Room 611: Thursday, April 3. 2025

Today's schedule is DCBA

B Block Criminology - Today you have a quiz on violent crime. I have a note/cheat sheet that you may use to help. The quiz should take no more than half an hour to complete. After, we'll start with our look at property crimes, where we'll discuss the history of theft and make sense of the differences between occasional and professional thieves. You'll need to answer the following:

What are the differences between a professional and an occasional thief?
What is a "situational inducement"?
What is a "Booster", a "Snitch", and a "Fence"?

A Block Physical Geography - Today we finish Dante's Peak and don't forget that you have a series of questions to answer about the volcanology of the movie (in your Volcano work package). Today we'll get to the main portion of the volcanic eruption and the effects that Dante's Peak takes on the small town that sits in a valley near its base. Dante's Peak produces a Plinian eruption (lots of material ejected and very active). The order of eruption at Dante's Peak is:

Tectonic Earthquakes
Harmonic Tremors
Vertical Eruptive Cloud
Spreading of the Eruptive Cloud and Ash Fall
Lava Flow
Relative Calm...cue the slasher movie music
Lahars
Pyroclastic Cloud
End of Eruptive activity - relative calm
USGS Vulcanologist Harry Dalton hooks up with Mayor Rachel Wando and presumably live happily ever after

So it's bad...not as bad as the scientific premise behind Volcano (with Tommy Lee Jones) but bad. From Erik Klemetti at WIRED

Now, here is what I think: I hate Dante’s Peak. It isn’t really the lack of much scientific basics – sure, they mostly understand how volcanic monitoring works but they miss the boat on how volcanoes actually work. It isn’t the acting – Linda and Pierce are good and believable. It isn’t the coffee-loving USGS geolackeys (that is accurate). However, it is the combination of everything – the over-the-top response from Harry about the volcanic rumblings, the resistance from his boss, the recalcitrant grandmother, the deus ex machina mine shelter. The damn dog jumping in the truck as they drive over an ACTIVE LAVA FLOW. The film is, at the same time, trying to be realistic while being wildly unrealistic, and in most cases, there was no need to be unrealistic when it comes to an eruption in the Cascades threatening a town. But no, we can’t take the time to actually portray real events (“Dante’s Peak” lacked a scientific adviser). Sure, it can be exciting but, for me, it was so frustrating that I couldn’t get over it.

My friend I agree, wholeheartedly. Check out the archived Geological Guidebook to Dante's Peak and from the LA Times archive Volcanologists Survey ‘Dante’s Peak’ or Dino Jim's Dante's Peak Geological Overview