Jokulhlaup, Buckyball, Chaos Theory

Jokulhlaup               1) Large outburst flash flood event of glacial origin. 2) Any unpredictable and catastrophic release of water from a glacier, such as when a glacially dammed lake drains catastrophically. 3) Glacial outburst caused by melt water from a sub-glacial volcano. Also known as Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF), these events are caused by one or more factors that adversely affect the dam’s structural integrity, including erosion, increase in hydrostatic pressure, rock fall, snow avalanche, earthquake or cryoseism, volcanic activity under the ice, or if a large enough portion of a glacier overhanging the lake breaks off and massively displaces water in a glacial lake at its base. The resulting floods often transport significant debris loads and can attain high velocity due to large volumes of water being released suddenly in areas having high relief, frequently causing significant environmental damage and loss of human life and property. As an eruption begins in Iceland, for example, pressurized magma moves slowly toward the surface, bringing volatiles and groundwater in its path to the boiling point. But the overlying glacier acts like the lid on a giant pressure cooker. The thicker the ice, the more it contains the pressure of the boiling water and the magma. But when the volcano finally erupts, magma as hot as 2,200° F instantly mixes with the superheated groundwater and the ice. The result is a monstrous eruption of steam, ash, lava, and volcanic fragments that rockets skyward upward in what amounts to a classic mushroom cloud. Real World Example: On November 5 though 8, 1996, scientists from the Science Institute at the University of Iceland flew over a jokulhlaup that had been released from the Skeiararjokull Glacier following a sub-glacial volcanic eruption. Only hours after emerging from the ice sheet, the jokulhlaup had a discharge of 5,000 cubic meters per second, which increased to 45,000 cubic meters per second within an hour and a half (another way for this to make sense to Americans not accustomed to metrics, is to think of the flow as 1.5 million square feet per second). Two large bridges, 1,150 and 2,800 feet long, were destroyed and six miles of roads washed away. A large, elongated plume of suspended sediment formed in the ocean beyond the jokulhlaup’s outlet. On the glacier itself, collapse, scouring, and subsidence associated with the jokulhlaup formed an ice canyon two miles long with an average depth of 300 feet. Luckily, owing to the advanced warning system Iceland has had in place for years, no deaths occurred as a result of the outburst flood. Countries affected by GLOFs include Iceland, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, northern India, Chile, and Argentina. Author’s Note: Jokulhlaup (pronounced yokel lop) is an Icelandic word meaning sudden water release from glaciers. Duh.

Buckyball                 Enigmatic cluster or chain of carbon atoms discovered in a Rice University research laboratory in a collaboration of British astro-chemist Harold W. Kroto and American chemists Richard E. Smalley (1943-2005) and Robert F. Curl Jr. into the by-products of laser-vaporized graphite. Kroto, Smalley, and Curl then discovered that the combinations of hexagons and pentagons that characterized the new found hollow spherical structure were amazingly reminiscent of the geodesic dome designed by the engineer, R. Buckminster Fuller, for the 1967 Montreal World Exhibition. So they named the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, which today is shortened to fullerene or buckyball. The more straight-laced chemists write it as C-60 or Carbon60 (or simply as C60). About that time Tony Haymet, an Australian theoretical chemist at the University of California at Berkeley, coincidentally published a paper predicting the existence of an allotropic form of carbon that he called footballene, named after a soccer ball (known as a football to the world outside of the U.S.) with its hexagonal-pentagonal leather cover. In 1996 Curl, Kroto, and Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery.

Author’s Note: The C-60 buckyball is the most famous of the fullerenes but by no means the only one. In fact, scientists have now discovered hundreds of different combinations of these interlocking pentagon/hexagon formations. However, it must be noted that the symmetry of C-60 makes it the most stable buckyball; other interesting variations include:

• Buckybabies — spheroid carbon molecules containing fewer than 60 carbon atoms
• Fuzzyballs — C-60 buckyballs attached to 60 other atoms such as hydrogen or fluorine or a combination of lithium/fluorine
• Giant fullerenes — fullerenes containing hundreds of carbon atoms in multilayer cages called “onions”
• C-70 — molecules with 70 carbon atoms, with an oblong shape somewhat like a rugby ball or an Australian Rules football
• Nitrogen fullerenes, especially C48N12, that hold promise for an impressive range of potential applications, from orthopedic implants to new pharmaceuticals to high explosives to propellants for supersonic aircraft/space vehicles

Actually fullerenes have been around for many thousands of years in small amounts, especially in burning candles or oil lamps whose flames vaporize wax molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Some of those molecules are instantly consumed while others move upwards into the yellow tip where temperatures are great enough to split them apart, creating carbon-rich soot particles that give off gentle yellow light. Buckyballs can be found amid the resulting soot. As Harry Kroto and his colleagues discovered, buckyballs are found in places ranging from interstellar dust to burning candle wicks to geological formations on Earth. Consequently, although they can be classified as an exciting scientific discovery, they’ve turned out to be fairly common in nature, although not in great quantities. Along with graphite and diamond, buckyballs are a form of pure carbon.

