Prelude to a detonation

Even though in general I don't think synchronicity Means Anything, there's no doubt that it can be pretty peculiar.

For example, it seems like in the last few days the universe has tried to get me to think about volcanoes.  First, Scientific American recently featured in their "New Books" column Robin George Andrews's Super Volcanoes, and given my fascination with volcanoes in general I had to get it (and it impressed me enough that it's this week's book-of-the-week).  Andrews's book goes a long way toward dispelling a lot of the hype around places like Yellowstone (no, it's not on the verge of an eruption), and has a lot of cool interviews with volcanologists, much in the style of the wonderful essayist John McPhee.  Only a couple of days after I started reading it, a friend sent me a link to the Naked Science YouTube video "Supervolcanoes," which seemed to be the anti-Andrews; if I can sum it up, it would be "WE'RE ALL FUCKED RUN FOR YOUR LIFE."  It isn't terrible, and does include some actual science, but the most striking thing about it is a CGI rendition of Yellowstone blowing sky-high which they use over and over and over and over in the fifty-minute-long video, as if they'd paid somebody a hefty sum to do the rendering, and by god, they were gonna get their money's worth out of it.

Then, just yesterday, a (different) friend sent me a link to a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that kind of splits the difference between Naked Science's screaming alarmism and Andrews's breeziness; it looks at the scarily huge Mount Toba volcano in Indonesia, and comes to the unsettling conclusions that (1) it definitely will erupt again, and (2) we probably won't have much warning when it does.

The last significant eruption of Toba was about 74,000 years ago, and was a VEI8 -- the highest ranking on the Volcanic Explosivity Index -- releasing an estimated three thousand cubic kilometers of ash and lava, and causing a worldwide (if temporary) drop in average temperature by about three degrees Celsius.  (For comparison, this is over seven hundred times the volume ejected by the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.)  The eruption blew the entire top of the mountain clean off, and the evacuation of the magma chamber beneath it caused the caldera to collapse.  It filled with water, and is now a beautiful -- and seemingly peaceful -- crater lake, Lake Toba.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Visions of Domino, Indonesia - Lake Toba (26224127503), CC BY 2.0]

The operative word here is "seemingly."  The processes that caused the original eruption, mostly the subduction of the Indian and Australian Tectonic Plates beneath the Sunda Plate, continue to cause massive earthquakes including the colossal (9.2 on the Richter Scale) Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of December 2004, which killed over 225,000 people.  In the case of Toba, the magma chamber has been steadily refilling, and now contains an estimated 50,000 cubic kilometers of magma -- four times the volume of Lake Superior.  This refilling has pushed the entire caldera upward, lifting Samosir Island and the Uluan Peninsula an estimated 450 meters.

It's hard to talk about this without lapsing into superlatives.  The scariest thing about it, though, is that the recent study indicates that such volcanoes can seem quiescent until -- well, until they aren't any more.  "[W]ith few super-eruptions in the last two million years, it is not possible for us to obtain statistically significant values for the frequency of these catastrophic events at a global scale," said study co-author Ping-Ping Liu of Peking University, in a press release from the Université de Genève.  "Our study also shows that no extreme events occur before a super-eruption.  This suggests that signs of an impending super-eruption, such as a significant increase in earthquakes or rapid ground uplift, might not be as obvious as pictured in disaster movies by the film industry.  At Toba volcano, everything is happening silently underground."

The reassuring part is "not as obvious" doesn't mean "without any warning;" the entire Indonesian archipelago is an area of intense study by volcanologists and seismologists, and it's likely there'd be enough anomalous activity to give us at least a hint that an eruption was impending.  Whether we'd do much about it in the form of evacuations is another matter.  Sumatra (where the volcano is located) and the nearby island of Bali are densely populated, and the idea of getting all those people out (to where?) makes the phrase "mammoth undertaking" a significant understatement.  And for those of you who like certainty, the current study doesn't give us any clear idea of exactly when the next big eruption will occur, just that (1) it's inevitable, (2) when it does, it'll be bad, (3) the filling of the magma chamber is still happening, and (4) there are signs that the volcanic activity at Toba and the surrounding regions is speeding up.

"[There's been a] progressive increase of the temperature of the continental crust in which Toba’s magma reservoir is assembled," Liu said.  "The input of magma has gradually heated the surrounding continental crust, which makes the magma cool slower.  This is a ‘vicious circle’ of eruptions: the more the magma heats the crust, the slower the magma cools and the faster the rate of magma accumulation becomes.  The result is that super-eruptions can become more frequent in time."

