Moving mountains

I live in a place that doesn't change very much, and I mean that not only in the human sense -- rural upstate New York is not exactly a center of urban development -- but even on the geological time scale.  The bedrock here is Devonian shale, slate, and limestone, on the order of three hundred million years old.  At the point this rock was forming, where I'm sitting right now would have been at the bottom of a shallow subtropical ocean.  Since then, things have dried out a tad, and it's no longer anywhere near subtropical.  There have been a few glaciers in the last few million years; the most recent one started to melt back about 75,000 years ago.  This left behind the Elmira Moraine, only thirty miles south of where I live -- a rubble pile that marks the southern edge of where the glacier pushed rocks and debris ahead of it like a plow.  (The gazillions of rocks of various descriptions that I curse every time I try to dig in my yard are gifts from that last glacier -- glacial erratics -- some of them carried hundreds of miles away from where they formed.)

Other than that, I live in a pretty calm part of the world.  It'd be easy to look around and think the world is static, that the way things are now is the way they'll always be.

Not so in some places.  There are areas of the world where people are well aware that the topography can change in an instant from earthquakes or volcanoes.  Unfortunately, geologically-active areas tend to be heavily populated -- the temblor-prone regions because the scenery is often beautiful (think coastal California) and the volcanic regions because the soil is so fertile (like the land near Naples, Italy, in the shadow of the infamous Mount Vesuvius).  But the fraction of the world's population that lives in an area where the land is changing shape quickly is honestly very small, so most of us figure the mountains and lakes and rivers and whatnot aren't going anywhere.

If you were under any illusions about the fact that the Earth is an active place, consider the paper that came out in Nature last week describing the largest underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded -- one that literally caused a mountain to appear where none had been five years earlier.  Check out the before-and-after photos of the ocean floor, from 2014 and 2019:

Even a non-geologist like myself hardly needs the giant red arrow to see the new mountain where there wasn't one before.

The volcano, fifty kilometers off the coast of the island of Mayotte in the Comoros Archipelago (which lie between the northern tip of Madagascar and the coast of northern Mozambique), is thought to be part of the extremely active East African Rift Zone, an incipient divergent fault system that will ultimately tear off the "Horn of Africa" and create a new microcontinent containing all of Somalia and pieces of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  The eruption seems to have begun in May of 2018, when an earthquake of magnitude 5.8 hit Mayotte.  A team of geologists from France was dispatched to see what was going on, and they installed a monitoring system in February of 2019.  They recorded more than 17,000 seismic events in the next three months, as the mountain grew.

A map showing the chronology of the eruption

Ultimately, the series of eruptions added five cubic kilometers of hardened magma to the seafloor -- a new undersea mountain.

"The volumes and flux of emitted lava during the Mayotte magmatic event are comparable to those observed during eruptions at Earth's largest hotspots," the researchers wrote.  "Future scenarios could include a new caldera collapse, submarine eruptions on the upper slope or onshore eruptions.  Large lava flows and cones on the upper slope and onshore Mayotte indicate that this has occurred in the past."

So if you have a beach home in Mayotte, you might want to consider moving.

All of which makes me once again thankful to live in a place as geologically quiet as we do.  The St. Lawrence Valley, about two hundred kilometers north of us, has earthquakes sometimes, and I recently found out that New York City has fault lines that could potentially generate earthquakes, and in fact have done (none, thus far, severe, at least not in recorded history).  

But here, all is tranquil.  Which is fine by me.  Given that an exciting day in upstate New York is when the farmer across the road bales his hay, I always hope for something unexpected, but if it comes to major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, I'd just as soon not be anywhere near.

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Poetry reading

A friend of mine and I were discussing poetry a few days ago, and the inevitable question came up: what is your favorite poem?  After our chat, I started thinking that this would be a good topic for Fiction Friday.

I'm not a poet myself, so I can't claim any particular expertise.  Poetry is a compact, crystallized way to tell a story or evoke an emotion, and I tend to be... a little long-winded.  Thus the fact that I'm a novelist.  I am always in awe of someone who can pull off a truly beautiful or evocative poem, because creating resonance in the reader in such a short form seems like such a challenge.  My own favorite poetry usually has some twist on the use of words, something that spins your brain around a little and makes you see the world in a different way.  That's why I've always loved e. e. cummings.  He has a way of turning simple language on its head to create uniquely surreal beauty.  Two of my favorites are the sweet, joyous "if everything happens that can't be done" and the short but chilling "me up at does."  Another contender is Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful "The Fish," and I would be remiss not to mention Stevie Smith's brilliant "Our Bog is Dood," which seems to make no sense at all until... suddenly... the message is crystal clear, and devastating.

