Between 2001 and 2006 Nakheel dredged sand off the Persian Gulf seabed and sprayed it into the shape of a palm tree. 5.72 square kilometres of new land. 94 million cubic metres of marine sand. Around $12 billion. It added 78 kilometres of coastline to Dubai, which was the whole economic case — beachfront commands premiums inland property doesn't, so manufacturing coastline is manufacturing margin.

What it doesn't have is a foundation. There's no concrete base, no seawall at the trunk. It's sand for the fronds and trunk, plus a crescent rock breakwater to shield the fronds from open-ocean wave action — 7 million tonnes of rock, quarried in the Hajar Mountains and barged 100 kilometres.

Which makes it structurally different from everything else people file it alongside. The Falkirk Wheel is steel and concrete with a 120-year design life. The Wuppertal Schwebebahn is structural steel and has been running since 1901. The Palm Jumeirah is built out of the one material water is specifically good at relocating, and its service life is a function of how much money Dubai spends putting sand back versus how fast the Gulf takes it away.

The maintenance is existential, not preventive

NASA satellite data has the island subsiding at roughly 5 mm/year. The fronds lose sand continuously to wave action and tidal currents — one major replenishment operation moved over 3.5 million cubic metres.

Dredged marine sand is a worse structural material than it looks, because it lacks what natural coastal sand has: shell fragment content, organic matter, and the compaction history that gives a natural beach cohesion. You're placing a poorly-graded, uncompacted, cohesionless fill and then asking it to hold a shape against continuous hydraulic loading.

The comparison worth drawing is the Delta Works, which protects land that exists naturally and would flood without intervention. Failure there means inundation of terrain that still exists underneath. Palm Jumeirah protects land that doesn't exist naturally and would dissolve without intervention. Failure means the terrain stops being terrain. Same category of engineering, fundamentally different failure mode.

Self-defeating by construction

The dredging buried roughly 1.2 square kilometres of coral reef under sediment.

Coral reef is a natural breakwater. It dissipates wave energy before it reaches shore — which is exactly the function the 7-million-tonne rock crescent was built to perform. The construction destroyed the free, self-maintaining, self-repairing wave attenuation structure and replaced it with a quarried one that requires monitoring and repair, on the same site, to protect the thing that was built on top of the first one.

The sediment plume also smothered oyster beds and seagrass under about five centimetres of silt across a wide radius, and turbidity cut light penetration enough to kill photosynthetic organisms in the affected zone. Artificial reef structures have since been installed along the breakwater with some documented recovery, but the remediation is cosmetic against the scale of the original loss.

Two consequences nobody designed for

The first is downstream erosion. Dubai's beaches lose 10,000 to 15,000 cubic metres of sand a year naturally. The island disrupts alongshore sediment transport — the mechanism that moves sand from one beach to the next along the coast. Sand that would have travelled east now accumulates on the western side of the island, and the beaches east of it starve. Some sections have retreated at up to 10 metres per year, and Dubai has spent millions on seawalls, groynes, and rock revetments to arrest erosion the island itself caused.

The second is water quality. The crescent breakwater that protects the fronds from storm waves also prevents tidal flushing, so the lagoons don't circulate properly. That produces stagnant zones, algal blooms, and the smell tourists have been reporting since it opened. Engineers deepened channels and installed circulation infrastructure — you're now running engineered water movement to substitute for the tidal exchange the breakwater blocks. Partially effective.

Both are the same class of problem: a structure that solves its primary design objective by interrupting a natural transport process, and then requires secondary infrastructure to replace the process it interrupted.

They're building the bigger one

Palm Jebel Ali — 50 percent larger, shelved after 2008 — relaunched in 2023. Redesigned masterplan with 80 hotels, homes for 35,000 families, six marinas. Jan De Nul took an AED 810 million marine works contract covering dredging, reclamation, beach profiling, and sand placement. First eight fronds targeted site-ready by early 2025, completion revised to 2027.

Meanwhile The World — 300 islands arranged as a world map, four kilometres offshore — sat largely undeveloped for a decade after the crash, visibly dissolving on satellite imagery. Individual island owners carry their own shoreline protection costs, running into millions of dirhams annually per island, which is a reasonable explanation for why most of them remain empty. A Monaco-themed resort opened in 2022 and a Sweden Island development is in progress.

Full write-up on the construction, the sediment transport problem, the reef loss, and Palm Jebel Ali: https://unteachablecourses.com/palm-jumeirah-dubai-artificial-islands-2026/

The engineering question I'd actually like an answer to: is there a design approach for large-scale sand reclamation that gets you to something self-sustaining, or is perpetual replenishment inherent to the method? Geotextile containment, cement or polymer stabilisation of the fill, deliberately engineered reef structures as primary rather than supplementary wave attenuation — do any of these change the maintenance curve meaningfully at 5+ km² scale, or is the honest answer that if you build land out of cohesionless dredged fill in open water, you have signed up for an annual sand budget in perpetuity and the only variable is its size?

