Musings on megafloods

‘up early and off to Dover this morning for a circle through Belgium, the Netherlands, and north England.  The weather started out wintry on the drive east, rainy and windy, ill omen for the ferry crossing.  But it opened to sunshine on approach to the refurbished Port entry, maybe a smooth sail?

  

‘not to be, the wind and waves picked up as we left the harbour, and the boat pitched and rocked for the whole two hours to Dunkirk.  I took my favored spot at the fore-windows, a table near the cafe, and kept my eyes on the horizon.  unable to do any reading, the mind starts to wander.

What body of water are we crossing to France?  The English Channel?  Well, mostly.  The eastern limit of the channel lies along a straight line stretching from St. Margaret’s Bay, a couple of miles north of Dover Docks, to Wade Lighthouse, a couple of miles east of Calais.  Beyond lies the North Sea, with the ferry pretty closely tracing the boundary.

More interesting, this line approximates a shallow ridge that is the remains of the land bridge that once connected Britain to France.  At the end of the last ice age, the ridge  rose above sea level, damming waters flowing from the Thames and Rhine rivers into the North Sea, forming a large lake behind the retreating ice sheets. 

A quarter million years ago, the lake topped, then breached, the chalk ridge.  A vast surge of water flowed south and west, scouring the seabed and creating the English Channel.  It may have lasted months, yet released a million cubic meters of water per second.

  

These findings are actually from very recent research (Nature, 2007), a result of improved technology able to map the ocean floor with sufficient resolution (10 cm) to reveal the streamlines and erosion features left by the surge.

Are megafloods still a risk to coastal areas?   No, but yes.   Other recent research suggests that, although vast reservoirs from melting ice no longer exist, atmospheric rivers resulting from extreme weather conditions may have similar effects.  

Geologic studies suggest that massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100-200 years (the last one, ominously, was in 1861).  The USGS published a study in 2010 modeling the results of an ARkStorm of this scale, its a fascinating read.

 

‘Safe across the Channel and tucked into Dunkirk, we made a quick provisioning stop at the Auchen near the port, and motored on towards Maastricht.  It was well past dark on arrival, I retrieved the key from Bert and got things unloaded, the apartment opened, and unpacked to settle in.  It’s been too long, but (despite a weather eye on the Maas after all of the high-water stories) very nice to be back.

Stubbings House gardens

In 1940, Dutch Queen Wilhelmina fled the Netherlands ahead of the advancing German army, landing in the United Kingdom to maintain an independent Dutch government.  She broadcast messages back to the Netherlands as Radio Oranje, actually air time granted on BBC transmitters.  Loyal, outspoken and sometimes controversial in her criticism of the Dutch political leadership, Churchill once commented that she the only real man among the governments-in-exile in the UK.

Koeningdag will be celebrated on Monday in the Netherlands, a date set aside since Juliana’s ascension to the Dutch throne following the end of the War.  In Wilhelmina’s day, it was held on August 31, popular as the final day of school summer vacation.

 

Among the places she lived while in the UK was Stubbings House, pictured above, now a private residence and garden center in Berkshire.  The gardens were open for charity this weekend, and so ‘off to see the 18th century Georgian building and the surrounding rare trees and woodland flowers.

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The fields beyond the Ha-ha (a novelty trench designed to keep cows out of the crops) were yellow with blooming rapeseed, and the woodlands were sprinkled with primrose and buttercups amidst the remaining bluebells and daffodils.  The signage could have been better the Iron Age ruins and Ice Pit were impossible to find.

 

The rain held off long enough for a good walk through the estate, cake and tea in the greenhouse, and browsing for a few plants among the flowering trees to take back home.

  

Midmorning’s eclipse

The UK enjoyed a solar eclipse this morning,.  Totality was over the Faro Islands, far north, but Dorset got 85% coverage of the sun.  Maximum darkness was predicted for 9:30 in the morning,, so I was up early to get fresh bread and coffee from Parkstone so that I could settle in for the event comfortably.

  

It’s an astronomic day in other ways as well.  Equinox, where the sun lies directly above the equator for a few moments, was also today: the first day of spring.

‘hard to tell locally, though.  Temperatures are still barely above freezing and the only the hardiest trees are flowering.

I’d hoped to see the crescent sun at mid-morning, but the day started grey and cloudy.  BBC astronomer-royale Brian Cox (actually a particle physicist) was holding forth from Jodrell Bank, near Manchester.  The skies were clear and sunny.  Schoolchildren, dressed in welding goggles and trying to image the sun through colanders made, for a good backdrop.  To the north, the Faro’s were cloaked in cloud, but there were various airborne cameras broadcasting from clear skies in airplanes overhead.  Apparently, for £5000, anyone could join.

