Song of the Rifleman

As an avid birdwatcher, I've learned many of the vocalizations of our local species.  Some, especially the migratory species we only hear from May to September, I have to relearn every year, but a few of them are so distinct that my ears perk up whenever I hear them.  One of my favorites is the whirling, ethereal song of the Veery (Catharus fuscescens):

Another lovely one, often heard in the same sorts of deep-woods habitats as the Veery, is the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina):

By far the strangest bird songs I've ever heard, though, we came across when we visited the lowlands of eastern Ecuador about twenty years ago.  There were two we heard but never saw -- first, the aptly-named Screaming Piha (Lipaugus vociferans), which can be heard for miles:

And second, the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis), which is cryptically-colored and nocturnal, so they're almost never seen.  But when they sing at night... holy crap.  Imagine being out in the jungle, alone, at night, and hearing this:

It's no wonder the locals thought there were monsters out there.

Bird songs serve two main purposes.  They're territorial defense signals and mate attractants.  (Which led a former student of mine to say, in some astonishment, "So birds only sing when they're mad or horny?")  Songs are usually only done by males, and mostly during the breeding season.  Calls, on the other hand, are done by both males and females, at any time of the year, and can mean a variety of things from "there's food over here" to "watch out for the cat" to "hey, howsyamommaandem?"  (The latter mostly from birds in the southeastern United States.)  Those of you in the eastern half of North America certainly already have heard the difference; our local Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) has a call, the familiar "chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee" that gives the species its name, and a song -- a two-note whistle with the second note a whole step below the first.  Listening to them, you'd never guess it was the same bird.

There's an interesting distinction in how animals vocalize.  Some vocalizations seem to be innate and hard-wired; the barking of dogs, for example, doesn't need to be learned.  A great many bird species, however, including songbirds and parrots, learn vocalizations, and deprived of examples to learn from, never sing.  (This includes the amazing mimicry of birds like the Australian Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), which can learn to imitate not only birdsongs but a huge variety of other sounds as well):

The topic comes up because of a study that came out this week in the journal Communications Biology about the Rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), a tiny species from New Zealand that is one of only two surviving species in the family Acanthisittidae, the New Zealand wrens, which are only distantly related to the more familiar and widespread true wrens.  (If you're curious, its odd common name comes from the cheerful colors of the plumage, which someone decided looked like a military uniform:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons digitaltrails, Lake Sylvan - Rifleman (5626163357) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Rifleman is not a songbird, and (if the preceding distinction holds) should be unable to learn vocalizations; any sounds it makes should be instinctive and fixed, like the clucking of a chicken.  But the study found that there were variations in the vocalizations of different individuals, and those variations were independent of how closely related they were; what mattered was how nearby they lived to each other, implying that the alterations in sound were learned, not innate. 

"The vocal behavior that we were unravelling in this study is very similar to what is known as vocal accommodation in human linguistics," said Ines Moran, of the University of Auckland, who led the research.  "It's similar to our ability to adjust our ways of speaking in different social, dialectal, or hierarchical settings -- modulating our voices to better fit in certain social groups."

So bird vocalizations may not be as simple as we'd thought.  Like most things, I suppose.  It brings up the silly distinction that I heard over and over again from students, that there's a split between "human" and "animal."  We're clearly animals; and, conversely, what we call "animals" share a great deal more with us than we often realize.  We have a lot to learn from the other species we whom we cohabit the planet.  It's nice that we're beginning to pay more attention.

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

Silence is golden

Yesterday over at The Anomalist, a website I frequent that acts as a sort of clearinghouse for News of the Weird, I ran into a link to a post at the Jamza Online Forum by Paul Dale Roberts, whose title apparently is "Esoteric Detective" at Sacramento Paranormal Investigations.  Which, I have to admit, is pretty badass-sounding, and puts me in mind of Carl Kolchak running around chasing werewolves and vampires and zombies and succubi, not to mention special offers like Spanish Moss Monsters where you can actually see the zipper running up the front of the Monster Suit.

It's a job I'd like to have, although living as I do in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere, opportunities for esoteric detection have been pretty slim.  I've only done one in-person esoteric investigation, which fortunately happened to focus on a place not far from where I live, and once visited a haunted hotel in Arkansas.  My experience both times was that absolutely nothing happened other than in the first case I met a stoned guy who was extremely impressed that I was a paranormal investigator even though it was technically the only actual paranormal investigation I'd ever done, and in the second I saw some old ladies in period dress and had to be reassured by the other members of my party that (1) they saw them, too, and (2) the old ladies were tour guides.

