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"I'm going to put on this flying squirrel suit and fly through the air after I jump off this cliff," said Dean Potter.  Actual photograph of Dean Potter
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May 18, 2015 06:52
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satanic splash-back posted:"I'm going to put on this flying squirrel suit and fly through the air after I jump off this cliff," said Dean Potter. Zoinks
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May 18, 2015 07:04
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Rondette posted:2 people died trying to Base Jump at Yosemite He died doing what he loved. Smacking into a rock face at 80 miles per hour.
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May 18, 2015 07:44
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BASE jumping is cool because it's just so aggressively dangerous. Like, nobody who does it has any illusions, they're just like "yep if I do this long enough it will almost certainly kill me, but its fun". There's not even any real subtext of challenging nature or whatever, just doing super dangerous poo poo for the thrill of it.
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May 18, 2015 08:08
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All good but best part was NYT posted:Living in Yosemite, with his longtime girlfriend, Jenn Rapp, and her children, Potter was often accompanied on his climbs and jumps by his miniature Australian cattle dog, Whisper, who became a bit of a celebrity, too, although Whisper was not on the fatal flight.
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May 18, 2015 12:50
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satanic splash-back posted:"I'm going to put on this flying squirrel suit and fly through the air after I jump off this cliff," said Dean Potter. Is this the guy who wanted to wingsuit off Everest?
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May 18, 2015 13:03
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ZombieLenin posted:Is this the guy who wanted to wingsuit off Everest? nah, different guy I also think you have to forfeit wingsuiting and 8000 climbing once you have kids, poo poo's not fair to them to be left fatherless by dad's reckless hobby
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May 18, 2015 13:14
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OMGVBFLOL posted:The first time someone sets foot on the summit of Olympus Mons, they will have flown and landed there directly. I doubt it'll ever be "climbed" in the sense we think of climbing mountains. It'd be like "climbing" from the Louisiana delta to Denver; just an enormously long overland trek with no discernable slope despite the elevation gain. K2 is remote enough that people probably said it about that mountain as well. Eventually, someone climbed it. Someone will climb Olympus Mons at some point if all of humanity isn't too obese to make it into space at that point thousands of years from now.
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May 18, 2015 14:06
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JiimyPopAli posted:K2 is remote enough that people probably said it about that mountain as well. Eventually, someone climbed it. K2 has a very clear peak. Olympus Mons is like walking on a slightly inclined plain for days.
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May 18, 2015 14:48
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From the top of Mount Olympus the horizon is also Mount Olympus.
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May 18, 2015 14:57
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Still waiting for people to climb the real highest peak on Earth, Mauna Kea. Tourists in total pitch darkness with special deep-dive submersible suits where one chink in the armour causes you to implode like crushing a can of coke. Also death by giant squid. The sherpas are some kind of mermen.
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May 18, 2015 15:04
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...and then Reinhold Messner comes along and does it without oxygen.
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May 18, 2015 15:22
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Jeza posted:Still waiting for people to climb the real highest peak on Earth, Mauna Kea. Tourists in total pitch darkness with special deep-dive submersible suits where one chink in the armour causes you to implode like crushing a can of coke. Also death by giant squid. The sherpas are some kind of mermen. im already training. everest, k2, an arbys parking lot- ive photoshopped myself in all sorts of places.
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May 18, 2015 16:00
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May 18, 2015 16:17
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Goddamn
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May 18, 2015 16:23
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May 18, 2015 16:23
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May 18, 2015 20:36
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 Uk goons there is a documentary about K2 on bbc4 right now
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May 18, 2015 21:11
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'The Killer Summit' (Storyville) is on BBC4 now, for UK people, so it'll be on the iPlayer for a while. I'm pretty sure it's the same film as 'The Summit' that's recommended in here a lot (edit - yeah, same movie) ^^^ffs
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May 18, 2015 21:13
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May 18, 2015 21:16
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goon hero 
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May 18, 2015 21:28
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May 18, 2015 22:06
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May 18, 2015 22:15
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A facebook friend of mine posted about the base jumper, and I was about to post 'lol base jumpers' when someone else posted "he was such a great guy, a good friend of mine" etc so I just shut up instead. I'll say it here though: lol base jumpers.
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May 18, 2015 23:29
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redreader posted:A facebook friend of mine posted about the base jumper, and I was about to post 'lol base jumpers' when someone else posted "he was such a great guy, a good friend of mine" etc so I just shut up instead. I'll say it here though: lol base jumpers. Isn't that the guy who would take his dog on jumps with him? Seems like a great guy lol.
