Laki - The Haze from Hell

On the 8th of June 1783 Iceland opened up and started spewing out its guts all over Europe creating some horrifying months where they sky was red and the air was toxic to breath.

Ahhh, beautiful! Wait, what? *cough cough* Somebody invent gas-masks fast...

What became known as the Laki Haze in northern Europe was actually a combination of hydrofluoric acid & sulfur-dioxide that moved eerily through the streets of the highly religious parts of England and France, turning day into a perpetual reddish twilight, killing people and generally made life miserable for the hard working English, and wine drinking French. Remember that his was before industrial robots and tractors so there was a lot of hard manual labour, usually an exercise where you appreciate the fresh Enlightenment air.

Not invented, thankfully not industries either

 The reason for this excitement was that rising magma collided with groundwater, creating phreatomagmatic explosions and simultaneously opened 130 craters that spent the next 8 months spreading death and terror over the neighbourhood. That sort of thing was frowned upon even back then, fortunately nobody had invented satellites either so they had no idea death came from Iceland, most people probably didn't know that there was an Iceland at all.

Not invented. Which was bad because no GPS:es meant people got lost all the time. But good because nobody had to spend a Saturday watching reruns of The Hills with their girlfriend.

In the beginning the Icelanders stood in awe watching 1400m high lava fountains, while the Brits brushed ash of their Frocks. Then started The Mist Hardships where 25% of the Icelandish population died in the famine that followed after their animals began dying of dental and skeletal fluorosis (tell your dentist that next time he tries to force fluorine-tables down your throat). Things got so bad they where forced to invent new dishes, like the scrumptious Book-soup where they actually boiled the pages that was made of animal skins. It's strangely absent from modern cooking books. Nigella, I have a top tip! Gimme a call.

A freakishly hot summer combined with a high pressure zone over Iceland meant that the poisonous, sulphuric air moved like a freight-train down over Norway, Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and ending up in Great Britain in only 6 days (which is much faster than a train actually, all trains being delayed by insurmountable obstacles like leaves and a small breeze).
And while English captains stood on shore cursing at the blood red sun, unable to take to the sea due to the thick mist, some 23 000 Brits died around them. That's around 100.000 in todays currency.

Besides being unhealthy to breathe the haze also caused weather worthy of a Roland Emmerich film. 

Epic thunderstorms with lightnings that killed horses and men, hails that killed livestock and torrential rains.
What followed was a bitterly cold and cruel winter killing at least 8000 more than usual winters.
 

Not invented, which meant that  the Greeks had to pay their own bills. 

The British had excellent records over their dead which makes it quite easy to calculate how many more died during these months than normally. The French (being very French) didn't  bother writing down such information though, they kept busy shouting at the haze, getting priest to exorcise it and probably tried to get it into a guillotine (killing things in guillotines being their national sport at the day)

Invented, which made some people shorter, and a lot of crazy French revolutionaries ecstatic

The extreme weather actually screwed up the French crops so much that the ensuing famine and poverty (as this was before the EU was invented the Germans wouldn't bail out the frogs) may have kick-started the French Revolution. Although, knowing the French, it would probably have happened anyway sooner or later.

This is not just meant to educate and amuse, but also to put the current ash-cloud into perspective. What small problems we are experiencing so far and what may come at any time. Today's society is much better equipped to deal with such disasters and that is thanks to the magic of economic growth leading to product development.

Scary Wednesday - Irukandji

If you are small and live in the ocean you're pretty much fucked. There will be sharks, turtles, nosy divers, black smokers, moray eels and outboard motors everywhere just waiting to eat, poke and slice you into a million pieces. So you need something special to be successful, a gimmick if you will. Like Britney Spears who is s a pretty sucky singer, but compensate by not wearing knickers.

The Irukandji (Carukia Barnesi) is a jellyfish that's very small, very fragile and almost invisible as it swims in the ocean.

 most venomous creature in the world

So it need something better than an absence of underwear to make it. And it has, and that is, as always; poison. Extremely potent poison, designed to catch fast moving fish and kill then in a heartbeat.
When you get stung by and Irukandji you initially just feel a mild pain that you will have no idea where it came from because the Irukandji is a little transparent devil far from the big hairy spider we featured last week.  After an hour or so you start vomiting. Am I seasick? You ask yourself. Well, maybe you are but it wouldn't help if you where Captain Haddock himself, you would still empty yourself all over the Fraser Island coastline, making local birds pretty happy and local divers pretty miserable.
If you have the good luck to be close to the boat and be driven to hospital you will probably survive, although you will spend a week wishing you didn't. As the doctors pumps as much weapons-grade morphine straight into you veins as possible, you will still experience the worst pain you have ever felt. People are known to have asked their doctors to kill them to get over it.  Yes, really
In the television show Super Animal a women says this:
""It's like when you're in labor, having a baby, and you've reached the peak of a contraction—that absolute peak—and you feel like you just can't do it anymore. That's the minimum that [Irukandji] pain is at, and it just builds from there."

