This week in lunacy

On the whole, I'm an optimist.

It seems a happier way to be.  In general, I would rather expect people to behave well and occasionally be disappointed than to start from the assumption that everyone is an asshole and occasionally be pleasantly surprised.  I know a couple of people who are diehard pessimists, who believe that the worst of humanity is the rule and not the exception, and by and large they're chronically unhappy -- even when things turn out well.

On the other hand, the last few years have been a trial to my generally positive mindset.  I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fifteen years, and the anti-science attitudes and loony counterfactual beliefs that impelled me to start this blog seem to be as common as ever.  Take, for example, the four stories I came across on Reddit, one after the other, while I was casting about for a topic for today's post.

First we have an article courtesy of the ever-entertaining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose main function seems to be making sure that Lauren Boebert is never proclaimed the Stupidest Member of the United States Congress.  Greene just introduced a bill to make weather modification a felony, because -- and this is a direct quote -- "we need clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!"

The irony here is that Greene has supported every one of Donald Trump's efforts to weaken environmental protection -- hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, crippling research into climate change, increasing the number of coal-fired power plants, clear-cutting forests on public land, and deregulating mining and oil production.  But sure, Marjorie, let's outlaw "weather modification," which she says was responsible for Hurricane Helene, the California wildfires, and most recently, the devastating flooding in central Texas.

Hell, if the evil liberal-controlled Deep State could modify the weather, they'd have dispatched EF-5 tornadoes to level Mar-a-Lago ages ago.  But I wouldn't expect logic like that to appeal to Greene, who responded to critics by using my least favorite phrase, "I've done my research," and based on that has come to the conclusion that people who say that hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are natural events are big fat liars.

Expect her "research" to that effect to appear in Nature any time now.

Then we had evangelical preacher Troy Brewer, who claimed that the Texas floods weren't weather modification, they were God sending a message to us.  It was significant, he said, that the flooding (well, some of the flooding) happened on July 4.  In a passage that I swear I'm not making up, Brewer said, "It was a divine signal...  Whenever this thing happened on July the 4th… this is not just about Texas.  This is a word for all the United States of America.  It's no coincidence that 1776 divided by two is 888, the numerical value of the name Jesus in Greek.  Did you know that there were 888 people rescued out of that creek?  888 is the number of Jesus...  And remember that the site of the flood, Kerrville, is the home to the 77-foot-high sculpture known as The Empty Cross."

It does strike me as odd that if this is God sending a message about how lawless and evil and wicked we all are, smiting the shit out of central Texas -- one of the most devoutly Christian places in America -- is kind of an odd move.  I mean, Kerrville isn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah.  But "God drowned hundreds of good Christians to show you all how important it is to be a good Christian" isn't any crazier than a lot of what these people believe, so I guess it's not really all that surprising.

Next, there's Joe Rogan, who if this was a fair world would have zero credibility left, claiming that Lyme disease was a deliberately-leaked biological weapon from the secret labs on Plum Island.  It probably won't take you longer than a couple of nanoseconds to figure out where he got this amazing revelation from:

RFK Jr.

The only person out there with less scientific credibility than Joe Rogan.

"The ticks are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs," RFK said in the January 2024 episode of the RFK Jr Podcast.  "We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people."

Of course, this is the kind of thing that gives Joe Rogan multiple orgasms, so he was all in on the bioweapon claim. 

"Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized," Rogan said.  "It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut.  And RFK Jr. firmly believes that this was a weapons program...  What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community.  So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them...  Can you imagine if those cunts created a fucking disease and now everyone on the East Coast has it?  Because it's mostly out there."

The Rogan/RFK Jr. claim kind of falls prey to the fact that there's ample evidence that Lyme, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has been around for a very long time.  To take just one example, Ötzi -- the "Ice Man," the five-thousand-year-old frozen human found in the Alps in Switzerland -- was found in 2012 to be Lyme-positive through DNA analysis of his tissues.

What, Joe -- did the evil Plum Island scientists use their time machines to go back and infect Ötzi in order to throw us all off their trail?  Or should we tune in next week to hear you come up with some even more insane explanation?

Finally, we have a loony claim surrounding a viral craze I hadn't even heard of.  To be fair, I'm not exactly the sort who immerses himself in pop culture, but this one is apparently huge and had escaped me entirely.  It's called a "Labubu doll," and is a "plush monster elf toy" created by Hong Kong designer Kaising Lung.  It got picked up by a couple of big names like Dua Lipa and Rihanna, and now everyone wants one.

Well, you can't have a popular toy out there without someone deciding that it's eeeeee-vil.  And especially... look at those teeth.  So now people on X and TikTok are warning that you should burn your Labubu doll because it's possessed by a demon called, I shit you not, Pazuzu.

