Signals from the ice

I was maybe sixteen years old when I first read H. P. Lovecraft's atmospheric and terrifying short story "At the Mountains of Madness."  Unique amongst his fiction, it's set in Antarctica, which I thought was an odd choice; just about everything else I'd read by him was set somewhere in his home territory of New England.  But as I read, I realized what a good decision that was.  There's something inherently alien about the southernmost continent that makes it the perfect place for a spooky story.  Lovecraft writes:

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope.  Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.

Of course, being a Lovecraft story, the intrepid band of geologists and paleontologists who are the main characters make discoveries in Antarctica that very quickly lead them to regret ever going there.  Of the two who survive to the very end, one is clearly headed for a padded cell and a jacket with extra-long sleeves, and the other only marginally better-off.

Happy endings were never Lovecraft's forte.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerzy Strzelecki, Antarctica(js) 32, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a dear friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a peculiar discovery by some scientists working on a different kind of antarctic research -- astrophysics.  The project is called ANITA -- the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna -- and is designed to detect neutrinos, those ghostly, fast-moving particles that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 based on the fact that momentum and spin seemed not to be conserved in beta decay, so there must be an additional undetected particle to (so to speak) make the equation balance.  Even knowing that it must be there, it still took twelve more years to detect it directly, because it almost never interacts with matter; neutrinos can (and do) pass all the way through the Earth unimpeded.

This is why the experiment is sited in such a remote place.  Signals from actual neutrino capture are so rare that if you put your detection apparatus in an area with lots of human-created electromagnetic noise, you'd never see them.

"You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don’t really interact," said Stephanie Wissel, of Pennsylvania State University, who leads the ANITA project.  "So, this is the double-edged sword problem.  If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else."

Like Lovecraft's researchers, though, the ANITA team found something they weren't looking for -- and something they have yet to explain.

Fortunately for Wissel and her colleagues, it wasn't a bunch of Shoggoths waiting to tear them limb from limb.

It was radio signals that seemed to be coming from beneath the ice sheet.

"We have these radio antennas on a balloon that flies forty kilometers above the ice in Antarctica," Wissel said.  "We point our antennas down at the ice and look for neutrinos that interact in the ice, producing radio emissions that we can then sense on our detectors.  During those sweeps, we recorded a series of radio pulses.  However, unlike the expected detection of neutrino interactions caused by cosmic neutrinos, we saw bizarre radio pulses originating from the other direction...  The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like thirty degrees below the surface of the ice."

What's weird is that although the neutrinos themselves can pass through huge, massive objects without being bothered, radio waves can't.  So whatever is causing the radio waves really does seem to be under the ice sheet -- but not very far under the ice sheet.

At the moment, the researchers have no good explanation for the detection, which they are calling "anomalous."

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don’t fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven’t been able to find any of those yet either," Wissel said.  "So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries."

Well, "the scientists can't explain it" opens the doors for the wackos to say "... but we can!"  I snooped a little around some of the sketchier subreddits and YouTube channels -- not a task recommended for the faint of heart -- and I'm already seeing the following:

• It's an auto-transmitter left over from an abandoned Nazi base.  Or... maybe... one that isn't abandoned.  *meaningful eyebrow raise*
• It's a relay station operated by the Illuminati.  One person recommended that the ANITA team get the hell out for their safety's sake, because "these people don't like anyone knowing of their existence."
• It's a leaking signal from inside the "hollow Earth."  So there must be an opening into the interior nearby, which the ANITA team should focus on finding.
• Something about the Schumann Resonance that was about ten paragraphs long, and which I tried unsuccessfully to paraphrase.  The best I can come up with is "weird cosmic shit is happening and the Earth is responding."
• Aliens.  (You knew they'd come up.)

Okay, folks, can we just hang on a moment?

"We don't know" means... "we don't know."  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If it's unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  And call me narrow-minded, but I'm content to wait for the actual scientists to figure out what's going on here rather than listening to a bunch of wackos who are using an anomalous radio signal to support whatever particular brand of lunacy they happen to favor.

And I can guarantee that whatever it turns out to be, it won't be a Nazi Illuminati radio transmitter tuned by aliens to the Schumann Resonance sending signals from inside the hollow Earth.

So what we have here is a curious and unexpected detection of a radio signal that is currently unexplained, but probably will be at some point.  This is one of the exciting things about science, isn't it?  Stumbling upon something you didn't even know was there.  These sorts of discoveries often open up new avenues of research, and sometimes (albeit rarely) can completely turn our models on their heads.

Wissel and her team have some exciting times ahead.

Me, I'd just as soon watch their progress from a distance, however.  I do not like being cold.  I've found Antarctica fascinating for a very long time, but I don't know if I'd ever be brave enough to go there.