But if I had to pick one only, it would be Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," which (because it was written in 1912) I will reproduce here in full:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

What I love about this poem is that it gives you a piece of a story, and leaves you to imagine what the rest might be.  What had the Traveller given his word to do, and to whom, and why?  Who are the listeners, and why didn't they answer?  The whole thing gives me chills every time I read it, because -- as Stephen King pointed out in his masterful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, sometimes it's better for writers of horror to leave the door closed.  Left to their own, readers can conjure up some really scary explanations for what might be behind it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's my favorite poem, and I hope you'll take the time to check out the links I provided to some other wonderful ones.  Now, let's hear from you: what are some of your favorites?

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

I feel pretty

The drive to adorn our bodies is pretty close to universal.

Clothing, for example, serves the triple purpose of protecting our skin, keeping us warm, and making us look good.  Well, some of us.  I'll admit up front that I have a fashion sense that, if you were to rank it on a scale of one to ten, would have to be expressed in imaginary numbers.  But for a lot of people, clothing choice is a means of self-expression, a confident assertion that they care to look their best.  

Then there are tattoos, about which I've written here before because I'm a serious fan (if you want to see photos of my ink, take a look at the link).  Tattooing goes back a long way -- Ötzi the "Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body discovered preserved in glacial ice in the Alps, had no fewer than 61 tattoos.  No one knows what Ötzi's ink signifies; my guess is that just like today, the meanings of tattoos back then were probably specific to the culture, perhaps even to the individual.  

Then there's jewelry.  We know from archaeological research that jewelry fashioned from gems and precious metals also has a long history; a 24-karat gold pendant found in Bulgaria is thought to have been made in around 4,300 B.C.E., which means that our distant ancestors used metal casting for more than just weapon-making.  So between decorative clothing, tattoos, and jewelry, we've been spending inordinate amounts of time and effort (and pain, in the case of tattooing, piercing, and scarification) altering our appearances.  

Why?  No way to be sure, but my guess is that there are a variety of reasons.  Enhancing sexual attractiveness certainly played, and plays, a role.  Some adornments were clearly signs of rank, power, or social role.  Others were personal means of self-expression.  Evolutionists talk about "highly conserved features" -- adaptations that are between common and universal within a species or a clade -- and the usual explanation is that anything that is so persistent must be highly selected, and therefore important for survival and reproduction.  It's thin ice to throw learned behaviors in this same category, but I think the same argument at least has some applicability here; given that adornment is common to just about all human groups studied, the likelihood is that it serves a pretty important purpose.  What's undeniable is that we spend a lot of time and resources on it that could be used for more directly beneficial activities.

What's most interesting is that we're the only species we know of that does this.  There are a few weak instances of this sort of behavior -- for example, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, in which the males collect brightly-colored objects like flower petals, shells, and bits of glass or stone to create a little garden to attract mates.  But we seem to be the only animals that regularly adorn their own bodies.

How far back does this impulse go?  We got at least a tentative answer to this in a paper this week in Science Advances, which was about an archaeological discovery in Morocco of shell beads that were used for jewelry...

... 150,000 years ago.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," said study co-author Steven Kuhn, of the University of Arizona.  "They’re the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait.  They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

A sampling of the Stone Age shell beads found in Morocco

Like with Ötzi's tattoos, we don't know what exactly the beads were intending to communicate.  Consider how culture-dependent those sorts of signals are; imagine, for example, taking someone from three thousand years ago, and trying to explain what the subtle and often complex significance of appearances and behaviors that we here in the present understand immediately.  "You think about how society works – somebody’s tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, ‘What’s your problem?'" Kuhn said.  "But if you see they’re wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it’s a police officer pulling you over."

Unfortunately, there's probably no way to know whether the shell beads were used purely for personal adornment, or if they had another religious or cultural significance.  "It’s one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'...  We don’t know what they meant, but they’re clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them."

