This picture isn't just gorgeous. It's also confirmation that mining technologies haven't changed much over the past two centuries, though the engineers' shiny Hazmat getups have. Images by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds via Getty.

Scientists got the idea for injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere from watching massive volcanoes blow their top. When big boomers like Mount St. Helens or Pinatubo go, they throw huge plumes of sulfur-rich gunk into the atmosphere, and climate around the globe can cool significantly for up to a few years. The ozone layer also thins significantly.

Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and her colleagues calculated that if humans started artificially pumping two different sizes of sulfate molecules into the atmosphere, we could lose as much as 3/4 of the ozone layer:

The study found that injections of small particles, over the next 20 years, could reduce the ozone layer by 100 to 230 Dobson Units. This would represent a significant loss of ozone because the average thickness of the ozone layer in the Northern Hemisphere is 300 to 450 Dobson Units. (A Dobson Unit is equivalent to the number of ozone molecules that would create a layer 0.01 millimeters thick under conditions at Earth's surface).

With large particles, the Arctic loss would range from 70 to 150 Dobson Units. In each case, the larger figure is correlated with colder winters.

The ozone loss would drop in the later part of the century to about 60 to 150 Dobson Units, depending on the size of the sulfates and the severity of winters.

In the Antarctic, most of the ozone is already depleted and the sulfate injections would not significantly reduce the thickness of the ozone layer. Instead, they would significantly delay the recovery of the ozone hole.

The authors caution that the actual impacts on ozone could be somewhat different than estimated if atmospheric changes led to unusually warm or cold polar winters. They also warn that a geoengineering project could lead to even more severe ozone loss if a major volcanic eruption took place at the same time.

Like a strange new race of Celtic gods, London's wealthiest residents, "digging dozens of feet underground," the Times reported, were busy constructing a literally subsurface world for themselves in the ancient waterproof clay of southern England.

As the Times explained, London's "super-rich," including oil barons, Indian steel tycoons, and the odd American hedge fund manager, have been "seeking permission to excavate under the garden... making space for a three-story garage with car stacker, a swimming pool, a gym and a private home cinema." At least one example of this bizarre new form of subterranean architectural eccentricity even includes a "walk-in shower with waterproof television screens and glass walls that turn opaque with the press of a button."

While doing this, of course, there's still a house to consider, sitting up there on the earth's surface - so, in an effort to prevent cave-ins, the "original house" has been "propped up on giant steel pillars." Digging machines and men in helmets, like a painting by Fernand Léger, grind away at the planet beneath.

This spelunking upper class of central London - surely something new in human history? - are even now "engaged in a multimillion-pound game of one-upmanship," the Times suggested, "as they vie with each other to dig ever bigger, wider and deeper extensions."

So I'd like to propose a slightly more interesting addiction for investor class Brits, hip-hop moguls, and easy-money Hollywood types who think cocaine is still a thrill and Courvoisier worth pursuing: Give up your alcoholism and your sports cars and your use of bad drugs from the 1980s - and start digging show caves.

Dig vast, artificial caverns that extend for miles beneath the city.

Show your friends.

"I'd like to introduce you to Komatsu earth-moving equipment," I'd say, sitting across the table from Robert Downey Jr. I'd show him a sales brochure. "For the price of one custom Ferrari, you could buy half a dozen of these things - and rip away."

Buy land outside Moab. Buy a thousand mountain acres in Colorado. Buy an estate house somewhere deep in London - and tear the basement up. Go down. Go under. Stay up all night in a haze of klieg lights, dust, and diesel fumes, drilling into the planet.

Rats will flee from you. Water mains will burst.

Now start a few side tunnels and install nice couches.

Because who cares? You're the world's first interesting celebrity. You build tunnels beneath rowhouses and drink liquid Vitamin D.

And forget your neighbors. Slash would have thrown TVs out the window and played his guitar too loud - how exciting! So you're just playing with earth-moving machines at 3am, building artificial show caves beneath the city streets. You've got dredging equipment. Pulverizers.

You could be up, listening to the irritating squeal of a mobile crusher, shredding concrete four floors below ground.

You wake up to hear that Keith Richards has been arrested - and not because he's wrecked a Rolls Royce or bought heroin, but because he's tunneled all the way to France.

Or Colin Farrell gives up sex to construct a network of manmade caverns beneath his house in outer Dublin. That's not an earthquake - it's Colin Farrell.

He's drilling again.

Colin Farrell Addicted to Mining, the newspapers report.

I'm reminded of Seymour Cray, founder of Cray supercomputers, who apparently found "his inspiration" somewhere "deep in a dirt tunnel beneath his Wisconsin home." Having eventually tunneled out toward the nearby woods, his underground adventure wasn't always free from surface incidents: "When a tree fell through the top of the tunnel several years ago," Time magazine reported in 1988, "Cray used the opening to install a periscope-equipped lookout."