As half-nine approached, it did get noticeably darker: car headlights went on and the birds got quiet.  The commentators waxed about the 384,400km column of shadow moving across England.  Cox dithered about the diamond ring effect of the sun’s re-emergence.  Contact with the reporter in the airplane flickered.  Schoolkids spun wind gauges and twirled thermometers, participating in a survey off the effect of the eclipse on the weather.  Everyone forgot to check in with the dark, frigid pictures from the ground in the barren Faro Islands.

 

Then it was over and past, the streets brightening, the birds did their 5 am thing, the BBC returning to regular talk about politics.  But, since I used to teach astronomy at Columbia Basin College, so I still get excited about events like this, and it was cool to follow the coverage and pictures for a few hours.  There is a big solar eclipse in the US in August 2017, ‘probably the next chance I’ll have to see one. 

I’ll miss Brian Cox, though.

By the numbers

It’s a working week from the road, ranging from Braintree to Poole, London to Reading.  I need to moderate work and travel,  getting back into healthier habits by February.  So I’m making an effort to stay off email before 9, on the bike after 5, and to cook regular meals in the evenings.  I’m reading again, catching up with articles pushed into Pocket during my travels and popping Baldacci spy novels downloaded from the library at bedtime.

‘Among the interesting bits bobbing up so far:

HIIT Training:  The New York Times has been advocating High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), periods of extremely intense activity alternated with brief periods of recovery.   The workout is supposed to promote strength and endurance – I would hope to be able to use it as a travel-friendly routine that accelerates my (re)conditioning

I’ve adapted it midway into my hour’s biking as 30 seconds on / 1 minute off, repeated ten time.  It boosts my heart rate towards 160 and the calories expended by 20% during a 50% increase (60 –> 90 rpm) in effort.  I wish that the bike could show how progressive and sustained the bursts are: I can only gauge that it’s difficult to maintain the intensity by the seventh rep.

And no, that’s not me (yet) in the graphic.

Keeping Friends:  Gerald Mollenhorst, a social psychologist in Utrecht, reported five years ago that while the size of people’s social networks are remaining constant, the composition of their close relationships are changing more quickly. On average, half of a person’s close friends would likely be replaced by new ones within seven years, mostly driven by a lack of meeting opportunities.

In particularly Dutch context, Mollenhorst also looked at implications for neighborhoods, finding that “locale has not lost relevance to its residents”.  Neighbor networks have changed, becoming more superficial, contacts more about holding a ladder than discussing important personal matters.  But for the Dutch elderly, non-movers and home-owners, neighbors are more, not less, important parts of their voluntary personal networks.

The flip side would be that tumbleweeds and expats would tend to become more isolated by their lifestyles.  So, as practical advice, here are pointers for Dutch friendships.

Forming habits: Conventional wisdom holds that actions repeated for 21 days become habitual.  That’s actually a distortion, derived from 1950’s research that surgical patients accepted their new self-image within three weeks.  A recent study suggests that new habits actually set over 84 days, with lots of individual variation averaging to 66 days.  Happily, an occasional lapse in maintaining a new habit didn’t affect its consolidation.

Business self-help writers are breaking this into a series of tasks and milestones.  I find that it’s more just simple practice: do it regularly until it becomes second nature, then celebrate with a good shared reward when its taken hold.

Finding perfection:  Many activities in life involve searching, for a best product, solution, maybe a partner.  How much must you search, and how do you know when to stop?  The BBC asked mathematician Matt Parker for a suggestion, and he advanced one from probability: the Optimal Stopping Problem.

Suppose that you figured that you could get to know 100 potential partners and wanted to decide when to stop and have a long-term relationship with a likely ‘best’ one.  (Note: this is his example, not mine). 

Start with a sample of the whole (n) people, sqrt(n), therefore consisting of 10 of the 100.  Date them, and rank them so that you know who was best in that group.  The optimal strategy would then be to continue meeting people until the first one came along who was better than that, then stop.

There are other strategies that might be tried, and there was a lively discussion on Radio 4 about whether there could be any general mathematical rules governing human relationships. 

At the Hampton Court Flower Show

It’s my month for gardens: the Barrington Open Gardens, and now the biggest in Britain: the annual fest at Hampton Court Palace.  It takes the better part of a day to explore: acres of show gardens, pavilions, and vendors.  All of the plants are meticulously labeled, beautifully arranged, competitively judged, and all for sale.  I’ve put a selection of images on my Flickr site in addition to these.

   

 

Serious shoppers find their plantings at the show, all collected into Wheelie Boxes.  These are dangerously underfoot in the pavilions, worse than any airport.

 

And, while looking down, I found that it was easy to identify the (over)serious gardeners by their footware.

  

They love to label things, almost to the point of losing the blooms,

 

Among the flowers were sculptures, glass and brass and water,

  

And around them were concept gardens, urban gardens, low-water ‘impact’ gardens, and world gardens.  Here, for example, is the ‘Beer garden’ and the ‘London Riot garden”.