The US Army Bombed a Hawaiian Lava Flow. It Didn't Work. (dailypress.com) 75
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
Why were two apparently unexploded bombs sticking out of a lava tube on Hawaii's Mauna Loa? That's what Kawika Singson, a photographer, wondered in February when he was hiking on Mauna Loa, the colossal shield volcano that rises 55,700 feet from its base below the sea to its summit. Singson had stumbled upon relics of one of volcanology's more quixotic disaster response plans. These devices, described in more detail recently in the U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory's Volcano Watch blog, were two of 40 dropped by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1935 in an attempt to stop lava from plowing into Hilo, the most populous town on the island of Hawaii.
While Hilo was spared as the lava flow naturally lost its forward momentum, it wasn't the last time that humanity tried to fight volcanic fire with fire of its own. History is filled with schemes to stop molten kinetic rock, and the ineffective 1935 bombing and others show that lava flows are very rarely "a force we humans can reckon with," said Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program...
That December, a pond of lava breached its levees and advanced on Hilo at a rate of a mile per day. Fearing it would reach the town and its watershed, Thomas Jaggar, the founder and first director of the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, called on the Army Air Corps. On Dec. 27, 10 Keystone B-3 and B-4 biplane bombers struck the lava flow, targeting its tubes and channels. Half these bombs were packed with 355 pounds of TNT. The other half were not explosive, and instead designed to emit smoke so the pilots could see where the bona fide bombs landed. Singson found one of those inert devices last month.
On Jan. 2, 1936, the lava flows ceased. Jaggar was convinced the bombing worked, but other experts thought it was a coincidence. Pilots did spot several imploded lava tubes, but their collapses were insufficient to block the flow of lava.
A similar operation was attempted in 1942, again to not much effect.
The conclusion reached by the Times' reporter? "Dense, superheated lava does whatever it wants."
While Hilo was spared as the lava flow naturally lost its forward momentum, it wasn't the last time that humanity tried to fight volcanic fire with fire of its own. History is filled with schemes to stop molten kinetic rock, and the ineffective 1935 bombing and others show that lava flows are very rarely "a force we humans can reckon with," said Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program...
That December, a pond of lava breached its levees and advanced on Hilo at a rate of a mile per day. Fearing it would reach the town and its watershed, Thomas Jaggar, the founder and first director of the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, called on the Army Air Corps. On Dec. 27, 10 Keystone B-3 and B-4 biplane bombers struck the lava flow, targeting its tubes and channels. Half these bombs were packed with 355 pounds of TNT. The other half were not explosive, and instead designed to emit smoke so the pilots could see where the bona fide bombs landed. Singson found one of those inert devices last month.
On Jan. 2, 1936, the lava flows ceased. Jaggar was convinced the bombing worked, but other experts thought it was a coincidence. Pilots did spot several imploded lava tubes, but their collapses were insufficient to block the flow of lava.
A similar operation was attempted in 1942, again to not much effect.
The conclusion reached by the Times' reporter? "Dense, superheated lava does whatever it wants."
What is this? Slow news day? (Score:5, Funny)
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Think of the ads and needed clicks.
Every click is a day with some ad money.
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Hell, it's more interesting than the 30. story about a virus named after a beer.
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If they ever name a beer Wuflu it will be a top seller.
Re: What is this? Slow news day? (Score:2)
From the summary... (Score:2)
"a force we humans can reckon with,"
A preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.
(I'm sorry.)
Re:What is this? Slow news day? (Score:5, Informative)
No, no. You see, the 1930s/1940s is the be-all end-all of human knowledge on lava modeling and diversion. Please ignore all of the (successful) modern attempts at the subject.
Hawaii has this bizarrely fatalistic, anti-lava-diversion culture compared to most risk areas. I've seen a lot of Hawaiians express it in some form of, "if Pele wants to destroy something, she'll destroy it." When they do make efforts, they're generally minimal, half-hearted, improvised jobs, and their inevitable failure is used as an excuse to not try harder in the future.
