When a jam occurs, correct procedure is…what? That’s right, shut down the machinery, open a hatch in the casing, and use a pry bar to dislodge the jam. Then start the machinery back up.
Incorrect procedure, as demonstrated by one worker, is to take a six-foot jimmy bar and bash the side of the casing in an effort to dislodge the jam. This is a bad idea because cast iron can fracture if abused. But the screw feeder is a rugged piece of equipment. It survived the bashing.
Our antihero then opened the inspection panel while the feeder was running. He spotted the jam and dislodged it with the same six-foot jimmy bar. Did I mention that the feeder was still running? Did I mention that it’s a large and rugged piece of equipment?
* * *
“He put an end to the smelter’s accident-free run in a public and highly amusing fashion.”
* * *
The screw grabbed the end of the jimmy bar and whipped it around violently. The free end of the bar intersected our man’s testicles. He landed in a crumpled, semiconscious heap ten feet away from the now free-running feeder. Fortunately for him the mangled bar missed him when it was flung free of the feeder moments later; otherwise this story would have a more somber ending.
The unfortunate worker sustained injuries to his genitalia that necessitated a hospital stay. And worse yet, he put an end to the smelter’s accident-free run in a public and highly amusing fashion. His pride was as crushed as his testicles. Almost.
Kalgoorlie is a mining town as famous for its hotels, hookers, and gambling as it is for being the center of Australia’s gold fields. But even by Kal’s standards this one was a ripper.
Reference: Eyewitness account of Mat Meyer, who says,
“My younger brother worked at the Kalgoorlie Nickel Smelter.
He was laughing so hard telling this story that he nearly wet himself.”
Reader Comment:
“Talk about a workplace fling!”
SCIENCE INTERLUDE: THE GREAT DYING
By Norm Sleep
SIBERIA, FEBRUARY, LATE PERMIAN PERIOD 252 MILLION YEARS AGO
In the Arctic night a herd of dicynodonts (mammal-like ox-sized reptiles) huddled against the polar wind. They nibbled small leaves exposed by the blowing snow in the dim light. Suddenly the ground lurched. The animals had felt numerous earthquakes. They bared their twin tusks and roared, fearfully looking up for rocks that might cascade upon them. But then quiet returned, and the herd went back to its grazing.
However, this was no ordinary quake. The shaking resumed and became more intense. On the horizon to the north a pillar of fire erupted, bringing a false dawn. Then, only a few hundred meters from the herd, the earth cracked open. The crack exploded into a chasm that soon extended to both horizons. Lava poured to the surface, followed by deafening detonations. Red-hot gas spewed from the crack, and glowing coal and rock fragments pelted through the air. A dense hot cloud of gas blew across the Siberian landscape, incinerating the trees in its path.
The dicynodonts fled, but nowhere was safe.
Local vicissitudes such as volcanoes and earthquakes are common over geological time. They remove countless individual organisms from the gene pool but usually have little effect on evolution. This time, however, the effect of the eruption was global and catastrophic. Seventy-five percent of land species and ninety-five percent of marine species would soon be extinct.
Geology of the Eruption
Beneath the grazing dicynodonts a giant pool of lava had welled up from the base of the lithosphere one hundred kilometers down. At forty kilometers the lava reached the earth’s crust and accumulated beneath the buoyant and deformable lower crustal rocks. Hours before the dicynodonts’ doom a crack opened above the lava pool. A river of lava rushed toward the surface of the planet.
Just before the lava reached the surface, it intruded on a vast coal bed that happened to lie a few hundred meters below the surface. Coal is less dense than lava. The lava took the path of least resistance right through the coal bed, spreading through it far from the initial crack.
The Siberian coals contained pore water and hydrocarbons. When lava hit the coal beds, the hydrocarbons turned to gas, just as happens today in coking plants. The heavier tar hydro-carbons “cracked” into smaller molecules, creating more gas. The red-hot coals reacted with the pore water to form coal gas, composed of methane and carbon monoxide, with smaller amounts of other hydrocarbons. All of these heated gases then started to expand.
In some places the surface of the earth collapsed into the coal bed, releasing gas. Elsewhere, the incandescent gas followed the lava up cracks. When the hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and methane came into contact with the oxygen in the air, they ignited, causing titanic explosions. As in a blast furnace, the burning coal reacted with ferrous iron (FeO) in the lava to form iron metal and carbon dioxide. Sulfur from the lava and coal added brimstone to the fire. Within days a broad area of Siberia became a monstrous landscape of collapsed pits and coal gas flares extending all the way into the stratosphere.
Overall, several trillion tons of carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere—the makings for a global disaster on land and sea. In comparison the atmosphere currently holds three trillion tons of carbon dioxide; doubling this amount would be calamitous.
The infernos continued for a decade, fed by the pool of lava at the base of the crust. Lava flows and coal fires continued for hundreds of thousands of years. Basalt flows eventually covered most of Siberia, a formation now known as the Siberian Traps.
