Suigetsu MkII

[Lasting Damage]

Wait ... So you DO think the Kato 44cm layer correlates to the Kawakami core at some level? What level please?

I'm not playing this game. Dave, it's you who is saying that the an-ei tephra is not actually the an-ei tephra. So what is it?

[Febble]

I contend that it is wishful thinking to suppose that 3-6mm layers would get compressed to 0.5-1mm thickness by squeezing water out of them. We're not talking about grapefruit pulp here.

Oh for goodness sake.

Look, Dave, very fine particles do not behave like larger particles in water. For them the water is like treacle. Their terminal velocity is extremely low, and it is only in extremely still conditions that they are deposited on the bottom of the lake at all. Think of snow, settling lightly on the ground. Each flake is decelerated so gently when it touches the already fallen layer that the flakes often remain at the angle at which they fell. Even when about about 6 inches has fallen, it's still light and fluffy. But as more snow falls the weight of the snow above gradually compresses the snow below, squeezing out the air. Eventually, the snow is at the bottom is compressed to solid ice.

Of course the deeper layers are compressed. How could they not be?

Hey! maybe that's how we got glaciers!

Wow!

Well, there's that mystery solved!

Well, before Dave leaps in, of course there's one big difference which is that when you compress ice it melts, then refreezes.

But he seems to have forgotten that if you apply weight to a lightly packed layer of particles they will tend to arrange themselves more densely, even if each particle itself is relatively incompressible. Why else would anything leave footprints?

[RAFH]

Er ... Lake sediments are soft, yes. But incompressible? Not the same thing.

Compressibility is what makes things soft, TGBd. Or didn't you learn anything as an engineer?

While the grains of sediment may be fairly hard and incompressible, the pores, the spaces between the grains aren't. They are air or water and if you squeeze out the air or water, the volume of the sediment decreases.

Remember your little water and sand experiment? That shows the volume of space between the sand grains.

I was going to give it up, but you really are a buffoon.

[RAFH]

Does anyone know why LD thinks this 1774 layer correlates with another core?

Dave, if you read what I pointed out earlier, the 1774/1779 layer is a volcano tephra layer with exactly the same mineralogical and pyroclastic characteristics as tephra from the actual recorded explosion at Sakurajima that killed lots of people. It's clearly volcanic tephra, it's clearly sakurajima volcanic tephra, it's clearly in the late 1770s, there aren't any other possible sources for it. It's pretty obvious what it is. If you don't think it's sakurajima tephra, then tell us what it is. Tsunami runoff? earthquake destritus? what's the source? Everything points unequivocally to sakurajima.

Ah ... So you don't try to correlate it with the Kawakami core. I was thinking that would be quite impossible.

Do you think this ash layer is airfall tephra which fell directly on the lake? If not, why do you think it's existence at 44cm means it was emplaced there in the same year as the explosion? Couldn't this ash have flowed in during the 1896 earthquake/flood event?

Interesting questions, but my previous questions are more pressing RE evaluating alternative models.

Right davey, that ash sat there on the ground for 120 years, never moving, not being blown by the wind nor washed away by the rain. Then whammo, just when there was another different volcanic event, this tephra washes into the lake and the new tephra stays on the shore.

What a fucking buffoon.

[RAFH]

If Dave thinks the 1774/1779 layer came from the flood 4.x kya, then the Sakurajima layer must be somewhere above it.

Come now. You should know by now I don't think that.

Not only don't you think that, you don't think, period. Whatever it is that goes on in your buttocks, it's not thinking.

[RAFH]

I contend that it is wishful thinking to suppose that 3-6mm layers would get compressed to 0.5-1mm thickness by squeezing water out of them. We're not talking about grapefruit pulp here.

We aren't? And how do you know that davey? Did you go there and measure and test the sediments? No, you didn't. but you contend it's wishful thinking they could. You, with no education, no training and no experience. None! Yeah, you know better than anybody else.

What a fucking amazing buffoon.

[Dave Hawkins]

Susannah ...

Or go down to the beach. Reach underwater, and pick up a handful of loose sand. Still underwater, squeeze hard. What happens to the sand

I've done it. It doesn't compress. It displaces, but it doesn't compress.

[Coleslaw]

What a wimpy handshake you must have, then.

[Dave Hawkins]

Wait ... So you DO think the Kato 44cm layer correlates to the Kawakami core at some level? What level please?

I'm not playing this game. Dave, it's you who is saying that the an-ei tephra is not actually the an-ei tephra. So what is it?

