and very well too. it's neat to see where we slice through earth and can see the changes it went through.

Good Rob! I was including this stuff in Mass Wasting and Diastrophism but here is even better. Now tell me all about a destructive earth. I just lived thru a week of the most intensive toradoes on record for this area. Eleven died south of us.

oh yes, that was all over the news. the AM said he was shocked that the damage was done to those brick homes vs all the trailer homes we usually see. still amazing how it can hit one house and leave the one next door alone.

That is the problem with tornadoes. You an more or less predict where lava flows are going to go. With tornadoes, you find caprice and not logic. I can opt to go see a lava flow. Tornadoes make house calls !

indeed! with lava, you have time to get out of the way (for the most part).

Kia Ora Thanks Terry. Marcia, if I scan them to the computer, and e-mail them to you, would you like to put up some cool pics from Franz Josef which I will use to explain the geomorphological processes there. Okay, okay, maybe you cannot see them very clearly - these processes usually only reveal themselves if the geomorphological environment has been upset by something as drastic as an earthquake. However maybe by seeing the land as it looks now, and then see it after a major event and you will get an appreciation for geomorphology in action. Rob

Sure Rob ! Send them to me at critter514@aol.com. Thanks. No matter they are not as clear as you'd like. They are far better than none at all.

oooohh, hurry up, i wanna see *grin*

Yes indeedy. It s Geo 89. Enjoy! You might like to add to the American Folkways please!

Kia Ora Marcia. In your e-mail please find two photos attached of the Waimakariri River. I scanned them in last year when I was writing a mock resource consent application for an environmental science paper. Could you please put them up here? People. I have for you two photos of one the finest examples of a BRAIDED river - a river with multiple channels lined by alluvial sediment and subject to the processes of fluvial geomorphology - that you will see anywhere in the world. With the exception of Alaska where a couple exist and maybe in the Soviet Union, it is unlikely you will see any examples anywhere else in the world that are this good. The best example would have to be the Rakaia River. For most of it's 145km course, the Rakaia River is a mass of braided channels on a riverbed more than a mile wide at the township of Rakaia. In low flow - 250 cubic metres per second or less - most of the multitude of channels are fordable. In full flood the whole riverbed is a single brown torrent running at anything up to 6000 cubic metres per second. Rob

Kia Ora http://www.dantecdynamics.com/applications/Images/backdropM.jpg - Rakaia River from the air. All the blue streaks are river channels meandering all over the river bed. Rob

Just being a smartypants and posting the picture Rob pointed to.

Terry, Rob's two latest are on their way to you. Please post them too. They remind me of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers at the confluence. It is braided all over the place in what is called the American Bottoms which is the richest farmland in North America. What is the land like around the braided pictures you are posting?

Hi all Okay. Cool. Terry has the pic of the Rakaia River up. This airborne shot is taken looking inland towards the foothill ranges of the Southern Alps. You can see that the river is very braided here, and thus appears like this for most of its 145km run from the Alps to the Pacific Ocean. If you look at the land immediately left of the river, you can see older river channels that were active when the river had meandered over to that side of its course. If you look about 3/4 of the way up the photo you can see what I think is a glacial moraine extending into the river, which was left from the last ice age when the big braided river valleys were conduits for the glaciers coming off the Southern Alps. Most of those river channels are 1-3 metres deep. None of them exist in the array that you see there, as their network changes with each flood event that comes down the river - as recently as Tuesday the Rakaia had a 1050+ cubic metre per second flood going down the river. Rob

Kia Ora http://spring.net/geo/rob/ Thanks for that Terry. Now to explain a braided river to people who haven't seen them before... Essentially what you are looking at is a river with multiple channels meandering over a riverbed that here, is about 750-1000 metres wide. In these photos of the Waimakariri River after rainfall in the mountains, the river is running high and dirty. The channel closest to you in the bottom pic is usually about half as wide and blue when the river is low. You can see that the river is just starting to drop (notice wet rocks on edge of channel in top photo). In high flood, all 750-1000m of river bed width will be under water - the number of people who get caught out on braided river beds or who simply don't understand Canterbury weather is amazing. Centrifugal forces shape the channel. Just as water running down the edge of the shower wall seems to bend for no apparent reason, the same happens in river channels. The gravel on the river bed is all alluvial sediment washed down by thousands and thousands of years of fluvial geomorphology in action. Rob

Thanks Terry. Is this the way future graphics will be put on Geo if they are not already on the interet? Great stuff, Rob. I am so happy you have returned. Rivers are new to me as neighbors. I find them fascinating. We were on the Indiana side of the Ohio not long ago and noted that what seems like a peaceful river had flung trash 20 or 30 feet into the tops of trees on the last flood stage. I am happy we are several miles from the main course.

Sure, I can help you get set up to post graphics. Download filezilla.

what's filezilla? afore i go and download it myself!

It's a real easy to use ftp program that will let you put pictures on the spring servers.

Ok Will do that. Meanwhile this just came thru -- Tsunami warnings issued for Fiji and New Zealand after earthquake measuring a magnitude of about 8.0 shakes southern Pacific Ocean.

A magnitude 8.0 earthquake IN TONGA has occurred at: 20.03S 174.23W Depth 16km Wed May 3 15:26:35 2006 UTC Time: Universal Time (UTC) Wed May 3 15:26:35 2006 Time Near Epicenter Thu May 4 04:26:35 2006 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) Wed May 3 11:26:35 2006 Central Daylight Time (CDT) Wed May 3 10:26:35 2006 Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) Wed May 3 09:26:35 2006 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) Wed May 3 08:26:35 2006 Alaska Daylight Time (ADT) Wed May 3 07:26:35 2006 Hawaii Standard Time (HST) Wed May 3 05:26:35 2006 Location with respect to nearby cities: 155 km (95 miles) S of Neiafu, Tonga (pop 3,000) 160 km (100 miles) NE of NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga (pop 37,000) 455 km (280 miles) S of Hihifo, Tonga 2145 km (1340 miles) NNE of Auckland, New Zealand

I just saw that on MSNBC. It hit Tonga. It's off the East Coast of Australia. Will Hawaii feel this?

Expect more large earthquakes from various parts of the world as the struck bell effect sends reverberations throughout the planet.

Hawaii may be affected. Dropping a pebble in a lake spreads the waves to every corner.. thus it is possible - though much reduced in strength over long distances.

Kia Ora Ideas that this was near Oz are fiction. It was nearly 1000km away. Oz might have felt it, but like everyone else outside of Nuku'alofa and American Samoa that thought a tsunami was coming, they were dreaming if they thought they saw a fluctuation in the water level. Australia has no plate boundaries or subduction zones in its waters. Rob

well, i certainly am glad you are safe. btw: i didn't catch any of this on the news (abc) last night, unless i missed it....

Thanks, Rob. That is why I went to the Honolulu newspaper for their report. It was more reliable than local news here. Thank goodness it was pretty harmless.