The fingerprints of the Manatee

Cosmic ray is a catch-all term for the high-energy particles that constantly bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere.  The majority of them are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field or absorbed by the atmosphere, but a very few are energetic enough to reach the surface of the planet.  About 90% of cosmic rays are protons; a good chunk of the remaining ten percent are alpha particles (helium nuclei, consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound together).  The rest are varying mixes of particles from the subatomic zoo, sometimes even including positrons and antiprotons -- particles of antimatter.  They were discovered in 1912 by Austrian-American physicist Victor Hess in 1912, for which he won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The lion's share of cosmic rays that strike the Earth originate from the Sun, but some come from much farther away.  As we've seen here several times at Skeptophilia, the universe is an energetic and often violent place, not lacking in mechanisms for sending bits of matter careening across the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light.  As you might expect, supernovae produce cosmic rays; so do gamma ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, and quasars.  The last-mentioned are thought to be supermassive black holes surrounded by an inward-spiraling accretion disk of gas and dust, which accelerates as it tumbles toward the event horizon and gives of one final death scream of radiation.  This makes quasars one of the brightest objects in the known universe, with luminosities tens of thousands of times that of the Milky Way.

Trying to pinpoint the origin of particular cosmic rays is tricky.  Being mostly made of charged particles, they're deflected by magnetic fields; so even if you find one and know the direction it was traveling when it hit your detector, you can't just trace the line backwards and assume that's the point in the sky where it originated.  So scientists who are interested in figuring out where the highest-energy cosmic rays come from -- ones that almost certainly weren't created by our placid, stable home star -- have a difficult task.

A team led by Laura Olivera-Nieto of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics has tackled this problem, and in a paper published last week in Science, came up with an answer for at least some of these mysterious particles.  Working at the High-Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS -- a nice nod to the discoverer of cosmic rays) in Namibia, Olivera-Nieto and her team are studying a curious source of cosmic rays -- black holes that are in a binary system with another star.

The current study is of an object called SS 433, a source of x-rays so powerful it's been nicknamed a "microquasar."  It lies in the middle of the Manatee Nebula in the constellation Aquila, a shell of gas and dust blown outward when a star went supernova between ten and a hundred thousand years ago.  The supernova resulted in a black hole as the doomed star's core collapsed, but its companion star lived on.

The Manatee Nebula [Image credit: B. Saxton, (NRAO/AUI/NSF) from data provided by M. Goss, et al.]

Well, after a fashion.  The enormous gravitational pull of the black hole is siphoning off matter from the companion star, and as that plume of gas spirals inward, it accelerates and gives off radiation -- just as the accretion disk of a quasar does.  The result is a jet of cosmic rays, including not only the typical charged particles but x-rays and gamma rays, which (unlike charged particles) are unaffected by magnetic fields.  This allows astronomers to pinpoint their sources.

So in the midst of this seemingly placid bit of space is a whirling hurricane of gas and dust that is accelerated so strongly it creates jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light.  (Exactly the speed of light, in the case of the x-rays and gamma rays.)  Some of those particles eventually reach the Earth -- a few of which are picked up by Olivera-Nieto's team at HESS.

And those cosmic rays allows us to discern the fingerprints of an incredibly violent process taking place eighteen thousand light years away.

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Brighter than the Sun

A frequent (and maddening) thing in science journalism is when they lead news stories with clickbait-y headlines like "This Will Rewrite All Of The Science Textbooks!"  When, in fact, the story turns out to be no more than mildly interesting, and will at best generate a footnote in chapter 23 of the science textbooks.

Likewise for stories headed by "Researchers Dumbfounded" or "Scientists Are Back To The Drawing Board."

Sometimes, though, there really are discoveries that leave scientists baffled, and one of these was the subject of a paper last week in Science (although the event it analyzes happened in May of 2021).  And despite intensive research during the intervening two and a half years, physicists are still unsure of how to explain what happened -- especially since it isn't the first time.