Notwithstanding the fact that Labubu and Pazuzu sound like names that a rich old lady would give her poodles, people are taking this extremely seriously.  "I’m not superstitious, I’m a little stitious, but I’d never buy a Labubu," said one person on X.  "It comes from Pazuzu, which is a demon, and possessed the girl in The Exorcist."

So this individual is warning us not to buy a doll representing a fictional creature because it might be inhabited by a fictional demon who possessed a fictional girl in a fictional movie.

But do go on about how plausible all this is.

Then there's the person who commented, "Please before falling into the trap of Labubu or any trend nowadays, do your research.  THEY’RE MADE AFTER A DEMON DEITY (Pazuzu as they say)."

Yes, of course!  For fuck's sake!  Do your research!

Other people are blessing their Labubus or anointing them with holy water to "turn them into protector spirits." I guess this is better than burning them, at least from the standpoint of releasing toxins from burning plastic into the air, which would probably make Marjorie Taylor Greene think that the liberals were trying to modify the weather using smoldering demon flesh or something.

So.  Yeah.  Some days it's hard to remain optimistic.  Just yesterday, my wife and I were discussing how the average dog is a better person than the average person, and these stories haven't done anything to diminish that assessment.  So I think I'll spend the rest of the day socializing with my dogs.

I'll try being optimistic about humanity again tomorrow.  We'll see how long it lasts.

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Atmospheric rivers

If I asked you to name the deadliest single-event natural disaster to strike the western half of the United States in recorded history, what would you answer?

If I had to hazard a guess, most people are going to suggest the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  This was a bad one, no doubt about it; an estimated three thousand people died, and most of the city was destroyed by the quake and the fires that followed it.  Another one that might come to mind is the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, but that one comes in a distant follower at fifty-seven casualties.

The worst natural disaster in the western United States -- by a significant margin -- is one a lot of people haven't heard of.  In the winter of 1861-1862, an atmospheric river event turned the entire Central Valley of California into an enormous lake, submerging once dry land under as much as ten meters of water.  Over a period of forty-five days, a hard-even-to-imagine three meters of rain fell in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the surrounding area, draining down into the lowlands far too fast to run off.  Rivers overflowed their banks; some simply vanished under the expanding lake.  Although the middle part of the state bore the worst of it, devastating floods were recorded that year from northern Oregon all the way down to Los Angeles.

The exact death toll will probably never be known, but it's well over four thousand.  That's about one percent of the entire population of the state at the time.

A man named John Carr, writing in his memoir thirty years later, had this to say:

From November until the latter part of March there was a succession of storms and floods... The ground was covered with snow a foot deep, and on the mountains much deeper...  The water in the river ... seemed like some mighty uncontrollable monster of destruction broken away from its bonds, rushing uncontrollably on, and everywhere carrying ruin and destruction in its course.  When rising, the river seemed highest in the middle...  From the head settlement to the mouth of the Trinity River, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, everything was swept to destruction.  Not a bridge was left, or a mining-wheel or a sluice-box.  Parts of ranches and miners cabins met the same fate.  The labor of hundreds of men, and their savings of years, invested in bridges, mines and ranches, were all swept away.  In forty-eight hours the valley of the Trinity was left desolate.  The county never recovered from that disastrous flood.  Many of the mining-wheels and bridges were never rebuilt.

Many of the smaller towns never were, either.

Lithograph of K Street, Sacramento, California, in January of 1862 [Image is in the Public Domain]

What seems to have happened is that in rapid succession, a series of narrow plumes of moist tropical air were carried in off the Pacific.  These "atmospheric rivers" can carry an astonishing amount of water -- some of them have a greater flow rate than the Amazon River.  When they cross over land, sometimes they dissipate, raining out over a wide geographical area.  But the West Coast's odd geography -- two mountain ranges, the Coast Range/Cascades and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, running parallel to each other with a broad valley in between -- meant that as those plumes of moisture moved inland, they were forced upward in altitude (twice).  The drop in pressure and temperature as the air rose caused the water to condense, triggering a month-and-a-half-long rain event that drowned nearly the entire middle of the state.

The reason I bring this up is because the geological record indicates the Great Flood of 1861-62 was not a one-off.  These kinds of floods hit the region on the order of once every century or so.

Only now, the Central Valley is home to 6.5 million people.  And one of the predictions of our best models of climate change is that the warm-up will make atmospheric river events more common.

