No need for you to exit stage right. We are simply trying to make sense of some very unusual events with potentially huge “global war-level” ramifications. The more minds working on this, the better!
Lawdog’s hypothesis fails for obvious technical reasons, such as where does the heat come from to effect a phase change in his postulated methane clathrate plug. (Incidentally, that high heat demand is one of the reasons attempts to commercialize the planet’s huge resource of clathrate have gone nowhere).
Here is yet another hypothesis, which at least has the benefit of conforming to the laws of physics:
Were Nord Stream explosions really a military accident? - Asia Times
Lots of WWII weapons dumped in the Baltic Sea. Maybe some of them exploded near the pipelines?
The problem with most of the potential explanations is how to reconcile them with at least two separate explosions/leaks separated by hours and miles, affecting 3 separate pipelines? That tends to suggest a deliberate human action.
The “cui bono?” test puts the US government at the head of the list of potential actors, since it removes Germany’s ability to break with NATO and cut a deal with Russia on gas supplies. But we should not ignore the possibility that Germany itself may have deliberately cut its own lifeline. After all, the lady from Germany’s dominant Green Party has explicitly said that continuing to support the Ukraine is more important than keeping German citizens warm, employed, & fed this winter. Plus the Greens may see eliminating a source of evil hydrocarbons in addition to supporting Zelensky as a “twofer”.
As always, time will tell. But it may be a very long time before the truth comes out. People still debate what caused the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898.
From the left on left violence category, we have a Muslim prisoner so far successfully pursuing a religious-based claim against being searched by a transmale guard:
I was thinking the melting happens due to the pressure drop. I was looking for the temperature at which the methane hydrate will melt and found the below from this abstract.. That is a large range from something like 20 to 120F. But I don’t know how Methane Hydrate acts like water (higher pressure lower freezing point) or like most other materials.
I don’t really buy into the diesel effect lawdog talks about. For one, you need oxygen present for diesel combustion and for another a 200 mph say 4,000 lb mass would be a gigantic explosion if it acted like a diesel engine. However, I could see something coming apart if pressure difference existed (2800 sq inches on a 5 ft pipe) when a plug let loose.
Also, I don’t think he is right with regard to needing the gas to flow to remove water, but maybe he means that the hydrate is more likely to form without flow.
Didn’t the Russians just order a turbine? I presume for compression? Maybe there was an accident.
Delicious. Reminds me of the “case of first impression” (to quote many legal rulings) many years ago when a whale (that genus serving as a leftist religious icon, but whose name is questionable as it has been used in ‘fat shaming’) was killed by eskimos (who serve the left as an oppressed group and who must now be called ‘native Alaskans’) as part of their cultural heritage. Do you get the sense it is difficult to put together a politically-correct sentence nowadays? Nonetheless, I get a frisson whenever leftists are called upon determine the rank their religious symbols.
Hahaha!!! Traffic jam in the Intersection!
Thank you ,@CTLaw, for yet another bright spot in the otherwise SSDD day. Love it.
Hey, don’t harsh my pristine mellow!
Trump v. CNN
Today’s Kunstler dot com is interesting….
Ah, the old school “harvest time is a national emergency” tradition has returned to the former USSR.
Perfect! To quote the current idiom.
Pixie dust? Hardly “Tesla-speed”.
The new facility will be the largest semiconductor fabrication plant in the history of the United States, Micron claims, with construction and investment stretching out over a long period of time: building it will take the next 20-plus years, and the first phase investment of $20 billion is scheduled for the end of this decade.
They held such a buyback in Elmira last year, but I hadn’t heard of it. Otherwise I definitely would have printed a few pewpews.