The discovery was made by the Telescope Array in Utah, which doesn't follow the usual pattern of astronomers giving new telescopes clever names (like MeerKAT in South Africa and IceCube in Antarctica).  Did they just give up during the naming process?  You have to wonder if the conversation went like this:

Astronomer 1: I'm completely out of ideas.  All the cool names for observatories are already taken.

Astronomer 2: Plus, don't you think it's time we do some actual research rather than spending all our time trying to name this damn telescope array?

Astronomer 1 and Astronomer 2: *look at each other*

Astronomer 1 and Astronomer 2 (simultaneously):  I have an idea.

In any case, the Telescope Array was studying cosmic rays, high-energy particles that constantly bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere.  Most of them come from the Sun, but some originate outside the Solar System (or even outside the Milky Way).  They're a pretty well understood phenomenon -- but every once in a while, there's one that makes astrophysicists sit up and take notice, like the one recorded on 27 May 2021.

This one had an energy of 244 exa-electron-volts.  If you're not familiar with the prefix exa-, you're not alone; I used to teach science and I had to look it up.  It means 10^18 -- 10 followed by 18 zeroes.  So this cosmic ray had an energy of 244,000,000,000,000,000,000 electron volts, or -- as the brilliant science writer Jennifer Ouellette described it, the energy of a bowling ball dropped from shoulder height compressed into a volume smaller than a hydrogen atom.

Researchers nicknamed the event Amaterasu, after the Shinto goddess of the Sun.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's an evocative choice for a name but inaccurate in one respect -- the particle didn't come from the Sun.  In fact, where exactly it came from is a significant mystery.  There is an astrophysical principle called the GZK cutoff (named for the three scientists who proposed it, Kenneth Greisen, Georgiy Zatsepin, and Vadim Kuzmin), which showed that there is a theoretical limit for the energy of a cosmic ray -- it can carry no more than 50 EeV, and come from no farther away than three hundred million light years.  Amaterasu is one of two events that exceeded that -- the other is the aptly-named "Oh-My-God particle," which carried an estimated 320 EeV (equivalent to the kinetic energy of a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball).

Most baffling of all, when astrophysicists traced the trajectory of both Amaterasu and the OMG particle backwards, they led into different parts of an area called the Local Void -- a vast region of empty space.

So not only is there nothing there that looks capable of being able to produce such a high-energy particle, there's... nothing there.

But whatever's doing this, there are at least two of them.

"These events seem like they're coming from completely different places in the sky,” said study co-author John Belz, of the University of Utah. "It’s not like there's one mysterious source.  It could be defects in the structure of spacetime, colliding cosmic strings.  I mean, I’m just spit-balling crazy ideas that people are coming up with because there's not a conventional explanation.  Maybe magnetic fields are stronger than we thought, but that disagrees with other observations that show they’re not strong enough to produce significant curvature at these ten-to-the-twentieth electron volt energies.  It’s a real mystery."

So thanks to my eagle-eyed writer friend Gil Miller, who alerted me to this story.  I guess this is a discovery that may "rewrite the textbooks," or at least add an interesting new chapter.

Once they figure out what the hell it actually is.

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Cosmic storms

Because we clearly don't have enough to worry about, a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A describes apparent solar storm events captured in tree ring data that, if they happened today, would simultaneously fry every electronic device on Earth.

Those of you who are history buffs may think I'm talking about the 1859 Carrington Event, that caused auroras as near the equator as the Caribbean and triggered sparking, fires, and general failure in the telegraph system.  But no: the repeated Miyake Events -- which occurred six times in the last ten thousand years, most recently in 993 C.E. -- are estimated to have been a hundred times more powerful than Carrington, and worse still, scientists have no clear idea what caused them.