So my experience as an esoteric investigator is kind of slim, but I'll just put it out there that if an opportunity arises, I'm all in. 

Anyhow, what Paul Dale Roberts tells us about is a place that sounds well worth investigating.  It's nicknamed "the Zone of Silence," and is located about four hundred miles from El Paso, Texas, near the point where the borders of the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Durango meet.  From the sound of it, the Zone of Silence is a little like the Mexican version of the Bermuda Triangle.  Within this area, "radio and TV signals... are gobbled up," "strange lights or fireballs (maneuver) at night, changing colors, hanging motionless and then taking off at great speed," and there are falls of "small metallic balls... known locally as guíjolas," which are "collected by locals and visitors alike, and treated with great reverence."

My thought on this last part is that if you are the sort of person who might be tempted to treat a small metallic ball with great reverence, you probably should not be allowed to wander about in the desert unaccompanied.

One difference between this place and the Bermuda Triangle is that being dry land (extremely dry, in this case), the Zone of Silence can also host honest-to-Fox-Mulder Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There have been several reports of meetings with "tall blond individuals," who spoke flawless Spanish "with a musical ring."  In one case, they were wearing yellow raincoats, and helped some lost travelers whose car was stuck in the mud during one of the area's infrequent, but torrential, downpours.  This is encouraging; most of the other aliens I've heard of seem more interested in evil pastimes, such as infiltrating world governments, dissecting livestock, and placing computer chips in the heads of abducted earthlings, after the obligatory horrifying medical exam on board the spacecraft, about which we will say no more out of respect for the more sensitive members of the studio audience.  Myself, I find reports of helpful aliens distinctly encouraging, and hope you won't think me self-serving if I just mention briefly that if there are any like-minded aliens visiting upstate New York soon, I could sure use a hand weeding my vegetable garden.

I found this image of a "Nordic Alien" on a website that cautions you against getting into a spaceship piloted by tall blond extraterrestrials, which honestly seems like good advice, although it must be said that this one is kind of hot-looking.  It also says that The Matrix was a coded message warning us about the dangers of being harvested by aliens. The good news is that if you are approached, all you have to do is say, "I decline your offer to a contract," and they'll have no choice but to retreat in disarray.

Of course, my more scientific readers will be asking themselves why, exactly, is this spot a "zone of silence?"  Answers vary, as you might expect.  One explanation I've seen proffered is the presence of uranium ore in nearby mountains (because diffuse deposits of radioactive ores clearly attract aliens, cause small metal balls to fall from the sky, and interfere with radio signals).  Another is that this spot represents a "concentration of earth energies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  It is also claimed that there is an "astronomical observatory thousands of years old... a Mexican Stonehenge" in the area.  Well, that's enough for me!  Uranium ore + "concentration of earth energies" + anything that can be compared to Stonehenge = some serious shit!  The Upstate New York Esoteric Detective is on it!  Mobilize the troops!

Well, not really.  Sadly, I'm not able to mobilize in this direction at the present time.  The disappointing fact is that given the current state of affairs in northern Mexico, it's not all that appealing to go down and visit the place.  I mean, tall sexy blond aliens with yellow rain slickers are one thing; dodging bullets from members of mutually hostile drug cartels is quite another.  I think the field work will have to wait until things calm down a little.

Until then, however, keep your eyes open for any other esoteric phenomena that may pop up -- I'm ready to investigate, especially if it's close enough to where I live that I can be back by nap time.  Should such opportunities come to my attention, I'll post further research notes here.  You'll be the first to know.

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

The chalk mound

There's something about the mysterious that invites attention.  Curiosity is built into the human mind; it's just not in us to say "we don't know what this is, and probably never will," and forthwith let the matter go. 

Our deep and abiding fascination with the unexplained has its positive aspects, of course.  It's largely what drives science.  On the other hand, it can sometimes impel wild speculation -- and the less hard evidence there is, the broader the field is for fancy to take hold.

Take, for example, Silbury Hill, near Avebury, Wiltshire, England.  The area has been occupied for a very long time.  If you're an archaeology buff, you undoubtedly know about the Avebury Ring, a stone circle a little like Stonehenge that appears to have been built for some unknown purpose on the order of five thousand years ago.  Like the other stone circles in England, Scotland, Ireland, and northern France, the Avebury Ring is surmised to have had some sort of ceremonial purpose, but what exactly that might have been is a matter of conjecture.