When people think of deadly disasters, they usually come up with obvious and violent ones like earthquakes and volcanoes.  Certainly, those can be horrific; the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China killed an estimated three hundred thousand people.  But the two most dangerous kinds of natural disasters, both in terms of human lives lost and property damage, are flooding and droughts -- two opposite sides of the climatic coin, and both of which are predicted to get dramatically worse if we don't somehow get a handle on the scale of fossil fuel burning.

I saw a quip making its way around social media a while back, that every disaster movie and horror flick starts with someone in charge ignoring a scientist.  There's some truth to that.  Unfortunately, we've not been very good at taking that message to heart.  We need to start listening -- and fast -- and learning from the lessons of the past.  Disasters like the Great California Flood will happen again, and now that we've stomped on the climatic accelerator, it will likely be sooner rather than later.

Let's hope we don't close our eyes to the potential for a catastrophe that will dwarf the one of 170 years ago by several orders of magnitude.

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The rain of glass

A couple of weeks ago I looked at the rather unsettling fact that the seeming benevolence of our home planet is something of an illusion.  As I write this, I'm sitting in a warm house with the calm, clear sunshine sparkling on frost-covered grass, hardly a cloud in the sky, and it's difficult to imagine it ever being any different.  While I don't believe a thoroughly pessimistic outlook helps anything or anyone, it does bear keeping in mind how fragile it all is -- if for no other reason, so that we value what we have.

I started thinking about how quickly and unpredictably a place can go from tranquility to devastation when I ran across a paper that appeared in the journal Geology two weeks ago.  In it, I learned about something I'd never heard about -- a seventy-five-kilometer-wide patch of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile that is covered with shards of black and green glass.

The Atacama Desert is a strange place in and of itself.  Other than the dry valleys of Antarctica, it is far and away the most arid place on Earth; the average rainfall is around fifteen millimeters per year, and there are parts of it that are down in the nearly-unmeasurable range of one to three millimeters.  The few plants and animals that live there have dry-climate adaptations that beggar belief; they get most of the water they need using condensation from fog.  The reason for the peculiar climate is a combination of a more-or-less permanent temperature inversion produced by the South Pacific Anticyclone and the cold, northward-flowing Humboldt Current, combined with a two-sided rain shadow caused by the parallel Andes Mountains and Chilean Coast Range.  It's so dry and barren that it was used by NASA as one of the places to test the Mars Lander's ability to detect the presence of microscopic life.

The aridity is what allowed for the discovery that was the subject of the November 2 paper.  Geologists Peter Schultz (Brown University), R. Scott Harris (Fernbank Science Center), Sebastián Perroud (Universidad Santo Tomás), and Nicolas Blanco and Andrew Tomlinson (Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería de Chile) analyzed the peculiar shards that cover the patch on the northern end of the desert, and found out that they were all formed in one event -- the mid-air explosion of a comet about twelve thousand years ago.

The authors write:

Twisted and folded silicate glasses (up to 50 cm across) concentrated in certain areas across the Atacama Desert near Pica (northern Chile) indicate nearly simultaneous (seconds to minutes) intense airbursts close to Earth’s surface near the end of the Pleistocene.  The evidence includes mineral decompositions that require ultrahigh temperatures, dynamic modes of emplacement for the glasses, and entrained meteoritic dust.  Thousands of identical meteoritic grains trapped in these glasses show compositions and assemblages that resemble those found exclusively in comets and CI group primitive chondrites.  Combined with the broad distribution of the glasses, the Pica glasses provide the first clear evidence for a cometary body (or bodies) exploding at a low altitude.  This occurred soon after the arrival of proto-Archaic hunter-gatherers and around the time of rapid climate change in the Southern Hemisphere.

The dry climate is why we even know about this event.  Cometary collisions almost never leave a crater; given that comets are mostly made of various kinds of ice, the heat of friction from the atmosphere causes them to evaporate and finally explode, creating an airburst but no solid-object impact.  The airburst can be devastating enough, of course.  The 1908 Tunguska Event, the largest such occurrence in recorded history, flattened eighty thousand trees in over two thousand square kilometers of Siberian forest, and registered on seismographs all the way around the world in Washington, D.C.  If Tunguska had happened over a major city, there wouldn't have been a person left alive or a building left standing in the blast zone.

Like Tunguska, at the time and place of the Atacama airburst, there weren't many people in the danger zone.  There was, however, a lot of sand, and the heat from the collision melted it into glass -- indicating temperatures in excess of 1,700 C.  In a climate with ordinary amounts of rainfall, the glass would have been degraded and eroded, but here, it rained out of the sky and then has just kind of sat there for the intervening twelve thousand years.

"It was clear the glass had been thrown around and rolled," study lead author Peter Schultz said, in an interview with Science News.  "It was basically kneaded like bread dough."