The evidence comes from carbon-14 deposition rates.  Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is produced at a relatively steady rate by bombardment of upper-atmosphere carbon dioxide by cosmic rays.  That C-14 is then incorporated into plant tissue via photosynthesis.  So tree ring C-14 content is a good indicator of the rate of radiation bombardment -- and the team, led by astrophysicist Benjamin Pope of the University of Queensland, have been analyzing six crazily high spikes of C-14 in tree rings, called "Miyake Events" after the scientist who first identified them.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Air Force]

Identifying the events is not the same as discovering their underlying cause, and the Miyake Events have the researchers stumped, at least for now.  Solar storms tend to coincide with the eleven-year sunspot cycle, but the Miyake Events show no periodicity lining up with sunspots (or anything else, for that matter).  There has even been speculation that they may not be of solar origin at all, but come from some source outside the Solar System -- perhaps a gamma-ray burster or Wolf-Rayet star -- but there are no known candidates that are anywhere near close enough to be responsible, especially given that the phenomenon (whatever it is) has occurred six times in the past ten thousand years.

So the Miyake Events may be real, honest-to-goodness cosmic storms.  Not, I hasten to add, the nonsense from the abysmal 1960s series Lost in Space, wherein Will Robinson and Doctor Smith and the Robot would be amusing themselves, then suddenly the Robot would start flailing about and yelling "Danger!  Danger!  Cosmic storm imminent!"  Then some wind would happen and blow over cardboard props and styrofoam rocks, and Will and Doctor Smith would pretend they were being flung about helplessly.  In the midst of all this there would be a cosmic noise ("BWOYOYOYOYOYOY") and an alien would appear out of nowhere.  These aliens included a space pirate (complete with an electronic parrot on his shoulder), a bunch of alien hillbillies (their spaceship looked like an old shack with a front porch), a motorcycle gang, a group of hippies, some space teenagers, and in one episode I swear I am not making up, Brünhilde, wearing a feathered helmet and astride a cosmic horse (which unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic).  She then proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place until eventually Thor showed up, after which things got kind of ridiculous.

But I digress.

Anyhow, back to the real cosmic storms.  The weirdest thing about the current research is the discovery that these were not sudden, one-and-done events like Carrington, which only lasted a few hours.  "At least two, maybe three of these events... took longer than a year, which is surprising because that's not going to happen if it's a solar flare," Pope said, in an interview with ABC Science.  "We thought we were going to have a big slam dunk where we could prove that [Miyake events were caused by] the Sun...  This is the most comprehensive study ever made of these events and the big result is a big shrug; we don't know what's going on...  There's a kind of extreme astrophysical phenomenon that we don't understand and it actually could be a threat to us."

So that's cheerful.

What's the scariest about an event like this is that even though it wouldn't directly cause any harm to us, it could cause a simultaneous collapse of the entire electrical infrastructure, and that the damage would take weeks or months even to begin to fix.  Can you imagine?  Not only no internet, but no GPS, no cellphones, maybe even no electrical grid.  Air travel would be impossible without the radar and navigational systems that it relies on.  For the first time since electricity became widespread, the world would suddenly go dark -- not only figuratively, but literally.

Research into what caused the Miyake Events is ongoing.  Even if they can figure out what caused them, though, it's hard to see what, if anything, we could do about it.  Chances are they'd occur without warning -- everything toodling along normally, then suddenly, wham.

Probably best not to worry about it.

Have a nice day.

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The postman always rings twice

When I started this blog ten years ago, I knew that I was gonna get hate mail.  It was inevitable, given my own strong opinions and the nature of the topics I write on.  I try to be as fair as I can, but I have no particular problem with identifying bullshit as such, and that has the effect of pissing a lot of people off.

 The thing that never fails to amaze me, though, is which posts get people stirred up.  I wrote a post comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, and nary a peep.  And yesterday I get two -- count 'em, two -- vitriolic screeds, both from posts I did ages ago -- one from the post I did in 2013 about the claim that hair is basically extended nerve endings, and the other about the claim I looked at a year earlier that there are giant glass pyramids on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that collect and focus cosmic ray energy.

The first one lambasted me for not going out and doing a study on the topic myself before criticizing it, despite the fact that the story I was responding to had no evidence presented whatsoever except for an alleged study by someone whose name was changed to protect privacy.  Because, presumably, studying hair is frowned upon by the scientific community and could result in death threats, or something.  The original article was also laced with claims that were demonstrably false (such as that hair "emits electromagnetic energy"). But I guess my pointing this out pasted a target on my chest:

Humans have predators in the natural world...you're trying to say that our primitive ancestors were as lazy and non-attentive as some random douche canoe 'skeptic' on his computer, shovelling Bugles into his mouth in his Family Guy jammie pants?  HA!  No.  They slept in fucking trees to stay alive (hence the hypnic jerk) and had to intuit and be aware of their surroundings.