Silbury Hill, though, is even more puzzling.  It's a forty-meter-tall conical chalk mound, a little less than one hundred and seventy meters in diameter at the base, making it similar in volume to the Egyptian pyramids (which were built around the same time).  It has been the subject of repeated archaeological investigations since the seventeenth century, with shafts drilled down into it vertically from the top and horizontally into the side, and what's been brought up is nothing more than the chalky local soil and fragments of branches from native plants like oak, hazel, and mistletoe.  The few bones found there were from oxen and deer, and date from about 4,500 years ago, so about the same general era as the Avebury Ring was built.

Other than that, and a handful of tiny artifacts of uncertain provenance... nothing.

It does really appear to be just a gigantic mound of clay and chalk.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Photograph by Greg O'Beirne, SilburyHill gobeirne, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why would people build something like this?  Whatever the reason, it must have been important to them; a 1974 study estimated that constructing it -- moving and shaping the 250,000 cubic meters of heavy soil that composes it -- would have taken eighteen million person-hours.  Put another way, it would take five hundred strong individuals, working eight hours a day, fifteen years to create something like Silbury.

Naturally enough, the oddity of the structure, and its lack of any obvious purpose, has led to some bizarre speculation.  In the sixteenth century, the locals believed it had been created when the Devil brought a gigantic bag of dirt with which he intended to smother the town of Avebury, but the priest of Avebury prayed to God to intercede.  God forced Satan to drop his burden prematurely, creating Silbury.  Another legend is that a monarch named King Sil is buried inside the mound, his skeleton riding a gigantic statue of a horse made of solid gold -- but needless to say, no evidence of that has been forthcoming.  (As far as King Sil, he probably didn't exist in any case; the name Silbury seems to come from the Old English selebeorg, meaning "barrow hall.")

Even later investigators weren't immune to attributing Silbury to wild legends; eighteenth-century amateur archaeologists William Stukeley and Edward Drax thought the mound was connected to the Greek myth of the god Apollo killing the monster Python and burying him under a mountain.

Needless to say, no evil dragons were found by the excavations, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  Silbury Hill was built by some extremely dedicated Neolithic Britons, but toward what end, we have no idea.  It's certainly curious, rising above the flat Wiltshire plains like the cone of a small volcano, and to this day it attracts tourists.

We are drawn to puzzles -- even if in this case, it's very likely one we'll never be able to solve.

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

The ghost children

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgments about them based on the way we do things in our own.

I've written recently about the Roman Empire, which is a culture a lot of people in the western world revere for its dedication to art, architecture, and literature.  The fact remains, however, that they were (from our standpoint) classist and sexist, had no problem with slavery, and punished people for minor offenses in a way most of us would describe as extremely brutal.  You can't laud them for their (very real) accomplishments without simultaneously opening your eyes to the many ways in which their culture, from a modern perspective, breaks all manner of standards for conventional morality and ethics.  Those practices were as much an integral part of Roman society as were the beautiful things they created.

I'm not saying we should condone what they did, but it's important to try to understand it. 

Another example, and the reason the topic comes up, is the Classical Mayan civilization, which lasted from the third to the ninth century C.E., at which point the government collapsed from what appears to be internecine warfare triggered by a massive drought and famine.  The Mayans had some traditions that are difficult for us to comprehend -- a good example is the ritual ball game.  It was played on a court ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld), and so was considered to be a liminal space somewhere between the real world and the spirit world.  The losers were often sacrificed -- but it was considered to be an honor to lose your life in a ball game, and it assured you a high place in the next plane of existence.

Strange, perhaps.  Although given our adulation of sports superstars, maybe it's not as far away from our culture as it might appear at first.

Even further from our norms is their practice of ritual child sacrifice.  A paper in Nature last week describes the discovery in Chichén Itzá of 64 skeletons, mostly young boys, who were apparently sacrificed to the gods -- most intriguingly, the DNA evidence shows that many of them were closely related to each other, and a few were pairs of identical twins.  There's a legend recorded in the Mayan sacred document Popol Vuh of a pair of hero twins fighting (and winning) against hostile deities, and it's possible that this is why the twins were chosen for sacrifice.  The children died toward the end of the Classic Period, and the conjecture, based upon inscriptions in the tunnels where the skeletons were found, is that the sacrifices were to the rain god Chaac.

Understandable considering what was unfolding climatically at the time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, too little is known for sure about pre-contact Mayan practices to be all that certain about the context in which these sacrifices were made.  The Christian missionaries who came into what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did far too thorough a job of stamping out indigenous beliefs and destroying the Native people's artifacts and writings to have very much to go on.  But what's certain is that child sacrifice was widely practiced -- and not of captured children of conquered enemies, but of their own offspring, leaving behind these pathetic remains, the ghost children of a long-gone civilization.