And that's not even counting the danger of being mauled by Shoggoths, which I'm sure would ruin your day.

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Dry times

If I asked you to name the driest spots on Earth, I wonder if this one would come to mind -- even though it's a top contender for the number one spot.

You might have thought of Chile's Atacama Desert, or possibly somewhere in the Gobi, Sahara, or the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia.  All good guesses, and certainly they're not what I'd call wet climates.  In fact, parts of the Atacama come in second; the high elevation and perpetual clear skies are why it's such a great spot for astronomical observatories -- it's currently home to three of the best, and a fourth is being built.  The La Silla Observatory, the Paranal Observatory (which includes the Very Large Telescope), the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory (which hosts the ALMA international radio observatory), and the Cerro Armazones Observatory (site of the future Extremely Large Telescope), are all in the Atacama Desert.

As an aside, can astronomers please try to come up with better names for their observatories?  I mean, what the hell?  The "Very Large Telescope" and the "Extremely Large Telescope"?  What's next, the "Abso-fucking-lutely Humongous Telescope, No Really I'm Totally Serious You Won't Believe How Big It Is"?

Probably not.  AflHTNRITSYWBHBII would be hard to fit on a grant application.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the top spot for the driest climate on Earth is the McMurdo Dry Valley region of Antarctica, and beats most of the other possibilities by a significant margin.  Some studies indicate the place hasn't had any significant accumulated precipitation in over two million years.  What small amount does fall -- estimates are in the range of a hundred millimeters per year -- almost all evaporates before it reaches the ground because of the fierce katabatic winds.  Katabatic winds occur because air density is strongly dependent upon temperature, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys are surrounded by mountains.  Air masses above the mountaintops lose heat faster, making them become more dense; the air then flows downhill, easily reaching hurricane speed, and pools in the valleys.  Most of the air already started out dry; any humidity it originally had was precipitated out as snow on the windward side of the mountains.  This drops the relative humidity to only a few percent and keeps it there.

Any snowflakes falling into that don't stand a chance.  They don't melt; it's too cold for that.  They sublimate -- turn from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid phase.

That's how cold and dry it is.

The result is that the McMurdo Dry Valleys are basically nothing but a vast expanse of extremely cold rock, gravel, and sand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dturme, Labyrinth, Wright Valley, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The exposed rocks are mostly of Triassic age, and belong to the Beacon Formation, which is largely made of sandstone.  There are a few volcanic intrusions only a few million years old, but by and large, the whole place is just one big bunch of very old wind-eroded sandstone, quartzite, and pebble conglomerate.

And yet... there are living things there.

Not many, of course, but the McMurdo Dry Valleys are home to endolithic bacteria, which live in the cracks and fissures inside rocks, subsisting on the minerals therein and the tiny amount of water in the soil (supplemented from time to time by trickles of glacial meltwater).  They're still poorly understood, but are thought to be metabolically similar to the mid-ocean vent bacteria, which are able to use minerals like sulfur, iron, and manganese as the basis of their metabolism.

All of which makes me wonder if Mars hosts life.  McMurdo has been described as "the most Mars-like environment on Earth;" the site has been used to test equipment for the Mars rover missions.  Hell, if bacteria can survive in McMurdo, it's not much of a stretch to surmise that there might be life underground on Mars -- perhaps a holdover from the distant past, when Mars was a much warmer, wetter place.

I find places like this fascinating.  The idea that we have here on our (mostly) temperate and green planet a spot so profoundly inhospitable is pretty astonishing.  I wonder how (or if) climate change will alter things there?  The entire continent is climatically isolated by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, one of the hugest oceanic water transporters in the world -- the amount of water flowing through the Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, is estimated at around 130 times the volume of all the world's rivers put together -- so it's hard to imagine this shifting in any significant way.

But given that many oceanographers fear that meltwater from Greenland is going to block the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the best-known part of which is the Gulf Stream -- maybe I shouldn't speak too soon.

So that's our look at the Earth's answer to Mars.  Not, I'm afraid, a locale I'm eager to visit, given how little I like the cold.  I'm adventurous, but I draw the line at a place that hostile.

Plus, I like rocks as much as the next guy, but when there's nothing else to see -- well, I can think of a few other places that are higher on the destinations list.  I'm content to appreciate McMurdo from afar.

