Thursday, January 06, 2011

Hot Red Earth, Cold Blue Jazz



What do you think about a possible link between all the bird deaths in Beebe and the drum die-off in Oxford?


My perspective is that I personally cannot imagine how there is a connection between these two events. With the drum feeding primarily on mollusks in the bottom of the river, if there was something that was affecting them – and this is a pretty deep river – maybe 30 feet deep. So, we don’t know diseases that go from fish to birds or the other way or environmental circumstances that would affect a bird and a fish 120 miles apart. So, it’s just not likely that they are connected. We’re hoping to get results fairly soon on the bacteria and virus cultures and that’s going to be very telling.




Mark Oliver
Chief of Fisheries,
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission


Interviewed by Linda Moulton Howe






Messages of love from the deep, hot biosphere,
up-welling valentines of hydrogen sulfide
and methane and others, disperse, collect, confide
their affection to our fish, birds, smother their fear,

wrench their diffuse part from their mechanical gear,
bones, eyes, hearts, the dense stuff from around the outside,
and take the thinnest part, the real part from inside,
down through the rock sky to the molten atmosphere.

I hate being alone. I’ll miss the birds and fish,
and trees here don’t care if I sing in the morning.
But as this place becomes the surface of the Moon

the lonely trees will disappear, too. Then I’ll wish
I’d sung to their indifferent branches. Their warning,
that lonely indifference, is a cold blue jazz tune.




I think the geophysics that can kill bottom-feeding fish and flying birds isn’t too obscure. And the fact that we don’t see anyone speculating about it is disconcerting in itself.

Gases vent upward through porous rocks and crevices. Often, of course, these gases vent directly into the atmosphere. But when gases vent into a body of water, the gases are most concentrated, most deadly in the cases of hydrogen sulfide and others, right at the bottom of the water where the gases vent out of the earth. So, there at the bottom of the water, the gases kill any bottom-feeding fish that happen to be in the vicinity of the vent. But then the gases disperse into the water, becoming less concentrated, less deadly, and don’t kill other fish. When the gases eventually rise up out of the water and enter the atmosphere, normal air currents disperse the gas further but, sometimes, randomly, air currents will concentrate gas into transient pockets that are dense enough to be deadly to flocks of birds that, again randomly, fly through the shifting concentrations of gas.

I’m not a geologist or a physicist, but that sounds like a reasonable mechanism. And I believe that up-welling gases often have been deadly in just these manners in volcanic areas around the globe, so this isn’t random speculation or pure invention.

But is the whole Gulf Coast and most of the East Coast becoming a volcanic area?






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Thomas Gold at Wikipedia



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This Evening At The Stilyagi Bar®


The Point Of A Pin



Quasi Una Petroleum Fantasia









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