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I have a theory...
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.
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.
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Their level of craptacularness is why it took me a year to give BSG a chance.
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Now that'd be a good movie
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Someone did notice. And put it on SciFi Channel.
Well...
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....
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.