For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s."

Of course, Seymour Cray was no by means the first person to relieve a bit of stress through home tunneling.

Two years ago, the excellent blog Modern Mechanix looked at a man named Dr. H.G. Dyar, who had "one of the oddest hobbies in the world": he had "found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home."

Almost a quarter of a mile of tunnels has been completed, lined with concrete. The deepest passage... extends 32 feet down. Every bit of earth was removed unaided by Dr. Dyar, being carried out in pails. He found the tunnel-digging an appealing form of exercise to relieve the intense strain of his work day, which involved much close work with high-power microscopes.

Almost anti-climactically, we learn that "the idea first came to Dyar when he sought to make an underground entrance to his furnace cellar" - but, as with all things worthwhile, anywhere, he simply kept going. "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," William Blake once wrote - and Blake wasn't even a tunneler.

Finally, there was William Lyttle, the so-called Mole Man of Hackney. Lyttle was an east London eccentric who lived in a dilapidated house on Mortimer Road. "But this is no ordinary house," the Guardian reported in August 2006.

Quoting at great length, because I love this story:

Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.

Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property.

"I often used to joke that I expect him to come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor," said Marc Beishon, who lives a few yards from Mr Lyttle's house.

His wife, Joy, sees the serious side of the issue, however. "We moved in six years ago and we've been complaining to the council ever since," she said. "Until six weeks ago they had the audacity to tell us the house was structurally sound. The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable."

Now, after 40 years of complaints, the council has admitted Mr Lyttle's quarrying has put the neighbourhood at risk. Last week it obtained a court order to temporarily evict him in order to enable engineers to fill the holes with cement, at an estimated cost of £100,000 - for which Mr Lyttle will be billed.

"There has been movement in the ground," Phillip Wilman, a council surveyor, told Thames magistrates court.

In any case, how much more interesting would the world be if, say, Eliot Spitzer's recent and mysterious financial transactions had not been directed toward sex - it's easy enough to get that, Mr. Spitzer - but toward weird and illegal machines that caused movement in the ground outside his Albany mansion? Police surveyors armed with ground-penetrating radar swarm the place - and discover several miles' worth of artificial caves in a warren of entrances and exits throughout the city. Eliot Spitzer did this, the gruff, benchpress-ready men quietly say. We've got to stop him.

But I've made my point.

What I'd like to see, at some point before I die, is a series of show caves, free and open to the public, that have been excavated and paid for by the film and music revenues of global superstars.

All the tunnels have been supervised by celebrities, who are addicted to digging. Shia LaBoeuf has a tunnel. Shakira has several. Even Bob Dole has one - but he's forgotten how to use it.

You book a flight to Hollywood, then, and you buy a Star Map - but within three hours you find yourself one hundred and sixty seven feet below ground in the most spectacular cave you've ever seen. Its stalactites have been precision-cut by CNC-milling machines, the walls shaped by computer-programmable routers. There is a vague smell of sawdust in the air, and you notice several wood boards holding up some parts of the walls. There are vaults visible in the distance, and a slight groaning sound.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the New York Times, was there last week - and he hated the place.

Rumor has it, though, that a vast, echoless complex exists beneath Atlanta, dug by Ludacris. Its dimensions are too shocking to believe. He hangs out down there with Umberto Eco, discussing the Hollow Earth Theory and practicing rhymes.

Whenever another royalty check comes through, he digs deeper.

(Note: The final two images show the Excelsior Tunnel, and were taken by the always impressive Nick Catford of Subterranea Britannica; all rights, copyrights, and otherwise remain with him. The opening thumbnail is a South American ice cave, shot by Flickr user Tom Holub)

During the several decades of building the 48 mile canal in the early twentieth century, 27,500 workers died. Today, oil tankers like this one travel through several locks full of water to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic (or vice versa). Here's another tanker, below. It's moving through a lock very near the area that is being widened. I love the gigantic "no smoking" sign. Below you can see one of the "trains" that helps pull boats through the locks. Here's a view from above of the area that's being widened. And here is Panama City, just a few kilometers from the Canal, which is about to start building a bunch of skyscrapers that will be completed in 2009 and 2010 around the same time as the canal project. Real estate speculators believe the widening of the canal will lead to more business. Images via Getty.

She said:

For cold clouds below zero degrees, we use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their mean size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall and precipitation can be reduced. For clouds above zero degrees we use the seeding agent silver iodide to accelerate the droplets' collision and coalescence, producing a downdraft which suppresses the formation of clouds.

China 'will stop the rain' [News.com via Slashdot]

"It's only a matter of time before the world's militaries learn to use the Earth itself as a weapon," Cascio writes. He speculates about how climate change and global warming could also be weaponized:

The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts.

Battlefield Earth [Foreign Policy]