red fingernails

Laura painted my nails a lovely, glossy red. It's only on one hand though. There was nothing interesting to watch on tv today so i started reading Brisingr again.

Some people do stupid things at the expense of their community. In Aberfan in South Wales, the government decided to dump their coal waste in a steep valley above their town. When heavy rainfall added weight to the waste tip which reduced any internal cohesion in it, it naturally triggered slope failure and a mudflow holding 100,000 cubic metres of material. This engulfed part of the town and killed 147 people and the council finally decided it would be a good time to lower the waste tips and dump them elsewhere. This was in 1966. 

But you know, sometimes adding extra weight on land considered unsafe is unavoidable. For example, from 1948 to 1998, Hong Kong experienced rapid urbanisation which forced newcomers to live on unsafe slopes. Torrential rainstorms then triggered massive landslides due to inadequacies of hillside construction. 

It is also easier to predict volcano eruptions than earthquakes. This is because earthquakes can happen in fault lines not even known to mankind until they occur. To predict earthquakes you monitor for signs of pre shocks, observe levels of ground water, map epicentres and frequencies of previous earthquakes to derive a possible time pattern and detect electrical signals from underground. Some people even look out for unusual animal behaviour.

With volcanoes, there are more obvious signs like tremors increasing within the volcano. As magma rises, so do ground temperatures - and these can be detected by satellites using heat seeking cameras or measuring temperatures of nearby lakes. The rising magma also causes volcanoes to swell and bulge so you measure slope angles and just before the eruption, the volcano will emit increasing amounts of gas and steam - although i think it's a bit late to run if you figure you're just about to die.

I hope that was as educational to you as it was for my cramming for Geography. If you bothered to read it, that is. I expect the next post to be on Biology later in the day.