The glass shards (the dark bits) in the northern Atacama Desert [photograph by Peter Schultz]

It would have been quite a spectacular thing to witness (from a safe distance), and you have to wonder how the survivors explained it.  "It would have seemed like the entire horizon was on fire," Schultz said. "If you weren’t religious before, you would be after."

So that's our disquieting scientific research for the day.  The reassuring news is that we've gotten pretty skilled at mapping the asteroids, meteors, and comets out there in the Solar System, and none of them seem to be headed our way, at least not for a good long while.  Which is a bit of a relief.  As often as I complain about how dull it is to live in a part of the world where the biggest excitement of the day is when the farmer across the road lets his cows out into the field, this isn't the kind of change of pace I'm really looking for.

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If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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Analysis of a triple-whammy

I always find it wryly amusing when I hear someone talk about the Strong Anthropic Principle -- the idea that the universe was fine-tuned by a creator to be hospitable to life, particularly human life -- because it doesn't take much of a close look to become aware of exactly how inhospitable the universe actually is.

Even here on Earth, the situation is kind of dicey.  Our planet's history is really one cataclysm after another; that our own particular lineage survived is probably more a matter of luck than anything else.  In fact, only 74,000 years ago, climate havoc caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Toba is thought by some scientists to have nearly wiped out our species -- they estimate the "Toba bottleneck event" to have reduced the entire population of Homo sapiens to under ten thousand individuals.  (For reference, that means that the human population of the whole planet was about as many people as currently live in Sitka, Alaska.)  Besides major volcanic eruptions, add in earthquakes and tsunamis, global marine anoxia events, and meteor strikes, and you can see that where we live isn't nearly as hospitable as it might look at first.

So the truth lies closer to the Weak Anthropic Principle -- of course the universe, and the Earth in particular, have the conditions necessary for life to exist, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be here to consider the question.

The reason all this catastrophic stuff comes up is a paper that came out a couple of weeks ago in Nature Communications Biology.  Entitled, "Widespread Loss of Mammalian Lineage and Dietary Diversity in the Early Oligocene of Afro-Arabia," by Dorien de Vries (of the University of Salford), Steven Heritage (of Stony Brook University), and Matthew Borths, Hesham Sallam, and Erik Seiffert (of the Duke University Museum of Natural History), it looks at a little-known extinction event that was apparently the result of a one-two-three punch that nearly halted the mammalian species in Africa in their tracks.

Which, of course, also includes our own ancestors.

Some of the Eocene animal groups affected by the extinction -- the left two are primates, the upper right a hyaenodont, and the lower right a prehistoric rodent.  [Photo by Matthew Borths]

The researchers had their first clues about the magnitude of the event, which occurred on the order of thirty-three million years ago, from looking at fossilized mammal teeth from East Africa, and found that right on the boundary of the Eocene and Oligocene, the number of mammal species dropped drastically.

"In our anthropoid ancestors, diversity bottoms out to almost nothing around thirty million years ago, leaving them with a single tooth type,” said Erik Seiffert, senior co-author of the paper, in an interview with EurekAlert.  "That ancestral tooth shape determined what was possible in terms of later dietary diversification...  There's an interesting story about the role of that bottleneck in our own early evolutionary history.  We came pretty close to never existing, if our monkey-like ancestors had gone extinct thirty million years ago.  Luckily they didn’t."

What seems to have driven the extinction was a triple-whammy -- rapid cooling of the climate after the equally catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (during which the global average temperature was eight degrees warmer than it is now), followed by the huge Chesapeake Bay meteorite collision and a near-simultaneous massive eruption of flood basalts in Ethiopia.

Diversity plummeted.  More interestingly, the extinction preferentially spared generalists -- mammals which, from their tooth morphology, apparently could eat a variety of different kinds of food.  Specialists got hit the hardest, once again reinforcing the general evolutionary concept that if the ecosystem is stable, specialization is a good thing, but during periods of rapid change, it's the generalists who come out on top.

This -- as Seiffert says, luckily for us -- left our own distant ancestors to continue loping about on the African savanna, and also knocked out a lot of the competition.  The shape and structure of our own teeth reflect that event.  "We lost a lot of diversity at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary," said study co-author Matthew Borths.  "But the species that survived apparently had enough of a toolkit to persist through this fluctuating climate."

This should be yet another cautionary note about the fragility of the Earth's suitability for humanity, not to mention our current heedless messing-about with the planetary climate and ecosystems.  It's unlikely to, of course.  We don't have a very good record of listening to scientists, even when our own survival is at stake.  Part of this is that in recent memory we haven't had to deal with planet-wide natural disasters -- it's made us cocky.

