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To: Rarebird who wrote (49365)	2/20/2000 12:53:00 PM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116753

Sorry All, looks like I missed the link for the GREAT article from the BBC: "ROBERT SMITH: I was working at the south end of this lake at a place called Peal Island. I was standing on the island one day and I noticed a couple of unusual things. The, the boat dock that we normally would use at this place seemed to be underwater. That evening as I was looking over the expanse of the south end of the lake I could see trees that were being inundated by water. I took a look at these trees and they were be, being inundated with water a few inches, maybe a foot deep and it was very unusual for me to see that because nowhere else in the lake would the lake level have really changed. What did it mean? We did not know. NARRATOR: Smith commissioned a survey to try to find out what was happening at Yellowstone. The Park had last been surveyed in the 1920s when the elevation, the height above sea-level, was measured at various points across Yellowstone. 50 years later, Smith surveyed the same points. ROBERT SMITH: The idea was to survey their elevations and to compare the elevations in the mid-70s to what they were in 1923 and the type of thing that we did is to make recordings at a precision level of, of a few millimetres. NARRATOR: The two sets of figures should have been similar, but as the survey team moved across the Park, they noticed something unexpected: the ground seemed to be heaving upwards. ROBERT SMITH: The surveyor said to me there's something wrong and he said it's not me, it's got to be something else, so we went through all the measurements again trying to be very careful and the conclusion kind of hit me in the face and said this caldera has uplifted at that time 740 millimetres in the middle of the caldera. NARRATOR: As the measuring continued, an explanation for the submerged trees began to emerge. The ground beneath the north of Yellowstone was bulging up, tilting the rest of the Park downwards. This was tipping out the sound end of the lake inundating the shoreside trees with water. The vulcanologist realised only one thing could make the Earth heave in this way: a vast living magma chamber. The Yellowstone supervolcano was alive and if the calculations of the cycle were correct, the next eruption was already overdue. ROBERT CHRISTIANSEN: Well this gave us a real shiver of nervousness if you will about the fact that we have been through this 600,000 year cycle and that the last eruption was about 600,000 years ago. ROBERT SMITH: I felt like telling people, that is we basically have on our hands a giant. NARRATOR: The scientists had found the largest single active volcanic system yet discovered. There were many things they needed to find out. How big was the magma chamber deep underground, how widespread would the effects of an eruption be and crucially, when would it happen? To answer any of these questions vulcanologists knew they first had to understand Yellowstone's mysterious magma chamber. ROBERT SMITH: It's incredibly important to understand what's happening inside of the magma chamber because that pressure and that heat, the fluid is what's triggering the final eruption. It's like understanding the primer in a bullet. NARRATOR: Understanding the magma chamber would be very difficult. Smith and his team needed to discover the size of something 8 kilometres below the ground. They began harnessing information from an ingenious source: earthquakes. ROBERT SMITH: Well, what we have here is a seismometer. This is the working end of a seismograph, the device that's used to record earthquakes. It is able to pick up the smallest of earthquakes in, in Yellowstone plus it picks up moderate to large earthquakes around the world, it is so sensitive. This forms one of a network of 22 seismograph stations in Yellowstone that is used for monitoring and all the data are transmitted to a central recording facility at the University of Utah. NARRATOR: Like many thermal areas, Yellowstone has hundreds of tiny earth tremors each year. They are harmless, but in his seismographic lab Smith has been using them to trace the size of the magma chamber. ROBERT SMITH: Earthquakes are essentially telling you the pulse. They tell you the real time pulse of how the caldera is deforming, of how faults are fracturing. NARRATOR: Bob Smith's 22 permanent seismographs are spread across the Park. They detect the sound-waves which come from earthquakes deep underground. These waves travel at different speeds depending on the texture of what they pass through. Soundwaves passing through solid rock go faster than those travelling through molten rock or magma. By measuring the time they take to reach the seismographs Smith can tell what they've passed through. Eventually this builds up a picture of what lies beneath the Park. ROBERT SMITH: The magma chamber we found extends basically beneath the entire caldera. It's maybe 40-50 kilometres long, maybe 20 kilometres wide and it has a thickness of about 10 kilometres. So it's a giant in volume and essentially encompasses a half or a third of the area beneath Yellowstone National Park. NARRATOR: The magma chamber was enormous. If it erupted it would be devastating. To discover the extent of the devastation scientists had to understand the force of the eruption. The clues to this could be found in a much smaller volcano halfway across the world: the Greek island of Santorini. The eruption here 3,500 years ago, although not VEI8 in scale, did have a small magma chamber. Professor Steve Sparks has spent much of his career studying Santorini. PROF. STEVE SPARKS (University of Bristol): When I first came to Santorini and started to look at the pumice deposits from these caldera forming eruptions I found evidence of a dramatic change in the power and violence of the eruption. NARRATION: By examining the layers of Santorini pumice Sparks discovered magma chambers could erupt with almost unimaginable force and spread their devastation widely. STEVE SPARKS: There's dramatic evidence of a sudden increase in the power. Huge blocks about 2 metres in diameter were hurled out of the volcano reaching 7 kilometres and smashing into the ground and to do that the blocks must have been thrown from the volcano at hundreds of metres per second, about the speed of Concorde and you can imagine this enormous red rock crashing in and breaking up on impact. NARRATOR: To understand why caldera volcanoes could erupt with such power Sparks replicated their violence at one trillionth of the scale. STEVE SPARKS: OK, so we need this? NARRATOR: In the lab he modelled a reaction which occurs in the magma chamber of an erupting caldera. STEVE SPARKS: The problem is we can't go into a magma chamber so the next best thing to do is to go to the laboratory and try and simulate what happens in the magma chamber and in the pathway to the surface. ..." bbc.co.uk

