got a sequel, and since in writing that newsletter I found a few reasons to defend Imperial (only a few ) I thought some of you might find it interesting, or at least a chance to teach me something by explaining to me how wrong I am. Cheers!
I'm the author of this piece. Since a few of my geology stories were very kindly received on here a while back, I thought I'd give this a go, with the hope I'm not being spammy in foisting my own stuff upon you all. Cheers for taking a look - and it's a pretty remarkable natural feature which I previously knew nothing about (if it was laid across Europe, it'd run from London to Belgrade).
Hi everyone. Since you were kind enough to upvote a couple of my pieces a good while back on the Zanclean Megaflood and Atlantropa, I thought I'd give this a whirl here, on the last & maybe the most ludicrous acquisition of the British Empire - a 20-metre high island in the Atlantic, surrounded by some of the roughest seas in the world, that's become the focus of a lot of paranoia and high farce over the last century. Cheers!
Hi everyone. Since a bit over a year ago many of you were kind enough to upvote and leave comments on my newsletter about the Zanclean megaflood (which seems to have filled up the Mediterranean basin in a matter of months), I figured you might be as interested as I was to learn that the English coast had its own version.
(And if this is me being tediously self-promotional, huge apologies.)
Couldnt agree more. (I grew up in Cyprus.) From what I could tell, it didn't occur to Sörgel what effect the dams and evaporation would have on sea-life, and on the coastal economies depending on it. Probably catastrophic. But one thing that was encouraging about the Orkney turbine mentioned elsewhere in these comments: they ran a trial first, to see how wildlife would be affected. Result: negligible impact. So a modern-tech version that respects all that beauty does seem to be possible - if mining the raw materials required to build it is factored in, because that is a massive ongoing issue.
Hah. Not at all! If it sounds like that, I've misrepresented myself - I agree with you here, and the Strait is the perfect place to do it, using something like this: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid
Agreed. There's a tidal turbine off Orkney, the most powerful in the world, that just went live: https://www.orkney.com/news/orbital-grid It's powering 2,000 homes and an electrolyzer creating green hydrogen. A few of those - or a few arrays of them- in the Strait might do wonders.
The final part of a trilogy of stories I ran in my newsletter - and since the first two were well-received on here a few months back, and got me some generous & good advice on tightening them up, I thought I'd push my luck a final time. Plus, this topic's both wtf-barmy and perhaps timely, considering Europe's energy supply issues right now.
Thanks for that. Yep - I think the widely (wildly) varying numbers are due to there being various models currently being explored. The paper I referred to was recent but not "2020" recent. I'd also trust Gaffney's team's findings as the Lost Frontiers team are at the cutting edge of all this.
I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts):
"Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."
Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged!
(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)
That's a fair comment, thank you. I originally wrote it that way because it was for longterm readers, with a bunch of callbacks to previous stuff, as you mention there. But for first-time visitors, it could be seen as clutter. I've cut some of that out, and I think you're right. Cheers!
Fabulous. Not just for the light-pollution & energy side of things, but because softer lighting is the thing sleep experts have been telling us to introduce into our lives in the evenings, all the blue light filters for our phones etc, to help us tell our bodies it's time to sleep...
But the comments here about bright light deterring crime are important (and true). Not sure what a solution is that deals with that AND helps us sleep better etc.
This is sort of a sequel to a piece about the ancient Mediterranean megaflood that did really well on here last month - so, with my fingers crossed it's not too obnoxiously self-promotional of me to do it, I thought I'd give this one a punt as well.
Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.