So there's your cheerful news of the day.  As far as the synchronicity aspect of this, I'm not gonna make much of it.  The fact that two different friends know enough of my obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes to send me the link to the YouTube video and paper is hardly to be wondered at.  As far as the book review, it's no wonder I noticed it given that the tile of the book is Super Volcanoes.  I don't think this is some kind of cosmic warning that we're about to get blown to smithereens.

So if you were looking for an excuse to stay home from work this week, you'll probably have to come up with a different one.

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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.

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

When the volcano blows

If you were wondering what the final act of the 2020 fever-dream theater might be, I have a possible contender.

Geologists have just discovered another supervolcano besides Yellowstone.

Supervolcanoes -- known in scientific circles as caldera eruptions -- are insanely powerful.  The famous 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, in Indonesia, was a caldera eruption, but even that was on the small end of things; it blasted 25 cubic kilometers of ash and rock fragments into the air, while the last major eruption of Yellowstone (650,000 years ago) released forty times that much, and covered most of what is now the central United States in a meter or two of ash.

And Toba, another Indonesian volcano, released almost three times more than that, 74,000 years ago -- and some anthropologists think the resulting climate impact nearly wiped out the up-and-coming human race, by some estimates reducing the entire population of humans to only about a thousand individuals.

By comparison, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980 was pretty much a wet firecracker.

So anyhow, why this all comes up is because we thought we knew where most of the potentially huge calderas were located, and geologists have given a great effort to calming everyone down, saying we have a handle on things and will have plenty of warning if any of them show signs of an imminent eruption.

Turns out, we didn't even know one of them was there.

A cluster of six islands in the Aleutian chain -- Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Chagulak, and Uliaga -- have long been known to be stratovolcanoes, conical, explosive volcanoes of the same type as Mount Vesuvius.  What scientists didn't know until now is that apparently, the magma reservoirs of these six islands are not separate blobs, but one enormous blob underlying the entire island chain.

Just like the one under Yellowstone.

Mount Cleveland [Image is in the Public Domain]

The findings, which will be formally presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday, are a little alarming.  According to the press release from Science Daily:

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland, the most active volcano of the group, trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains.  They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Unlike stratovolcanoes, which tend to tap small- to modestly-sized reservoirs of magma, a caldera is created by tapping a huge reservoir in the Earth's crust.  When the reservoir's pressure exceeds the strength of the crust, gigantic amounts of lava and ash are released in a catastrophic episode of eruption...

If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.

So yeah.  That's just marvelous.  Okay, I know, the discovery doesn't mean it's going to erupt any time soon, although it bears mention that Mount Cleveland has erupted 22 times in the past 230 years, and eight of those eruptions were in the last eleven years.  So it would totally be on-brand for 2020 if the whole thing went kablooie.

Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be superstitious or engage in magical thinking or anything.  Given how this year's gone, I think I deserve a little slack, here.  No one will be happier than me if January 1, 2021 comes and the Aleutian Islands still exist, but at present I'm not ruling anything out. 

There we have it -- a supervolcano that we didn't even realize existed.  Just another thing to put in your Box of Anxiety.  Honestly, at the moment I'm more concerned about what Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump and his cronies could potentially do to the United States on the way out the door.  In my experience, assholes can do more damage than ash holes.

Even the super-sized ones.

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

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

Retreating into science

I try to keep myself informed about what's going on in the world, but lately, what's going on in the world has led me to the unfortunate conclusion that humans are, by and large, crazy.  It's not a comforting thought.  But between the shootings, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and the Republican National Convention, I seem to have no other option.

Because the news I'm seeing out there is simply too depressing, for today's post I'm retreating to my happy place, better known as science.

Think of it as my answer to flowers, rainbows, and friendly bunnies.

So let's take a look at a few new developments in the scientific world, and take a refreshing break from the irrationality and insanity that is the main course in the media these days.

First, from field biologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge, we have a charming study of a partnership between humans and wild animals -- in this case, between human honey-hunters in Africa and a little brown bird called the Greater Honeyguide.

Honeyguides have been partners with humans for as far back as we have any information.  Honey-hunters in Mozambique call in the birds with a trilling sound, and the birds then lead their human pals to bees' nests.  When the nest is raided, the humans share some of the honeycomb with their guides, so it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

"Communication between domesticated species and people is well known, but the fascinating point in the case of the honeyguide is that it describes such a relationship between a wild animal and humans," said behavioral biologist Claudia Wascher of the University of Anglia Ruskin (UK), commenting on Spottiswoode's study.  "This has not been described scientifically before."