"We've always been fine before," is the general attitude.

All it takes is reading the de Vries et al. paper to realize that "always" is singularly inapt.

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My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

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

The burning fields

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a peculiar fascination for things that are huge and powerful and can kill you.

I'm not entirely sure where this obsession comes from, but it's what's driven me to write here about such upbeat topics as giant predatory dinosaurs, tornadoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes, supernovas, gamma-ray bursters, and the cheerful concept of "false vacuum decay" (which wouldn't just destroy the Earth, but the entire universe).  I'm guessing part of it is my generally anxiety-ridden attitude toward everything; after all, just because we don't think there's a Wolf-Rayet star nearby that's ready to explode and fry the Solar System doesn't mean there isn't one.  I know that worrying about all of that stuff isn't going to (1) make it any less likely that it'll happen, or (2) make a damn bit of difference to my survival if it does, but even so I don't seem to be able to just relax and focus on more positive things, such as the fact that with the sea-level rise predicted from climate change, it looks like here in upstate New York I may finally own ocean-front property.

It's also why I keep regular tabs on the known volcanoes on the Earth -- on some level, I'm always waiting for the next major eruption.  One of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes on Earth is in Italy, and I'm not talking about Vesuvius; I'm referring to the Campi Flegrei ("burning fields," from the Greek φλέγω, "to burn"), which isn't far away from the more famous mountain and seems to be powered by the same magma chamber complex that obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 C.E.  Both Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are highly active, and near the top of the list of "world's most dangerous volcanoes."

The problem is, the three million residents of Naples live right smack in between the two, only twenty-odd kilometers away from Vesuvius (to the east) and Campi Flegrei (to the west).  (For reference, Pompeii was nine kilometers from the summit of Vesuvius.)

The Campi Flegrei, looking west from Naples [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baku, VedutaEremo2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem is that volcanoes like these two don't erupt like the familiar fountains of lava you see from Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the current eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands.  The most typical eruption from volcanoes like Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are pyroclastic flows -- surely one of the most terrifying phenomena on Earth -- a superheated mass of steam and ash that rush downhill at speeds of up to a hundred kilometers an hour, flash-frying everything in its wake.  That the Campi Flegrei volcanoes are capable of such massive events is witnessed by the surrounding rock formation called the "Neapolitan Yellow Tuff."  A "welded tuff" is a layer of volcanic ash that was so hot when it stopped moving that it was still partially molten, and fused together into a solid porous rock.

A video of a pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991

The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff isn't very recent; it came from an eruption about 39,000 years ago.  But there are signs the Campi Flegrei are heating up again, which is seriously bad news not only for Naples but for the town of Pozzuoli, which was built right inside the main caldera.

That people would build a town on top of an active volcano is explained mostly by the fact that people have short memories.  And also, the richness of volcanic soils is generally good for agriculture.  Once Pompeii was re-discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with extremely eerie casts of the bodies of people and animals who got hit by the pyroclastic flow, you'd think people would say, "no fucking way am I living anywhere near that mountain."  But... no.  If you'll look at a world map, you might come to the conclusion that siting big cities near places prone to various natural disasters was some kind of species-wide game of chicken or something.

In any case, the good news is that a recent study showed that even if Campi Flegrei is (1) heating up, and (2) eventually going to erupt catastrophically, there's no sign it's going to happen any time soon, and it's pretty likely we'd have plenty of warning if an eruption was imminent.  

But still.  Such phenomena make me feel very, very tiny.  And once again, thankful that I live in a relatively peaceful, catastrophe-free part of the world.  Our biggest concern around here is snow, and even that's rarely a big deal; we don't get anything like the killer blizzards that bury the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states every year.  Given my generally neurotic outlook on life, I can't imagine what I'd be like if I did live somewhere that had serious natural disasters.

Never leave my underground bunker, is probably pretty close to the mark.

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Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

The cities on the plain

Scary place, this universe of ours.

I've dealt here before with some cosmic-level catastrophes -- supernovas and Wolf-Rayet stars and black holes and gamma-ray bursters and false vacuums -- but the situation's not much better down here on the seemingly peaceful surface of the Earth.  There are weather-related disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as spectacular but less-known phenomena such as convective microbursts, which are not only scary and violent but strike seemingly out of nowhere, producing wind that goes from dead calm to 120 kilometers per hour in under two minutes (and are over equally quickly).  Volcanoes and earthquakes are seldom a surprise with regards to location, but are unpredictable in terms of timing -- although now with better remote sensing techniques, we're getting more accurate at forecasting quakes and eruptions, such as the one currently devastating the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.  (The Ministry of Tourism announced that the island is "still open to tourism," adding, "You must have a valid passport, as well as proof that you are a complete idiot.")