Dreadful Aftermath
The initial effect of the Siberia coal fires on the climate was mild: a cold spring in the northern hemisphere, with a hazy sky. The smoke and dust settled, and sunlight once again reached the surface. But the heat could not escape through the new blanket of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases. By summer, temperatures were several degrees Celsius hotter than normal. Drought prevailed. Plants withered and fungi prospered on the carcasses of rotting plants and animals.
Seventy to seventy-five percent of the land species became extinct.
* * *
“Trilobites wandered blindly to their extinction.”
* * *
Marine life suffered even more. Carbon dioxide dissolved into the top sixty meters of ocean water. The carbon dioxide and water created carbonic acid, as happens in carbonated drinks (chemically: CO2 + H2O → H2CO3, carbonic acid.) Seawater became acidic. Calcium carbonate shells dissolved into a bicarbonate solution (chemically: CaCO3 + H2CO3 → Ca++ + 2HCO3-). Shell-making organisms perished. Reefs died. The food chain collapsed. Trilobites wandered blindly to their extinction. The acid had dissolved the carbonate lenses of their eyes.
Ninety-five percent of the marine species became extinct.
Mantle Plumes
What caused so much lava to erupt?
Modern geologists commonly ascribe the Siberia event to a mantle plume starting near Earth’s core. Tens of millions of years before the eruption Earth’s core heated the overlying mantle, and a massive chunk of solid magma (yes, solid) slowly ascended through the cooler mantle rock toward the surface. Scientific models of mantle plumes resemble the flow of fluid in a lava lamp: The plume has a long tail and a bulbous top, because the mantle flows more quickly through the hot tail than the top can push its way up through denser mantle.
* * *
Most but not all earth scientists accept mantle plumes. Seismologists have resolved their tail conduits in the uppermost few hundred kilometers. Images of the lower mantle (below seven hundred kilometers depth) show fuzzy features that may be tail conduits.
* * *
This huge bulb of mantle rose slowly, a few centimeters per year, and eventually reached the base of the lithosphere, the cool layer of rock near Earth’s surface. Now under less pressure, it partially melted and spread out like a bubble beneath aquarium glass. Hot basalt lava began to flow upward through the crust to meet its fate with the coal.
Magma plumes are common in the geological recor
d. The Palisades basalt near New York City is the result of an event two hundred million years ago. Giant’s Causeway of the Spanish Armada’s bane formed sixty million years ago. More than a dozen basalt plains are known, each caused by a hot mantle plume that originated near the core of the planet.
Philosophy
“Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
—Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1819–1891)
We can do nothing to prevent mantle plumes. Starbuck rebukes Ahab, a prime fictional candidate for a Darwin Award, with the pragmatic Yankee view of natural phenomena as purposeless and uncaring. Charles Darwin quoted Aristotle, who said that rain falls not (with the intention) to ruin crops during harvest. If a mantle plume has a ticket to a coal or oil field, no prayers can swerve its course. But there is one consolation. Be assured that seismologists would have already detected the approach of such a mantle plume.
Science does not draw moral lessons from natural events, but one can make a practical analogy, and the analogy is stark. The herds of dicynodonts had no hand in the Great Dying, but we burn fossil fuels of our own volition. We know that burning fossil fuel puts heat and carbon dioxide into the air. About a third of the carbon dioxide now in our atmosphere was generated from this source. We have the power to avoid a man-made repeat of the great Permian extinctions by using other energy sources, or by sequestering the carbon dioxide we generate.
Our educational system has brought us to the realizations of Aristotle and Starbuck. Weather is regarded as a natural phenomenon beyond our control. Ironically, we must now teach the public that weather is no longer an immutable natural phenomenon. We are the masters of our climate.
We can learn from the distant past—or repeat it.
Norm Sleep teaches geophysics at Stanford University. His interests include conditions on Earth and the habitability of other planets. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in the paper mill town of Parchment. He graduated from Michigan State University and arrived at MIT during the plate-tectonic scientific revolution. His thesis was on subducting slabs. He taught at Northwestern University before moving to Stanford. His interest in habitability stems from his work on hydrothermal circulation at midoceanic ridges and his work on the feeble tectonic activity on Mars.
CHAPTER 7
COMBUSTION CRAZIES
Pyrotechnical allure seduces many a man to his untimely demise. So many combustibles to choose from: fireworks, grenades, flaming shots, elemental sodium, homemade bombs, and lightsabers…. In order to evolve traits that protect us against a fascination with the flammable, we must sacrifice a few limbs and lives.
Darwin Award: Electronic Fireworks
Confirmed True by Darwin
1 JANUARY 2007, NETHERLANDS
The first Darwin Award of 2007 went to Serge, thirty-six, who thought it reasonable to hover over an illegal professional firework and light the electronic ignition with an open flame. This was not a traditional fuse—it was a device designed for precision timing, and a flame should not have been used at all. Regardless of the fuse type a person’s head should never be placed in the way of a firework.
The heat triggered an immediate launch and the firework catapulted upward, killing our amateur pyrotechnician en route to a spectacular burst across the night sky.