It runs in the browser, no signup, no ads, free. There's a live water cycle canvas plus a "Journey Mode" where a student rides one droplet through evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection, transpiration, and infiltration, making choices along the way (headwater streams, floodplain wetlands, agricultural watersheds, suburban edges). I work in schools and built this as part of a larger open source teaching platform, but I'm not a domain expert in every subject I've covered, and I'd rather hear "your infiltration rates are nonsense" from this sub than have a 6th grader learn it wrong. Specific things I'm least sure about: the relative emphasis on transpiration, and how I've simplified groundwater flow. I'll fix anything you catch and report back in this thread. Thanks for your help!

What is the future scope after studying earth science or geology at iiser... Wil we get any jobs after geology or what????

Been chewing on this and want to know if it matches other people's experience or if I'm overweighting something rare.

Most mistakes in research eventually surface. Bad stats get caught. Dodgy method gets caught. Overclaimed result gets caught. Someone tells you, usually at the worst possible moment, and you fix it.

Missing a paper doesn't work like that. There's no signal. Nothing tells you the thing you've spent eight months on was published in 1996 under terminology nobody uses anymore. You find out from a reviewer, or from someone at a conference, or you never find out and neither does anyone else.

What gets me is that you can't protect yourself with effort. Searching harder means running more queries with the words you already have. If the earlier work used different words, more searching doesn't help. You'd need to already know the term in order to find the term.

And it seems to land hardest on the people least able to absorb it. Someone 25 years into a field carries a lot of it in their head, half-remembers something from the 80s, goes and looks. A first-year PhD student has none of that.

So, for people further along than me:

Does the worry ever go away, or do you just get better at living with it?

Has it actually happened to you, and how did you find out?

Do you do anything specific to guard against it, or is it just accepted as part of the job?

so i was listening to my teacher about the earth and she said earth is just a big magnet so i wondered if earth is just a big magnet we can possibly make a magnet thats big enough to pull all the continents together resulting in undoing the great continental drift because there're also tiny magnets inside the soil little ones it can possibly help attract the lands together and it will also help the big magnet that we can possibly make if you're wondering how do we make the big magnet Wrap many turns of insulated copper wire tightly around a large iron core (like a thick steel rod or pipe), then connect the wire ends to a strong DC power source (battery or power supply). The stronger the current and the more turns of wire, the stronger the electromagnet we can simply multiply this to make a large one but it will take decades of work.Thats all thanks

Há menos de uma hora, outro sismo, agora de magnitude 3,3, perto do Cadaval

É esta a informação do IPMA:

Informação Sismológica Aviso de Sismo Sentido no Continente
10-08-2026 12:31 O Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera informa
que no dia 10-08-2026 pelas 12:31 (hora local) foi registado nas
estações da Rede Sísmica do Continente, um sismo de magnitude 3.3
(Richter) e cujo epicentro se localizou a cerca de 10 km a Sudeste de
Cadaval.Este sismo, de acordo com a informação disponível até ao
momento, não causou danos pessoais ou materiais e foi sentido com
intensidade máxima IV (escala de Mercalli modificada) nos concelhos
de Bombarral (Leiria), Alenquer e Cadaval (Lisboa).Foi ainda sentido
com menor intensidade nos concelhos de Arruda dos Vinhos, Lourinhã,
Torres Vedras (Lisboa) e Rio Maior (Santarém).

https://preview.redd.it/eo2hrdcdjjih1.png?width=595&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a92648db48e72dbbc0c32c9cc68484298a8d19f

https://shakemap.ipma.pt/2026081011314301/intensity.html

Recordo que a 19 de Fevereiro deste ano, tivemos um par de sismos de magnitude 4,1 muito perto daí.

Not give us powers. But as a power source to use as electricity where we can harness their essence or they're very being as electricity. Using their existence as power for electricity. They Don't Care about Us and don't care how they use us so why should we care about them.

What do you think about the North and South Pole getting ready to meet late 2030 early 2040s

Day was breaking on August 8, 1303, when a Mw8.0-8.3 earthquake, possibly located southeast of Crete, accompanied by a powerful tsunami spread destruction through a very large area., along the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

https://preview.redd.it/l1kcp2fhu0ih1.jpg?width=560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9f5b4770d7381ce3ee5a39dd7bcd5cbf4092e504

https://emidius.eu/AHEAD/event/13030808_0330_000

The island of Crete, then under Venitian rule, was the most affected place.

Almost all the houses of the capital, Candia (now Heraklion), were reduced to ruins, the same happening to the most part of the Venetian castles in other locations in the island.

The tsunami also contributed to the destruction of buildings, namely in Candia.