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A door in the ice

In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror short story "At the Mountains of Madness," some scientists are sent on an expedition to Antarctica to drill down through the ice and see what they can find out about the geology and paleontology of that largely-unexplored continent, and -- unsurprisingly, if you've ever read any Lovecraft -- they should have declined to participate.  First they discover fossil evidence of advanced forms of life dating back to the Precambrian Era; then, carved stones showing that some of those creatures had culture and tool-making capabilities; and finally, in an icy cave, they come across the frozen remains of life forms unlike anything known from Earth's prehistory.  Ultimately, they find that these life forms were intelligent -- far more intelligent than humans -- and in the interior of Antarctica, the scientific team discovers the remains of an ancient city:

Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause...  This cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge.  It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality...  For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim we decided we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come.  We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent.

So, of course, they decide to land their plane and investigate.  And of course find out that not all the monsters are frozen.  And of course a number of them end up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  Which kind of sucked for them, but is also no more than you should expect if you're a character in a Lovecraft story.

The reason all this comes up is that the conspiracy theorists are currently having multiple orgasms over the discovery on Google Earth of what looks like a giant door in the ice in Antarctica, southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station.  This has sparked a huge amount of buzz, despite the fact that the image itself is... um... underwhelming, to put it mildly:

So it's far from "a cyclopean maze" spreading for "boundless miles in every direction," and light years from anything that "only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause."  It is, in fact, a vaguely rectangular block of ice that probably slid down the slope and got hung up on a projection in the rock. 

Once this explanation was presented to the conspiracy theorists, they all frowned, scratched their heads, laughed in an embarrassed sort of way, and said, "Oh, all right, then!  What goobers we were!"

Ha!  I made that up.  If you know anything about conspiracy theorists, you surely know that the obvious, rational explanation just made them conspiracy even harder.  Besides the "OMFG Lovecraft was rightI!!!!!" responses, here are a few of the reactions I saw, before my prefrontal cortex started whimpering for mercy and I had to stop reading:

• It's the door to Agartha.  Agartha is a kingdom located on the inner surface of the Earth.
• I bet it's a clone reptile base.
• Bunker entrance?  It's too regular to be natural.  Could be an old Nazi base.
• Didn't someone found entrance on Mars same like this one?  [sic]
• It's a secret doorway to another dimension. 

Then someone had the audacity to point out the obvious.  "Wouldn't they make sure Google Earth DIDN'T photograph it if it was secret?"  Which has, all along, been one of my main objections to conspiracy theorists; they're asking you to believe that major world events are being engineered by a cabal of brilliant but devious malevolent supergeniuses, who are so intelligent they can do things like modify the weather and build secret bases on Mars and engineer spacecraft with faster-than-light capability and use 5G technology to manipulate our minds, but this same cabal is simultaneously so stupid that some neckbeard can figure out everything they're doing without ever leaving his mom's basement.

But that kind of argument is a non-starter with these people, so of course the guy who wondered why Google Earth would slip up and photograph the secret door if it was a secret door was immediately shouted down.

Anyhow, it's wryly amusing how little it takes to get the conspiracy theorists going.  If there really is some kind of bizarre structure on Antarctica, I'll wait for better evidence.  Boundless miles of eldritch, blasphemous, cyclopean architecture would do it for me.  Although don't ask me to be the one to go down there and investigate.  For one thing, I'm not fond of the cold.  For another, I'd rather not get eaten by a Shoggoth.  I'll stay here in my comfortable house and see what I can find out on Google Earth.

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The shroud of ice

It's hard to imagine Antarctica as anything but a frozen wasteland.  Bitterly cold even in summer, barely any precipitation (if it were warmer, Antarctica would be classified as a desert), much of the continent buried under a sheet of ice hundreds of meters thick.  The central "dry valleys" of Antarctica were used as a proving ground for the Mars rovers -- because it was the place on Earth that's the most like Mars.

It's kind of cool that H. P. Lovecraft, writing early in the twentieth century, recognized that this icy and inhospitable land might not always have been that way.  In one of his best short stories, "At the Mountains of Madness," we find out that the continent was once inhabited.  And by "once," I mean long before Homo sapiens appeared on the African savanna.  The denizens of the place -- the "Elder Things" -- were bizarre beasts with five-way symmetry and brains far more advanced than ours, and they built colossal edifices (invariably described as "eldritch" and "cyclopean") which, in the context of the story, are the subject of a scientific investigation.

And being that this is Lovecraft we're talking about, it did not end well.

Even more interesting is his story "The Shadow Out of Time," wherein we find out that the Elder Things amassed the information they have by using their eldritch (of course) technology to switch bodies -- they can flip their consciousness with a member of another sentient species anywhere in time and space, spend a year or two learning about the species and its culture, then flip back and write down what they found out.  The Elder Things lived in Antarctica a hundred million years ago, at which time the frozen continent was a warm, lush, humid jungle.  Listen to how one of their unwilling visitors, a human man from the early twentieth century, describes the place:

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains.  Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom.  When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.  Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors...  I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.