So think about that next time you put on a necklace or bracelet or earrings.  You are participating in a tradition that goes back at least 150,000 years.  Maybe our jewelry-making ability has improved beyond shell beads with a hole drilled through, but the impulse remains the same -- whatever its origins.

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Illuminating Hessdalen

In his wonderful poem/performance piece Storm, Tim Minchin said: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be 'not magic'."

As I've pointed out many times here before, it's not that I'm saying any of the thus-far-classified-as "out there beliefs" are impossible; it's that if they actually do exist, they should be accessible to scientific inquiry.  Auras, qi, chakras?  Demonstrate they're detectable by something other than a subjective viewer.  Hauntings?  Ditto.  Cryptids of various shapes and descriptions?  Give me something analyzable other than blurry photos and anecdotal eyewitness accounts.  Psychic abilities?  Show they work under controlled conditions.  

Interestingly, there was just an article in The Skeptic asserting that parapsychology has grown to the point that it deserves the title of science rather than pseudoscience.  I'm sure that the author, Chris French, professor of psychology at the University of London, will receive some blowback from this essay, as will The Skeptic in general for publishing it; but I agree with his central thesis, which is that parapsychological claims stand and fall on exactly the same basis as scientific claims do -- evidence.

And, as Minchin says, if a supernatural explanation turns out to be scientifically demonstrable, then it's no longer supernatural, is it?  It's just natural.  After that, it can be studied by the methods of science, just like every other feature of our weird, wonderful, amazingly complex universe.

What brings this up is a recent paper in Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics that considered the odd phenomenon of the "Hessdalen Lights" which occurs in a valley in central Norway, wherein people report seeing free-floating balls of light.  I'd written about the Hessdalen Lights (and various other accounts of lights in the sky) back in 2017, and described it as follows:

The Hessdalen Lights have been seen since the 1940s in the valley of Hessdalen in Norway.  They're stationary, bright white or yellow lights, floating above the ground, sometimes remaining visible for over an hour.  With such a cooperative phenomenon, you would think it would be easily explained; but despite the efforts of scientists, who have been studying the Hessdalen Lights for decades, there is yet to be a convincing explanation.  Hypotheses abound: that it is the combustion of dust from the valley floor; that it is a stable plasma, ionized by the decay of radon from minerals in the valley; or even that it is an electrical discharge from piezoelectric compression of quartz crystals in the underlying rock.  None of these is completely convincing, and the Hessdalen Lights remain one of the most puzzling natural phenomena I know of.

The lack of a convincing explanation opens the door to all sorts of wild speculation, and those abound -- ghosts, aliens, portals in time and space, you name it.  

Photograph of the Hessdalen Lights

As usual, my fallback position was, "I may not know what the scientific explanation is, but I'm certain that one exists."  Given how many times this phenomenon has been reported and photographed, it seemed pretty likely that it wasn't a hoax, or even misattributing it to something purely prosaic (like Neil deGrasse Tyson's story of a cop who was driving down a winding country road, chasing a "weird light in the sky" -- which turned out to be the planet Venus).  So accepting that the Hessdalen Lights actually occur as advertised, what the hell are they?

Much was my delight when I ran across the recent paper, by atmospheric chemist Gerson Paiva of Federal University Pernambuco (Brazil), which seems to have solved the mystery, using...

... wait for it...

... science.

Here's what Paiva writes:

Hessdalen lights are unusual, free-floating light balls presenting different shapes and light colors, observed in the Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway.  In this work, it is shown that these ghostly light balls are produced by an electrically active inversion layer above Hessdalen valley during geomagnetic storms.  Puzzling geometric shapes and energy content observed in the HL phenomenon may be explained through a little-known solution of Maxwell’s equations to electric (and magnetic) field lines: they can form loops in a finite space...  “Natural battery”, aerosols and global atmospheric electric circuits may play a crucial role for the electrification of the temperature inversion layers.

Now, I hasten to add that I don't know if Paiva's explanation is right.  But that's the other great thing about science; it's falsifiable.  When a researcher publishes something like this, it's immediately analyzed and taken to pieces by other experts in the field.  Unlike us fiction writers, who basically want everyone to read our writing and tell us how awesome it is, scientists are looking for rigorous criticism; they want their colleagues to try to tear it down, to see if their analysis is robust enough to withstand attempts to refute it.  So time will tell if Paiva has found the answer to this enduring mystery of atmospheric science.