So we're better off than the people in Pompeii in 79 C.E., or the poor folks in 1902 who were the victims of a pyroclastic eruption from Mont Pelée in Martinique, which killed thirty thousand people in less than five minutes.  There were only three known survivors, the most famous of which was in an underground jail cell at the time.  All three escaped with burns and other injuries, but at least didn't get flash-fried like the rest of the city.

I'm pretty lucky here in upstate New York.  We're not in an earthquake zone, even farther from the nearest volcano, very rarely have tornadoes, and although we sometimes get sideswiped by the remnants of an Atlantic hurricane, we seldom get anything serious.  The worst we have to contend with is snow, but even our worst storms (like the "Hundred-Year Storm" of  March 1993, eight months after I moved here from Seattle, Washington, which dropped almost two meters of snow on us in a space of 48 hours) are nowhere near as violent as the killer blizzards they get in the Rocky Mountain states and the upper Midwest.

So I can't complain.  Even though I do sometimes anyhow.

But I guess even in a relatively clement place, you never know what's going to hit you.  Sometimes literally, to judge by a paper this week in Nature by a team led by geologist Ted Bunch of Northern Arizona University, which describes the fate of the city of Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley. 

Never heard of it?  Neither had I, which is surprising considering both its prominence and its ultimate fate.  Up till about 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was the bustling center of commerce for a region inhabited by an estimated fifty thousand people.  

The authors describe it as follows:

The three largest settlements in this area were Tall el-Hammam [TeH], Tall Nimrin, and Jericho (aka, Tell Es-Sultan), urban anchors of three city-state clusters, each surrounded by numerous smaller satellite towns and villages.  At 36 hectares of fortifications (0.36 km2) and an additional 30 hectares of “suburban sprawl,” TeH at its zenith was > 4× larger than Tall Nimrin and > 5× larger than Jericho, and thus, was likely to have been the area’s politically dominant MBA [Middle Bronze Age] urban center for many centuries.  TeH was initially occupied during the early Chalcolithic Period (~ 6600 cal BP) and was a well-established fortified urban center by the Early Bronze Age (~ 5300 cal BP).  The city reached its peak of hegemony during the MBA and dominated the eastern half of the Middle Ghor and most likely, the western half as well.

Then -- suddenly -- the entire city was wiped off the map.  The entire region was abandoned for over six hundred years, and in fact wasn't substantially recolonized for almost a millennium.

So what happened? 

Bunch et al. believe they've figured it out.  In 1650 B.C.E., Tall el-Hammam was flattened -- by a stratospheric meteorite explosion.

Artist's conception of what the original palace at Tall el-Hammam looked like -- and what's left of it

You may recall the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, an object an estimated twenty meters across that exploded about thirty kilometers above the surface of the Earth, creating a shock wave that damaged houses and injured an estimated 1,491 people.  The 1908 Tunguska Event was even larger, caused by an object an estimated fifty meters across, and blew down trees radially outward from ground zero, destroying over two thousand square kilometers of forest that were (fortunately) far away from any densely-occupied areas.

The one that destroyed Tall el-Hammam is estimated to be larger still -- the researchers suggest a diameter of around seventy meters.  Tall el-Hammam was, quite literally, blown away, the thick walls of the palace sheared off at the foundation.  Mud bricks and roofing clay actually melted.  Mineralogical analysis of the rocks and debris show something kind of terrifying; inclusions of high-melting-point materials like platinum, iridium, and zircon melted as well, indicating temperatures above 2,000 C (and thus ruling out such causes as city-wide conflagrations, which don't get anywhere near that hot).  Quartz granules in the rocks of the area have radial fracture patterns similar to the circular cracks in your windshield when it's hit by a flying piece of gravel, indicating that something big punched the site.

Really hard.

The researchers suggest that the meteor strike at Tall el-Hammam might have been the origin of the biblical story of the destruction of "the Cities on the Plain," most famously Sodom and Gomorrah, although the jury's still out on that.  It would certainly explain the suddenness and totality of the destruction described in the biblical account, although it'd still leave up in the air why Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt.

As an aside, the meteor strike in 1650 B.C.E. is not considered a possible basis of the biblical account of the destruction of Jericho, in Joshua chapter 6; by what we know of the chronology of the history of Judea, the Book of Joshua was written nearly a thousand years later.  And it's worth mentioning that there seems to be no evidence whatsoever of Jericho experiencing a catastrophic collapse (the Bible talks about the walls of the city "falling flat") during that entire time period, leading archaeologist and biblical scholar William Dever to state that the story of the fall of Jericho was "invented from whole cloth" as nationalist propaganda by the leaders of the state of Judah to bolster their reputation as not only the Chosen Ones of God, but as all-around tough motherfuckers.  (I paraphrase Dever's actual analysis slightly.)