I never said that. Quote me if you like. I said that your idea that there is correlation of this layer is codswallop. So I take it now that you agree that the Kato 44cm tephra layer is not correlated with the Kawakami/Kitagawa core?

[Seven Popes]

Clay is an excellent example of compressible material. The stuff we use locally is rock hard and unusable as it sits, but knead a bit of water into it, and it's fun for hours. To really get any proper use, you have to mix it with half its volume of water, stir and allow to sit for an hour. Carefully decant the liquid, and you will find sand, pebbles and often roots at the bottom of your container, which need to be discarded. What remains will be liquid for a couple of hours, but gradually settles. We carefully pour off the clear water over the course of a few days, and end up with a very nice clay to model with.

[ericmurphy]

Susannah ...

Or go down to the beach. Reach underwater, and pick up a handful of loose sand. Still underwater, squeeze hard. What happens to the sand

I've done it. It doesn't compress. It displaces, but it doesn't compress.

Dave, does bituminous asphalt compress when the steam-roller rolls over it? Does it just "displace"? How about the dirt when they backfill a trench? Most construction codes require compression to at most 90% of the pre-backfill volume (I think RAFH might have something to say about this). That dirt is made up of solid particles, right? So it's "incompressible," right?

Take a sheet of corrugated cardboard, Dave. Now take a stack of corrugated cardboard a hundred meters thick. Cardboard is solid, isn't it? But are you saying the sheets of cardboard at the base of a hundred-meter tall stack of cardboard won't be any thinner than the ones at the top?

Amazing, the lengths Dave will go to to avoid having to deal with radiocarbon calibration curves. He now appears to be arguing that sediment layers don't get compressed when they go from the top of the lakebed to several dozen meters beneath the top.

And he expects people to believe him that there's no compression going on.

[ninewands]

There. Did I say it right?

no. hence what you said after was wrong, because nothing I said was contradicted by the data in the paper.

Also, where do we get this idea that sediments under water are compressible in the first place? We're talking about fairly incompressible materials here ... Clay particles, sand, silt, diatoms, etc. Are we to believe that the 3-6mm layers discussed by Kato are compressed 5-10 fold? Not very believeable. Sounds like story telling.

yes they are compressible. If you don't think so, go and step in some silt in a lake* and come back and tell us that the silt did not compress. Do you think that the sediments under the lake are equally solid all the way to the surface of the bed? if you do, then I think you need to get out more and enjoy nature. Are the researchers lying when they say that the lake bed is soft?

* I suggest a fairly shallow one. I've got stuck in lake sediments before and it's not very nice. you get this horrible vacuum forming around your foot and it's not easy to get out, so you really do want your head to be above the water.

Okay, folks, Dave is sort of right about the compressibility of the sediment particles. He's just right enough to make everything else he says really, REALLY wrong. This is why the correct term for what we're talking about is "compaction." The term has more to do with the arrangement of the particles in the sediment than it does with the overburden pressure even though the overburden pressure is what causes it.

Freshly settled clay particles on the bottom of a lake would look something like this under SEM:

Notice the extremely high porosity and the unstable arrangement of the particles (and yes, Dave, MOST clay minerals have rather plate-like crystals as shown here). This is why lake-bottom muds are so soft and have a slimy feel to them. They are MOSTLY water.

After the mud has been buried for a few years by later sedimentation the arrangement of the clay particles looks sorta like this:

You'll notice how a lot of the unstable arrangement of the particles is gone now. This is what causes the "de-watering" of the clay. More stable particle arrangements have, by definition, lower porosity than less stable arrangements do. This state roughly corresponds to what ceramicists call "leather-hard"

Finally, after a couple or three centuries you get to an arrangement like this when the clays are fully compacted:

This is probably the state of the clays from about the Kanbun-related turbidite layer all the way to the base of the varve deposits. These clays are fairly tough and will resist deformation or separation unless the force is applied along a bedding plane. After a few dozen millenia have passed this will become a fully hardened shale.

The reduction of porosity within the body of a clay layer implies, of necessity, that the compacted clay layer will be significantly thinner than when it was first deposited. However, since sedimentation is far from being a constant-rate process, it is completely invalid reasoning to try and argue that a few thick layers deeper down in a core disproves the fact that ON AVERAGE the thicker deposits are nearer the surface. So Dave has taken the ONE time I've ever seen him right on a statement of scientific fact (clay minerals are relatively incompressible) and shot himself squarely in the foot with it. It's nice to see that he REMAINS the past master of self-pwnage of the entire internet.

Dave ... did the Air Force ever let you fly an ARMED aircraft other than a simulator?