Greater Honeyguide [image courtesy of photographer Gisela Gerson Lohman-Braun and the Wikimedia Commons]

"The results show that there is communication between humans and free-living wild animals that the animals understand," Spottiswoode said.  "There is a rich cultural diversity of interaction between humans and honeyguides.  We'd love to try to understand it."

Next, we have a discovery from the world of astronomy.  Two rocky, Earthlike planets have been discovered that lie in the habitable zone -- around the same star.

The star, called TRAPPIST-1, is only 40 light years away.  While it is certain that the two planets, dubbed TRAPPIST-1-b and c, have atmospheres and are not gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, it remains to be seen whether they actually are capable of harboring life.

"Now we can say that these planets are rocky. Now the question is, what kind of atmosphere do they have?" study author Julian de Wit of MIT said.  "The plausible scenarios include something like Venus, where the atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide, or an Earth-like atmosphere with heavy clouds, or even something like Mars with a depleted atmosphere.  The next step is to try to disentangle all these possible scenarios that exist for these terrestrial planets."

However, it must be said that "only 40 light years away" is still far too distant for any conventional spacecraft to reach.  Even communicating via radio waves wouldn't be very interesting, given the forty year transit time (one way) for messages:

Earth scientist: "Hi there, alien civilization!"
*80 year wait*
Alien scientist on TRAPPIST-1-b: "Hi, Earthling! How's it hangin'?"
Earth scientist: "I'm fine, how're the wife and kids?"
*another 80 year wait*
Alien scientist on TRAPPIST-1-b: "They're doing well, and yours?"

 So it doesn't really lend itself to scintillating repartee. But it's still a tremendously exciting discovery, further indicating that habitable planets are probably common in the universe -- and that we might not be alone after all.

From geologists Guilherme Gualda (of Vanderbilt University) and Stephen Sutton (of the University of Chicago) we have a paper that indicates that supervolcanoes might only give a year's warning before a colossal eruption.  They studied the Bishop Tuff, an outcropping in California that formed 760,000 years ago during the massive Long Valley Caldera eruption, and through analysis of quartz crystals deposited there concluded that the decompression gas bubbles that initiate the explosion form really quickly.

"The evolution of a giant, super-eruption-feeding magma body is characterized by events taking place at a variety of time scales," said Gualda.  "Tens of thousands of years are needed to prime the crust to generate sufficient eruptible magma.  Once established, these melt-rich, giant magma bodies are unstable features that last for only centuries to few millennia.  Now we have shown that the onset of the process of decompression, which releases the gas bubbles that power the eruption, starts less than a year before eruption."

When people think of supervolcanoes, they usually come up with Yellowstone, but it bears mention that there are other supervolcanoes in the world -- Campi Flegrei in Italy, Oruanui in New Zealand, and Toba/Tambora in Indonesia, to name three.  So it's a good thing that the geologists are monitoring the situation, although you have to wonder what they'd do if they found that an eruption was imminent.  "Evacuate Italy" doesn't seem like a viable plan.  But because I said that this post was going to be cheerful and uplifting, perhaps I'd better move on.


Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales have just made a discovery that could help the world move to a post-fossil-fuel economy: that using a cheap catalyst and sunlight, hydrogen gas can be made from grass clippings.

The technique is called photocatalysis, and the catalyst is nickel.  (The process also works well using palladium or gold as a catalyst, but that ups the cost significantly.)  Basically, the idea is that using the catalyst and sunlight as an energy source, cellulose in plant matter can be broken down and produce hydrogen, which can then be used to power hydrogen fuel cells.

"Hydrogen is seen as an important future energy carrier as the world moves from fossil fuels to renewable feedstocks, and our research has shown that even garden grass could be a good way of getting hold of it," said Michael Bowker, who headed the study at Cardiff.  "This is significant as it avoids the need to separate and purify cellulose from a sample, which can be both arduous and costly...  Our results show that significant amounts of hydrogen can be produced using this method with the help of a bit of sunlight and a cheap catalyst."

And when you consider the amount of cellulose-rich agricultural waste that is simply discarded -- think rice husks and cornstalks -- it'd be an amazing breakthrough to be able to use it for fuel production.

So that's our brief retreat into the cheering world of scientific discovery.  It's nice to know that there are still people who are working toward understanding the universe and bettering humanity, and that they're not all crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics.  It's a refreshing thought.  Maybe I should sustain the feeling by avoiding the news for a while.  I'll miss hearing the spin about Donald Trump's speech last night at the RNC, which would be an added benefit.