The forest primeval

A couple of days ago my friend and fellow writer Andrew Butters sent me a link about a new fossil discovery.  He hastened to point out that he'd thought of me because he knows I'm interested in paleontology, not because my name comes to mind when he thinks about antiquated relics.  There may have been a touch of local pride involved as well, because the discovery was made in his home province of New Brunswick, Canada.

There's no doubt that it was a remarkable find.  The fossil was unearthed in a quarry near the town of Norton, where there is a layer of 350-million-year-old sandstone deposited when Atlantic Canada was a tropical swamp.  This was near the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, a time when the Earth was significantly warmer and wetter than it is now.  The high temperatures and carbon dioxide levels boosted plant growth, causing the oxygen levels to rise to an estimated 35% (compared to today's 21%).  This had the effect of allowing animals that had previously been held back by their inefficient respiratory systems, especially arthropods, to become huge, leading to millipedes 2.5 meters long and dragonflies with 75-centimeter wingspans.

The plants, though, were also pretty different from what we've got around now; by far the most common ones today are flowering plants, which make their first unequivocal appearance in the fossil record about 130 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period.  So when the New Brunswick sandstone was being deposited, the first flowering plants were still 220 million years in the future.

The dominant plants back then were distantly related to today's ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, although as you'll see we don't have anything left that looks much like what you'd see in a typical Carboniferous forest.  But the fossil discovered in the Canadian quarry was bizarre even compared to a lot of the strange vegetation from that time -- and has drawn comparisons to something you might see in a book by Dr. Seuss.

"What it really does look like is one of those truffula trees from The Lorax," said Olivia King, of St. Mary's University in Halifax, who was part of the team that discovered the fossils.  The most remarkable thing about the fossil, though, is its amazing state of preservation.  It's thought to have been entombed in an upright position when a landslide caused part of the bank of a lake to collapse.  The entire tree was dragged down to the bottom of the lake and buried in sediment, where it's lain for 350 million years -- and now has been excavated carefully to reveal what it looked like when it was alive.  Dubbed Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, after quarry owner Laurie Sanford who has been instrumental in allowing the investigation to progress, it had a mop of spiky leaves topping a spindly trunk:

A reconstruction of Sanfordiacaulis densifolia [Image credit: artist Tim Stonesifer]

With the acceleration of plant growth during that time period, there was extreme competition to access light, leading to dramatic increases in plant height and canopy size.  Eventually, there were club mosses (genus Lepidodendron) fifty meters tall -- taller than the oaks and maples in an average hardwood forest.

A sampler of ancient trees, from Robert Gastaldo et al., Current Biology.  [Note: "Mississippian" and "Pennsylvanian" are two divisions of time usually lumped together as the Carboniferous Period.]

Of course, the good times -- at least if you were a weird club moss tree or a 2.5-meter-long millipede -- couldn't last forever.  Around 305 million years ago, the climate turned from hot and humid to cool and arid, probably because by that time the plants had locked up so much atmospheric carbon dioxide underground -- what would eventually become our coal deposits -- that the greenhouse effect decreased and the temperature fell.  In essence, the plants sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and in the Carboniferous rain forest collapse that followed, the enormous forests and many of the animals that depended upon them became extinct.

It also set the fuse for the largest mass extinction ever.  All that organic matter sequestered underground was tinder just waiting to burn, and when the Siberian Traps erupted 252 million years ago, the lava ripped through a huge chunk of the Carboniferous coal and peat, using up oxygen (dropping it to an estimated 12%) and dumping that excess carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.  The temperature spiked, the oceans became anoxic, and something like 95% of life on Earth became extinct.

But at the point that the Sanfordiacaulis tree was growing in what would become New Brunswick, that cataclysmic event was still a hundred million years in the future.  Think about what a thrill it'd be to get to wander amongst those bizarre forests, so unlike anything we have today.

Even if it meant dodging enormous dragonflies.

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Stairway to heaven

One of the things I love about writing daily here at Skeptophilia is that my long-time readers are constantly on the lookout for good topics.  One of my regular contributors, not to mention a dear friend, is the inimitable novelist K. D. McCrite, best known for her charming cozy mysteries and her fall-out-of-your-chair-funny young adult series The Confessions of April Grace.  K. D. and I were chatting a couple of days ago, and she asked me if I had ever heard of the phenomenon of stairs in the forest.

I told her I hadn't.

"Oh, yes," K. D. told me.  "Apparently it's a big thing.  You're out there in the woods, far away from everything, and you happen unexpectedly upon a set of stairs that goes nowhere.  No building, nothing nearby."

"What's it supposed to be?" I asked.  "I mean, besides a random set of stairs."

