Biggest earthquake in 40 years hits Southeast Asia - Part 2

[Brundlefly]

I paid for dinner yesterday with a credit card and on the receipt under the 'tip' line there was a 'tsunami aid' line. wtf?

[Mr. Harley]

Ned, been off due to drug interactions, and of course I have to participate in a thread hi-jack. Actually, they can back-date using mutations in non-critical DNA areas, both mitochondrial and nuclear. Some people have challenged that analysis, looking at how instead multiple sources could result in the same type of drift. I haven't looked at the debate in over a decade, it is for the math geniuses who have an intuitive grasp of how statistical interactions work. I may be able to run stats for a thesis, but those folks and their arguments are such that I understand what they are arguing about, but I don't have a week free to try to understand the merits of the various debates that they can comprehend in hours, not weeks.

[chequita guevara]

Hmmmm, Toba's still active. It has two extruded domes, and it is is seismically active.

[Bosh]

Back to DNA. Is there a way to calculate the timing of the so-called bottleneck by some other form of analysis that looks only to the human genome? For example, if we know humans arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, we can measure the genetic diversity of Australian natives and determine, roughly, the rate of diversification of a population. We can then take the African population and calculate the date of the origin of our species using the Australian metric.

You can do that quite easily if everyone in a given population is descended from one female (for example we have a pretty good guess as to when "mitochondrial eve" existed). If a given founding population is larger then its possible but harder and some guess-work is involved. But yes, I believe the sort of genetic analysis that you're talking about has been done.

[Winston]

4 weeks after the disaster, one starts to wonder why this thread is topped.

[Ming]

Because if it wasn't... somebody would start a new thread on the topic, because it is still one of the big news stories

Usually I untop after the activity really dies down. I was going to do it after three days of no posts...

[Dis]

not much else to say about it.

The press seems to be moving on. I guess the inaguration diverted attention. I haven't seen a whole lot of news coverage about this anymore, aside from quick tidbits. Which is sad.

I remember reading an article about the top news guys complaining because it costs so much to cover a story like this. Flying all that equipment over there. Everything has to be satellite feed etc. Some places could only be reached by helicopter or boat.

[Ned]

Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was.

Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity."

I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age.

It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Ned
Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was.

Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity."

I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age.

It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

why I suport global warming . We are protecting ourselves when the next ice age comes.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Dissident


why I suport global warming . We are protecting ourselves when the next ice age comes.

Not if ice ages are triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. We then get the "nuclear winter" scenario. The earth goes into a deep freeze. It does not come out, as the ice and snow blanketing the Northern Hemisphere are enough to sustain the cold.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Ned


Not if ice ages are triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. We then get the "nuclear winter" scenario. The earth goes into a deep freeze. It does not come out, as the ice and snow blanketing the Northern Hemisphere are enough to sustain the cold.

I thought the nuclear winter theory was debunked. Temperatures just would not drop that much. A few degrees celcius at the most.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Ned
Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was.

Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity."

I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age.

It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

Well Yellowstone is big enough (pretty much the entire Yellowstone area is a giant caldera) that if it erupted you'd probably be too dead to collect on the investment.

[Ned]

Bosko, I live West of Yellowstone. Those to the East die.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Ned
Bosko, I live West of Yellostone. Those to the East die.

great news.

[Ned]

Not only that, Dis, but the ice will not get this far South. We will still have the best climate in the world while New York lies under a mile high glacier.

Just a thought, if such an event happened, we might have to move our Eastern population South to Mexico as in the recent catastrophe movie. I hardly think, though, that the Mexicans will welcome the move, necessitating a short war.

In Europe, the people will have to move to Africa. I wonder how they would do that. Beg?