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May 18, 2015 23:45
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redreader posted:A facebook friend of mine posted about the base jumper, and I was about to post 'lol base jumpers' when someone else posted "he was such a great guy, a good friend of mine" etc so I just shut up instead. I'll say it here though: lol base jumpers. Your callous laughter at risk taker death is safe in the Everest thread, friend
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May 18, 2015 23:46
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woof! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqZUoZpRv3A
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May 18, 2015 23:54
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theflyingexecutive posted:nah, different guy Totally agree. I gave up motorcycles for the time being until my kid is at least a late teen and that's not even really that dangerous if you are careful. I don't even ride my bicycle in the street anymore.
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May 18, 2015 23:58
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My stepdad put off club racing (motorcycles) until all of us kids were at least in our late teens; and, he took out a very large and generous life insurance policy, and ran it past his lawyer to make absolutely sure that if he died while racing or due to injuries caused by racing, it'd pay out. Even then, I had a problem with it, but he's a willful guy. At least he was being clear-minded about the risks. Also, the racing he was doing at that level was not especially dangerous: he used to say that given the conditions, the careful attention to the bikes and track, the mandatory training, etc. it was pretty much just as safe as riding on the road during commute hours. Certainly it was many times less dangerous than BASE jumping or cave diving or trying to summit 8,000m mountains.
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May 19, 2015 00:39
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5
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May 19, 2015 02:14
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redreader posted:A facebook friend of mine posted about the base jumper, and I was about to post 'lol base jumpers' when someone else posted "he was such a great guy, a good friend of mine" etc so I just shut up instead. I'll say it here though: lol base jumpers. SA was social media before facebook etc. But now that we have all that, this is what somethingawful is now for
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May 19, 2015 02:35
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quote:“Dean was part of this community and had such an impact on climbing. He was a luminary and in the pantheon of climbing gods.” If your god dies running face-first into a rock at 100 miles per hour, maybe you should change religions.
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May 19, 2015 02:38
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He had an impact on climbing... and on base jumping.
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May 19, 2015 03:15
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excellent Today's the 35th anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens eruption, so let's talk volcanologists. Volcanologists are insane. They do poo poo that I would never do, even if you were paying me more money than God. Lava lake? Great place to show off your janky Daft Punk cosplay while playing around lava so hot that it runs faster than you can. Lava tube? Gather up you friends and make a party of fishing for basalt. Active vent? Just sit around it and get high on fresh sulfur. It's a job you have to have a screw loose to take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEGaBXG3Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQrUwFn6bU Don't get me wrong, it's a really, really useful job. Volcanoes are dangerous and violent, and any lead time you can get on forecasting when a volcano is going to erupt is going to save lives. Seimsometers and GPS can tell you when stuff is moving around underneath the volcano or up into the vent, but they can only tell you so much. Looking at the composition of fresh lava can tell you whether an active period is still on the rise or in decline, and sudden changes in the amount of activity around fumaroles can tell you that something is about to happen. Remote sensing technology has lessened the physical workload of volcanologists, but some of the environments are so rugged that robots just can't operate. It's a dangerous job, but it's one that volcanologists eagerly take. Mt. St. Helens is one of the most active volcano in the Cascade Range, and before the cataclysmic eruption in 1980, the most beautiful. The local Klikitat tribes had a legend about the volcano: quote:Northwest Indians told early explorers about the fiery Mount St. Helens. In fact, an Indian name for the mountain, Louwala-Clough, means "smoking mountain". According to one legend, the mountain was once a beautiful maiden, "Loowit". When two sons of the Great Spirit "Sahale" fell in love with her, she could not choose between them. The two braves, Wyeast and Klickitat fought over her, burying villages and forests in the process. Sahale was furious. He smote the three lovers and erected a mighty mountain peak where each fell. Because Loowit was beautiful, her mountain (Mount St. Helens) was a beautiful, symmetrical cone of dazzling white. Wyeast (Mount Hood) lifts his head in pride, but Klickitat (Mount Adams) wept to see the beautiful maiden wrapped in snow, so he bends his head as he gazes on St. Helens. As white settlers pushed in, they also noted the mountain's symmetrical cone, referring to it as the "America's Mt. Fuji". But behind that beauty was a dangerous mountain. Nearly 100 eruptions have happened in the last 40,000 years. At least four of the most recent eruptions (1480, 1482, 1800, 1842) were on the scale of the 1980 blast, and one layer of ash from ~100 BCE suggests that the 1980 eruption wasn't the first time the volcano had erupted laterally, although this wasn't discovered until the mid-80s. Eruptions occur in phases - a few decades of relatively intense activity followed by a few centuries of quiet. Prior to 1980, the last eruptive phase lasted from 1800-1850. Most of the eruptions happened around a vent on the northeast side of the mountain, and the dome that built