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Graeme

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6 hours ago, ShannonHoon said:

Hey Graeme, intrigued by your story may i ask what you did for a living in Mexico ?

The first time I was there, it was an internship in a University-based volcano observatory, so I was mainly involved in the gathering and analysis of field data from the volcano near the city. The next two times, I was a PhD researcher, working in the same office as before but focussed on my own project instead.

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4 minutes ago, Graeme said:

The first time I was there, it was an internship in a University-based volcano observatory, so I was mainly involved in the gathering and analysis of field data from the volcano near the city. The next two times, I was a PhD researcher, working in the same office as before but focussed on my own project instead.

Wow sincerely amazing thank you for answering, since i have a special interest in Mexico i loved reading your story :thumbsup:

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5 hours ago, ShannonHoon said:

Wow sincerely amazing thank you for answering, since i have a special interest in Mexico i loved reading your story :thumbsup:

No worries, I'm glad you're interested! Have you been? :)

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7 hours ago, janrichmond said:

Welcome home @Graeme your post made me feel happy, i don't venture out of England but for a few minutes in my mind i was in Mexico, i liked it :)

Me too, so I read it with a certain amount of dread, fearing some crazy cartel members would show up in the next sentence and that our poor Graeme was posting from jail after having been "convinced" to help them out with their new Scotland push which, for him, would involve crossing borders stuffed like a cocaine piñata.

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I love MX. It's my second home 💜..my father lives down there in Durango. I only get to travel down there every 2 or 3 years or so, but each trip is always very memorable. I need to work on my Spanish though! But no, can't say I have  actually lived in any other countries. 

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I can sing the Mexican national anthem.  No shit :lol:  I mean not properly, I just mean like...copying the sounds of the words from having heard it so much through my life.  From watching so many mexican fighters in boxing.  Cracking national anthem too, sounds great!

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12 hours ago, SoulMonster said:

Me too, so I read it with a certain amount of dread, fearing some crazy cartel members would show up in the next sentence and that our poor Graeme was posting from jail after having been "convinced" to help them out with their new Scotland push which, for him, would involve crossing borders stuffed like a cocaine piñata.

:lol: Oh dear. I was actually hoping we could get through this thread without mention of drugs and violence... When I talk to people, I'm trying as much as I can to talk about everything that Mexico has going for it rather than focussing on the negatives. I don't mean denying what's going on, it's sadly a very real part of Mexico's story and some very fucked up things have happened to people who're very close to me... But the fact that there are people there who're close to me at all is something I'd rather focus on because it's a much bigger part of my life, my impression of Mexico is overwhelmingly positive. In my experience Mexican people have been welcoming, inclusive, kind-hearted, generous, trustworthy, hospitable, helpful above and beyond any expectations, and great fun to be around. I think we need to talk about that side of Mexico more. Not to the extent that this is now the "Foreigners commenting on Mexico" thread, but you know what I mean.

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3 hours ago, Graeme said:

:lol: Oh dear. I was actually hoping we could get through this thread without mention of drugs and violence... When I talk to people, I'm trying as much as I can to talk about everything that Mexico has going for it rather than focussing on the negatives. I don't mean denying what's going on, it's sadly a very real part of Mexico's story and some very fucked up things have happened to people who're very close to me... But the fact that there are people there who're close to me at all is something I'd rather focus on because it's a much bigger part of my life, my impression of Mexico is overwhelmingly positive. In my experience Mexican people have been welcoming, inclusive, kind-hearted, generous, trustworthy, hospitable, helpful above and beyond any expectations, and great fun to be around. I think we need to talk about that side of Mexico more. Not to the extent that this is now the "Foreigners commenting on Mexico" thread, but you know what I mean.

I thought to be the catalyst for you emphasizing this. Of course Mexicans are welcoming and kind-hearted. Aren't we all when introduced correctly?

On a sidenote, are you Dr. Graeme now? And did your thesis come up with ways to prevent volcanoes from happening? They must be the evilest of natural phenomena. Just look at Hawaii. There you are, sipping in a drink in your back garden and suddenly it is all ruined by a geysir of lava just erupting by your pool. Has got to ruin house prices. Bummer.

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On 24/05/2018 at 4:53 AM, SoulMonster said:

Me too, so I read it with a certain amount of dread, fearing some crazy cartel members would show up in the next sentence and that our poor Graeme was posting from jail after having been "convinced" to help them out with their new Scotland push which, for him, would involve crossing borders stuffed like a cocaine piñata.

Well I’d sniff his arse!

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6 minutes ago, spunko12345 said:

Glad you had a good time Gra👍

As an aside has there ever been any incidents your aware of anyone falling into the lava that oozes down the volcano? Any footage about?