[Steviepinhead]

It appears that Dave thinks if he can get the average varve layer to be 8mm thick, he will have proved something.

I have every confidence dave will be able to prove his thickness.

[Steviepinhead]

LD, responding to dave's hypothesis that lakebed silt ought not to be very compressible:

If you don't think so, go and step in some silt in a lake* and come back and tell us that the silt did not compress. Do you think that the sediments under the lake are equally solid all the way to the surface of the bed? if you do, then I think you need to get out more and enjoy nature. Are the researchers lying when they say that the lake bed is soft?

I've said it before, and I don't even mean it critically, but just as something that dave needs to start taking into account: he simply has a demonstrably poor grasp of commonplace physical processes.

And it's been remarked many times, by myself and others, that dave's aversion to actually getting out in the field--any field!--is astonishing, given his claimed interest in geology.

These two traits--when taken in combination and not corrected for--go a long way to explain dave's conflation of different kinds of canyon walls, different kinds of laminae, his poor track record in devising relevant "analogies" and "experiments," his difficulty in understanding what he's reading, etc.

That's not to say that these are the only reasons he gets things wrong, but they would throw off his "common-sense" and his "intuition" all by themselves, even if he didn't have an agenda and were otherwise irreproachably ethical and honest.

[Dave Hawkins]

You guys are just story telling and story telling and story telling.

You can't get a 6mm layer to compress down to 1mm by compression and water removal.

This argument is dead.

And it leaves you with quite a conundrum for your supposedly reliable Lake Suigetsu "clock."

[Seven Popes]

You guys are just story telling and story telling and story telling.

You can't get a 6mm layer to compress down to 1mm by compression and water removal.

This argument is dead.

And it leaves you with quite a conundrum for your supposedly reliable Lake Suigetsu "clock."

I can do this by webcast with clay.
1000.00 US dollars.

[Occam's Aftershave]

As always, a 30 second search on Google Scholar turned up thousands of papers and articles on sediment compressibility, since it is so critical to the petroleum industry.

Here is one of the best, most clear overviews I could find (caution: 6.8 Meg pdf)

Pressure and Compaction in the Rock Physics Space

With nice diagrams explaining the effects of porosity, water content, particle size, depth, etc.

Did anyone really expect Dumbass Dave to research this himself?

[Steviepinhead]

To further make my point ... Water can be thought of as soft. That is, you sink in it if you jump into it. But water is very incompressible. Hope that helps.

Dave, for flying frisbees' sake! Even I, the Inexplicably Imperturbable Pinhead, am beginning to lose my fabled patience!

Water may be incompressible if you stick it in a water-tight piston, sure.

But if you truly believe that water under pressure cannot be squeezed out of a porous matrix, please, be my guest--

THROW OUT ALL YOUR USELESS SPONGES* AND WASHCLOTHS!!

Sheesh, dude!

Then go re-read my post above about poor grasp of common physical mechanisms. You are shooting for yet another dave-law, here, my friend.

__________
*Reading on down the thread, I see Improvius beat me to the sponge example.

[ninewands]

I hate to tell you this Dave, but a six-to-one reduction in volume from freshly-deposited clay on a lake bottom to fully compacted clay is not unusually high.

You really WOULD have had a problem with Soils and Foundations if you'd majored in Civil Engineering since you can't grasp that.

BTW, there's a LOT of good information in those Dvorkin slides. Reminds me of the stuff I had to learn when I was evaluating well logs and cores for a living. Dave ... do you have any idea what oil & gas companies spend on exploration in a year? Do you think they'd do that if the mechanics of sedimentary rocks weren't pretty thoroughly understood?

[E. Mota Kahn]

Thursday Profile/Dave Hawkins

Internet Data Miner Seeks Online Gold for God

RANTSNRAVES.ORG, Jan. 31 (Internet News Service) — “Check this out,” Dave Hawkins says, a big, gratified grin sprawling across his face. “This is pure gold.”

“… Darwinism is … a theory of chance,” Richard Dawkins said recently. “It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that …Darwinism … couldn't work.”

“Dawkins!” Hawkins says, banging a fist down on his desk for emphasis. “Dawkins himself says Darwinism couldn’t work!”

Hawkins is a miner. But his quarry isn’t actual gold, or even oil or coal. And the ground he works isn’t real, but virtual.

He is after data and quotes.

Hawkins, a young earth creationist and advocate for “Flood Geology” — the idea that Noah’s worldwide flood really happened — runs an Internet-based data and quote mining operation called Hawkins Geomythology LLC. In this case, “LLC” stands, not for “Limited Liability Corporation,” but “Lying for the Lord Covenant.”

