[GHung]

pstarr posted; "Now I realize they rolled because the river also flows down stream. Let me repeat: down stream ie down hill on an incline. Not so magical."

Gosh, there are other examples of water pushing bolders uphill. Here's just one:

Local Catastrophes Happen: Mega-Tsunami Moves 700-Ton Boulders Uphill
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2015/10 ... -uphill-2/

A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. That wave picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.

Yes, local geological catastrophes happen and those catastrophes can alter the landscape. In a geological who-done-it, huge boulders found on an otherwise relatively flat surface on a remote island begged the question: how did they get there?....

..... They are composed of rock unlike the immediate ground they sit upon and are not like rock found at higher ground. So if they didn’t erode in-place or roll down from higher ground where did they come from?

They came from below. These boulders are composed of volcanic material along with marine limestone. Rock of similar composition is found well below these boulders’ current location. If that rock from below is the source of these boulder then how did they come to be over 500 feet or more above sea level? One hypothesis left is that they must have been pushed up there by some force. In this case, that force was a giant tsunami.



Looking 30 miles across open ocean there is another island. That island is one large volcano and you can see from the Google map below (zoom in on the left side island) that this volcano has all the appearance of having collapsed in the past. That collapse would have sent a wall of water toward the very location where these boulders are found.....

Dismissing pstarr's and KJ's unqualified assertions, the real question here is if super-storms can produce a big enough surge, for a long enough period, to move giant stones as these scientists posit they have. Since storm surges from hurricanes during my lifetime have been known to move large heavy objects far inland, I can at least entertain the possibility. Then, again, unlike some folks who comment here, I don't pretend to know everything. I could be wrong. One thing I do know is that pstarr's contention that water can't move heavy objects uphill is clearly false.

[chilyb]

It's an interesting theory.

I'll add these quotes from the article:

"On Ireland’s Aran Islands, geologist Rónadh Cox of Williams College found that in intense North Atlantic storms in the winter of 2013 and 2014, more than 2,000 boulders moved, based on GPS mapping. Many were pretty small, but the biggest was over 400 tons."

"People skeptical that ocean waves can move boulders are not thinking about the physics right, said Robert Weiss, a geophysicist at Texas A&M University. “The density of air is about a thousand times smaller than the density of water,” Weiss said. He added that a simple cubic meter of water, a cube that is a meter long on every side, already weighs a ton."

I am not arguing that waves can not move boulders, anyone who grew up near enough to Lake Erie to observe storm effects has seen that with their own eyes. My contention is moving large boulders from sea floor location to cliff top locations takes more force than even a super storm produces, but a Tsunami, Earthquake or Volcano could all do so easily. Why reach for an unlikely answer when more likely answers already exist? Occums Razor, the simplest solution is more likely to give the correct answer.

I agree. I am not sure I completely understand why Hansen completely discounts the (more easily explained) tsunami theory. This part of the explanation seems a bit thin:

Farther inland in areas not protected by large cliffs, he thinks, the storms created curious chevron ridges, large V-shaped walls of rock sometimes extending several miles and always pointing to the southwest.

At very high heights on the islands, meanwhile, Hearty suggests that the huge waves left sediment layers featuring telltale beach bubbles, or fenestrae, suggesting waves reaching as much as 80 feet above the current sea level.

All of these features taken together, Hearty contends, are best explained by gigantic storms. He likes to invoke the principle of “parsimony,” meaning that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. “It’s really the parsimony between the trilogy of evidence that makes this story hold together,” Hearty says.

All that being said, I don't have an issue with one of the main points of Hansen's research, that a large temperature gradient between the tropics and the greenland melt will kick up some serious storms. That what it's all about, right?

[GHung]

Evidence of a super-storm would be more localised than that of a tsunami. The effects of a tsunami that large would extend for perhaps thousands of miles, in all directions. Maybe they took that into account.

[Ibon]

The boy who cried the 1000 ton boulder?