A witness told reporters, “His face disappeared. If someone has no face left, you know it’s serious.” Serge had purchased the firework legally in Belgium but then illegally transported it into the Netherlands. His father disputed the notion that Serge was careless, characterizing his son as a man who gave due consideration to his acts.
* * *
“If someone has no face left, you know it’s serious.”
* * *
Every year another idiot gets nominated for a Darwin Award for this same reason. Please, readers, keep your itchy fingers off the triggers of these dangerous fireworks!
Reference: fok.nl, ad.nl
Darwin Award: Rolling Stones
Confirmed True by Darwin
20 MARCH 2006, VIETNAM
A rolling stone is not all that gathers no moss. Three Vietnamese men scavenging for scrap metal found an unexploded five-hundred-pound bomb perched atop a hill near Hanoi and decided to retrieve it with a little help from Sir Isaac Newton. After all, gravity is free. As they rolled the bomb down the hillside, it detonated, blasting a four-meter crater and sending all three entrepreneurs to a face-to-face meeting with their deceased hero.
Reference: WISTV.com
Darwin Award: Hammer of Doom
Confirmed True by Darwin
AUGUST 2006, BRAZIL
August brings us a winner from Brazil, who tried to disassemble a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. This technique was ineffective, so he escalated to pounding the RPG with a sledgehammer. The second try worked—in a sense. The explosion proved fatal to one man, six cars, and the repair shop wherein the efforts took place.
* * *
Philosophy Corner
Darwin has begun to question the merits of landmine nominations. Many a poor person must take risks to put food on the table. A reader who cleared mines for many years said, “These people have little choice but to scavenge metal to feed their families. It’s not stupid behavior, although many are killed. A sad state of affairs.” When a poor person takes risks for his family, he is acting honorably. On the other hand, slamming a sledgehammer into a mine that is meant to blow a human being to smithereens is surely the least best way to salvage metal from it. Avoiding one’s own demise is ALSO of use to the family.
What do you think? darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2006-04.html
* * *
* * *
“This technique was ineffective, so he escalated….”
* * *
Fourteen more RPGs were found in a car parked nearby. Police believe the ammunition was being scavenged to sell as scrap metal. If it wasn’t scrap then, it certainly is now!
Reference: WISTV.com, O Dia (Brazil), msnbc.com, UK Daily Mail
Reader Comments:
“Wham…wham…kaboom!”
“This is the hardest egg I ever had to crack!”
“More scrap metal than he planned for.”
Darwin Award: Timing Is Everything
Confirmed True by Darwin
9 DECEMBER 2007, INDIANA
Russell, nineteen, had a grudge against a semitruck abandoned on a rural property. Russell was not the silent, brooding type. He was a man of action. He built a gunpowder-and-propane tank bomb, attached a timer, planted it in the moldering truck, and retreated to a distant vantage point to wait for the fireworks.
And waited.
And waited, until he could wait no more. No boom? This was not right. Why was nothing happening? Russell approached the stubborn truck—just in time for an up-close-and-personal look at a cloud of rapidly expanding incandescent gas.
* * *
“He waited. And waited. And waited until he could wait no more.”
* * *
Detectives found bomb-making materials at Russell’s mobile home and believe he was also responsible for two explosions the night before his death, one at the mobile home park and another at a hobby shop. Although Russell will be missed, we are all a bit safer now.
Reference: theindychannel.com; The Indianapolis Star; The Star Press, Muncie, IN
At Risk Survivor: The Flaming Shot
Unconfirmed
NOVEMBER 2001, MINNESOTA
Grain alcohol and fire don’t mix.
After consuming many cocktails at a party, my friends and I had a BRILLIANT idea to pour a shot of ALCOHOL and set it on FIRE and drink it. I believe the ultimate goal was to impress the ladies present.
This excellent suggestion would be easy to accomplish since we had nearly pure grain alcohol in front of us. Let me add that the person who described the flaming shot neglected to mention that you are supposed to blow it out before swall
owing it.
* * *
“The ultimate goal was to impress the ladies present.”
* * *
So we poured the liquor into a shot glass and set it on fire. So far, so good! We looked at each other, each hoping someone else would volunteer to be the guinea pig. After much debate we had our first contender. My friend proceeded to pick up the shot glass, put it down, pick it up, put it down, and finally he simply stared at the flames for a good two minutes.
“C’mon, man up!”
“?!$%!! that!” he declared.
I decided that the democratic process would produce no results. I picked up the hot glass and slammed the flaming concoction down my throat. Upside: The fire was quickly extinguished after I closed my mouth. Downside: The inside of my mouth felt and tasted like it was burning. For two days.
I was too much in shock to speak.
The friend who had previously hesitated saw how easily the shot had been dispatched and prepared another for himself. Not to be outdone, he poured the grain alcohol right up to the rim of the glass and lit it. Upside: He would outdo me! Downside: Completely full shot glasses are difficult to lift without spilling. And if the liquor is on fire when it spills…
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