Here when Eldfell erupted on Heimaey, people brought in every pump they could get their hands on and were literally climbing over still-hot lava to cool it and form a lava-wall to (successfully) protect the harbour. And that was the 1970s, and an on-the-spot improvised solution to a threat that they didn't realize existed (nobody realized that Eldfell was still active). In 1983, flows from Mount Etna were successfully diverted by a series of barriers - $2M of deflection work is estimated to have prevented $100M in damage. Then 10 years later, they did it again, with even greater success than the first time. Today we have far greater tools at our disposal - in particular, computer modeling of flows. It's not just "drop a couple unguided WWII-era bombs on a lava tube and hope they do so something".
And they keep coming up with new techniques. For example, one that's been proposed recently is not just to build barriers (like was done for Etna), but specifically, to build them out of dolomite or limestone. The endothermic dissolution of carbonate rocks cools lava and makes it more viscous; modeling shows that it'll cause the flow to build up its own wall against itself.
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Okay, but if you're presented with a volcano problem and your first reaction isn't "let's see what happens if we bomb the shit out if it," you have to relinquish your Man Card.
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Probably not the half including you though.
Volcano (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows that's not how you do it. You have to funnel all the lava down one street, build a wall of those concrete dividers you see on the highway, then use firetrucks to both buttress the wall and spray down the lava to cool it.
Of course, if/when that doesnt work, you simply implode a building which will magically stop the lava and redirect it into the sea.
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As long as you throw in the required cute spunky geologist into your application, I'm sure you can get some grant money for scale testing.
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If you're dealing with a lava flow 10-100 meters high [mtu.edu], that could pose a problem.
55K feet? (Score:4, Informative)
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The other thing I don't like is how some people like to measure Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa's height from the base instead of sea level. I feel like that is just BS, I mean, I get that the mountain is made of a different mineral composition than the seafloor but ultimately it's still the ground. .. It just seems unfair to all the geological processes that worked hard on Mt. Everest and the Himalayas to just award "tallest mountain" to Mauna Kea.
Re:55K feet? (Score:5, Interesting)
The notion of base-to-peak is typically most useful when talking about mountains that are not on earth, because there is no "sea level" to measure the altitude relative to. Base to peak, however, is only one measure of "tallest", and cannot reasonably be compared to something measured in height above sea level. Everest actually only has a 12,000 foot rise, for example.
Mount Everest also only just barely makes the top ten when measuring tallness in terms of distance from the core of the earth, while Hawaii's tallest mountain does not even rank in that list..
Everest still holds the distinction of having the highest altitude, however, which is yet another notion of measuring "tallest", and is by far the most commonly used for places here on earth.
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unfair to all the geological processes
I think that's kinda the point. The geological processes which made Everest so high didn't have to work as hard, since Everest's base is already pretty high up.
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Re: 55K feet? (Score:4, Informative)
This makes you worse than the anti-media straw man you failed to set up, because you couldn't be bothered to even google the thing you were disputing. The Wikipedia page you skimmed actually supports the facts too, you just stopped reading when you got the answer you wanted. Ouch man.
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vol... [usgs.gov]
"This makes the volcano's summit about 17 km (55,700 ft) above its base!"
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Radar, man, dig it?
Seismology, man, dig it?
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Can You dig it? [youtube.com]
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Re: 55K feet? (Score:1)
...if its total height
Don't you mean "heighth?"
>ducks
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While Hawaii has the greatest tallnicity, Everest has the greatest tallitude.
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There will be a next time (Score:1)
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Re: There will be a next time (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm only 14 years younger than Donald Trump. When I was in elementary school my textbooks and library materials still had propaganda from the US "Atoms for Peace" initiative, which was intended to allay public fears of the planned shift in military stance towards nuclear weapons by touting civilian applications of nuclear technology, including bombs.
These materials weren't actually taught anymore, but I always read my books all the way through to the end, usually in the first week. One of my social studies book had a play students were supposed to act out, in which Miss Atoms For Peace, dressed like the Statue of Liberty, uses the light of her Peaceful Uses torch to banish the demons of fear and war.
