Relics of the distant past

Today we'll stay in an archaeological vein, mostly because a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post and responded with links of their own and messages which basically boil down to, "Yes, but have you seen this?"

The first one comes to us from the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe, but unlike their usual fare of Bigfoots and UFOs, this one is about legitimate scientific research.  Not that you could tell from the title, which is "Yorkshire's Atlantis May Have Finally Been Found."  To be fair, the appellation of "Atlantis" isn't the fault of the author, Paul Seaburn; apparently this site, Ravenser Odd, has been called that before.  But unlike Atlantis, Ravenser Odd is a real place.  It was a port city on the estuary of the River Humber, attested thoroughly in records of the time until in 1362 there was a storm that breached the sand-based seawall and swamped it completely, and the once thriving town -- like its mythological namesake -- sank beneath the waves.

The shape of the long, narrow seawall is what gave the place its name, all the way back in Viking times, some four hundred years earlier; Ravenser Odd is a mangled version of hrafns eyr, which means "raven's eye" in Old Norse.  In its time it was a busy place.  It was one of the most thriving ports in the region, and a record from 1299 describes it as containing a central marketplace, wharves, warehouses, a court, a prison, a chapel, two mills, a tannery, an annual fair, and over a thousand residences.  The coastal region near the original submerged town retained the name, and in fact it's mentioned twice in Shakespeare, where he calls it "Ravenspurgh" (Richard II, act 2, scene 1, line 298, and Henry IV Part 1, act 1, scene 3, line 245).

Despite multiple attestations in the records, no one was able to find where the original Ravenser Odd had stood -- until now.

An amateur archaeologist named Philip Mathison, who is something of an expert on Ravenser Odd, stumbled upon an 1892 document on eBay that mentioned "submarine remains" at Spurn, a tidal island north of the mouth of the Humber -- and gave directions on how to find them.  Mathison went out in a boat with an echo sounder, and found what looked like a human-made rock wall, exactly where the document had said it would be.

"People had assumed it was way out to sea, as the shape of the peninsula now is very different to how it was in the thirteenth century," Mathison said.  "This document showed a stone ledge to the east of Spurn which I believe could be the walls of a dock or quay... The ridge was most likely rock armor to protect the port, as it was under threat from erosion way before it was abandoned.  The bulk of the town's buildings were on a shingle bank called The Old Den, to the west side of Spurn, and some brickwork from them has been found in the past.  The town curved around like a fish hook and the wharves were at the other end... But it needs a proper dive to find out."

Seems like Mathison is going to get his wish -- two archaeologists from the University of Hull have already purchased scanning equipment and obtained funding for other supplies for an expedition this summer, when the weather in the North Sea improves.

Also with a Viking connection is a study done at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst that seems to upend a long-held theory about why the Norse settlements of Greenland died out in the late fourteenth century.  Previous models had attributed the collapse to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a worldwide drop in global average temperature that (among other things) caused the Greenland sea access to freeze up year round and made it an even more miserable place to live than it already is.  But the new study -- using two organic molecules as markers that are known to indicate, respectively, temperature and water availability -- showed that during the period of the collapse, the temperature didn't drop much, but it became significantly drier.

The harsh winters were one thing, but when the rain stopped falling even in the warmest months of summer, that was the kiss of death for the crops and domesticated animals at the Norse settlements, and ultimately, the Norse themselves.  

For the last story, we return to the British Isles, where a geophysical survey near the town of Aberlemno uncovered a 1.7-meter-long stone carved with designs identified with the Picts, the mysterious people who inhabited northern and eastern Scotland before the Dál Riada Scots moved in and kind of took over in the tenth century.  There aren't many Pictish records around; they were Celtic, but appear to have spoken a Brythonic language related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, not a Goidelic language like Gaelic, Irish, and Manx.

The discovery was made quite by accident.  While moving some surveying equipment, they noticed some anomalies that seemed to indicate the buried foundation of a settlement.  They dug into the soil, and hit a rock. "I just brushed my hand, and there was a symbol," said Zack Hinckley, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen.  "And we had a freakout... there were genuine tears."

The Pictish stone from Aberlemno, Scotland

The difficulty is that given the paucity of Pictish records, little is known of the script, and it's currently unknown whether these were written language, or simply decorative symbols.  The stone has been removed to an archaeological conservation lab in Edinburgh for further study.

So there you are.  The world of archaeology has been hopping lately.  It's always amazing to me that despite the extensive research that's been done, with state-of-the-art mapping and surveying tools, that there are still plenty of astonishing artifacts out there to find.

Some of them, apparently, right underneath our feet.

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The climate teeter-totter

Ever heard of the Grindelwald Fluctuation?

Your first guess might have to do with Harry Potter, or possibly that it's an episode of The Big Bang Theory, but it's neither.  It refers to a sudden, catastrophic dive in average global temperature that occurred in the middle of the already-cold "Little Ice Age," that had started in around 1300 C.E. and didn't really draw to a close until the middle of the nineteenth century.  The Grindelwald Fluctuation was a seventy-year period that was cold even by comparison to that baseline.  It's named after the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, which grew significantly during that time period.  The other results were grim -- crop failures, early (and unusually late) hard freezes, famine, widespread starvation.