Lovecraft's prescience was shown when plate tectonics was discovered, twenty years after the author's death.  Antarctica wasn't always centered at the South Pole, and in fact had drifted in that direction from somewhere far nearer to the equator.  Since Lovecraft's time, fossils of temperate-climate organisms have been found in abundance, indicating that the climate had shifted dramatically, just as he'd said.

And shrouded underneath thousands of meters of ice, that primordial terrain is waiting to be studied.

Artist's conception of the ancient Antarctic rain forests [Image credit: James McKay of the Alfred Wegener Institut]

That colossal task has been taken on by a team led by glaciologist Stewart Jamieson of Durham University, who led a research project to use a remote telemetry technique called radio-echo sounding to map, for the first time, what's underneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.  The region is home to the coldest temperatures ever recorded -- below -80 C -- and experiences katabatic winds (winds caused by cold air rushing downhill from higher elevations) in excess of three hundred kilometers per hour.  

Not a place most of us would choose to visit.  But Jamieson and his team did -- spending whole seasons traversing the continent with their sensors.  The result was a "ghost image," a map showing sharply-peaked, river-carved hills and a hollow that probably was once a massive lake.  The topography reminded Jamieson of Snowdonia in Wales.

"It's an undiscovered landscape," Jamieson said.  "No one's laid eyes on it.  The ice sheet that covers it has been there for at least fourteen million years, perhaps longer.  The land under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is less well-known than the surface of Mars."

No word on whether his team saw signs of any eldritch and cyclopean architecture.

Despite the fact that I've known for many years that the continents move around and climates change, I'm always a little blown away when I consider how different things are now from even the relatively recent geological past.  And, of course, that the current configuration we have now will itself change as plate tectonics (and human messing-about) alters the Earth's ecosystems.  It may be true that in the span of a human lifetime -- as the famous song by Kansas put it -- it may seem like "nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky," the truth is that given a long enough time scale, Tennyson hit closer to the mark:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?

There, where the long road roars

Has been the stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands,

They melt like mists, the solid lands,

Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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Big bird

If last week's post about the Demon Ducks of Australia wasn't sufficient to scare you into stopping your project to build a working time machine so you can study prehistoric life first-hand, take a look at a different recent fossil discovery -- this one of a bird with a six-meter wingspan...

... and teeth.

Well, pseudoteeth, says the Wikipedia article on pelagornithids, because they don't have the same structure as true teeth and are actually outgrowths of the premaxillary and mandibular bones.  But that would have been little consolation to their prey:

This rather horrifying discovery, which I found out about thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, lived in Antarctica on the order of fifty million years ago.  The entire order was around for a very long time -- they first evolved shortly after the Cretaceous Extinction 66 million years ago, and only went extinct at the end of the Pliocene Epoch, three million years ago.  So these enormous toothed birds (pardon me, pseudotoothed birds) were swooping around scaring the absolute shit out of everyone for about sixty times longer than humans have even existed.

"In a lifestyle likely similar to living albatrosses, the giant extinct pelagornithids, with their very long-pointed wings, would have flown widely over the ancient open seas, which had yet to be dominated by whales and seals, in search of squid, fish and other seafood to catch with their beaks lined with sharp pseudoteeth," said Thomas Stidham of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who co-authored the study.  "The big ones are nearly twice the size of albatrosses, and these bony-toothed birds would have been formidable predators that evolved to be at the top of their ecosystem."

It's easy to look around at today's chickadees and warblers and think of birds as being small, feathery, fluttering creatures who are more often prey than predator.  But even today we have, as a reminder that birds are dinosaurs, species like cassowaries:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Darica Cassowary 00974, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which are as foul-tempered as their expression suggests, and have been known to attack people by kicking them with their heavy, razor-taloned feet.  So it's not just the prehistoric birds that have as their motto, "Do not fuck with me."

Anyhow, that's today's installment from the "Be Glad You Live When And Where You Do" department.  As fascinating as I find prehistoric life and birds in particular, I'd prefer not to meet in person a bird that could carry me away and eat me for breakfast.  

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Meltdown

One of the most frustrating things about human behavior is that we can receive repeated hints and warnings that if we keep doing what we're doing, bad stuff will happen, then when we continue and bad stuff does indeed happen as predicted, we act all surprised.

We've seen it before with volcanic eruptions, a topic I just dealt with in more detail last week.  As I pointed out, it's impossible (as science currently stands) to predict exactly when volcanoes will erupt, and sometimes they still take us completely by surprise, such as the May 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But a much better-known example of an eruption geologists saw coming was the March 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which killed 57 people, a significant fraction of whom were leisure hikers hoping to get close to the mountain, some of whom deliberately went around signs and barricades warning of the danger.