Anyhow, the Bunch et al. paper is a tour de force of thorough scientific investigation, and from my (admitted layperson's) perspective, it seems like they've locked down their case pretty tightly.  So now you have something else to worry about, even if (like me) you're far away from raging volcanoes, earthquake zones, and Tornado Alley, not to mention any local gamma-ray bursters and black holes.  Exploding rocks from space.  At least it'd be a quick way to go; considering the level of destruction they describe at Tall el-Hammam, we're talking "loud noise and bright light, look upward for a second, then get blasted to smithereens."

Have a nice day.

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

Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing a prominent Muslim cleric is worrying about, which is: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if two guys having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, were mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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

Falling in line

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising. I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

So this whole thing is an excellent example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the choosing of data points favorable to your hypothesis after the fact.  The name comes from a folk story:

A traveler through Texas passed a barn that had a bullseye painted on the side, with three bullet holes near the dead center of the target.  There were two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and the visitor slowed down his car and said, "That's some pretty good shooting, right there."

One of the old-timers grins, and says, "Why, thank you."

The other one scowls.  "Don't pay any attention to him.  He just got drunk one night and shot the side of his barn, then the next morning painted a bullseye around the bullet holes."

Anyhow, what gets me most about the claim in The Watchman's Cry is that they don't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

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

Lines of sight

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising.  I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

But what gets me most about this guy is that he doesn't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Further from the intersection, they are further apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffices to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

Accretion, eruption, and paranoia

Astrophysicists talk about the process of accretion, where microscopic particles of dust and ice stick together (largely through electrostatic attraction), leading to the formation of disks of matter around the parent star than can eventually form planets.  As the clumps of dust get larger, so does their gravitational attraction to nearby clumps -- so they grow, and grow, and grow.

Conspiracy theories also grow by accretion.

One person notices one thing -- very likely something natural, accidental, minor, insignificant -- and points it out.  Others begin to notice other, similar phenomena, and stick those to the original observation, whether or not there is any real connection.  And as the number of accreted ideas grows, so does the likelihood of attracting other ideas, and soon you have a full-blown gas giant of craziness.

It seems to be, for example, how the whole nonsense about "chemtrails" started.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) in 2007 was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

It seems like in the last couple of months, we're seeing the birth of a new conspiracy theory, as if we needed another one.  Back in 2011, I started seeing stories about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, and how we were "overdue for an eruption" (implying that volcanoes operate on some kind of timetable).  At first, it was just in dubiously reliable places like LiveScience, but eventually other, better sources got involved, probably as a reaction to people demanding information on what seemed like a dire threat.  No, the geologists said, there's no cause for worry.  There's no indication that the caldera is going to erupt any time soon.  Yes, the place is geologically active, venting steam and gases, but there is no particular reason to be alarmed, because volcanoes do that.

Then, last month, we had people who panicked when they saw a video clip of bison running about, and became convinced that the bison had sensed an eruption coming and were "fleeing the park in terror."  And once again, we had to speak soothingly to the panicked individuals, reassuring them that bison are prone to roaming about even when not prompted to do so by a volcano (cf. the lyrics to "Home on the Range," wherein the singer wishes for "a home where the buffalo roam," despite the fact that such a home would probably face animal dander issues on a scale even we dog owners can't begin to imagine).

[image courtesy of photographer Daniel Mayer and the Wikimedia Commons]

But the accretion wasn't done yet.  The bison were too running from the volcano, people said.  So were the elk.  And then the real crazies got involved, and said that the government was already beginning to evacuate people from a wide region around Yellowstone, and relocating them to FEMA camps where they are cut off from communicating with anyone.  And when there was an explosion and fire at a gas processing plant in Opal, Wyoming two weeks ago, 150 miles from Yellowstone, and the whole town was evacuated, the conspiracy theorists went nuts.  This is it, they said.  It's starting.  The government is getting people out, because they know the whole freakin' place is going to explode.

Never mind the fact that the residents of Opal were all allowed back two days later, once the fire was under control.  Facts never seem to matter much, with this crowd.