Real World Examples: For the past two decades materials scientists have been eagerly exploring the properties of fullerenes. In 1991, Japanese scientists discovered that the buckyball structure can be extended to form long, slender tubes, or carbon nanotubes, that are single molecules comprised of rolled graphene sheets capped at each end. Computer simulations and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that those nanotubes have extraordinary resilience and strength and various unusual properties; for example, under load they can abruptly and reversibly snap from one shape to another and can be formed into very strong rope-like shapes. They also exhibit electrical conductivity that has led to experiments with tiny nanowires and nanoscale transistors. Although manufacture of such incredibly small molecular structures poses enormous technical challenges, numerous practical applications are now being pursued. Richard Smalley believed that carbon nanotubes could one day be woven into long transmission wires that would be far lighter, stronger, and more efficient than the existing electrical grid. He also saw nanotechnology as the key to producing solar and other renewable energy sources that could replace fossil fuels. In 1990 for the first time physicists Wolfgang Krätschmer and Donald R. Huffman devised a technique that produced large quantities of C60 by arcing a current between two graphite electrodes to burn in a helium atmosphere and extracting the carbon condensate with an organic solvent. The Kratschmer-Huffman technique is now being applied in hundreds, if not thousands, of laboratories throughout the world that are engaged in an entirely new branch of chemical research in such diverse areas as astro-chemistry, biochemistry, solid-state physics, superconductivity, and materials chemistry/physics.

Additional Author’s Note: The formal name for the C-60 molecule’s structure is truncated icosahedron, which is the same shape that is used in the construction of soccer balls. It was also the configuration of the lenses used to focus the explosive shock waves of the detonators in the Fat Man plutonium implosion-type bomb the American military dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Chaos Theory[1]                    In the book In the Wake of Chaos, philosopher Stephen H. Kellert defined chaos theory as: “The qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems.” To put that thought into simpler words, Chaos Theory posits that it is possible to observe complex, unpredictable, and apparently random behavior arising from seemingly simple natural systems. Chaos Theory also asserts the reverse scenario, that an observer can study seemingly random systems and show order within the apparent randomness/chaos.

Unlike many other branches of mathematics and physics, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear problems and thus is not exclusively dependent on numerical calculations in developing predictions. The issue is nonlinear problems are generally more difficult to study because the behavior of nonlinear systems cannot be predicted in a straight-line manner. In essence, Chaos Theory asserts that the future behavior of complex and dynamic systems (like weather) is incredibly sensitive to small variations in initial conditions.

In the early 1960s, MIT meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz discovered chaotic behavior as he worked on a computer analysis of weather patterns. In his effort to predict weather Lorenz used an early digital computer to solve a set of twelve mathematical equations that roughly modeled a given number of weather patterns. Because at that time computer runs of complex mathematical equations were very time consuming and costly, on his second effort Lorenz started the computer run at the mid-point of his analysis and rounded his original numbers from six decimal places to three. However, because the numbers entered were not exactly the same as in the first analysis, the calculations produced by the computer quickly began diverging from those of the original outcome. Lorenz then substituted very nearly the same initial conditions for his system of equations but found that regardless of how slight the initial variation, the numbers that the equations were generating always diverged drastically after a relatively short period of time.

That occurrence led Lorenz to the conclusion that complex systems such as the weather are incredibly sensitive with respect to the initial conditions of the system. In Lorenz’s own words:

It implies that two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states. If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state — and in any real system such errors seem inevitable — and acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible. An alteration so small that it only affected the one-millionth place value of a decimal point, comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings perhaps, could throw off the whole prediction.

This incredible dependence on initial conditions was labeled by Lorenz as the “Butterfly Effect.” According to his analogy, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil it thus changes the initial conditions within the atmosphere (though by only a fractionally small amount) and thereby could cause rain in Texas. Think about that idea for a moment. Lorenz’s concept indeed reveals an astonishing world that is not readily apparent. Until Lorenz’s discovery, scientists had no reason to believe that the stability of a subsystem could be independent of the stability of the rest of the system. Nor had anyone thought that a nonlinear system could be stable when driven by chaotic signals.

Author’s Note: So, what good is chaos in natural systems and does Chaos Theory have practical application? Before the 1990s most scientists believed that chaos was unreliable, uncontrollable, and therefore unusable in any scientific application. It is true that no one can ever predict exactly how a chaotic system will behave over long periods. For that reason, engineers and scientists initially dealt with Chaos Theory by avoiding it. Today, that strategy is regarded as shortsighted. Within the past few years scientists have demonstrated that chaos can be manageable, exploitable, and even invaluable. Application of Chaos Theory has resulted in increases in the power of lasers, synchronization of the output of electronic circuits, control of oscillations in chemical reactions, stabilization of erratic heart beats of unhealthy animals, and the encoding of electronic messages for secure communications. Therefore, who knows what the future holds, other than more chaos? For an in-depth review of non-linear science including Chaos Theory, see: Alwyn C. Scott. Nonlinear Science: Emergence and Dynamics of Coherent Structures. Oxford University Press, 2003; and “The Development of Nonlinear Science,” paper given at the University of New Mexico, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Consortium of the Americas Seminars, October 10, 2005; online source: http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/AScott(rev).pdf

---

[1] Sources: “Chaos Theory: The Mergence of Science and Philosophy” by Manus J. Donahue, found online at: http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/Ch3.htm#first

And “Mastering Chaos” by William L. Ditto and Louis M. Pecora, found online at http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/mastring.html

Also see: http://www.alunw.freeuk.com/chaos.html