She told me that the aficionados claimed it was some kind of portal to another dimension.  "Supposedly it's connected with hikers going missing and other such spooky stuff."  She then sent me a couple of videos about the phenomenon.

If you want to take a look for yourself, the videos are here and here, and are worth watching just for the creepy photographs.  The general upshot of the videos is "there's this thing we've found in the woods and we don't know why it's there, so alien abductions and time slips and general scary shit."

Whatever the origin of the staircases, it's always a little spooky to find something in the woods you weren't expecting.  I still remember the inexplicable thrill of fear I felt when my wife and I were on a late October hike in our nearby national forest a few years ago, and I found something odd -- a Mardi Gras mask, in perfect condition, sitting on a log.  It looked like it'd just been placed there; it was in pristine condition, and wasn't even damp.  It was a cool, cloudy day, and we hadn't seen a single other person out there, which made it doubly bizarre.

So I said, "Hey, Carol," and put the mask on.

Carol looked at me for a moment, and then said, "You know, if you were a character in one of your own novels, you'd be about to die right now."

Anyhow, I didn't die, or even get possessed by an evil spirit or anything.  So I brought it home, and hung it on the wall in my office.

The next morning when I came in, the mask was in the middle of the floor.

After doing a double take, and then getting my heart rate back to normal, I ascertained that the strap had come loose.  So I put the strap back on, rehung it, and it's been there quietly ever since then.

Probably just waiting for an unguarded moment to jump on me and glue itself to my face and take over my soul.  You know how haunted masks are.

But I digress.

The staircase-in-the-woods thing is certainly atmospheric and creepy, although K. D. and I are in agreement that if we saw one, we'd immediately climb up to the top.  This would be inadvisable, according to one witness:

This is... probably the weirdest story I have.  Now, I don't know if this is true in every SAR [search-and-rescue] unit, but in mine, it's sort of an unspoken, regular thing we run into.  You can try asking about it with other SAR officers, but even if they know what you're talking about, they probably won't say anything about it.  We've been told not to talk about it by our superiors, and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore.  On just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness, I'm talking 30 or 40 miles, at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods.  It's almost like if you took the stairs in your house, cut them out, and put them in the forest.  I asked about it the first time I saw some, and the other officer just told me not to worry about it, that it was normal.  Everyone I asked said the same thing.  I wanted to go check them out, but I was told, very emphatically, that I should never go near any of them.  I just sort of ignore them now when I run into them because it happens so frequently.

People who come across these lone staircases frequently feel "an unaccountable sensation of dread," and folks who have climbed them have come back down to find that several hours have passed, when it only felt like a few minutes.

That's... if they're ever seen again.

*cue scary music*

Now, as you might expect, I think there's a prosaic explanation here, or more likely, several of them.  The more pristine-looking ones, such as the one in the photograph above, could be observation platforms.  I've seen this sort of thing in a lot of places, especially areas known for their wildlife viewing.  The more dilapidated ones are probably the remnants of wood-frame houses with stone stairs, left behind when the wooden parts rotted away.  (Hiking with my brother-in-law in rural Massachusetts, we've come across a good many old house foundations -- one of which was the inspiration for my creepy story "The Cellar Hole.")  Some of the ones pictured in the video looked like they were simply steps that had been built into a steep hillside, and so not "going nowhere" at all.  Others appeared to be what was left of bridges or overpasses that had caved in.  Some could well be there because someone thought it'd be fun to create a mystery in the woods, like the little footbridge over nothing out in a flat open field near where my son used to live in Palmyra, New York.

That doesn't mean that if I came across one, I wouldn't be a little weirded out, especially now that I've been primed to think about Scary Stuff when I see one.  I still am pretty sure I'd climb it, because when might I have another opportunity to be abducted by aliens?

But sadly, I've never seen anything like this, despite the fact that when I was in my twenties and thirties, I spent damn near every summer back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics.  The weirdest thing I saw out there was a random boardwalk in the middle of nowhere across a place called Ahlstrom's Prairie, where you're hiking through dense Douglas fir forest and suddenly come out into an open field bisected by a wooden boardwalk.  The effect is startling, a sudden reminder of humanity in a place out in the wilderness where you can spend a week and not see a single other person.

Of course, there's a reason for the boardwalk in Ahlstrom's Prairie: Ahlstrom, who built the thing and lived in a cabin nearby in the early part of the 20th century.  And the Parks Service that keeps it in good shape.  But it's an atmospheric place, and on my many hikes down it on the way to the mouth of the Ozette River, I always found it to be a little spooky, especially on a foggy day (pretty common in western Washington).

So I'm not going to jump to any paranormal explanations for the staircases in the woods, at least not till I experience a time slip myself.  But my thanks to my pal K. D. for suggesting the topic, which (despite all my inquiries into the supernatural over the past ten years) I'd never even heard of.