“Look,” Hawkins says, rattling the paper on which the Dawkins quote is printed. Hawkins says he downloaded it from the Web and “slightly edited it for reasons of space.”

“Don’t worry about the ellipses,” Hawkins said, waving off a reporter who wanted to check the quote against the original source. “When people hear this read in Church, they don’t hear the ellipses. They hear the words!”

“Sophisticated codswallop” and “story-telling” is how Hawkins describes modern geology that points to an ancient earth, much older than 6,000 years, and one in which Noah’s flood could not have happened.

“Varves, curves, sediments, carbon-14, booo-rring,” Hawkins says with an exaggerated yawn. He is talking about a recent thread on the Rants ‘n’ Raves message board in which he has been discussing his ideas with geological experts. He shakes his head at the verbal abuse that he has received from many of them.

“I suppose some people are insecure in their beliefs and resort to childish behavior when faced with the truth,” he says.

Young adult members of Hawkins’ church are employed in the mining operation, Googling the Web day and night for science paper abstracts, book blurbs and even stray bits of random data that can be “edited” to support the young earth thesis.

Theirs is a joyous operation, and as they mine the Web for data and quotes, they constantly sing, to the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves”:

Googling in the morning, Googling sites of science,
Googling in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the data, and the time of printing,
We shall go a-Googling, proving our beliefs.

Refrain:

Proving our beliefs, proving our beliefs
We shall go a-Googling, proving our beliefs
Proving our beliefs, proving our beliefs
We shall go a-Googling, proving our beliefs!

“The kids are super,” Hawkins says, noting that his love of youth has led him to make Flash movies teaching young children about the Lord.

“They’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of enthusiasm and, best of all, because they’re all under 18, I don’t have to pay them the minimum wage,” Hawkins adds.

[Steviepinhead]

Dave Hawkins:

We're not talking about grapefruit pulp here.

For a change, dave, I agree with you completely.

If we'd wanted to talk about the consistency of your gray matter, we would've come right out and said so.

[ericmurphy]

You guys are just story telling and story telling and story telling.

You can't get a 6mm layer to compress down to 1mm by compression and water removal.

This argument is dead.

What? Based on your personal incredulity? I don't think so, given that your incredulity is utterly worthless.

And it leaves you with quite a conundrum for your supposedly reliable Lake Suigetsu "clock."

I'm afraid not, Dave, since we already know that "clock" is accurate. How do we know? How can I say this with such assurance? The same reason as always, Dave:

The Curves Agree.

[VoxRat]

I hate to tell you this Dave, but a six-to-one reduction in volume from freshly-deposited clay on a lake bottom to fully compacted clay is not unusually high.

You really WOULD have had a problem with Soils and Foundations if you'd majored in Civil Engineering if you can't grasp that.

BESIDES WHICH...
Dave is STILL trying to pretend that compaction is the only variable here!

One more time: the thickness of the layer depends on BOTH

• how much solid there is in it, AND
• how much water has been squeezed out of it

The FIRST item will vary from year to year, depending on rainfall, whether there was a volcanic eruption, and any number of other variables. The SECOND item will vary depending on how long the layer's been getting squeezed, and how much weight is squeezing it.

No wonder creationists don't do research! They can't seem to cope with the simplest of physical phenomena!

[Dave Hawkins]

I hate to tell you this Dave, but a six-to-one reduction in volume from freshly-deposited clay on a lake bottom to fully compacted clay is not unusually high.

You really WOULD have had a problem with Soils and Foundations if you'd majored in Civil Engineering since you can't grasp that.

BTW, there's a LOT of good information in those Dvorkin slides. Reminds me of the stuff I had to learn when I was evaluating well logs and cores for a living. Dave ... do you have any idea what oil & gas companies spend on exploration in a year? Do you think they'd do that if the mechanics of sedimentary rocks weren't pretty thoroughly understood?

We're not talking about freshly deposited sediments, Ninewands ... We are talking about sediments supposedly deposited up to 400 years ago. Read the papers.

And I doubt you're right about freshly laid sediments anyway. Do you have any studies to support your point?

[Occam's Aftershave]

You guys are just story telling and story telling and story telling.

You can't get a 6mm layer to compress down to 1mm by compression and water removal.

This argument is dead.

And it leaves you with quite a conundrum for your supposedly reliable Lake Suigetsu "clock."

I can do this by webcast with clay.
1000.00 US dollars.

I'll take $1000 of that action too.

How about it Dave? You willing to put $2K (U.S.) where your mouth is?