There's something in human nature that makes us say, "Oh, c'mon, that sign isn't meant for me.  We'll be fine."

Which is why we're now in the position of being presented with a study from the University of South Florida confirming what climatologists have been saying for decades -- that anthropogenic climate change, generated by the burning of fossil fuels, is going to melt the on-land ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland, and produce catastrophic sea level rise.

The first person who connected atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with global average temperature was, I shit you not, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, 126 years ago.  That's how long we've known about this.  It started being the subject of serious study (and concern) in the 1970s, and in the 80s and 90s popularizers such as James Burke and Al Gore brought it to the public notice with (respectively) After the Warming and An Inconvenient Truth.  But it's easy to ignore people if paying attention to them means having to change your lifestyle; easier to listen to knuckle-draggers like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as "proof" that the world wasn't warming up.

Unfortunately for Senator Inhofe, nature continues to operate by the laws of physics and not the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, because the temperature has continued to climb.  And just last week, a new study in Nature has shown that the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica has lost contact with the rocky basin it rests on, and is in the process of collapse -- something that could raise global sea levels by three meters.

"Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails," said marine geophysicist and study co-author Robert Larter from the British Antarctic Survey.  "We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed."

If that doesn't drive the point home hard enough, the authors point out that according to the United Nations, roughly forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast.

The edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I feel like the climatologists, and also science writers like myself, have been jumping up and down yelling ourselves hoarse for years trying to get people to wake up, and for God's sake, do something.  But the USF study is the most recent indication that whatever window we had to mitigate the effects of human-induced climate change might well have closed.  I hate to be a doom-and-gloom purveyor, and I wish I had good news; but at the moment, this is what we have.  We've allowed people like Senator Inhofe and their mouthpieces over at Fox News to convince the public that somehow we climate activists want bad things to happen, so we're exaggerating them for our own malign purposes.  And all the while, the voters have been climbing over the signs saying "Danger, Do Not Proceed Past This Point," saying, "Ha ha, this can't be meant for me."

I'm very much afraid that the result is we're in the latter half of "Fuck around and find out."

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

**************************************

Cliffs of ice and rivers in the sky

One of the most frustrating things is that instead of meeting the challenges we have and then moving forward, we seem to be fighting the same battles over and over and over.  It's like running on a treadmill, except instead of getting aerobic exercise, all you get is high blood pressure and an ulcer.

It will come as no surprise that I'm once again referring to anthropogenic climate change, which has such a mountain of evidence behind it that there is no argument any more.  Or there shouldn't be.  But all it takes is Some Guy On The Internet making a comment that amounts to "Nuh-uh, is not," and all of the science deniers give him a standing ovation and say, "See, we told you."

The latest in the long line of unqualified anti-science types acting as if their pronouncements somehow outweigh actual research is a tweet from Matt Thomas claiming that the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia in 2020 exceeded all of the human-generated carbon dioxide ever emitted.  Thomas said, "This volcano just spewed more CO2 than every car driven in history.  Climate change is natural.  Taxing us into poverty isn’t the answer."

Despite the fact that this isn't just false, it's false by several orders of magnitude, it immediately started a Greek chorus of "Climate change is a hoax!" from all the self-appointed climatologists on Twitter.  The tweet got over a hundred thousand likes, and the video link he provided got millions of views.  I've seen it posted on social media dozens of times myself, always to shouts of acclamation.  Very few people responded the way I did, which was to say, "You, sir, are a dangerous idiot."  It seems like a lot of the people who actually trust science have been wearied to the point of exhaustion, and we're just not taking the bait any more.

And it's not like the numbers aren't out there to confirm Thomas's dangerous idiocy.  Anyone with a computer and access to scientific databases on the internet can check his figures, and see that he's not just in left field, he's so far away he couldn't see left field with a powerful telescope.  In an average year, all the volcanic activity in the world releases about 0.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide; the carbon dioxide released in one year from vehicular exhaust is ten times higher than that.  (Note that this is all the emissions from all the volcanoes in a year, as compared to vehicular emissions in a year; Thomas was claiming that one volcano exceeded the emissions of all the automobiles ever created.  I guess if you're gonna lie, you may as well make it a doozy.)

So instead of trusting Some Guy On The Internet, let's look at what the actual science is saying.  How's that for a novel idea?

Just last week there were three studies that in a sane world, would alarm the hell out of everyone, but for some reason, have barely caused a blip on the radar.

