Talk:3078: Anchor Bolts

As a kid, I was ALWAYS worried about how plate tectonics would change the continent's layout in a few hundred million years' time, along with how the Sun will die (and maybe consume the Earth if we don't move it) in five billion years. Young me would be SO glad we are finally fixing the first issue. MinersHavenM43 (talk) 03:28, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Was young you a Superman fan, and did you ever wonder what really happened on Krypton? Scientists and engineers, funded and enabled by a Trump-style politician and his promise to "Stop The Earthquakes NOW!", actually overcame (temporarily) the materials issues and solved the stress equations (see below), and installed a (temporarily) successful planetary plate-anchoring system. Jor-El objected to the project, he and any who supported him were de-funded as a result, and he spent his remaining time ensuring that he could get his son the [deleted] outa there before the accumulated strain ruptured the anchors and blew the planet apart. 162.158.41.45 04:09, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Did you also worried about the collision with Andromeda galaxy? -- Hkmaly (talk) 05:15, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

I was more sad that I wouldn't be able to see it within my lifetime :( MinersHavenM43 (talk) 21:02, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Would an anti-subduction screw really work? The tectonic plates are slow, but they are quite heavy, so they have a fair bit of momentum. Indeed, enough to overcome the not inconsiderable friction already present due to the weight of the uplifted portion of the upper plate. Such a screw would therefore need to exert quite a bit of additional pressure to bring the motion to a halt; Exactly how much I shall leave as an exercise for the reader (because I have no clue where to even start trying to work it out), but my guess is that you're gonna need some seriously high tensile strength material for these, even if they are placed at very short intervals along the plate boundary. 172.68.84.172 03:52, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

The screw material could easily be some sort of unobtanium, it would still not work. With the forces involved, the result would be the stone would break around the screws, IMHO. -- Hkmaly (talk) 05:16, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Looks like somebody got to Randall M. and pointed out that what he drew is a bolt, not a screw. The title and caption of the comic have been edited accordingly. 162.158.41.3 05:38, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

The item depicted is a 'machine screw'; A bolt has a portion of the shaft un-threaded. An actual bolt would likely be more suitable for this application, but it's not uncommon for machine screws to be used instead.172.69.23.21 09:21, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

This appears to be incorrect, as least in the USNA (United States in North America), fans of spurious renaming of political geography. "The [sigh] American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) defines machine screws as featuring a diameter of up to 0.75 inches. While machine-screw diameters can be smaller than this, they can't be any larger, which means machine screws are typically smaller than most other screws." "Machine screws are used with a threaded hole to join two components together, sometimes requiring a nut. Bolts rely on nuts and are fitted through a clearance hole to secure parts together." On this evidence, the illustrated fastener is a bolt. 172.71.142.16 14:34, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

It's hard to be pedantic about this, because nobody agrees on the distinction between a screw a bolt.172.68.245.131 13:24, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Kinda figures. 'Cause, it seems, no matter how we try, or don't try, to make this bolt fit, we're screwed. [Runs.] 172.71.147.211 14:20, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

This is silly. The global cooperation and engineering required to make this work (I'm assuming unobtanium as a given) far surpasses that required to decarbonise commerce and fix climate change, which project is not going well, to say the least. Neil UK (talk) 08:32, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

I love how we'll give the narrative enough suspension of disbelief to allow for the bolognium we'd need to make this physically work, but actual humans, working together on a global scale project? That's way too unbelievable.172.70.126.168 22:19, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but that's the entire reason it's funny. Log of n (talk) 12:03, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Added an Actual Citation Needed to vulcanism being bad for humanity. Without it, life may not have started in the first place. And fertile volcanic soils would not have sustained us/our predecessors if such life had started. Minor issues like localised danger are surely a blip in time compared to that, and even now there's only a danger to some humans (less than, say, yellowstone erupting, which isn't something a bolt could stop... in fact, drilling the bolthole sounds like it could cause a Yellowstone, if done wrongly (if, in fact, there is a 'right' way)).
...other than that, yeah, go ahead! 172.70.91.181 09:49, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Sure, but that's not the right way to get that issue fixed. Feel free to rephrase it, or ask people to rephrase it for you in the incomplete tag. --FaviFake (talk) 11:21, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Did #2 --FaviFake (talk) 11:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Solved the phrasing? I think I can remove the request from the Incomplete, but would want to retain the other expected bit (at least until the whole Incomplete gets removed, which would traditionally be no earlier than some time next week). Looks like there's arguments about this, though. 172.70.58.97 14:20, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