No, what I'm saying is that hair, being dead strands of keratin, are not nerves.  Keep your eye on the ball, here.  Also, being that I spent years teaching a neuroscience class, I'm well aware that we have sense organs, and the evolutionary origins thereof.

You honestly believe that there is NO WAY somebody with longer hair might be able to sense changes in the wind, movements from other animals around them, foreign predatory energy (as in E=MC squared) approaching?  REALLY?  It makes SO much sense, that it warrants a study, and it should be done.

Actually, if you'll read what I wrote, you'll see that I did say that hair increases skin sensitivity, and that whiskers in many animals function as tactile sensors.  And did you really just say that Einstein's mass/energy equivalence has something to do with picking up "foreign predatory energy?"

And as far as this warranting a study, I'll simply quote Christopher Hitchens: "What is asserted without proof may be dismissed without proof."

You clearly have no fucking CLUE what you're talking about, and that's coming from somebody who actually comes from the scientific community.  Stop trying to play scientist; you're bad at it.  So many of you Atheist/skeptics/whatever say the things you BELIEVE a scientist would say, when they would NEVER say it; you don't have the knowledge to back a claim, and just go around saying something is bullshit because you think it makes you appear intelligent...but something you clearly don't know is that an actual researcher or scientist would know WITHOUT A DOUBT that something was correct or incorrect before saying so. 

Cf. my earlier comment about my teaching neuroscience. Your move.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The second one, about the ocean floor pyramids, was, if possible, even snarkier.  It began as follows:

The thing that makes me fucking angry about idiots like yourself is that you dismiss stuff you've never seen.

Another quote comes to mind, this one from Delos McKown, to wit: "The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike."  But point made. I've never been to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  Do continue.

If something doesn't fit the way you think the world is, you say it doesn't exist, piss on it, and walk away. 

It's hard to see how I'd piss on something that doesn't exist.  Even worse, how I'd piss on a nonexistent object that's not at the bottom of the Atlantic.  But all purely mechanical problems aside, I guess I was a little dismissive.

How do you know what the effects of cosmic rays are on the energy of the planet?  You talk like you have proof that pyramids couldn't be channelers of energy, but you can't prove it because you never leave your fucking armchair long enough to do anything but scoff.

I get out of my armchair pretty frequently, actually.  As far as how I know what cosmic rays can and cannot do, I once again feel obliged to point out that I have a degree in physics, teaching certificates in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and the ability to read.  Those put together give me at least a reasonably good ability to understand actual science.

And another thing: there's this fallacy called "shifting the burden of proof."  If you make an outrageous statement -- such as there being giant glass pyramids in the ocean that focus quantum energy frequency vibrations -- it is not the responsibility of those who say "bullshit" to prove they don't exist.

The pyramid guy ended by saying:

I bet you don't even have the balls to post this comment on your blog.  People like you hate it when you're challenged, because you want to be right without doing any work.  Anyhow, fuck you.

You're right that I'm not posting it, because it is, as you point out, my blog.  (Although I am writing an entire post about it instead, the irony of which does not escape me.)  Let me be plain about this: commenting is a privilege, not a right.  I'm happy to post contrary points-of-view -- not that I enjoy being wrong, mind you, but having new information brought to light is how we learn.  I've more than once printed retractions when I have been dead wrong, an experience which is profoundly humbling but is necessary for honesty's sake.

But it's a little frustrating to be accused of being a shallow-minded scoffer by people who retort with shallow-minded scoffing.  If someone has legitimate science -- not just a screaming post of "it could be so, and you can't prove it isn't, so fuck you!" -- I'm happy to listen.

Until then, I'm sticking with my original stance, and don't expect me to rise to the bait and argue with you.   Or even post your comment.  Call me a douche canoe skeptic, but there you are.

