I Drink Too Much Coffee I Have To Pee

astrodidact:

World’s ‘Most Beautiful’ Eternal Flame Reveals New Gas Source

Nestled behind a waterfall in western New York state is an eternal flame whose beauty is only surpassed by its mystery. It is one of a few hundred “natural” eternal flames around the world, fed by gas seeping to the Earth’s surface from underground, said Arndt Schimmelmann, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.

But even within this rarefied group, this flame is special. Perhaps lit by Native Americans hundreds or thousands of years ago, it is fed by a new type of geologic process that hasn’t been recorded before in nature, Schimmelmann told OurAmazingPlanet.

Typically, this type of gas is thought to come from deeply submerged, ancient and extremely hot deposits of shale, a kind of rock. Temperatures have to be near the boiling point of water or hotter to break down the large carbon molecules in shale and create smaller molecules of natural gas, Schimmelmann explained.

A curiosity “nobody believed in”

In this case, though, the rocks that feed the flame are only warm — “like a cup of tea” — as well as geologically younger than expected, and shallow, Schimmelmann said. Those findings suggest the gas is being produced by a different process, whereby some sort of catalyst is creating gas from organic molecules in the shale, he said.

“This mechanism has been proposed for many years, but it was a curiosity that nobody believed in,” Schimmelmann said. “We think there’s a different pathway of gas generation in this location and that there probably is elsewhere as well.” If that’s true, and gas is naturally produced this way in other locations, “we have much more shale-gas resources than we thought,” he added.

Originally, Schimmelmann and his colleague Maria Mastalerz, of the Indiana Geological Survey, were tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy to estimate the total amount of methane that seeps out of the ground in parts of the eastern United States. To help, they recruited Giuseppe Etiope, a researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy, and world expert on natural gas seeps and eternal flames, Schimmelmann said.

A flame eternal

Etiope guided the researchers to the aforementioned eternal flame in Chestnut Ridge Park in western New York, calling it “the most beautiful in the world,” Schimmelmann said. They also looked at a “permanently burning pit” in Cook Forest State Park in northwestern Pennsylvania, although this eternal flame is not as special because it’s supplied by an old gas well, Schimmelmann said. The team reported their findings on the New York eternal flame in a studypublished in the May issueof the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology.

Their results were consistent with estimates that about 30 percent of all methane emitted worldwide comes from natural sources such as these gas seeps. When possible, it can actually be beneficial to set fire to these gas seeps to create “eternal flames.” Fire converts methane to carbon dioxide, whichtraps about 20 times less heat than methane in the atmosphere, Mastalerz told OurAmazingPlanet.

However, “macro seeps” that can be lit and form eternal flames remain rare. In most cases, gas percolates through soil — where methane-eating bacteria convert it into carbon dioxide, Schimmelmann said — or it comes out in a location that can’t sustain combustion. In the case of the New York flame, gas percolates in a naturally hollowed-out chamber, where the flame flickers eternally.

The New York gas seep also features the highest concentration of ethane and propane of any seep in the world, according to the study.

http://www.livescience.com/29510-eternal-flames-natural-gas-source.html

(via scinerds)

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didyouknowgaming:

Minecraft.

http://www.vgfacts.com/trivia/636/

laughing

zodiaccity:

Common Zodiac Traits - Aries, Libra and Aquarius are the “stick-ups” of the zodiac. They’ll likely stick up for you if they see you’re being treated unfairly.

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spaceplasma:

The Big Bang’s Playing on TV

Noise, in analog video and television, is a random dot pattern of static displayed when no transmission signal is obtained by the antenna receiver of television set and other display devices. The random pattern superimposed on the picture, visible as a random flicker of “dots” or “snow”, is the result of electronic noise and radiated electromagnetic noise accidentally picked up by the antenna. This effect is most commonly seen with analog TV sets or blank VHS tapes.

There are many sources of electromagnetic noise which cause the characteristic display patterns of static. Atmospheric sources of noise are the most ubiquitous, and include electromagnetic signals prompted by cosmic microwave background radiation, or more localized radio wave noise from nearby electronic devices. 

 Microwaves are a low-energy form of radiation but higher in energy than radio waves. The cosmic microwave background blankets the universe and is responsible for a sizeable amount of static on your television set—well, before the days of cable. Turn your television to an “in between” channel, and part of the static you’ll see is the afterglow of the big bang.

(via scinerds)