But even if he hasn't, I'd bet cold hard cash that like Tim Minchin said, the answer will still turn out to be "not magic."

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

The disappearance of Tartessos

I'm not a historian, but I certainly have been fascinated with history for years.  I just finished re-reading Robert Graves's wonderful books I, Claudius and Claudius the God -- fictionalized, but largely historically accurate, accounts of the tumultuous life of Tiberius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as the Roman emperor Claudius, fifth and penultimate emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.  Since then I've gone back into reading some of the mytho-historical works I first looked at while doing my master's degree, the Icelandic saga literature (I'm currently in the middle of the Laxdæla Saga, the tale of the people of the Lax River Valley.  The highly entertaining chapter I just finished is about a guy named Killer-Hrapp who was so awful he didn't want to stop doing awful things after he died, so he had his wife bury his body under the floor of their house, and he proceeded to haunt the place as a reanimated corpse.  Apparently zombies are not a recent invention.)  After that, I'm back to the southern Mediterranean (and pure non-fiction) for How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy.

So I'm what I'd consider a reasonably well-informed amateur.  Which is why a link I was sent by my friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, Gil Miller, came as such a surprise.  Because the article describes a civilization on the Iberian Peninsula, contemporaneous to the ancient Greeks, that I'd never heard of before.

The civilization was called Tartessos.  They dominated the southern parts of what are now Spain and Portugal in the first part of the first millennium B.C.E., and inexplicably vanished sometime around the middle of it.  They spoke an unknown non-Indo-European language which has survived in written form in 95 different inscriptions; the alphabet has been deciphered -- "Southwestern Paleohispanic Script," a "semi-syllabic" script in which some characters represent single sounds and others represent syllables -- but the language itself is still largely a mystery, and doesn't appear to be closely related to any known language.

The Tartessian Fonte Velha inscription, found near Bensafrim, Portugal, which dates to the seventh century B.C.E.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Tartessians were known to the Greeks, who valued their trading partnerships with them because it gave them access to tin, necessary for the fabrication of bronze.  In the fourth century B.C.E. they were going strong -- the historian Ephorus describes "a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands" -- but then, right around that time, they vanished completely, for reasons that are still uncertain.

They went out with a bang, too.  The link Gil sent, which was to an article at the wonderful site Atlas Obscura, describes an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo, located in the Spanish province of Extremadura, near the border of Portugal.  What the researchers found seems to indicate that immediately before their mysterious disappearance, the Tartessians had a massive sacrifice of horses, donkeys, cattle, dogs, pigs... and possibly humans.  After arraying the sacrificed animals -- for example, deliberately arranging two horses facing each other symmetrically, with their forelegs crossed -- the Tartessians set fire to the entire place, burning to the ground what had been a thriving city.  They then apparently buried the ash, bones, and rubble...

... and took off for parts unknown.

Why a thriving and apparently wealthy civilization would do this is an open question.  There's been some speculation that they had been hit repeatedly by earthquakes, and thought that an enormous hecatomb would appease the gods.  But without any hard evidence, this is nothing more than a guess.  And the great likelihood, of course, is that they didn't vanish, nor even die out, but migrated elsewhere and merged with a pre-existing population.  But if that's true, then where did they go?  After about 400 B.C.E. there seems to be no sign of clearly Tartessian artifacts anywhere in western Europe.

They were still remembered long afterward, though.  In the second century C.E. the Greek historian Pausanias was in Olympia, Greece, and saw two bronze chambers in a sanctuary that the locals said were of Tartessian manufacture.  He elaborated thusly:

They say that Tartessos is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths, and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name.  The river, which is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, those of a later day called Baetis, and there are some who think that Tartessos was the ancient name of Carpia, a city of the Iberians.

Which squares with what we know about the Tartessians from archaeological sites, centering on the area near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, which flows into a marshland that is now the Doñana National Park, a beautiful place I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago.

But of course, there's no historical mystery without some kind of wild speculation appended to it, and the Tartessians are no exception.  There are people who claim that Tartessos is actually the civilization of Atlantis, described by the ancient Greeks as being "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" (i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar).  Which Tartessos is.  But any other connection to Atlantis seems way beyond tentative to me, starting with the fact that supposedly Atlantis "sank beneath the sea," while all of the sites known to be inhabited by the Tartessians are on dry land.