But I should wrap this up, because that mask hanging on my wall is whispering to me again, and I am compelled to do its bidding.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Tales from the flat Earth

Having steeped myself in All Things Woo-Woo for some years, you'd think I'd have it all figured out, at least with respect to why people believe weird things.  After all, the topic was the subject of one of my favorite reads, Michael Shermer's book entitled, oddly enough, Why People Believe Weird Things.  (And this book, in my opinion, should be required reading in every high school in America.)

But there's still a lot about the whole woo-woo belief system that mystifies me, and one of the things that baffles me most is why weird ideas come and go -- and then reappear.

I'm not talking about cases where the reappearance was caused by the money motive, as with all of the unreality shows now springing up like fungus after a rainstorm on networks like the This Used To Be About History But Isn't Anymore channel.  Programs with titles like Monster Quest, UFO Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal Witness, and Real Bigfoots of New Jersey.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But it's not really that much weirder than the actual ones that are out there.  And the plots are all the same; some people go out looking for whatever they're hunting, don't find it, and then high-five each other at the end as if their quest had been a raving success.

So it's no surprise that these shows resurrect interest in the paranormal.  But what is more perplexing to me is why all of a sudden woo-woo ideas from the past will catch hold and rise, zombie-like, from the grave, without there being any apparent monetary incentive involved.

In particular, I'm thinking of the Flat Earth Theory, which is only a "theory" in the sense of being "an idea that someone came up with."  Myself, I'd thought that the whole idea of the flat Earth had gone out of vogue somewhere back in the 15th century (and to be completely accurate, the fact that the Earth is a sphere had been proven without a shadow of a doubt way back in 240 B.C.E. by a Greek scientist named Eratosthenes).

I use the shadow metaphor deliberately, because what Eratosthenes did was to measure the difference in the angle of a shadow cast by a rod in Syene, Egypt, and compared it to the angle of the shadow of the same rod in Alexandria on the same day of the year -- and from the comparison, and using a little bit of trigonometry and solid geometry, came damn close to getting the circumference of the Earth right.

So you'd think that 2,200 years ago, the Flat Earthers would pretty much have said, "Oh.  Okay.  We were wrong."  But no.  They're back, and they're back with a vengeance.  As little as ten years ago, Flat Earthers were kind of a fringe group, and the Flat Earth Society was populated by a membership that seemed to be half True Believers and half people who joined it to have a good laugh.  But now, there is an increasing number of Flat Earthers out there, and they are not amused by us scoffers.

They're mad as hell, and they're not gonna take it any more.

And, according to an article in The Atlantic, they are coming up with additional wacky ideas to add to their view of the world, based upon the premise that if you believe one idiotic idea, appending other idiotic ideas onto it makes it more sensible.  According to Sam Kriss, who wrote the article, not only do they believe that NASA is leading a coverup of all of the evidence for Earth being shaped like a platter (and, therefore, all of the astronomers are too, because apparently NASA uses a substantial part of its ever-shrinking budget to pay off the scientists and keep them from spilling the beans), but the geologists are in on it, too.

Why would the geologists care, you might ask?  Well, according to a small but vocal subset of Flat Earthers, another thing that is fake about the scientific view of the world is... forests.  Because the forests we have now aren't real forests, at least not in the sense that they're like they were back eons ago.  Thousands of years ago, before humans were the common species they are now, there were actual honest-to-goodness forests made of actual honest-to-goodness trees...

... that had heights measured in miles.

What is the evidence for all of this?  Well, some of the stuff that geologists hoodwink the populace into thinking are "eroded volcanic cores," like the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, are actually the stumps of these humongous trees.

[image courtesy of photographer Colin Faulkingham and the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyhow.  I know that this is a nonsensical idea, but what puzzles me is why it's caught on so strongly just in the last year or so.  Social media has been buzzing with stridently vocal Flat Earthers who believe stuff like the aforementioned horseshit about MegaTrees, and who consider skeptics like me either deluded sheeple or else NASA shills.  (Which reminds me, NASA: where the hell is my shill check?  I'm waiting.)

I'm hoping that this is just a phase, and that this will fizzle out the same way that Ouija boards did a couple of years ago when there was a sudden flurry of people wanting to communicate with the Spirit World.  But this one is kind of annoying, because the Flat Earthers don't just quietly do their thing -- these people are cantankerous.  They gum up websites like the r/skeptic subreddit with their nonsense, engaging with people who just can't stand to ignore them.

So I'm counting on this being an example of what C. S. Lewis was talking about when he said, "Fashions come and go, but mostly they go."  And in my opinion, this one can't go soon enough.