Someone at Bluesky was wondering about how Mt. Saint Helen's latest eruption fits into the passage of geologic time. So I asked my brother. I always ask my brother when I need an equation. Several years ago I asked him what my total life earnings as a poet figured out to be as an hourly wage. The answer was 8 cents an hour. Yes. Anyway, on to Mt. Saint Helen.
Mt. Saint Helen and Mt. Rainier
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"Here are my calculations:___________________________________________________________
We actually don’t need to bring humans into the process, unless one thinks that our evil ways with the body politic have upset the mountain again.
Mt. Saint Helen's new dome peeking up over crater edge
Contrary to the early century Christian scholars who thought the earth was 144,000 years old, the scientist think its more like 5 billion years old. Putting in the zeros the number looks like this 5,000,000,000,000. Of course we scientist don’t like to waste things much even if they are zeros, either do Norwegians, so we use a short notation and write 5E+9, which means a five followed by nine zeros after it. The E stands for exponent, what ever that is. So if there is a 70% change of Mt. Saint Helens getting pissed off this year and we assume that she only get pissed on very occasionally, for you see she is a cool mountain, lots of snow, and so the chance of it getting pissed off over the age of the earth is this…
Let’s just first figure out what percent one year is compared to the age of the earth. That is easy..
1 year/ age of earth = 1/5,000,000,000,000
Now we are wasting zeros again, so we write this the stingy Norwegian math way 1/5E+9 was is approximately 0.5E-9. We use the minus sign after the E to denote how many zeros in front of the nine. So one year equals 50E-9 % of the earth life. Notice we moved the zeros around converting from fraction of 0.5 to percent 50%.
So then multiple that by 70%, which reduces it to a chance of say about 35E-9% which is a very small number by our normal measures
Satellite image of Mt. Saint Helen crater and new dome
But this calculation has a flaw because the mountain has not been around since the beginning of the earth. Mt. Saint Helens is more like a zit on the nose of the earth. When it gets squeezed, out comes earth blood and puss, which for the earth is red lave and white ash.
So what do humans have to do with all this? Humans have been waking around the zit for about 5E+3 years which is about 30 seconds of the history of the entire earth.
On a related subject I thought I might write a book for kids. Here is the title:
"Mathematical Ecology For 9 Year Olds or How I Learned To Get Even With My Big Sister"
Little brothers! They never really do grow up. I can count change.