First from the University of Tsukuba (Japan), we have a study showing that a scary meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river is predicted to spike in frequency, especially in east Asia.  Atmospheric rivers are pretty much what they sound like; narrow, fast-moving bands of extremely humid air, that undergo what's called adiabatic cooling when they run into land that has a higher elevation.  This forces the air upward, causing the volume to expand and the temperature to drop -- and all of that moisture condenses as rain or snow.

We're not talking insignificant amounts of water, here.  An atmospheric river, propelled by a typhoon a thousand kilometers to the east, struck Henan Province in China last year.  The amount of rainfall they received is, honestly, hard to imagine.  In three days the city of Zhengzhou got sixty centimeters of rainfall -- about equal to its average annual precipitation.  In some places in the region, the rainfall rate exceeded twenty centimeters per hour.  Over three hundred people died in the floods, and the damage was estimated at twelve billion dollars.

And this phenomenon isn't limited to east Asia.  Want it brought home to you, Americans?  This same phenomenon has been known to strike other places with strong on-shore air currents driving into lowland areas bounded by steep climbs in elevation -- like the Central Valley of California.

The second study is from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and found that current models support that Greenland -- one of the world's largest repositories of land-bound ice -- has a delayed response to warming.  Meaning that even if everyone suddenly wised up and cut greenhouse emissions and the temperature stabilized, the Greenland Ice Cap would continue to melt.

For centuries.

The response of Some Guy On The Internet to this was a viral YouTube video showing an ice cube melting in a cup of water, wherein the water level in the cup did not change, captioned,  "A little science lesson for the IDIOTS at the global warming conference," once again to rousing applause, despite the fact that this particular SGOTI neglected the fact that the meltwater that matters is from ice that starts out on land.

That almost no one raised this objection makes me despair for the state of science education in American public schools.

Scariest of all was the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union warning that the Thwaites Glacier -- an on-land mass of ice about the size of Florida -- is in imminent danger of collapse.  And I do mean imminent; we're not talking "by 2100."

The prediction is that the collapse could come some time in the next three to five years.

The leading edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

What's going on is that Thwaites is held back by a floating ice shelf, the bottom of which is caught against the top of an undersea mountain.  The recent study looked at the rate of warm water infiltration and melting on the underside of that ice sheet, and found that the area of ice that's caught -- the part that's providing the friction holding the whole thing in place --  has decreased drastically.  It's like putting a chuck underneath the tire of a car in neutral sitting on an incline.  It doesn't move -- until you remove the chuck.  After that, the car rolls forward, and continues to accelerate.

If the ice sheet holding Thwaites back buckles, the entire glacier will start to slide.  Dumping this much ice into the ocean will raise sea levels by something on the order of sixty centimeters, inundating coastlines and low-lying areas and displacing millions of people.

Although the studies have improved in terms of detail, none of this is new information.  Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades.  Increasingly they're taking the role of Cassandra -- the figure from Greek myth who was blessed with the ability to see the future, but cursed to have no one believe her.  The situation isn't helped by deliberate anti-science propaganda from the corporations who stand to lose financially if fossil fuels are phased out, and "news" services who are funded by those same corporations.

And, of course, by a populace who has been brainwashed to pay more attention to Some Guy On The Internet than to the hard data and sophisticated models generated by trained scientists.  But wearing blinders only works for so long.

Once you're up to your neck in sea water, it will be a little hard to argue that the scientists have been lying all along.

*************************************

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The shifting sands

In H. P. Lovecraft's wildly creepy story "The Shadow Out of Time," we meet a superintelligent alien race called the Yith who have a unique way of gathering information.

The Yith, who lived in what is now Australia's Great Sandy Desert some 250 million years ago, are capable of temporarily switching personalities with other intelligent beings throughout the cosmos and from any time period.  While the consciousness of the kidnapped individual is residing in its temporary Yith body, it enjoys the freedom to learn anything it wants from the extensive library of information the Yith have gleaned -- as long as the individual is willing to contribute his/her own knowledge to the library.  The main character, early twentieth century professor Nathaniel Peaslee, is switched, and while he is living with the Yith he meets a number of luminaries whose personalities have also been swiped, including:

• Titus Sempronius Blaesus: a Roman official from 80 B.C.E.
• Bartolomeo Corsi: a twelfth-century Florentine monk
• Crom-Ya: a Cimmerian chief who lived circa 15,000 B.C.E. 
• Khephnes: a Fourteenth Dynasty (circa 1700 B.C.E.) Egyptian pharaoh
• Nevil Kingston-Brown: an Australian physicist who would die in 2518 C.E.
• Pierre-Louis Montagny: an elderly Frenchman from the time of Louis XIII (early seventeenth century)
• Nug-Soth: a magician from a race of conquerors in16,000 C.E,
• S'gg'ha: a member of the star-headed "Great Race" of Antarctica, from a hundred million years ago
• Theodotides: a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.E.
• James Woodville: a Suffolk gentleman from the mid-seventeenth century
• Yiang-Li: a philosopher from the empire of Tsan-Chan, circa 5000 C.E.

