Mt Rainier – Seattle’s doom
It is worse than we thought. Marc Morano sent this over :
A warming world could leave cities flattened
Over the last decade, rock avalanches and landslides have become more common in high mountain ranges, apparently coinciding with the increase in exceptionally warm periods The collapses are triggered by melting glaciers and permafrost, which remove the glue that holds steep mountain slopes together.
Worse may be to come. Thinning glaciers on volcanoes could destabilise vast chunks of their summit cones, triggering mega-landslides capable of flattening cities such as Seattle and devastating local infrastructure.
Telephoto lenses are great. Mt Rainier is three miles high and seventy-four miles away from Seattle. That is going to be one heck of a landslide.
And one more minor problem …..
Temperatures at Mt. Rainier have been cooling for the last 80 years.
“Studies have suggested that intense rain cannot provide the lubrication needed for this to happen, so Tormey concludes that glacier melt must have been to blame.”
So they are using the Intelligent Design scientific principals now?
This is bad. Especially since I live here. I could scale the mountain, and make a sacrifice to the carbon gods. Maybe a slay a beetle or some such.
This URL should bring up the Lahar map for Mt. Rainier.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://minerals.usgs.gov/west/images/lahars.gif&imgrefurl=http://minerals.usgs.gov/west/projects/cashazdel.htm&usg=__b1UtLBGPBneJbB3XXnqdlCFrR5k=&h=532&w=501&sz=38&hl=en&start=0&sig2=BUFJuikGwEG879-rWtofYg&zoom=1&tbnid=CYObF4vMKMswkM:&tbnh=142&tbnw=134&ei=pP25TL6FLojksQOD7ZnmDg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmt%2Brainier%2Blahar%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2GPEA_en%26biw%3D1004%26bih%3D553%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=559&vpy=61&dur=293&hovh=231&hovw=218&tx=126&ty=91&oei=pP25TL6FLojksQOD7ZnmDg&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0
All of the area shown falls south of Seattle about 30 miles. When Rainier blows its cork, the town of Orting is probably toast. Then, as you can see, much of the flow is likely to travel the path of the Puyallup river into the sound near Tacoma. The Auburn valley and Renton will suck up most of the mud. A trickle might arrive in Seattle.
This shot is Rainier and St. Helens. They’re not as far apart as you might think.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5K6ZHlhikd0/TGr-yX23npI/AAAAAAAAB-8/M9CRXz6xsvk/s1600/IMG_4033.JPG
Yes but the Volcano erupting would cause a Lahar, not climate change
Not a beetle, your sacrifice can contain no carbon. Table salt.
Likely just a typo. Lots of greenies in Seattle so the original word must have been “fattened” as in swelling wallets from GCD grants…
I told you we could replace our science desk with second graders from the Montessori School.
There have been massive mudslides from Mt Rainier in the past, on a scale and of an extent to threaten/devastate Seattle.
However, they stem from volcanic eruptions causing a lahar, a rock and mud slide lubricated by the melting ice from the glaciers around the peak. It is an absurd stretch to extrapolate AGW into that kind of phenomenon.
etudiant, do you live in the Seattle area? If you mean threaten as in the nightly news extrapolating from a rain storm that its time to board the boats… They do like to wear those yellow rain slickers don’t they.
Layne, hello from across the lake.
“Worse may be to come. Thinning glaciers on volcanoes could destabilise vast chunks of their summit cones, triggering mega-landslides capable of flattening cities such as Seattle and devastating local infrastructure.”
Tired old meme with a different twist. The Ice it holding the world in!!!!
Will be amazing when all the volcanoes around the world flatten like pancakes, should be good tv, what time do we expect this to happen, next week? Might have to subscribe to cable and get some popcorn
So when Mnt St Helen’s erupted was that really climate change causing that landslide, I guess we were just not payi
paying attention properly at the time….
I think the next St. Helen’s is pay-per-view.