It's called; the Irukandji Syndrome.
It's a lovely little state where you vomit, sweat profusely, cramp, kidney pain, burning skin, massive headaches, feel very agitated, you have a very high blood pressure and you heart pumps like it's trying to escape your body. Basically like Shane Macgowan feels every morning. But this lasts for days and days.

most hungover creature in the world

Very little is known about the Irukandji, partly because is nearly invisible, partly because it's very hard to handle. You can't even keep it in an aquarium cause it will break apart if it even touches the wall. It's not the rhinoceros of the seas, exactly.
What we do know is that it lives around Fraser Island north of Australia, they are related to other box jellyfish and they kill everything that touches it so they are probably lonelier than Mike Tyson.

When it stings the stingers that cover both it's tentacles and bell uncoils and millions of minute poisonous stingers (nematocysts) that travels in through you skin and releasing poison all the way through, even from the tips deeply imbedded in your flesh. Like you're gulliver but instead of ending up on the beach you find youself in a container of the Lilliputs discarded hypodermic needles. They also break off the Irukandji and continue to pump poison even after the initial contact is over. Bastard...

Oh, and there is no antidote.

Links
timsaxon
Youtube
Official Site
Discovery Channel - Killer Jellyfish

Scary Wednesday - Brazilian Wandering Spider

So why is this scary? Because it’s an effing spider, of course. All spiders are the spawn of Satan and should have the common decency to stay out of everyones view.

This is my war face

This also extra scary because of several reasons,
First of all, it’s a wandering spider. That means it will fool you to think it’s less scary due to the fact that these spiders doesn’t make webs. And we all hate spiderwebs (except in photos with the morning dew covering it as the sun ascends),

 Not so scary

but that also means that you have no idea where it is. It’s not confound to a large web inside a remote forest. Spiders in webs are also pretty particular on what they attack. If something too big (i.e. you) rips the web, it stays hidden and wait for you to curse, wipe the web of your face and continue with your day, only slightly more aware of your surroundings.  When you are gone they set out to repair the damage and wait for insects to feast on. That’s a sweet deal between spiders and humans.

Deal breaker

The wandering spiders haven’t signed that deal though, they walk around and just wait for a fleshy human foot to sink their teeth in. Just for the hell of it…Oh, and they are nocturnal so you don’t even have a chance to see them. And during the day they hide, in your shoe or under your breakfast banana. And they have a leg span of 15 cm. And they attack everything that wakes them up with the ferocity of a demon with parent-issues.
But God can’t be so mean so that he made this angry, big spider that likes to inhabit the same places as humans poisonous, can he? That would be pretty sick of him, wouldn’t it?

 Phoneutria Nigriventer

It would, and it is.
The Phoneutria Nigriventer is arguably the most poisonous on earth (and by that, probably on any planet).
6 micrograms of Nigriventer posion kills a labrat where it takes 110 micrograms of Black Widow poision to kill it's mate. They actually blend strong neurotoxins with serotonin. This shock and awe cocktail shuts down your nervous systems and cause intense spasm, tremors and incredible pain. And it inflicts you with priapism (It's what you get when you ask for Viagra in hell).






Next time you see a spider, I suggests RUN!



Links
Video
The Spider Catalouge
Pics of Wandering Spiders

Lahar

I was thinking on starting at least one reoccurring theme. And I thought that at Wednesdays I would write about stuff I fear. The plan is to also have one day a week to someone awesome. We'll see...

So we start this Scary Wednesday theme with a the Lahar. You may have heard of it, and you may think it's pretty scary. But the worst kinds of Lahars are nothing short of avalanches from hell!

A Lahar is like a mudflow, and that's not something you wanna find yourself in the path of. I mean even a normal flood can be pretty horrific when it come crashing down on you, and that is just water.
A mudflow packs a considerably harder punch due to what it consists of, like mud (duh), trees, unlucky bystanders, cars or whatever it swallows down the road. Mudslides crashes bridges my tearing their foundations apart by pure pressure, destroys houses and generally screw up everyone's day.

 The bus will probably not arrive today

So a mudflow isn't a picnic, so what if that mudflow consists of pyroclastic material? Yes, pyroclastic, as in volcano! You see, lahars are volcanic mudflows.
They can move up to a 100 kph and it can be more than 1000 degrees C hot and flow more than 300 km. It's made up of molten rock, water, trees, hot ash, boulders 10 meters across and bombs. It actually grows about ten times as it speeds down the mountian and towards your house just with all the debris it picks up.
It's basically incredibly hot cement with the single purpose of killing everything. 

 This is the time of reckoning

  As it hits a river the hot ash heats the water to a steam, which makes the pyroclastic flow move even faster on the superheated steam surface.

So this is one crazy-train from the twilight zone that will incinerate everybone in its path, asphyxiate everybody that dodged it with deadly gasses, crush all the buildings it will ever meet and eventually stop and cover entire cities all with a sort of hard cement that will never be home to life again.
So it's no surprise that Lahars are the most dangerous volcanic hazard there is, more people die of Lahars and Pyroclastic Flows than anything else the volcanoes can throw at you.

Links

YouTube movie of Lahar

Geology.sdsu.edu