Compared to most of the gory dismemberments other Lovecraftians entities were fond of, the Yith are remarkably genteel in their approach. Of course, it's not without its downside for the kidnapped individual; not only do they lose control over their own bodies for a period up to a couple of years, they experience serious disorientation (bordering on insanity in some cases) upon their return to their own bodies.

Nevertheless, it's a fantastic concept for a story, and I remember when I first read it (at about age sixteen) how taken I was with the idea of being able to meet and talk with individuals from both past and future, not to mention other species.  But what struck me most viscerally when I read it was when Peaslee, in the Yith's body, describes what he sees surrounding the library.

It's a tropical rain forest.  What now is a barren desert, with barely a scrap of vegetation, was a lush jungle:

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would witness tremendous rains.  Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the Sun -- which looked abnormally large -- and the Moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never fathom.  When -- very rarely -- the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.  Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the Earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic fronds waving mockingly in the shifting vapors...  I saw constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark I could tell but little of their towering, moist vegetation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carl Malamud, Cretaceous Diorama 2, CC BY 2.0]

I think it's the first time I'd really gotten hit square between the eyes with how different the Earth is now than it had been, and that those changes haven't halted.  In the time of Lovecraft's Yith, 250 million years ago, where I am now (upstate New York) was underneath a shallow saltwater ocean.  Only a hundred thousand years ago, where my house stands was covered with a thick layer of ice, near the southern terminus of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet.  (In fact, the long, narrow lakes that give the Finger Lakes Region its name were carved out by that very glacier.)

I was immediately reminded of that moment of realization when I read a paper a couple of days ago in Nature called "Temperate Rainforests Near the South Pole During Peak Cretaceous Warmth," by a huge team led by Johann Klages of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, of Bremerhaven, Germany.  Klages's team made a spectacular find that demonstrates that a hundred million years ago, Antarctica wasn't the windswept polar desert it currently is, but something more like Lovecraft's vision of the site of the prehistoric library of Yith.  The authors write:

The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years, driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume.  In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether polar ice could exist under such environmental conditions.  Here we use a sedimentary sequence recovered from the West Antarctic shelf—the southernmost Cretaceous record reported so far—and show that a temperate lowland rainforest environment existed at a palaeolatitude of about 82° S during the Turonian–Santonian age (92 to 83 million years ago).   This record contains an intact 3-metre-long network of in situ fossil roots embedded in a mudstone matrix containing diverse pollen and spores.  A climate model simulation shows that the reconstructed temperate climate at this high latitude requires a combination of both atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,120–1,680 parts per million by volume and a vegetated land surface without major Antarctic glaciation, highlighting the important cooling effect exerted by ice albedo under high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It's a stunning discovery from a number of perspectives.  First, just the wonderment of realizing that the climate could change so drastically.  Note that this wasn't, or at least wasn't entirely, because of tectonic movement; the site of the find was still only eight degrees shy of the South Pole even back then.  Despite that, the warmth supported a tremendous assemblage of life, including hypsilophodontid dinosaurs, labyrinthodontid amphibians, and a diverse flora including conifers, cycads, and ferns.  (And given that at this point Antarctica and Australia were still connected, Lovecraft's vision of the home of the Yith was remarkably accurate.)

So, if it wasn't latitude that caused the warm climate, what was it?  The other thing that jumps out at me is the high carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back then -- 1,000 parts per million.  Our current levels are 410 parts per million, and going up a steady 2.5 ppm per year.  I know I've rung the changes on this topic often enough, but I'll say again -- this is not a natural warm-up, like the Earth experienced during the mid-Cretaceous.  This is due to our out-of-control fossil fuel use, returning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide that has been locked up underground for hundreds of millions of years.  When the tipping point will occur, when we can no longer stop the warm up from continuing, is still a matter of debate.  Some scientists think we may already have passed it, that a catastrophic increase in temperature is inevitable, leading to a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a consequent rise in sea level of ten meters or more.

What no informed and responsible person doubts any more is that the warm-up is happening, and that we are the cause.  People who are still "global warming doubters" (I'm not going to dignify them by calling them skeptics; a skeptic respects facts and evidence) are either woefully uninformed or else in the pockets of the fossil fuel interests.