In any case: keep those cards and letters coming.  I'm not fond of hate mail, but as Brendan Behan put it, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  

So I tend to agree with Captain Jack Sparrow.  If people are sending me hate mail, at least they're reading what I write, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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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!]

Deadly fireworks

I've always thought it would be amazingly cool to witness a supernova.

Imagine it.  Within a few hours, a dim, ordinary-looking star increases in luminosity until it outshines every other astronomical object in the sky except the Sun and Moon.  It's visible during the day and you can read by its light at night.  It's not a blink-and-you'll-miss-it phenomenon, either; the light from the massive explosion peaks rapidly but declines slowly.  Most supernovae will be visible for months, before dimming to near-invisibility, ending as neutron stars or black holes.

There are lots of candidates for what could be the next supernova, although don't get your hopes up; most of these fall into the "some time in the next million years" category.  Yeah, it could happen tomorrow, but I wouldn't put money on it.  Still, the list is sizable, and here are five of the best possibilities:

• Betelgeuse (720 light years away, in the constellation Orion).  This one got some serious press a few months ago because it suddenly started to decrease in brightness, and astronomers wondered if this was a prelude to an explosion.  What appears to have happened is that there was turbulence in the star's core that blew a cloud of dust from its surface, obscuring the star and making it appear to dim.  So we're still waiting for this red supergiant to explode, and probably will be for a while.
• IK Pegasi (154 light years away, in the constellation Pegasus).  IK Pegasi isn't well known because at an apparent magnitude of 6, it's not visible to the naked eye, but it bears mention as the nearest serious supernova candidate.  It's a double star -- a main-sequence star and a massive white dwarf orbiting a common center of mass.  As the main-sequence star evolves, it will become a red giant, with a radius large enough that its white dwarf companion will start suctioning matter from its surface.  When the white dwarf reaches what's called the Chandrasekhar Limit -- 1.4 solar masses -- it will explode cataclysmically as a Type 1a supernova.  This will not only be spectacular but potentially dangerous -- a topic we will revisit shortly.
• VY Canis Majoris (3,820 light years away, in the constellation Canis Major).  Another star not visible to the naked eye, VY Canis Majoris is a lot more spectacular than you'd think to look at it.  It's the largest star known, with a mass fifteen times that of the Sun, and a radius so large that if you put it where the Sun is, its surface would be about at the orbit of Jupiter (so we'd be inside the star).  This "hypergiant" is one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way, and is only dim because it's so far away.  This one is certain to go supernova, probably some time in the next 100,000 years, and the remnants will collapse into a black hole.
• Eta Carinae (7,500 light years away, in the constellation Carina).  Eta Carinae is another huge star, with a radius twenty times that of the Sun, but what makes this one stand out is its bizarre behavior.  In 1837 it suddenly brightened to being one of the five brightest stars in the night sky, then over the next sixty years faded to the point that it was only visible in binoculars.  Detailed observations have shown that it blew out a huge cloud of material in "The Great Eruption," which is now the Homunculus Nebula.  It's a unique object, which makes it hard to predict its future behavior.  What seems certain is that it'll eventually explode, but there's no telling when that might occur.

The consensus amongst astronomers, however, is that the next likely supernova probably isn't on the list -- that it will be a previously-unknown white dwarf or an unremarkable-looking red giant.  We know so little about supernovas that it's impossible to predict them with any kind of accuracy.  And while this is an exciting prospect, we'd better hope that the next supernova isn't too close.

The Homunculus Nebula with Eta Carinae at the center [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA/Hubble, Cosmic Fireworks in Ultraviolet Eta Carinae Nebula, CC BY 4.0]

Not only do supernovas produce a lot of light, they generate a tremendous amount of radiation of other kinds, including cosmic rays.  A close supernova could produce enough cosmic rays to wipe out the ozone layer -- leading to a huge influx of ultraviolet light from the Sun, with devastating effects.