And if it happens make sure you whip your phone out a bit lively and get us a nice little video!  And mind you don't put your finger over the mic, their dying screams are 50% of it :lol:

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Okay, volcanology lesson. There are different kinds of volcano that produce different kinds of lava, generally depending on the tectonic processes that produce them. The type of lava that @spunko12345 is thinking about, that runny, red-hot stuff is generally what we call basalt. It tends to be found at mid-ocean ridge volcanoes (e.g. Iceland) or sometimes at so-called 'hot spots' which are areas far from any tectonic boundary where a large body of magma called a 'mantle plume' has found its way through the crust (e.g. Hawaii). I don't know of any footage of anyone falling in (thankfully, because it would be horrific viewing) but here's a video of a bag of organic waste being flung into a basaltic lava lake that would simulate pretty much what would happen if a person fell in.

The volcano I've been working on in Mexico erupts a type of lava called andesite, more typically found on continental margins or island arcs. Andesite contains a lot more volatile chemicals and crystals which, generally speaking, make it a lot more viscous than basalt. As such, rather than forming lakes and river-like flows, think of andesite being squeezed out of the volcano like toothpaste. You get a big bulb of lava that fills the mouth of the volcano and looks a bit like this:

So, that whole light grey hill in the video is a big blob of lava that's forcing its way out of the vent, and inside it's glowing hot. You'd get 3rd degree burns from touching the surface, and it's an extremely dangerous place because it's so unstable but as it's more solid than liquid on the outside, you can't really 'fall in'. You'd just lie on top of it and burn or get bludgeoned by glowing hot, razor sharp falling rocks.

If you were really unlucky, you could be in front of an andesite dome when it collapses, and unleashes an avalanche of burning gas and rock called a 'pyroclastic density current'. These are much more dangerous than lava flows. They come down the side of volcanoes at hurricane speeds and generally flatten and incinerate anything in their path. This is a video where you can see part of a dome collapsing to produce a PDC that killed 43 people... Bear in mind the inside of the cloud was probably about 800 degrees celsius and laden with fragments of burning rock as big as fridges flying like missiles:

I've stared down one of those before. I had no idea when or if it was going to stop, it scared the shit out of me.

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Nice one cheers 😁. Nasty stuff. I just remembered watching red hot crusty lava creep down a hill very slowly. Almost porridge like in its consistency and thinking how fucking gruesome would it be to see some poor fucker trip over and fall into that!

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14 minutes ago, spunko12345 said:

Nice one cheers 😁. Nasty stuff. I just remembered watching red hot crusty lava creep down a hill very slowly. Almost porridge like in its consistency and thinking how fucking gruesome would it be to see some poor fucker trip over and fall into that!

Aye, it'd be pretty grim viewing. I imagine (in the case of complete immersion) the intensity of the heat would probably destroy the parts of the body sensitive to pain within seconds, perhaps even before making physical contact with the lava as you'd likely ignite at a distance of a couple of metres, and death would follow pretty rapidly.

The good news is that you can walk away from most lava flows, they only account for 0.32% of all historical deaths from volcanic eruptions... By contrast, PDCs account for 33%.

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8 hours ago, spunko12345 said:

Nice one cheers 😁. Nasty stuff. I just remembered watching red hot crusty lava creep down a hill very slowly. Almost porridge like in its consistency and secretly thinking I'd love to see some poor fucker trip over and fall into that!

Fixed.

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Aye, I have several friends/colleagues who have been walking around on the dome of a volcano called Evermann on an island called Socorro in the pacific ocean and have put their foot on a bit of ground that's turned out to be not as solid as it looks, it's gone through and they've ended up with their foot in a pool of boiling mud at nearly 500 degrees Celsius. The lucky ones got away with a partially melted boot and minor scalding, the unlucky ones were where the mud got inside their boots and some of them were rendered unable to walk for months.

Here's a photo of one I took when I was there: 

PICT1346.jpg

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If you tried to clog them, chances are the lava would just penetrate the artificial blockages you tried to put in its way in exactly the same way as it penetrated kilometres upon kilometres of solid rock in order to reach the surface :P . Even if you managed to prevent it coming out of that particular vent, it would probably just come out somewhere else in the same general vicinity, perhaps forcing its way out of the side of the volcano instead, which could be even more disastrous as it could create a laterally directed blast that shoots pyroclastic material sideways like a cannon.

Volcanoes are pretty localised phenomena, I guess they are all very loosely connected through mantle processes, but it's not a system with strong enough links that processes at one 'node' can have any kind of ripple effect on others (sometimes eruptions at one volcano do 'trigger' another, but they have to share the same local 'plumbing system' for that to happen, like Eyjafjallajökull and Katla in Iceland... However, a shared plumbing system is really not the case at very many volcanoes at all).

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