Inconvenient, that.

Of course, I have to admit it's hard to do underwater archaeology, so if there are Tartessian sites sunk in the Atlantic, we might not know about them.  Still, it seems a little sketchy to decide that "rich civilization near Gibraltar that vanished suddenly" leads to "Tartessos = Atlantis."

So that leaves us with a conundrum -- an apparently wealthy and powerful civilization upping stakes and taking off.  Of course, the Tartessians aren't the only instance of this happening; pretty much the same disappearing act had occurred eight hundred years earlier to the Myceneans, who had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for a good half a millennium before suddenly abandoning their strongholds (many of them were burned to the ground) in around 1,200 B.C.E.  (Some historians have attributed the collapse of Mycenae to a prolonged drought, but that's also speculation.)

In any case, that's today's historical mystery that I'd never heard of.  Hope you enjoyed it.  For me, it brings to mind the words of Socrates, when someone told him he'd been judged the wisest man in the world, and what did he think of that?  Socrates responded: "If I am accounted wise, it is only because I realize how little I know."

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Flipping out

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the Earth's impending magnetic field reversal.

Well, the alleged impending magnetic field reversal.  We don't know for sure that one is imminent; it's the same sort of thing as when you hear that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is "overdue for an eruption."  Neither of these is on some kind of timetable.  You rarely hear volcanoes say, "Well, I'd love to visit, but I'm supposed to erupt at 3:34 PM today, and I can't afford to be late."

The magnetic field flip is even more irregular than supervolcano eruptions, at least to judge by the geological record.  We know reversals have happened by looking at (relatively) new igneous rock formations near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; as the lava cools, magnetic particles in the molten rock freeze into place, locking in a magnetic signature that tells you what the Earth's magnetic field was doing at the time.  And if you do a scan across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge you find mirror-image parallel stripes along the ridge, progressively older as you move away, documenting 183 reversals over the past 83 million years.  The timing of those reversals, however -- and therefore the width of the stripes -- varies tremendously, from about 25,000 years to about ten million years (the longest stable interval discovered so far).

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

As a quick aside, you may know that these magnetic stripes were one of the most persuasive arguments for the developing theory of plate tectonics, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  The mid-ocean ridges were identified as divergent zones -- places where the plates were moving apart, and new rock upwelling to fill the space in between.

In any case, we don't know for sure if the Earth's field is ready to flip, but it certainly seems to be wandering around a bit.  The last full reversal was about 780,000 years ago, but there was what seems to have been an abortive flip -- the Laschamps Event -- about 41,400 years ago, which only lasted about five hundred years before flipping back to its original polarity.  (Because of the speed of the switch, geologists don't consider this to be a full geomagnetic reversal, but a "geomagnetic excursion," where the poles didn't make a long-term move but just kind of went on walkabout.)

In fact, the Laschamps Event is why the whole topic comes up.  Recently a paper was published in Science describing what scientists have learned from an unexpected source -- the sixty-ton trunk of a kauri tree (Agathis australis) that was accidentally unearthed in New Zealand by some workers breaking ground for a new power plant.  The tree trunk had been submerged in a bog and preserved, and as luck would have it, the tree's 1,700 year life span was right across the Laschamps Event.

Specifically, they looked at the content of carbon-14 in the wood; C-14 is a radioactive form of carbon that is best-known for its role in the dating of preserved organic matter, but also is a good indicator of the level of cosmic ray bombardment (because it's formed when stratospheric carbon dioxide is hit by ionizing radiation).  

What they found is a little alarming.  During the Laschamps Event the magnetic field of the Earth collapsed for something like five centuries, and the tree rings during that time show a significant spike in carbon-14 formation.  The level of bombardment, the researchers say, would have caused auroras in the subtropics -- and would have been sufficient to knock out the power grid.

Right around the same time, there were some significant biological shifts going on.  Large mammals in Australia died out, including the terrifying giant clawed wombat, Palorchestes.

In case you thought I was making this up. This thing got up to three meters from nose to tail and weighed an estimated 1,000 kilograms. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura, Palorchestes BW, CC BY 3.0]

At around the same time, Neanderthals disappeared from Europe, and things got a good bit colder -- our ancestors started taking up residence in caves, to judge by the appearance of sophisticated cave art.  Whether any or all of this is connected to the Laschamps Event, however, is unknown.