Scarily, this may have already happened in Earth's history.  One of the lesser-known mass extinctions occurred at the end of the Devonian Period, 359 million years ago.  Because it is poorly understood, and was dwarfed by the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction a little over a hundred million years later, it's not one you tend to read about in the paleontology-for-the-layperson books.  Even so, it was pretty significant, wiping out 19% of known families and 50% of known genera, including placoderms (armored fish), cystoids (a relative of the starfish), and graptolites (colonial animals not closely related to any living species).  Most striking were the collapse of reef-forming corals -- reefs didn't begin to form again on any significant scale until the Mesozoic Era, almost two hundred million years later -- and the near-complete wipeout of vertebrates.  The latter left no vertebrate species over a meter long (most of them were under ten centimeters), and again, it was millions of years before any kind of recovery took place.

Fortunately for us, it eventually did, because we're talking about our ancestors, here.

The cause of this catastrophe has been a matter of speculation, but a team led by Brian Fields, astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, may have found a smoking gun.  In a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we find out that the most likely cause for the End-Devonian Extinction is a nearby supernova that caused the collapse of the ozone layer, leading to the Earth's surface being scorched by ultraviolet light.  This triggered a massive die-off of plants -- which had only recently colonized the land -- and worldwide anoxia.  

The result?  A mass extinction that hit just about every taxon known.

The idea that a supernova might have been to blame for the End-Devonian Extinction came from the presence of hundreds of thousands of plant spores in sedimentary rock layers that showed evidence of what appeared to be radiation damage.  This isn't conclusive, of course; the Fields et al. team is up front that this is only a working hypothesis.  What they'll be looking for next is isotopes of elements in those same rock layers that are only produced by bombardment with radiation, such as plutonium-244 and samarium-146.  "When you see green bananas in Illinois, you know they are fresh, and you know they did not grow here," Fields said, in an interview in Science Daily.  "Like bananas, Pu-244 and Sm-146 decay over time.  So if we find these radioisotopes on Earth today, we know they are fresh and not from here -- the green bananas of the isotope world -- and thus the smoking guns of a nearby supernova."

So as much as I'd love to witness a supernova in my lifetime, it'd be nice if it was one well outside of the terrifyingly-named "kill zone" (thought to be about 25 light years or so).  And chances are, there's nothing inside that radius we need to worry about.  If any of the known supernova candidates explode, we'll almost certainly be able to enjoy the fireworks from a safe distance.

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Fan of true crime stories?  This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for you.

In The Poisoner's Handbook:Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, you'll find out about how forensic science got off the ground -- through the efforts of two scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who took on the corruption-ridden law enforcement offices of Tammany Hall in order to stop people from literally getting away with murder.

In a book that reads more like a crime thriller than it does history, Blum takes us along with Norris and Gettler as they turned crime detection into a true science, resulting in hundreds of people being brought to justice for what would otherwise have been unsolved murders.  In Blum's hands, it's a fast, brilliant read -- if you're a fan of CSI, Forensics Files, and Bones, get a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook, 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!]

When the volcano blows

A recommendation for bloggers and other commentators: if you are going to write about science, make sure you understand the damn science.  And for readers: make sure you find out about the writer's biases.

This comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Why Volcanic Eruptions and Earthquakes are Increasing."  The whole thing pivots on the scary idea that the Earth is becoming more tectonically active, which certainly would have a major impact on humanity.  But let us begin with the most pressing question, which is: are volcanic eruptions and earthquakes increasing?

Mt. Nyiragongo, Democratic Republic of Congo [Image licensed under the Creative Commons MONUSCO/Neil Wetmore, An aerial view of the towering volcanic peak of Mt. Nyiragongo, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The answer appears to be "no."  According to the site Volcano World, maintained by the geology department of Oregon State University, there is no evidence that there's more seismic or volcanic activity lately.  Not even a slow overall increase over the past few thousand years.  The appearance that there's more rumbling going on, they say, is due to two things:

1. The Earth is being more intensively monitored now than any other time in its history, so we're more aware of even small events than we would have been.  This information then gets relayed all over the globe, increasing laypeople's awareness of what's going on.
2. Because of the increase in human population, the impact of these events has become much greater.  To use the example from the site, if the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland had occurred in 1500, it's doubtful that it would have bothered -- or even been noticed by -- anyone but the Icelanders.