up around this vent was known as Goat Rocks. Here's a picture from Spirit Lake from sometime in the 1970s, Goat Rocks is the small black dome on the left flank:  The 1980 eruption was heralded by a swarm of earthquake activity that began on March 18, with a 4.2 earthquake centered a few km under the Goat Rocks dome. Earthquake activity gradually increased over the next few days, and by March 25 the constant shaking of the ground completely saturated the seismometers installed around the volcano, meaning that seismologists could no longer tell when an earthquake below 3.5 magnitude ended and another began. Snow began melting at the peak and around the Goat Rocks dome, and on March 27 the first small ash explosion happened at the summit. Since the mid-1970s, the USGS field office in San Francisco had been pushing for increased monitoring of the Cascade Volcanoes. Although a seismograph network had been installed in 1972, not much had been done. Now with the volcano erupting, they got their wish. Surveyors rapidly scouted the mountain, installing some base stations to monitor deformation on the volcano's flanks. More seismographs were installed, and volcanologists constantly helicoptered onto the mountain during quiet periods to collect gas samples from active vents. Meanwhile, the governor of Washington ordered the creation of a red zone around the mountain, and anyone entering this zone without permission would be punished with a $500 fine or 6 months in jail. Cabin owners around the area complained a lot about the red zone, because it prevented many of them from going to their summer cabins to move out valuables before an eruption. One cabin owner, Harry Truman of the Spirit Lake Lodge, refused to evacuate and became a folk hero. He told the press that if he left the lodge, he'd be dead within a week, and since his wife was buried there he'd be perfectly happy to be buried there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvfM3CNxeY As they worked, the northeastern face of the mountain began to swell rapidly through the month of April. In mid-April magma rising underneath the mountain had pushed out the north face of the mountain some 80 meters, and by the end of April the cryptodome (a term meaning that the land was being pushed up from underneath, as opposed to a true dome, which is built from lava flows) was growing at a rate approaching 2 m/day. A few days before the eruption, the north face of the mountain had bulged out 120 meters, and the force of the dome pushing up had caused the summit to drop by a few tens of meters.  (The cryptodome on April 30. Goat Rocks is the dark patch on the right edge of the mountain.) Despite this, geologists didn't see a full-scale eruption as imminent for the moment. Explosions at the summit had been old magma, and the activity under the bulge growing on the north side of the volcano suggested the magma was still relatively deep. In fact, they figured the greatest hazard was a landslide - visible cracks were forming near the toe of the bulge, suggesting a large chunk of it could slide down the mountain. I should note here that the idea that a lateral explosion like the one that happened was generally not accepted by the geologists working the volcano. Aside from a small minority of scientists, David Johnston included (more on him in a second), most believed that landslide or no landslide, any blast would be directed upwards, giving field workers time to get to shelter or safety. But like I said, that was a minority opinion, and when eruptions stopped completely on May 16, and on May 17th the public was allowed into the area during the daylight hours to collect valuables from their cabins, despite Johnston warning that the area was not safe at all. So who was David Johnston? He had been one of the leading proponents of pushing for a Cascade volcano field office, and had been the public face of the scientists monitoring the volcanoes almost from the start. One of my professors had gone to Washington State University when Johnston was still a TA there, and he describes him as wickedly sharp, funny (although at times caustically so), and someone who definitely knew his poo poo and was going to go places. Here's a couple pictures of him climbing down into the summit crater of the volcano on April 30th:   To give you a sense of scale, at this point the crater was about 150 meters deep, and the far wall is about a kilometer away. If you've ever had the chance to walk down an old cinder cone crater, you'll know how slow going it is to get back out, and how utterly hosed he would have been if the volcano had started clearing its throat. Anyway... When the north face of the volcano began to bulge out, the USGS had set up a field post (read, a camper van and a ham radio set) on a ridge about 10 km north of the mountain where a rotating team of geologists would spend a couple weeks monitoring the volcano 24/7 before someone took their place. Beginning on May 1, the observation post was staffed by graduate student Harry Glicken, and was due to be relieved by USGS staff geologist Don Swanson on May 18th. However, Swanson wanted to meet one of his graduate students leaving for Germany that day, so he asked Johnston to take his place. Johnston agreed to staff the post for the 18th, and Swanson would come up and relieve him on the 19th. Before taking over for Glicken on the evening of the 17th, Johnston and Carolyn Driedger climbed the volcano. Driedger was also a volcano observer, and Johnston told her that he would handle watching the volcano so that Driedger didn't need to camp out on another ridge overlooking the mountain.  (The last photograph of David Johnston, taken by Harry Glicken on the evening of the 17th) Now, while Johnston was a proponent of the lateral blast idea, he agreed with the other geologists that the mountain would give some signs that it was about to erupt (tiltmeters suddenly moving, sudden spikes of gas activity, etc), which would give geologists time to move out of the danger area. This turned out not to be the case - at 8:32 am on May 18th, a 5.2 magitude earthquake happened just underneath the bulge and let it loose. For the first second or two, it was simply a landslide. The largest in recorded history, but a landslide nonetheless. Johnston quickly radioed in "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!" - moments before the magma that had been under a lot of pressure suddenly found that pressure gone. As gas that had been dissolved in the magma suddenly escaped, it pushed a massive column of hot ash towards Johnston's location at speeds exceeding 1000 km/h. Johnston only had a few seconds to react, and he may not have even made it back into his camper. Mangled wreckage of the camper wasn't found until 1993, Johnston's body was never found. Likewise, Harry Truman was never found, but his and his cabins remains are probably several hundred feet under landslide debris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhU6jml6NY4 But that was only the beginning of the devestation. There was still plenty of ice and snow left on the mountain (although most of it was buried in ash, you'd never know from pictures), and with the eruption it was all melting. As the eruption shifted from a lateral blast to an upwards eruption, millions of tons of ice began to melt and flood the surrounding river valleys, creating a lahar. A lahar is a flash flood that's thick and heavy with mud. It poured down the North Toutle River, wiping out bridges and destroying forest and homes as it went. To get an idea of how high the mudflow reached, take a look at the standline on these trees. That's a person standing on the right side of the frame:  And a picture of the eruption column a few minutes after the explosion:  And from space:  That's about all I feel like writing for the moment, so here's some other stuff related to the eruption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fArB5Jz2wos And a day-by-day summary of the volcano's activity leading up to the eruption. EDIT: I forgot I found this gem this morning. The first couple minutes of the eruption seen from the summit of Mt. Hood: 
Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 03:47 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 03:39
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I remember seeing Mount St. Helens as a kid and all the flattened trees was a pretty spectacular sight. Happy anniversary death mountain
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May 19, 2015 04:07
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RIP in peace harry truman, the most metal of cabin-getaway owners
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May 19, 2015 05:14
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My dad worked at the USGS for a while and said he knew Dave Johnston.
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May 19, 2015 05:41
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that poor dog is just so happy to still be alive at the end of that video
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May 19, 2015 06:39
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I was living in California and going to elementary school when Mt. St. Helens erupted. It was one of the earliest events I distinctly remember watching news footage about. As kids, we were just excited, "holy poo poo volcanoes are cool," but the news coverage was talking about nearby cities coated with layers of ash. One of my friends came back from a family vacation a few months later and he brought along baggies of ash they'd scooped up at roadsides. I think my memory of that event was one of the things that spurred my interest in geology in college. Anyway, a few years ago, there was a period of new activity at Mt. St. Helens. There was no major eruption obviously, but there's a lava dome in the crater and it sort of oozed rock for a period of several months. The cool thing was the webcam they had pointing at it from an observatory to the south (not really a live video feed, more like a new frame once a minute or so). The lava dome by a few meters a day, which is not fast enough to notice from one frame to the next, but sometimes I'd look away for an hour or two and look back and things would be a little different. That inflating period stopped eventually, but it was a good reminder that the volcano is still active. You can watch the volcano cams here: http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/ although I don't think there's much to see these days. As an aside: the media often refers to any volcano that isn't actively erupting as "dormant." However, for geologists (at least what I was taught in the mid 90s), any volcano that's erupted in the last ~10,000 years, and could still erupt again, is an "active" volcano. A "dormant" volcano is one that still has a magma chamber, but hasn't erupted for at least 10k years, and may not erupt again. And an "extinct" volcano is one which has no magma chamber (it's deflated or it's solidified), so it cannot erupt again (although volcanic activity in the area isn't necessarily ruled out). All of the volcanoes of the Cascade range are active. The remnants of the Farralon oceanic tectonic plate, now called the Juan de Fuca plate are still subducting under the North American plate, driving active volcanism in the Cascades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F8AcDJq2QU As the remnant recedes northward, a new strike-slip faultline has formed... the San Andreas. The Sierra Nevada mountains are extinct volcanoes (but most of the igneous/volcanic rocks of those volcanoes have eroded away - what remains are mostly the igneous/plutonic granites and diorites that formed those volcanoes' ancient magma chambers). So if you go to Yosemite and check out Half Dome and El Capitan, you're looking at the magma chambers that once powered volcanoes, millions of years ago. The same arc of subduction-powered volcanoes that make up today's younger Cascades.  In this image, the grey stuff is the more or less continuous solid granitic slab of magma chamber. When it was molten, dinosaurs roamed the earth. The yellow stuff is what remains of the volcanoes that sat on top of it... smeared out into nevada, broken up as nevada's basin-and-range formed (that's another post), but increasinly intact as you travel north, encountering ever-younger volcanic rocks until you're in the Cascades proper, which is still active. A huge slab of rock formed this way is called a "batholith;" hence, the Sierra-Nevada Batholith.
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May 19, 2015 06:42
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Crusty Nutsack posted:that poor dog is just so happy to still be alive at the end of that video You have lived less than that dog. It's not fun unless you can die.
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May 19, 2015 07:12
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