gridlore: Doug looking off camera with a grin (Ka-boom)
[personal profile] gridlore
The people who make movies for SciFi actually do hire scientific consultants for their films. They then proceed to lock them in closets and film whatever hooie comes into their demented little skulls.

Case in point: tonight's epic Disaster Zone:Volcano in New York. Not only is this a bald-faced rip-off of Volcano with some of the same characters and set-ups, but it is filled with atrocious science.

Let's start with the concept. A volcano in New York. NYC sits on a massive slab of granite. It's why Manhattan has stood up under the weight of all those buildings for the last two centuries. How solid is the bedrock? On 9/11 the collapsing towers barely cracked the strata. I don't care how deep you drill, you are not going to get great gouts of magma shooting up all over the place. That requires pressure. The reason the Hawaiian volcanoes are so active is that Hawaii sits on top of a magma plume that creates a thin spot in the crust. New York sits on the geological equivalent of a bank vault door. Without pressure, nothing will force the magma to the surface.

Then we have a project drilling seven miles into the Earth's crust. Said project appears to be operating in midtown. Now, I'm no expert in NYC, but I think someone would notice several thousand tons of dross being piled up on the sidewalk. No9t to mention the constant tremors caused by massive drilling.

Oooohh.. we just had shots of lava fountaining out of manholes. If there is enough magma under pressure to send it shooting forty feet into the air, the streets would be melting long before any lava breached. I walked over an active lava tube in Hawaii. There was twenty feet of igneous rock between me and the magma flow and my boots were melting. The boot polish i used was running off and the soles were turning to goop. Standing fifty feet from an open fumarole was intolerable.

These idiots are coming within feet of lava flows without oxygen.

I won't even go into the awful writing. This is in the "so bad it's good" category.

Date: 26 Feb 2006 07:54 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] biomekanic.livejournal.com
All I know is that whenever I head SciFi and movie together, I ask myself why can't Joel and the Bots be here for this?

Their level of craptacularness is why it took me a year to give BSG a chance.

Date: 26 Feb 2006 08:37 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 10binary-cats.livejournal.com
Volcano no. Tsunami yes. There's an island in (iirc) the canary group ready to give the whole east coast a bath. A well placed nuke could set the whole thing into action.

Now that'd be a good movie

Date: 27 Feb 2006 05:52 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com
Or a supervillain with earthquake powers.
Not that I've considered this.

Date: 26 Feb 2006 12:30 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aurictech.livejournal.com
Now, I'm no expert in NYC, but I think someone would notice several thousand tons of dross being piled up on the sidewalk.

Someone did notice. And put it on SciFi Channel.

Well...

Date: 26 Feb 2006 20:23 (UTC)
seawasp: (Default)
From: [personal profile] seawasp
... it would take some TIME for that twenty feet of rock to get hot. The lava tubes form AROUND the lava flow and basically STAY hot. So if you had hot magma/lava flowing into underground tubes in New York, it would be a while before the street/rock over it conducted appreciable heat upwards.

This doesn't eliminate the other problems you mention, nor other problems which you DIDN'T mention, that would cause, um, very different effects.

But I'm glad to see that they did this so stupidly that I can still write the similar-general-concept story without worrying at all.

Only slightly related....

Date: 27 Feb 2006 12:45 (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jarlsberg71.livejournal.com
Saturday afternoon [livejournal.com profile] psychoticdreams and I were watching a TiVo'd engineering program about mega structures... a building that's .5 mile high, a boat that is 5 times longer than an aircraft carrier, and a suspension bridge that's 9 miles long (bridging africa and europe.)

during the boat sequence (and all were 2x as long as it should have been) they kept mixing measurements, saying the boat's top speed was 10 knots, and in a simulation a tsunami was rushing towards the boat (which was 12miles off shore) at 600 miles an hour... they kept mixing units and it got so bad that Mike and I MST2K'd the rest of the episode, I actually considdered turning the sound off.

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gridlore: Doug looking off camera with a grin (Default)
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