So we start out with a problem, which is that the central claim appears to be incorrect.  And in fact, if you're talking about violent eruptions, what we're seeing from Kilauea in the last few days is peanuts compared to the eruptions of Krakatoa, Tambora,and Toba in the Indonesian archipelago (respectively in 1883, 1815, and about 75,000 years ago) and the Lake Taupo (New Zealand) eruption in 180 C. E.  And even those pale by comparison to the events that formed the Columbia River Flood Basalts, the Deccan Traps, and the Siberian Traps, the latter of which spewed out 4 million cubic kilometers of lava, an amount that beggars belief, and which is believed to have played a role in the Permian-Triassic Extinction that wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.

But never mind all that.  The next thing the authors throw out is their explanation for this increase (which, recall, isn't occurring anyhow).  And the answer is: cosmic rays.

My first inclination was to guffaw at this, but then I decided to do some research (always a good idea, especially when there's the likelihood of rejecting an idea solely because "it seems wrong").  And I found that there is a (scientific) claim out there that the timing of volcanic eruptions is correlated with sunspot minimums, because those are correlated with a higher cosmic ray flux.  The paper in question is "Explosive Volcanic Eruptions Triggered by Cosmic Rays: Volcano as a Bubble Chamber," by Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, Hiroko Miyahara, Ryuho Kataoka, Tatsuhiko Sato, and Yasuhiro Ishimine, of the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and the University of Tokyo, which appeared in Gondwana Research back in 2011.  What the scientists propose is that for silica-rich volcanoes, the magma can become superheated, and a cosmic ray could act to trigger nucleation -- quick, explosive liquefaction.

But here's the problem.  The Ebisuzaki et al. study only looked at eleven volcanoes, all in Japan, which already seems like a pretty small sample size.  They found that nine of the volcanoes erupted during a solar minimum, and the other two nearer to a solar maximum.  But without even trying hard I went through some eruption records back to 1700 (the cutoff for their study) and found twelve more stratovolcano eruptions (volcanoes with explosive, silica-rich magma) -- Pinatubo (1991), Mount St. Helens (1980), Novarupta (1912), Santa Maria (1902), Mount Pelée (1902), Krakatoa (1883), Tambora (1815), and La Soufrière (1718, 1812, 1902, 1971, and 1979).  Of those, eight occurred during solar maximums; only two (Novarupta and the 1971 eruption of La Soufrière) were during a clear minimum.  Two eruptions, Tambora and the 1812 eruption of La Soufrière, occurred during a local maximum in the middle of a thirty-year period of overall low sunspot activity (the "Dalton Minimum").  So let's not count those in either column.

So with my additions, that brings us up to twenty-one eruptions -- eleven during minimums, and ten during maximums.

In other words, random chance -- no connection to sunspot activity whatsoever.

Now, I'm neither a geologist nor a statistician, and if there's something wrong with my reasoning, I'm happy to correct it.  But I haven't even hit the punchline yet: the whole thing winds its way around to the claim that the Earth isn't actually warming, it's cooling.

So we're back in climate change denial la-la land, which I should have realized the moment I read them quoting Roy W. Spencer, a meteorologist who is on the advisory board of the denialist, pro-fossil-fuels Heartland Institute.  The site Skeptical Science takes Spencer's claims apart one at a time, and with far more authority than I can wield, so I suggest perusing the site.

Anyhow, the original claim looks like bullshit to me, and yet another example of someone with an ax to grind cherry-picking data that supports what they would very much like to be true.  In any case, I think we can rest assured that the cosmic rays aren't going to cause volcanoes to erupt, and that volcanic eruptions in any case have been pretty frequent occurrences throughout Earth's history.  Me, I'm more worried about the fact that we're still burning fossil fuels like mad despite a near-universal scientific consensus that what we're doing is going to jeopardize the long-term habitability of the planet.  And that seems to me more important than fretting about sunspots and cosmic rays.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.