It's hard to fathom.  "Protect your children" is one of the foundational moral values of most of the world's cultures.  But what I wonder is, what if they believed this was protecting them -- dedicating them to the gods, assuring their place in the afterlife, just as the losers of the ball game believed?  Belief can make people act oddly -- at least, oddly from our perspective.  If the climate was careening toward drought, crops failing, wells and sinkholes drying up, maybe parents felt it was an honor to offer their children up, both for the sake of improving their fate in the next world but for the good of the entire community.

I'm not saying I understand it, not really.  This sort of thing still strikes me as the darkest side of what superstition can drive people to do.  But you have to wonder how an advanced alien civilization would view our own culture.  How many of our own accepted practices would horrify and disgust them?  We routinely turn our faces away from homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own communities.  The same people who proudly call themselves "pro-life" and follow a deity who said "Let the little children come unto me" regularly vote against programs to help our own society's poor children obtain access to food and medical care.  We shrug our shoulders at famine and war and suffering, as long as the ones affected are The Other -- a different skin color, language, ethnic identity, or religion than our own.  We marginalize people -- in some countries, imprison or execute them -- because they are LGBTQ+.

Once again, perhaps we're not so different from the cultures of the past as we'd like to believe.

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

Trying to escape

There's long been an association between creativity and mental illness.  Certainly there's plenty of anecdotal evidence -- people like Sylvia Plath, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Vincent van Gogh are commonly-cited examples -- and a few controlled studies have suggested that there is at least some degree of correlation between the two.

The question, as always, is whether this correlation is indicative of causation, and if so, which direction the causation points.  Does the underlying physiological problem that causes mental illness create, as a side effect, a greater degree of creativity?  (A recent study supports this conjecture, at least in some cases.)  Or does mental illness cause a desire to cultivate creative outlets as a way to assuage the pain?

This latter possibility was the subject of a paper that came out this week from Ohio State University, authored by psychologist Joseph Maffly-Kipp.  The research had two parts.  The first was a cross-sectional study of people from ages 18 to 72, in all walks of life, that assessed their experience of depression and mood disorders, and also scored them for fantasy-proneness -- to what extent did they find themselves escaping into fantasy worlds, whether through reading, watching television or movies, creative endeavors, or daydreaming?  The other was a longitudinal study took a group of college students and tracked them for six weeks to see how both of those measures changed over time.

Both groups were also assessed for their perceptions of "meaning in life" -- to what extent did they find any kind of meaning behind their daily experiences?  This, like fantasy-proneness, might take many forms, from conventional religiosity, to spirituality, to connection with other human beings, to dedication to a higher purpose.

The results are fascinating.  The people with higher levels of depression and high fantasy-proneness scored higher on assessments for meaning in life than the ones who were high on measures of depression but low on measures of fantasy-proneness.  Apparently for depressed individuals, our ability to maintain a sense of meaningfulness in life is boosted by our capacity to escape now and again into fantasy worlds.  Interesting, too, is the piece of the sample that showed negative results; individuals low for depression-proneness had no significant correlation between fantasy-proneness and meaning in life.

It seems like if you're not depressed, your capacity for finding meaning doesn't depend on your finding that sense of meaning in the imaginary.

"We found across several studies that the tendency to engage in vivid mental fantasies was related to greater perceptions that life was meaningful, but this was only true for people with high levels of depression," Maffly-Kipp said.  "We speculated that, because depressed people are struggling to find meaning in more typical ways (e.g., religion, social relationships, careers, community, etc.), they might resort to finding it through the engagement with fantasies.  Fantasies are less constrained by reality, more controllable, and might be free from the negativity biases seen in depression.  They could help a person find a sense of belonging and purpose, even if it is imaginary."

Nøkken Som Hvit Hest by Theodor Kittelsen (1907) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, it immediately made me think of my own case.  I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and ever since I was a child I've not only voraciously read escapist fiction (reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when I was about ten was a transcendent experience), but I've written it, too.  Not that everything I read or write is cheerful, mind you -- if you pick up one of my novels, don't expect that every character is going to have a happy ending, or necessarily even survive to the end.  But what my writing does consistently embody is that there is hope, that there are still selfless, brave, good people in the world, that a powerful cause is worth fighting for, and that love, loyalty, and friendship are the most important things in life.