It is estimated that 4,000 people were killed (most women and children) just in Crete.

DAMAGE IN THE ISLAND OF CRETE

But the destruction caused by the earthquake and by the tsunami extended to other places in Eastern Mediterranean.

Egypt (Alexandria, Cairo, etc.), Israel (Acre and Safed) and Rhodes were the most devastated, adding more thousands of lives lost.

EFFECTS IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN AREA

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009737632542

The 1303 event was one of the largest and deadliest events in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, only surpassed by the 365 AD earthquake and tsunami, also generated in the Hellenic Arc.

https://preview.redd.it/a4zlsoedu0ih1.jpg?width=1269&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=53f12a6bcaa1bef8d8b48c8cf3b2a46c8f36ceae

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tecto.2012.02.019

On August 12, 2026, humanity looked to the skies in awe, blind to the executioner’s axe hovering over the planet. Over the North Atlantic, the Moon slid directly into the path of the Sun, casting a total solar eclipse that turned mid-day into eerie, suffocating twilight. Simultaneously, aligned along a celestial thread, six of the solar system's planets sat pinned across the darkened heavens.
Astronomers had calculated the light, but they had ignored the gravity.
Deep beneath the ocean’s surface, precisely where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet along the North Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the subtle gravitational pull of six aligned worlds merged with the lunar-solar tidal stress. It created a resonance never seen in human history, a massive, subterranean magma tide. Deep within the Earth’s mantle, trillions of tons of super-heated liquid rock did not merely shift, they gathered into a hyperpressurized, underground tsunami of melt, surging violently upward into the tearing rift between two continents.
At 14:17 UTC, the oceanic seabed lost its structural integrity.
The rift didn't just open, it exploded. Submarine super-volcanoes along a two-thousand-mile fissure detonated in unison under the crushing pressure of the sea. The water above boiled instantaneously, turning the Atlantic into a cauldron of superheated steam and acoustic shockwaves that liquefied marine life for hundreds of miles. Driven by the colossal mantle-surge below, the sea floor began to buckle and heave. Whole underwater mountain ranges were blasted upward by miles in a matter of minutes, displacement on a scale that shattered the fundamental geometry of the Earth's crust.
Then came the structural collapse. As millions of cubic kilometers of rock were shoved toward the sky, the abyssal slopes destabilized. Billions of tons of basalt and sediment sheared off the ridge in hyper-velocity underwater landslides, plunging into deep ocean trenches and sending kinetic shockwaves straight into the bedrock of the planet.
The planet rang like a cracked bell.
Super-earthquakes, shattering the Richter scale at magnitudes never before witnessed, rippled outward from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Travelling through the rigid rock of the tectonic plates at hyper-sonic speed, the shockwaves struck the continental shelves.
To the east, Western Europe shuddered first. In London, Paris, Madrid, and Oslo, the ground did not just shake; it rolled in violently cresting stone waves. Skyscraper foundations sheared at the base. Bridges over the Seine and the Thames snapped like dry twigs as the bedrock folded. Within ninety seconds, every major city from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavian fjords was reduced to a vast, churning graveyard of pulverised concrete and dust.
To the west, the North American plate buckled. The earthquake roared ashore along the eastern seaboard of the United States. New York, Boston, Washington D.C., and Miami felt the continental granite rupture beneath them. The sky scrapers of Manhattan tipped into one another, shattering into roaring avalanches of glass and steel. The ground split open across hundreds of miles, swallowing highways, power grids, and entire suburban counties as the continent tore at its seams.
And yet, the true horror was only just gathering momentum out in the pitch-black Atlantic.
The violently uplifted ocean floor and the catastrophic submarine landslides had displaced a volume of water so vast it defied physical comprehension. A monolithic wall of water, a mega-tsunami over four hundred meters high and more than a thousand kilometers wide, rose out of the boiling sea. Moving at the speed of a jet airliner, the terrifying crest carved across the dark ocean under the blacked-out sky.
There were no sirens loud enough, no high ground high enough.
The mega-tsunami struck the eastern coast of the United States first. A black, churning wall of ocean swallowed the ruins of the Eastern Seaboard in a single, roaring bite. The wave swept over the Appalachian Mountains, drowning the interior of the country in hundreds of feet of churning, debris-laden seawater.
Minutes later, the eastern wing of the mega-wave slammed into Europe. It roared over the cliffs of Ireland and the United Kingdom, washing them off the map entirely. It swept through the English Channel and flooded deep into the continent, drowning France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia under a vast, inland sea.
When the shadow of the Moon finally lifted and the six planets drifted out of their fatal alignment, the Sun shone down on a world remade in silence. Where two thriving continents had once dominated the Northern Hemisphere, only a vast, turbid, and empty ocean remained, its surface still steaming over the boiling, broken spine of the Earth.

What do you guys think about the Ice wall of Antarctica