To avoid having to travel through the mantle to insert the bolt from the bottom, wouldn't it be better to use something like a spring toggle bolt in this case? Seems like sort of a drywall situation to me. 172.69.58.9 14:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Or a molly-bolt (which is dangerously close to using a wall plug/rawlplug with a screw... as originally alluded). 172.70.58.156 14:30, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

So what would be the result of this for the oceans (and connected systems)? Assuming that the bolts worked, and that the spreading at mid-ocean ridges was halted (by the vent system installed). The sea floor would not be renewed. Sediment would accumulate on the sea floor, and not be swepet under the rug. What would the long term consequences be? Would we have shallower oceans with less rocky bottoms? What would that do? (To currents, to climate, to marine life, ...) Would sedementation disrupt the circulation of ocean water through the lithosphere, messing with such things as the CO2 balance? 108.162.246.57 20:35, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

Changed "crust" to "lithosphere" in a few places to avoid the popular misconception that the plates consist only of crust, rather than crust plus the upper rigid layer of mantle (upper mantle lithosphere). This misconception might be in the comic too, as the scaling of the bolted 'plates' looks more appropriate to the crust (typically ~10 km thick on the ocean side and ~35 km thick in a continent) rather than the real thickness of the plates of lithosphere (typically ~100 km).Waldronjwf (talk) 16:40, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

It's odd to me that the discussion of anchor bolts talks about holding buildings to foundations, and furniture to the floor, but not the geotechnical engineering application to prevent falling rocks/erosion. An anchor bolt in that case is generally cemented into a hole in the rock, and then tensioned against the face of the hill/cliff to stabilize it.172.70.38.246 13:36, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

And all the state's boltings, and all the state's men,/Couldn't put Humpty together again. Vanity of vanities ... 172.68.22.41 14:32, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

This is basically the plot of the Mike McQuay book Richter 10, except for the book using "spot welding" with buried nukes. 172.71.178.58 10:03, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

The Trivia description of screws vs. bolts isn't entirely correct: (1) At the very least, screws aren't drilled in to holes; they're screwed in. They may have a pilot hole drilled before the screw is screwed in (to prevent the screw from splitting the material being fastened), which is what this section appears to be trying to describe, but for most common applications they don't (instead making their own holes as they're screwed in, with no drilling taking place). (2) A bigger issue is the description of screws as necessarily being pointed, and the implication (final sentence of this section) that they're necessarily self-tapping. Many types of screws (eg. machine screws, socket screws, set screws, grub screws, etc. etc.) are neither pointed nor self-tapping. Rather, the difference between screws and bolts is that screws are screwed in (meaning that torque must be applied along a lever radial to the direction of drive in order to drive the screw into the material), whereas bolts are driven in (meaning pressure is applied in the direction of drive in order to drive the bolt into the material) and then torque is applied to a nut to make fast. As has been mentioned both in this discussion page and at the citation in the Trivia section, bolts often have an un-threaded length of shank but screws (usually) don't: this is a *consequence* of the difference between them (viz. that one is screwed in and the other is driven in), not the difference between them itself (it can't be, since bolts don't always have an un-threaded length of shank and some rare types of screws do have one). If "screwed in" is too circular a way to define screws, "threaded-in", "rotated-in", or "torqued-in" seem like reasonable synonyms, and if a succinct defining criterion is needed I suggest "A screw either makes its own thread or makes use of a captive thread and is torqued-in to the material being fastened, whereas a bolt is driven in to the material straight, without being rotated, and then a nut is torqued onto the end of it." (3) Since presumably Randall's anchor bolt was driven in straight, he is correct to refer to it as a bolt rather than a screw. 172.68.186.51 15:21, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

The project could be conducted entirely from the surface, without complicated sub-surface operations, by drilling a hole the diameter of the bolt head - not the bolt shank - and filling it with some high-density liquid (mercury? lava? trans-uranic elements?) to prevent pressure from closing the hole immediately, then inserting the bolt head-first, then extracting the remaining liquid (or possibly even solidifying it, perhaps through cooling or polymerisation?), causing the hole to collapse around the bolt thus securing the head to prevent the bolt from rotating (I suspect the pressure of the rock on the shank would probably accomplish this even if the bolt didn't have a head) and finally the nut could be threaded onto the protruding shank-end and torqued-down. If the shear strength of the bolt is the most likely cause of failure, a considerable torque would need to be applied to increase the friction between the surfaces being mated so as to use the bolt's tensile-strength advantage to resist the shear load and oh goodness I've just been nerd-sniped....) 172.68.186.51 15:21, 23 April 2025 (UTC)