That some of what I write is spurred by my own attempts to escape the dark, chaotic whirlwind of my own brain, I have no doubt whatsoever.  Maffly-Kipp's study doesn't settle the question of whether we mentally ill people have a higher capacity for inventing fantasy worlds because of some underlying common cause, or if the mental illness came first and trying to escape from it into fantasy worlds evolved later as a coping mechanism; and of course, it could be both, or be different in different people.  Mental illness, like anything having to do with our cognitive apparatus, is a complicated matter, admitting of few easy explanations.

But it does highlight that even those of us who live with depression and anxiety on a daily basis can find ways to manage it -- even if it means leaving the real world at times.

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

Cloud collision

Contrary to what the medieval church wanted you to believe, the Earth is in constant motion.

They went to enormous lengths to stand by the principle that we're the center of the universe, motionless, while everything revolves around us in perfect circles.  Arrogant attitude, that.  Also wildly wrong.  Not only is the apparent motion of the stars at night caused by our own rotation, the stars aren't in quite the same positions at a given time one night as compared to the next because we're revolving around the Sun.

Then along came Kepler, and showed that even the "perfect circles" part was wrong; the planets and their moons orbit in ellipses, not circles, some of them quite eccentric (the mathematicians' word for the degree to which an ellipse deviates from a circle).

It's even worse than that.  The Earth's axis precesses, wobbling like a spinning top, drawing out a circle in the sky once every twenty-six thousand years.  So Polaris, hasn't always been the pole star, and at some point won't be any longer.  This fact was discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, but although the aforementioned church fathers loved the Greek philosophers -- they were especially fond of Aristotle -- they were also excellent at ignoring evidence that challenged their own worldviews, so Hipparchus's studies of axial precession were brushed aside.  The thirteenth century Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi studied astronomical records and came up with a value very close to our currently accepted precession rate, but the church fathers didn't much listen to the Muslims, either, so it wasn't until eighteenth century French mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert said, "No, really, guys, this precession thing is real" that people in the western world started to accept it.

The path of apparent precession of the pole star. The bright star at the bottom is Vega, which was the pole star twelve thousand years ago (and will be again in fourteen thousand years). [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tauʻolunga, Precession N, CC BY-SA 2.5]

But even that's not the end of it, because the Sun (and the rest of the Solar System) are in the edge of one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, and are traveling at about 230 kilometers per second in orbit around the galactic core.  This is a good clip -- it's only a bit under a thousandth of the speed of light -- but even so, the galaxy is so enormous it will take about 225,000,000 years to complete one orbit.  Put another way, the last time the Solar System was in this spot was the early Triassic Period -- right at the beginning of the "Age of Dinosaurs."

It's this last motion that's what brings the topic up today, because a team led by Boston University astronomer Merav Opher has just found that the motion of the Sun and planets around the galactic center swept it through two successive clouds of cold gas and dust, hitting one about seven million years ago and another a little over two million years ago.  The clouds, which from our current perspective are in the constellation of Lynx, provided enough resistance that the heliosphere -- the region of space dominated by the outward pressure of material thrown off by the Sun -- shrank to the point that the planets were exposed to the dust of the interstellar medium.  This caused a spike of supernova-generated isotopes like iron-60 and plutonium-244 in cosmic dust trapped in sediments and ice layers here on Earth.

Opher's team found this cosmic dust in every place of those ages they looked.  It was the fingerprint of a collision -- between the Solar System and a pair of clouds.

It's an open question what effect that had on the Earth.  The collisions happened just as our hominid ancestors were moving their way out of the African savanna, so any additional flux of cosmic rays from being outside the heliopause didn't seem to do us any harm.  But it's a cool reminder that although we feel like the Earth is solid and unmoving beneath our feet, it's actually being spun around the universe like a little kid on the Tilt-o-Whirl.

But finally, there's even another layer on top of all the above, because the Milky Way and the entire Local Group are moving toward something called the "Great Attractor" at six hundred kilometers per second, over twice as fast as the Solar System's orbital velocity around the galactic center.  Presumably this is because of some sort of gravitational effect, but what sucks is that although we know the general direction where the Great Attractor is located, we don't even know what's there because it's directly on the opposite side of the center of our own galaxy.  In other words, we can't see where we're headed because the Milky Way is in the way.  

What it's in the way of remains to be seen.

So yeah.  The medieval church fathers were kind of spectacularly wrong.  The more we've learned, the weirder the universe gets, and the farther from the center of anything we appear to be.  It's better this way, though, because it gives us constant reminders of how grand and magnificent the universe is -- even if the inevitable consequence is a reminder of how tiny we are by comparison.

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

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.

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