Just to be clear:
Definition of Lahar: an avalanche of VOLCANIC water and mud down the slopes of a volcano. No relation to fantasy climate change.
The only way to inject this kind of energy into all that snow and ice in a short period such as to create (anything like) a Lahar is either: Asteroid strike…. Nuclear detonation…. or volcanic eruption.
We just had the wettest November on record a few years ago. I think it was 17 inches. This area is already accustomed to high levels of precipitation. Development is designed for high rates of flow. That November, my back yard turned into a lake.
Yet… No slide on Rainier.
The point of my comment was to show that paths of flow/debris from any slide on Rainier (for any reason) are believed to affect areas south of Seattle. I hear the most about Orting and the Puyallup valley. The Auburn/Kent valley is also low ground. Seattle isn’t likely to see any effect even in the event of Lahar.
Bruce: Thanks. It’s a beautiful day over here.. hope it’s nice for you guys as well…
A volcano has a lot more energy than a gravity slide.
I’m sure others here know vastly more about this than me, but the reason I’ve seen cited for collapse of porous volcanic cones is giant injections of heat from earth’s mantle into water deposits in this porous material, vaporizing it, fracturing the structure, and rendering all of it liquid. This is an injection of heat that occurs in minutes or even seconds. It’s already saturated with water. I don’t know that more water will make the difference. It is the sudden expansion of water that breaks the cone apart, causing the Lahar.
I showed the shot of St. Helens and Rainier because they are so close together. An article in the local paper noted geologic record placed eruptions of Rainier no less than 500 years (always) AFTER eruptions at St. Helens. Let’s hope this holds true.
I’m another Seattle area resident and we have problems here: Seattle is a very blue city in a very blue county in a very blue state. That is a problem. Our volcanoes are not anywhere close to being our biggest problem, and our climate is doing just fine.
Perhaps it would help your readers to know about Washington State’s newest glacier, though. It is in the crater of Mt. St. Helens and sprang into being since the great eruption of 1980. Google it on Google Images – it is a beautiful thing we have growing here. And at a time of great and perilous global warming, if one is to believe the local papers.
And that glacier is not the only thing growing in the crater – a lava dome has grown concurrently with the new glacier. In fact, the new glacier encircles the new dome. Fire and ice, global warming; Something the climate alarmists are sure of is wrong.
stevengoddard says:
October 17, 2010 at 12:54 am
“A volcano has a lot more energy than a gravity slide.”
Agreed completely. A slide created by saturation is usually local in effect. If a hillside is going to slump, it does so when conditions for movement are met. The result is simple erosion of inclination. Mountains turn to rolling hills. Plateaus become humps.
A Lahar is an injection of energy that vastly exceeds that required to cause a slide.
Where is the warming? I became interested in this topic when we began experiencing very wet and cold winters. 2009 was nice. Now I understand it was El Nino. It was likely the preceding La Nina that caught my attention.
Now we’re facing another one…. Sh@t. But it’s nice today!
Layne, in words similar to Crocodile Dundee (“do you call that a knife?”) 17 ins in a month is not that much. Where I live ( nice and sunny and far from the wettest place in the country) we have had that in a day in recent times- this year we had 250mm in about 10hrs in February, the record (112 years ago) was over 1m in three days and over 1.8m (6ft) in one month. Floods -yes but no significant landslides.
The AGW crowd like to forget past cyclical records -inconvenient.
Keep well
Temperatures at Mt. Rainier have been cooling for the last 80 years.
It’s actually been warming there. The problem is they’re using a thermometer reading from the a cold area. You don’t do that. I meant, you do take the readings, but you don’t use them because it biases the record towards cooling. That’s always a wrong practice. So, you just take the thermometer readings from the lower, warmer areas, by the city, and that gives you the true temperature for that area. The city is growing so it’s getting warmer there. That always happens when a city grows. That’s the truth. You don’t want to lie, do you? No. You want the real temperature, the warming one. That’s the truth, it’s warming. That graph you’re showing is just wrong. You and that Watts are liars.