What seems certain is that if it were to occur today, it would be bad news for technology.  Not only would the flip wreak havoc on our power grid, it would foul up a lot of navigational systems.  (I wonder how birds would be affected, since many of them rely on magnetic field lines to guide their migration twice a year.)

As with all of these sorts of things, there are some people who are Chicken-Littling about the pole reversal spelling the death of humanity, and others who are shrugging and saying we'll be fine because this has happened many times in Earth's history, and here we are.  Well, yeah, giant meteor strikes and flood basalt events and ice ages have also happened many times in Earth's history, but that doesn't mean they're a good thing.

My own response is that we shouldn't panic, but we should try to prepare for it if and when it happens, i.e., listen to the damn scientists.  Which I've said about a million times before, mostly in connection to climate change and the COVID-19 vaccine, but it seems like good advice in general.

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

Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Buried treasure

Maybe I need to get myself a metal detector.

The reason I say this is that it's apparently an auspicious time for treasure hunters, at least judging by two discoveries I found out about (once again!) from my friend and fellow writer Gil Miller, without whom in the last couple of weeks I wouldn't have had much to write about here.

The first one was a discovery in Norway made by an amateur treasure hunting enthusiast, using his newly-purchased metal detector for the first time (maybe there's something to beginner's luck after all...).  The fortunate fellow is named Ole Ginnerup Schytz, and I have to point out that (1) no, I am not making this name up, and (2), yes, this is from a reputable source, specifically the National Museum of Denmark.

In any case, the discovery, made a couple of months ago near the town of Jelling but only announced recently, is absolutely stupendous.  It's a collection of gold artifacts dating from the Danish Iron Age, about seventh century C.E.  It consists primarily of bracteates -- rune-decorated medallions thought to have not only a decorative but a magical purpose.  This new collection has bracteate designs the archaeologists say they've never seen before.

"It is the symbolism represented on these objects that makes them unique, more than the quantity found," explained Mads Ravn, director of research at the Vejle Museum.

As far as Schytz, he was as stunned as everyone else by his discovery.  "When the device activated, I knelt down and found a small, bent piece of metal," he said.  "It was scratched and covered in mud.  I had no idea, so all I could think of was that it looked like the lid of a can of herring."

One of the bracteates from the Jelling cache

"It was the epitome of pure luck," Schytz said.  "Denmark is 43,000 square kilometers, and then I happen to choose to put the detector exactly where this find was."

One thing I find fascinating about the discovery is that it contained gold coins from the Roman Empire that had been converted into jewelry, and a medallion depicting Constantine the Great (ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire from 306 to 337 C.E.).  So even though the cache seems to have been buried in the seventh century, some of the artifacts are a good three hundred years older than that.  Jelling, apparently, was the center of trade back then -- including trade from over two thousand kilometers away.

The second discovery was made on the other side of the world, in Colombia.  Recently archaeologists discovered a trove of gold and emeralds, filling eight ceramic jars of a type made by the Muisca people, an indigenous group known for their find goldsmithing (and who may have inspired the legend of the city of El Dorado).  The jars are thought to have been buried about six centuries ago, but this is much less certain than the Jelling cache's date, because there were no obvious historical benchmarks here as there were in Denmark.

One of the jars from the Muisca site

A lot of the pieces from this discovery are figurines in the shape of snakes and other animals, as well as people wearing headdresses and carrying staffs and weapons.  This has prompted the leader of the team which made the discovery, Francisco Correa, to conclude that the site may have been associated with the worship of ancestor spirits and animal totems.

In any case, both the Danish and the Colombian find are staggeringly precious, not just because of the monetary value of the gold and jewels, but because of what it tells us about the cultures that created these beautiful pieces.  So like I said, if you believe in auspices, maybe it's time to go out and get yourself a metal detector.

I probably won't bother.  Not only do I not believe in strings of good fortune, I don't think there's any gold buried around here.  About the only use I've seen people make of metal detectors in this area is sweeping the village fairgrounds after the annual fair wraps up, looking for lost pocket change.

And frankly, I don't think the return on that investment would be enough to justify the time and expense.

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

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!]