To: Rarebird who wrote (49365)	2/20/2000 2:30:00 PM
From: Eashoa' M'sheekha	Respond to of 116753

Yes...But What Comes First?The Chicken Or The Egg? Being a bird..I thought you might consider this.:-) If Gold were to rise,Canadian,and to a larger degree, Australian, currencies would rise.Gold is one of OZ's main exports....which is why their Central Bank sale was so suspect,and why Canada admonishes Gold and has sold it off over the years.I have number of theories on this also. Canada's currency is considered to be undervalued by many by anywhere from five to ten cents.OZ by about five cents. These are anywhere from five to ten percent. Were the USD to begin a decline into say 95 or so on the overall index due to market declines and other circumstances,these currencies would rise and gold would rise at the same time.The cumulative effect,barring any intervention in the gold market,would begin to propel these two currencies and you would find yourself in a very fast moving Gold market. Do You Agree? As for the recession,I feel these fears are way overblown, and may be more of a lobby to the FED. to try to influence it.Right now the screaming from the hilltops of the very overvalued stock market are blaming Mr. Greenspan for market declines.Poo Poo........I say.The FED's responsibility is towards the Country as a whole...not Wall Street,although the distortion induced into the economy led by Wall Street has become more and more difficult for Mr.G to balance. And of interest...excuse the pun...why do you think the FED continues to raise rates when the figures reported are considered to be benign by Wall Street?Could it be that these figures are...errr...inacurate?Slowing an economy with " NO INFLATION " seems a little odd to mois. And another thing.... there are many economists who believe mild inflation is actually good for the economy.I believe this balancing act on the edge of a cliff is not the safest way to run a country's economy,unless someone has placed a safety net there.There is speculation on this also. PS:Your position is a safe one regarding your wait and see,but at what point do you feel safe? 305? 310? 315? 320? 325? 330? 335? 340? 345? 350?...............................$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ PPS: Sorry for the " fake " shot.I didn't realize at the time you were a MAVERICK.Big diff. <VBG>