So once again, the scientists are trying to pour oil on the waters.  An article in Wired yesterday describes recent research by an actual geologist (i.e. not just some crank with a videocamera) that has shown that the magma beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is mostly a semisolid, and is far below the threshold of 40% liquefaction that most volcanologists think is necessary for an eruption.  And we're not talking about some hand-waving layperson's "the volcano is overdue for an eruption" foolishness; this is a peer-reviewed technical study that merited publication in the prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters.  And about the conspiracy theorists, the article in Wired minces no words at all:

As usual, people are trying to rabble rouse when it comes to the Yellowstone Caldera. All these rumors that the government is trying to hide evidence of an impending eruption are pure fantasy, but that doesn’t stop some people from acting out their delusions to the detriment of others who fall prey to this misinformation. Yes, the Yellowstone Caldera is a massive volcano that has the potential to produce huge eruptions, but no, there are no indications right now that any sort of eruption will happen any time soon — and I’d be surprised if we see an eruption in our lifetime (just like any volcano that hasn’t had a confirmed eruption in the last ~70,000 years).

Of course, this will probably turn out to be shouting into a vacuum, as arguing with conspiracy theorists usually turns out to be.  Witness the fact that despite all of the research and debunking of chemtrails, the whole thing still has a considerable cadre of true believers, who claim that anyone who argues to the contrary is a blind fool at best and an evil shill at worst.

So look for more Yellowstone paranoia to be zinging about the interwebz over the next few weeks.  As for me, I'm grabbing the fleeing bison by the horns and going to Yellowstone in July.  We'll see if there's anything to all the hype.  I'm hoping to do some sightseeing and birdwatching and hiking, and simultaneously hoping not to be killed in a massive volcanic eruption or shot by a FEMA operative or hustled away into some godforsaken refugee camp.

Always the optimist, that's me.

Fear tactics and fleeing bison

Is there some facet of human personality that craves disaster?

I ask this question because of a story sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Reports of Bison 'Fleeing' Yellowstone Amid Fears Quake Could Trigger Eruption of Park's Supervolcano."  In it, we read a lot of fairly terrifying stuff about the supervolcano that lies beneath the park, and what havoc it could cause if it erupted:

Yellowstone National Park sits atop the Yellowstone Caldera, the crater of a massive supervolcano. The park attracts millions of visitors each year to its famous geysers and hot springs, powered by the hot lava below. 

In recent years, scientists discovered the caldera is 48 kilometres wide — far larger than previously thought... 

The Yellowstone super volcano has had three cataclysmic eruptions — 2 million, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago, creating a series of ‘nesting’ calderas, say scientists.
The eruption 2 million years ago was the most catastrophic, covering half of North America with ash and wiping out prehistoric animals, reports the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory... 

The inevitable next ‘big one’ will wipe out the surroundings for hundreds of kilometres, covering the US and Canada in ash, [University of Oregon geologist Ilya Bindeman] told EarthSky. It would devastate agriculture and cause global cooling for a decade, he says. 

A volcanic eruption of that size “hasn’t happened in modern civilisation,” he said.

All of which is true, of course.  And we're even told at the end, seemingly as an afterthought, that scientists are pretty sure that an eruption isn't imminent and that we'll have plenty of warning before one occurs (not that we'll be able to do much to stop it).

But before getting that reassurance, we're shown a video clip of some bison "fleeing for their lives" and told that the "animals may be leaving the park because they sense an impending catastrophic volcanic eruption triggered by recent earthquakes."

[image courtesy of photographer Jack Dykinga and the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, I looked at the video, and the first thing I noticed was that the bison didn't seem particularly alarmed.  I didn't get the "fleeing for their lives" vibe from them.  They were more moseying for their lives, or possibly even ambling for their lives.

But second, what the hell is the writer of the article trying to do by telling us in one breath that the bison were running away because the volcano is going to erupt, and in the next saying that scientists don't think it's going to erupt?  I've seen bison, and I know a good many scientists, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that most scientists are smarter than your average bison.

But we don't have a very good track record of listening to scientists, do we?  I'm honestly not surprised that the American citizenry would discount what a scientist is saying in favor of prognostications by a large ungulate, given our general approach on evolution, climate change, and vaccination.

Now, of course I know why the media loves stories like this; it gets people to click the links and read the articles.  But I'm more mystified why the general public likes disaster stories.  Since I was sent the link, I've seen the story posted three times on Facebook and twice on Twitter.  Why are people so eager to spread around a bogus story (and I'm convinced that anyone that has more brains than a bowl of chowder could tell that it was bogus just by reading all the way to the end and seeing the disclaimer about scientists doubting that we were going to see an eruption soon)?

So something must be appealing to people about "We're All Gonna Die" stories, but I'm damned if I see what it is.  At least the other idiotic stories that you see floating around -- stories of the "Miley Cyrus Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Chid" type -- don't leave you with the impression that civilization is about to end.

Although now that I think of it, I can understand how you might pray for the apocalypse after seeing the Miley Cyrus "twerking" video.  I know I did.  So maybe there's some justification after all.