Students in Trump's generation were taught that nuclear bombs were wonderfully versatile tools for digging canals, leveling roadways through mountains, and for drilling natural gas wells. I wasn't surprised he thought nuclear bombs could steer a hurricane, supposedly the only limits to what you could do with them was your imagination.
All it takes is to believe everything you were taught in grade school, and to not learn much after that point.
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I'm going to bet that some over-enthusiastic military general proposed this in the 1950s, back when everyone was nuclear-crazy [wikipedia.org].
Anyhow, obviously a few bombs won't divert lava, but it actually can be done to a limited degree [bbc.com] using more conventional means. The conditions have to be right, and even then its going to be expensive and far from a sure bet.
I visited Hawaii a few years back, and on the big island there are some rather massive lava flows, one of which was quite recent. It literally covered miles
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They talk about it in one of the engineering-related 1950s nuclear videos on archive.org, that was definitely a thing; blow up a safe path for the lava to take, saving a city.
The thing about Hawaii is that most of the eruptions happen on rift zones, on the flanks of the volcanoes, and there is only a small difference between flowing left or right and threatening completely different things because of the shape of the mountain and the rift zones.
Hurri Cain (Score:1)
Shhhh, don't give you-know-who more nuke ideas.
Water Bombing? (Score:3)
I suppose it would be a lot of water but it's a good example of how much potential energy geothermal solutions inherently have access to.
Re:Water Bombing? (Score:5, Informative)
It has had some success [wikipedia.org].
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Well, it does work in Minecraft...
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Having hoses available is a matter for your emergency planning department.
Deep dive (Score:1)
cf. Thomas 13
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It's a religion with esoteric as well as exoteric doctrine.
Unwilling and unperceptive idiots need not apply. Evolution takes care of it anyway.
Perhaps you prefer the Trump ASCII banners and the Nazi ones and the random elucidations of how the entire Internet is conspiring against him.
You've lost nothing. Until I take it all from you.
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She's precocious, and she knows just what it takes to make a pro blush [youtube.com]
It is not just the USA... (Score:3)
... which, even now that it's the 21st century, doesn't fully understand that dropping bombs usually does not solve problems...
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Empire of Japan calling on Line 1
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Photo? (Score:5, Insightful)
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https://www.livescience.com/ma... [livescience.com]
355 lbs of TNT? (Score:3)
Seems like a little tiny bomb, when we have modern conventional weapons up to 30,000lb bunker busters (MOP)
Bunker busters like the BLU-109 (for the lava tubes) combined with fluid dynamics modeling could allow the flow to be redirected with some more precision than 20 355lb bombs.
It would be an interesting study at least.
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What it wants is to obey gravity and go down hill.
That's why the only useful thing you can do with a bomb is change which direction downhill is.
In the most recent eruption on Kilauea only the walls of the lava channel separated going left, right, or center. One big bomb could have dumped it down the side, creating a new channel.
Re: 355 lbs of TNT? (Score:4, Informative)
There's an island west of Maui that was used as a bombing range. As a result of the bombing, the aquifer collapsed and the island is largely uninhabitable by humans (not just because of the risk of unexploded ordinance).
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No promises to pray lots, but you've had a few thoughts sent heavenward. And for those whose first inclination is to bash the Christian post - how about giving it a rest this time. Best wishes to you and all those you love and care about.
1973 Eldfell eruption (Score:5, Informative)
Icelanders were able to divert lava around the town on Heimaey in 1973 using jets of sea water.
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That lava was considerably more viscous and slow-moving, and had cooled considerably by the time it reached the town. Not all lava is created equal.
Dumb and dumber (Score:3)
Right, the army is dumb, but is it this dumb? [theguardian.com]
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Without even reading the link I can still confidently say, "Yes".
Good for them. (Score:2)
Or then again, you've got this guy. [imdb.com]. It's a good movie, watch it if you have time. Oh, you're doing nothing for the next 2 weeks for absolutely no reason?
Award-winning journalism... (Score:2)
Well colour me surprised. (Score:2)
When the US Army bombs anything it generally goes quite badly for whatever gets bombed or indeed anything within about 2,000 miles of the bombing!