I don't mean to end on a depressing note.  The Klages et al. paper is wonderful, and gives us a vision of an Earth that was a very different place than the one we now inhabit, and highlights that what we have now is different yet from what the Earth will look like a hundred million years in the future.  It brings home the evocative lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wonderful poem "In Memoriam:"

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

****************************************

Just last week, I wrote about the internal voice most of us live with, babbling at us constantly -- sometimes with novel or creative ideas, but most of the time (at least in my experience) with inane nonsense.  The fact that this internal voice is nearly ubiquitous, and what purpose it may serve, is the subject of psychologist Ethan Kross's wonderful book Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, released this month and already winning accolades from all over.

Chatter not only analyzes the inner voice in general terms, but looks at specific case studies where the internal chatter brought spectacular insight -- or short-circuited the individual's ability to function entirely.  It's a brilliant analysis of something we all experience, and gives some guidance not only into how to quiet it when it gets out of hand, but to harness it for boosting our creativity and mental agility.

If you're a student of your own inner mental workings, Chatter is a must-read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Reaping the whirlwind

George Santayana's words, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," have been quoted so often they've almost become a cliché.  This doesn't make the central message any less true, of course.  A great many of the crises we're currently facing have been faced before -- making it even more frustrating that we're approaching them with the same laissez-faire, Panglossian breeziness that didn't work the first time.

Bringing up another quote, of uncertain origin but often attributed to Einstein, that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

If you can stand one more cautionary tale that (given our track record) we still won't take to heart in our current situation, consider the fate of the 14th-century Greenland Vikings.

During the last decades of the first millennium C.E., the climate improved, opening up northern ocean lanes and encouraging the seafaring Danes, Swedes, and Norse to go forth and colonize (or from the perspective of the prior inhabitants, to rape, loot, and pillage).  Eventually this led to the settlement of coastal Greenland, in the form of several small villages that considering the conditions, did remarkably well for about three hundred years.

Then they were hit by a double whammy.

The first was the Little Ice Age, a quick downturn of global average temperature that occurred for reasons still largely unknown.  The Arctic ice began to extend its reach, making sea travel difficult to impossible.  The second was that the Greenlanders had overhunted the source of their livelihood; walruses, hunted both for meat and for ivory.  Walrus populations collapsed, killing trade and cutting the Greenlanders off from their European cousins -- especially now that travel was hazardous enough that there had to be a pretty significant financial incentive to make the trip.  This piece of the puzzle was the subject of a new paper that came out last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, and is why the topic was on my mind in the first place.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jensbn, Greenland scenery, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the villagers were on their own as the food sources dwindled and the weather got steadily worse.  At some point, the last of the European Greenlanders died, alone and forgotten, and that was the end of the Viking presence in Greenland.  The thought of the final villager, waiting all alone for his own death, was such a deeply poignant image that when I first read about the story I wrote a poem about it -- a poem that won second place in Writers' Journal national poetry competition, and appeared in the January 1999 issue of the magazine.  It remains one of the high points of my writing career (and the only award I've ever gotten).  Here's the poem:

Greenland Colony 1375 

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns.  His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home. 

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in. 

In his father's time ships had come.  The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed.  For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came.  Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago.  He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there. 

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores.  Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

The idea of a group of people sliding toward oblivion, ignoring the warning signs, and missing what you would discover only in retrospect was your last opportunity to escape, has a chilling resonance in our time.  What we're facing is the opposite of what did in the Greenland Vikings -- a human-induced climate warm-up.  Just last week, after an Antarctic summer that had an average temperature already poised to break the record, Esperanza Base on Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula recorded the continent's warmest temperature ever -- 64.9 F.  Ice is melting at a rate almost impossible to comprehend -- the average in the last five years is 252 billion tons melted per year.

But with few exceptions, the world's leaders are doing exactly what the poor Greenland Vikings did; carrying on as usual, expecting that things would work out at some point, all the while continuing to overutilize resources and ignore the warning signs.  The only difference here is that the climate cool-off that contributed to the collapse of the villages in coastal Greenland was a natural process.

Here, the warm-up is something we're doing to ourselves, and is due to a process that Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius warned us would lead to global warming -- in 1896.

But as long as things haven't hit us personally, it's easy to look the other way rather than give up our lavish lifestyles.  Even wakeup calls like the recent Australian wildfires haven't shocked the world's leaders into action.  Except for a lot of sad head-shaking about those poor people whose homes burned down, and look at the sad koalas, not a damn thing has changed.

I fear that like the last Norse Greenlander, we're going to realize at some point -- most likely when it's too late to act (if it isn't already).  It's hard not to despair over the whole thing.  And it brings to mind one last quote, this one from the Bible, specifically the book of Hosea, chapter 8:  "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind."

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]