A68 iceberg on collision path with South Georgia | Hacker News Reader

A68 iceberg on collision path with South Georgia

bbc.com

81 pointsRickJWagner38 comments

Fun bit of trivia: Shackleton had to cross 35 kms of uncharted rugged terrain and glaciers on South Georgia Island without any mountaineering equipment to get help for his men stranded on Elephant Island [1].

A bunch of experienced climbers recreated this journey with proper equipment and concluded that the Shackleton chose an exceedingly challenging route and yet somehow made it out the other side: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackletonexped/dispatches/200...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_James_Caird#Sout...

Shackleton proved time and time again that he was a reckless rogue, hellbent on doing things the hard way, constantly putting his crew in intractable dangerous situations that should never have happened.

> Shackleton had to cross 35 kms of uncharted rugged terrain and glaciers on South Georgia Island without any mountaineering equipment

And all this right after crossing, along with five of his companions, 1300 km of some of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world, in a modified lifeboat! The entire story of that whole expedition really is amazing.

If you ever get a chance to see the show https://www.tomcreanshow.com/ take it. It follows Creans adventures with Shackleton. The story telling is magnificent, I actually felt a shiver at one point as he described the cold and they played sounds of the wind.

Given that it's quite impossible for a giant iceberg to appear in either Armenia or Florida, I initially felt quite perplexed by the heading. Geography lesson learned. Are there any other Georgias one should know about?

Quite a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia

But not as many as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria

Well, people have towed icebergs to some odd places for water. Given how this year has gone, I wouldn't put it past someone.

I had the pleasure to visit South Georgia at the start of the year and it is one of the most wonderful experiences I've ever had. The island is beautiful and just teeming with life.

There has been a tremendous effort to help the ecosystem recover from the damage done by whaling. I don't know what can be done but I really hope the best for the island. It'd be a shame to lose it, both for a wildlife and for future generations.

How did you end up going there?

I went on a cruise through Quark Expeditions. We saw the Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica.

Going in Antarctica was what I was most excited about but South Georgia proved to be the surprise favorite of the trip.

If you have the time and the means I would highly recommend it. Especially because due to increased tour volumes the tour companies are starting to limit their activities to limit environmental damage. Starting this year they are limiting daily landings from 2 to 1 (or that was the plan at least).

Oh, nice. Thanks for the lead :) What ship were you on?

I was on the Ocean Diamond. Not the newest or nicest but still more than comfortable. And barely over 100 passengers, which is the max that can be on shore at one.

I can't say enough good things about Quark, they were incredibly professional and the expedition staff were all top tier. I still keep in touch with quite a few of them.

The island is also rat-free, which is utterly mind boggling given the terrain.

https://www.gov.gs/environment/eradication-projects/eradicat...

I guess it's too big to break up with explosives?

Even nukes? Do H-bombs generate a lot of fallout?

H-bombs use fission to start the fusion, so I'd guess that the amount of fallout is not much different. In any case, the test ban treaty would probably prevent the use of nukes.

The test ban absolutely would prevent it, but modern H-Bombs have next to no fallout, because the fission device is very efficient.

> The test ban absolutely would prevent it

Not quite. The Soviets used nukes with USA blessing (and on-site monitors) on several occasions for geo-engineering jobs. Mostly to plug burning oil wells. The CTBTO would not be happy, but depending on who built the nuke and how deep it is in the iceberg, this is boilerplate approvable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...

That being said, it's silly to nuke an iceberg and it wont achieve anything. The current will push the chunks back together and the shockwave will kill all the penguins.

edit: Another "funny" USSR use case for fission reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene . The mind boggling detail is that apparently it just worked (until it didn't).

I mean, my idea was to break it up before it got close to any penguins. And I wouldn't take it for granted that it would get squished back together, considering they're surprised it hasn't broken up already. Not saying that nukes are a good solution...

Why do you make that USSR? According to your second link, the USA did that too. Besides that, there are pictures on the net with tunnel boring machine in US Air Force livery from 1982 somewhere around Little Skull Mountain, Nevada, where they experimented with that, allegedly :)

But it's always the same picture, and it looks like a normal TBM to, except of the livery, of course :)

Mostly comes up in context of so called DUMBs(Deep Underground Military Bases) where the conspiracy fetishists lurk :)

I'm also always wondering what would happen if it meets groundwater, and the resulting steam explosion?

Most modern weapons are fission-fusion-fission designs with the latter fission step using neutrons from the preceding fusion step. Most of the energy in most "H-bomb" designs comes from fission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

A notable example where this wasn't the case was the test of the Tsar Bomba where the final fission component was left out largely because of the enormous amount of fall-out this would create - reducing the yield from 100Mt to 50Mt. The resulting explosion did have a very high fusion component.

The article says the iceberg is 4200 sq km. That's about the size of Rhode Island.

I don't think a few H-bombs are going to do much.

So it's wider than South Georgia Island itself? How crazy.

But you only need to break it up. Perhaps that could be achieved?

Exploding a single nuke on that berg is probably going to just produce a berg with a neat circular hole in it, some radioactive sea water (from neutron activation of sodium) and a lot of dead wildlife.

I think H-bombs are the opposite of what you want: they're all radiation and little to no explosion.

The idea is you detonate them in a city and then have your own citizens move in and take over the undamaged property.

Are you thinking of a neutron bomb? Whilst a hydrogen bomb doe s produce lots of radiation, it also produces one hell of a big boom.

Isn't a neutron bomb a hydrogen bomb design that lets the neutrons from the fusion escape rather than being used to drive a final fission stage?

What if we train a team of experienced oil drillers to become sailors, and have them blow it up? Or maybe it would be easier to train sailors to become oil drillers...

Either way, I think we can just pull it off. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahtp0sjA5U)

The UK has some Eurofighters stationed on Mount Pleasant in the Falklands, they can carry some nasty stuff. And submarines with torpedoes! Time for BAE Systems to show off, err... green wash, white wash, whatever.

Organisms fill every niche on the planet. Any unusual disturbance will kill a lot of them. It doesn't matter. Why do people have this worry about anything changing ever? Nothing will go extinct. Why not be excited about the spectacular event? People are so negative and looking at the gloomy side of so much.

Maybe they have children that they care about?

Not on South Georgia. No one lives there.

The rest of earth has a much different population density.

Rapid warming may end up extincting most current lifeforms. There are certain one-way thresholds it'll take millions of years to repair. Civilization is living in unprecedented stable temperatures, which we should strive to keep. See David's new documentary on Netflix.

Yeah I'm sure that's what dinosaurs thought.

They worry, because they are told to. They are told that humanity is a plague on the planet. The consequence of this (lie) is lots of hand wringing and self blame.

But there is nothing to be done about one's existence. Though surely some will have killed themselves and many have not had the families they wanted in account of this misplaced belief.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com