;o)
In the end doesn’t matter, since Steve’s graph shows that the temperature hasn’t changed, so why is the ice melting? Maybe Rainier is going to erupt, which I would be more worried about and most likely the cause of the previous massive landslides. Remember St Helens. From memory Rainier is the highest mountain on earth from sea level (Everest already has elevation), if it explodes into caldera formation there wouldn’t be much left of Seatle lol.
Don’t forget the megathrust earthquake is due also off the coast of Seatle, like a 8 to 9 on the reichter scale, the rivers show evidence of the massive tsunamis about 300 years ago, and similar regularities in the past, it’s due again…. 😛
I don’t suppose new roads and other land use changes had anything to do with increased landslides. In a sense they are right, had the last ice age not ended, we would not be doing much building in the mountains.
You can email the author and tell her what you think of her amazing article here: [email protected]. I’ve sent mine and am now off to find somewhere flat and away from the mountains to meditate on the stupefyingly idiotic profession we call Environmental Science Reporting.
The temperature at Ranier isn’t dropping. You’re just not showing the data correctly. You’re supposed to adjust the data to fit your preconception. Subtract a degree from the data in the 1930s, and gradually raise the number to zero by 1960, and then gradually raise it to +1 degree by today.
See? Now it’s heating up!
It does look a little Mount Doomlike:P
What amazes me is that the author’s employer ENTRIX says of itself on its website http://www.entrix.com/
“For over a quarter century, ENTRIX has provided consulting services in four critical areas: Water Resources Management, Natural Resources Management, Permitting & Compliance, and Liability Management.”
It seems to me to be similar to an insurance company publishing a “peer reviewed” paper which exaggerates the risk of some potential, impending disaster while simultaneously selling insurance against that disaster (Munich Re for example).
Not dissimilar either to Pachauri’s TERI quoting the erroneous glacier melt material to seek more funds.
http://ktwop.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/earth-is-starting-to-crumble-due-to-global-warming/
“Telephoto lenses are great. Mt Rainier is three miles high and seventy-four miles away from Seattle.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/mountsthelens/rain12.shtml
“Past Rainier mudflows and landslides covered areas as far as 70 miles from the mountain.”
Volcanoes have tremendous amounts of energy. Think Mt. St. Helens.
That is a completely different phenomenon from a gravity driven mudslide.
All strato-volcanoes are unstable! Glacier cover on active volcanoes is short lived due to the eruptions. The whole of the Cascade Range is a threat to the NW of America but it seems to be a great place to live.
Maybe if the author was really clever, she could have blamed climate change causing the eruption of Mount St Helens. I mean look at that landslide, if ice was holding it together it just would never have happened lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRnVhbfIKQ
When Mt Ranier erupts and lahars destroys property and kills residents, King and Pierce Counties will be bankrupted by damages awarded to the victims. The Counties’ liability is based upon reckless disregard from known hazards when issuing building permits for development throughout the danger zones.
It is not a question of if, only when will the lahars occur.
“It is an absurd stretch to extrapolate AGW into that kind of phenomenon.” – etudiant
In AGW game if you’re not making absurd stretches you ain’t tryin’ hard enough.
Just clicked over to this site from Morano. Sounds like a lot of contributors are from my beloved home town of Seattle. And really witty as well.
But I must say now that I live in Portland (and the Commie riddled Willamette Valley) I know that even in King Cty your Blue is “Baby” compared to Portland and Vancouver BC.
I do like the idea of Federal Insurance for AGW caused disasters. Since the dollar is worth 25% less than it was on Jan 2009 we could easily follow through and print enough to pay off all the Latte-pulling Libtards in Seattle and Portland if Mt Hood decides to cooperate and pay for Obamacare and mountainous (sorry for the pun) Krugman-like Stimulous packages as well!
JLK