I've been interested in the Little Ice Age for a long while, but I hadn't heard about this part of it before.  I started looking at the early parts of this Holocene cold period when I was doing my thesis research for my Master's Degree in linguistics, especially apropos of how it affected migrations (and thus linguistic intrusion) into the British Isles.  The Little Ice Age, though, had much a broader role in major historical events than simply changing where people went -- the Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s, that ravaged populations worldwide and literally wiped some towns off the map, was probably in part kicked off by falling temperatures and less food driving plague-carrying rats indoors, and into contact with humans.

I also have been fascinated by its effects on northern Europe, largely because of how it kind of stopped Viking/Scandinavian expansion in its tracks.  Danes and Norwegians had settled Iceland five centuries earlier, and in fact had even made inroads into Greenland -- then the climate shifted, sea lanes froze over, and weather turned stormy and hazardous, isolating Iceland and destroying the European settlements in coastal Greenland completely.  The thought of being stranded, of being the last colonist left alive in a desolate town knowing no one was coming to rescue me, was such a poignant image that it spurred me to write a piece of poetry called "Greenland Colony 1375"  that earned me the only award I've ever gotten for my writing -- second place in the Writers' Journal annual national poetry contest in 1999.  (If you're curious, you can read it at the link provided.)

The Grindelwald Fluctuation occurred in the midst of what was already the coldest weather humanity as a whole had experienced in recorded history, between the years 1560 and 1630.  The cause isn't certain, but may have to do with three huge volcanic eruptions in the Western Hemisphere (Colima in Mexico, Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, and Huaynaputina in Peru) blowing dust and ash into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing the temperatures to fall.

Hendrick Avercamp, A Scene on the Ice (ca. 1625) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Whatever the reason, it took a bad situation and made it far worse.  A paper in The Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society called "Weird Wether in Bristol During the Grindelwald Fluctuation," by Evan Jones and Rose Hewlett (of the University of Bristol) and Anson Mackay (of University College London), considers historical records documenting the experiences of the people who lived through it.  The paper is well worth reading in its entirety, so I won't steal their thunder by extensive quotes, but here's one of the records they cite, from the year 1607:

November the 20th 1607 began a frost which lasted till the 8th February following at which time the River of Severn and Wye were so hard frozen that people did pass on foot from side unto the other and played gambols and made fires to roast meat upon the ice.  No long trows etc could come to Bristol and when the ice broke away there came swimming down with the current of the tide great massy flakes of ice which endangered many ships that came up the [Bristol] Channel into Kingroad.  The continuance of the frost starved a great number of birds, and made corn sell very dear.

Anyone who knows the climate of coastal southwestern Britain can attest that a hard freeze lasting over three months is unheard of.  The sharp drop in temperature precipitated not only frigid temperatures but violent winter storms -- there's record after record describing catastrophic floods, windstorms, and snowstorms.

If the whole thing puts you in mind of this century's swing of temperature in the opposite direction, the authors want to make sure that point doesn't escape readers.  In the conclusion of the paper, they write:

Links between anthropogenic climate change in the modern world and different types of extreme weather events are now well established.  This could increase the costs of weather‐related hazards for about 350 million people across Europe in the coming decades, accompanied by a 50‐fold increase in weather‐related fatalities.  Such models fit with anecdotal evidence that the world is already experiencing more extreme weather. Recent examples in the United Kingdom include the record temperature highs of December 2019 and the Severn Valley floods of February 2020...

The economic, political and cultural context of the seventeenth century was... very different to that of the twenty‐first century...  Yet, despite these differences, the climate and weather of the early modern period provides a reminder of how destructive climate change and severe weather can be in both the short and long term.

The twentieth and early twenty-first century have had their own climate catastrophes, most of them due to a combination of natural and human causes -- the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985, the catastrophic droughts in Australia from 1939 to 1945 and from 1997 to 2009, the 2019 heatwave in India, and wildfires that have become a nearly annual occurrence in Indonesia.  No one honestly evaluating the evidence has any doubt of the role that anthropogenic carbon dioxide has in these events, nor its role in the general warm-up the entire world is experiencing.

I am tentatively hopeful now that there's an administration in the United States that isn't being run by a combination of crazy people and shills for the fossil fuels industry, but my fear is that even if we brake hard, we're still going to have a bad time of it.  Whether the climatic teeter-totter has truly passed a tipping point is unknown.  Plus, there's the purely pragmatic aspect of whether we could act fast enough to make a difference even in a best-case scenario.  Anyone realistic knows that the chance of every large economy in the world suddenly shucking fossil fuel dependence and going renewable is slim to none.  (It'd be nice, but still.)  

But maybe people will wake up, now that at least here in the United States we have leaders who acknowledge the problem and our role in it.  Any efforts to turn us around are better than nothing; the GOP's embrace of Sarah Palin's mantra "Burn, baby, burn" has done nothing but put us deeper into the pressure cooker.

But maybe -- just maybe -- having a president who is actually capable of reading and understanding a scientific paper like this week's Jones et al. study will give us a desperately needed step in the right direction.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

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