Silicon Valley is home to a plethora of wealthy tech companies, but the sinking land beneath risks leading to far worse floods in the years to come, researchers said Wednesday.
This sinking, or subsidence, coupled with sea level rise, doubles the territory in the area known as Silicon Valley at risk of flooding by 2100, said the report in the journal Science Advances.
Until now, official government flood maps and projections have been based solely on estimates of sea level rise. "The ground goes down, sea level comes up, and flood waters go much farther inland than either change would produce by itself," said lead author Manoochehr Shirzaei, assistant professor in Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.
Most of the San Francisco Bay shoreline is sinking by less than two millimeters a year, but "in several areas we discovered subsidence rates of 10 millimeters (half an inch) a year and more," said the study.
*This short article above was published in thejakartapost.com with the title "Land beneath Silicon Valley is sinking fast: Study". ~ https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2018/03/08/land-beneath-silicon-valley-is-sinking-fast-study.html.
Ok, we found out why Silicon Valley is sinking but why is Silicon Valley called 'Silicon Valley'? Its not because its sinking but maybe it is called that because it is sinking. Largely, its because of the industry that has built up there in the San Fransisco Bay area... technology using silica sand. Not only here in the US, but all over the world man is building his future on silica sand... Hence, Silicon Valley.
Let's look at another article ~
Silicon wafers are fundamental in manufacturing the electronic “chips” that pervade almost every aspect of our lives. New applications in IoT, wearable and mobile devices, self-driving cars, cloud computing, 5G communication networks, and more, practically guarantee that demand for wafers will continue to grow at an accelerating rate.
Our life is now built on the SEMI... the semiconductor equipment manufacturers’ industry association. Recently, that industry announced that 2018 shipments of silicon wafers had set a new record of more than 12 billion square inches, up 8% from the previous year. Revenues for the year totaled $11.38 billion, up 31% from the previous year and exceeding $10 billion for the first time ever.
But wafers are not the only place silicon is used and they are not even close to the largest consumer of silicon. Construction (sand and concrete) followed by steel and aluminum are by far the largest. There are smaller applications for silicon that are also critical, such as solar energy and specialty parts for semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Sand to wafers…
Fortunately, there is no shortage of raw material. Silicon is the second most common element in the earth’s crust, comprising about 26% and exceeded only by oxygen at 49%. But silicon does not occur naturally in the pure form needed for electronic applications, for which it must contain less than one in a billion non-silicon atoms. The starting material really is sand. Not just any sand, but silica sand, specially quarried for this purpose and having concentrations of quartz (silicon dioxide) as high as 95%.
Online Source * ~ https://semiengineering.com/from-sand-to-wafers/
Commentary: "The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its collapse!”…~ Matthew 7:25-27.
Folks, the Social Imagination will ultimately be controlled if not already by technology and such a house will collapse.
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