[dohboi]

Thanks for the great discussions about physics, etc. Even KJ was of some service, since his faulty notions prompted so many astute and informative comments!!

[clif]

A very simple example of just how wrong KJ's analogy is,

consider Hurricane Katrina's effect on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Which caused more damage,

the wind from the storm

or the storm surge of water from the storm.

Hint New Orleans survived the winds of the storm quite well,

but when the water arrived

and the levies broke ..............................................................................................

PS; KJ the wind was moving MUCH faster than the water was.

Maybe James Hanson knows a wee bit more

than the deniers want to give him credit for, eh?

[dohboi]

"no more sand (sand is really just tiny stones) in the ocean"

pete, don't embarrass yourself further, bro. Quit drinkin' while posting. (Or maybe you've just never been to the ocean in actual waves and felt sand, bits of shell, and other debris that gets picked up by them??)

clif, thanks again for the clear examples and points.

[dohboi]

You made the ridiculous claim that because there was still some sand anywhere on the ocean floor, the article must be bunk.

So now you admit that sand (which as you point out, is just little stones) does get moved around by waves??

[Outcast_Searcher]

So many people study Physics, so few ever use it for anything.

A little mental exercise for you. Suppose you have a slab of unbreakable stone, 1x4x9 meters (yes, that would be the "monolith" from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey). Suppose it is composed of a stone material that is twice as heavy as water. It is sitting on perfectly flat ground where the coefficient of friction is 1.5. The wind is blowing exactly at 90 degrees to one of the perfectly flat faces.

Care to calculate how fast the wind would have to blow to budge this object at sea level? I gave you round numbers and an exact shape, and even simpler you can do the whole calculation in the metric system. It doesn't get any easier than this. I'll even give you a hint.

Well, I was pondering using good old F=MA like we did in basic physics class in college almost 40 years ago.

But I see you give neither the mass of the stone nor the density of the stone (which I could calculate weight from).

Of course, it's a moot point since the discussion has to do with waves and not wind, but do you even know what you are talking about, or are you as usual, in typical science denial fashion, just throwing around science words while you pretend to know things about science?

[Tanada]

Dohboi please play nice, we can have an energetic discussion without falling to the level of the lowest common denominator.

OS right on your quote above KJ said 'twice as heavy as water' which I take to mean it has a density of 2g/cm^3 I am not digging out my old physics texts to do the math either, but we need to acknowledge what people actually say, not just skim it and assume they didn't give the details we are looking for.

[Synapsid]

GHung,

That photo is from The Racetrack, in Death Valley. There are lots of rocks at the ends of trails there.

Last year a team published their work from a long-term study using cameras; that study finally established the mechanism behind the movement of the rocks: Death Valley doesn't get much precipitation but when it does it's generally in the winter. The Racetrack is on a playa (dry lake bed) that does have a very shallow lake on it during rains, and the surface of the lake can freeze. (It does get cold in Death Valley during the winter.) Strong winds can break the ice into shards, and it turns out that the moving shards during steady winds can push the rocks along the then-muddy bottom of the lake.

Neat.

[GHung]

@Synapsid; Yeah, pretty cool, that. My point in posting that photo is that, with the right conditions, a gentle breeze of about 10MPH can move heavy stones across level ground. I can easily see how a fast moving surge of water from a super-storm could scale up to the point of moving large boulders up a slope, especially if those boulders were fairly round. If it's round, it rolls, eh?

[careinke]

Well that was quick. Instead of discussing mega storms, we talked about moving boulders. Maybe when one doesn't like the subject, they talk about the details. Initial stages of mega storms are already here. But lets debate the qualifications of a scientist, lets talk about the storms grandpa talked about, lets focus on football, survivor or some other piddling program and most of all, lets just ignore the whole thing. Sounds good to me. How about another cup of coffee. Or take an anti depressant. The US has 5% of the worlds population but consumes 80% of the anti depressants. Great life we got here.

SQUIRREL!!!!