Meltdown

One of the most frustrating things about human behavior is that we can receive repeated hints and warnings that if we keep doing what we're doing, bad stuff will happen, then when we continue and bad stuff does indeed happen as predicted, we act all surprised.

We've seen it before with volcanic eruptions, a topic I just dealt with in more detail last week.  As I pointed out, it's impossible (as science currently stands) to predict exactly when volcanoes will erupt, and sometimes they still take us completely by surprise, such as the May 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But a much better-known example of an eruption geologists saw coming was the March 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which killed 57 people, a significant fraction of whom were leisure hikers hoping to get close to the mountain, some of whom deliberately went around signs and barricades warning of the danger.

There's something in human nature that makes us say, "Oh, c'mon, that sign isn't meant for me.  We'll be fine."

Which is why we're now in the position of being presented with a study from the University of South Florida confirming what climatologists have been saying for decades -- that anthropogenic climate change, generated by the burning of fossil fuels, is going to melt the on-land ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland, and produce catastrophic sea level rise.

The first person who connected atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with global average temperature was, I shit you not, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, 126 years ago.  That's how long we've known about this.  It started being the subject of serious study (and concern) in the 1970s, and in the 80s and 90s popularizers such as James Burke and Al Gore brought it to the public notice with (respectively) After the Warming and An Inconvenient Truth.  But it's easy to ignore people if paying attention to them means having to change your lifestyle; easier to listen to knuckle-draggers like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who famously brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as "proof" that the world wasn't warming up.

Unfortunately for Senator Inhofe, nature continues to operate by the laws of physics and not the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry, because the temperature has continued to climb.  And just last week, a new study in Nature has shown that the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica has lost contact with the rocky basin it rests on, and is in the process of collapse -- something that could raise global sea levels by three meters.

"Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails," said marine geophysicist and study co-author Robert Larter from the British Antarctic Survey.  "We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future -- even from one year to the next -- once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed."

If that doesn't drive the point home hard enough, the authors point out that according to the United Nations, roughly forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast.

The edge of Thwaites Glacier [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I feel like the climatologists, and also science writers like myself, have been jumping up and down yelling ourselves hoarse for years trying to get people to wake up, and for God's sake, do something.  But the USF study is the most recent indication that whatever window we had to mitigate the effects of human-induced climate change might well have closed.  I hate to be a doom-and-gloom purveyor, and I wish I had good news; but at the moment, this is what we have.  We've allowed people like Senator Inhofe and their mouthpieces over at Fox News to convince the public that somehow we climate activists want bad things to happen, so we're exaggerating them for our own malign purposes.  And all the while, the voters have been climbing over the signs saying "Danger, Do Not Proceed Past This Point," saying, "Ha ha, this can't be meant for me."

I'm very much afraid that the result is we're in the latter half of "Fuck around and find out."

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Roly-poly fish-men

It's been a while since I've looked at a truly loopy claim, so today we're going to give our attention to one just posted this week over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe that was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia along with the message, "Get yourself a big glass of wine, sit down, and fasten your fucking seatbelt."

It was good advice.  The article is entitled, "The Strange, Hybrid Fish-Men and Bird-Men of Mesopotamian Art: Who Were They?", and one would think the text that followed would say, "They were fictional.  The end."

One would be wrong.

The article goes on and on and on and on, and ties together the following:

• Sumerian mythology
• aquifer ecology
• Jupiter's moon Europa
• the Hopi
• the Mayans
• Indigenous Australians
• magical pine cones
• Masaru Emoto, the Japanese dude who claimed that if you talk nicely to water as it freezes, it makes pretty crystals
• comets
• the Big Dipper
• the Pope

While I'm sure that the connections between all of the above are glaringly obvious to anyone with reasonable perspicacity, somehow I still don't get it even after reading the article all the way through.  Twice.  The best I can come up with is that the Sumerians believed in these dudes called Apkallu who were not only supposed to be super-intelligent but were hybrid human-fish beings.  It's uncertain where they come from, but one possibility the author considers is that they came from underground aquifers, which he apparently pictures as being like giant subterranean lakes, instead of what they actually are, which is waterlogged porous rock, and therefore not really something a hybrid fish-man could swim around in.  But he then takes a look at other possibilities for their origin, such as Jupiter's moon Europa, which is thought to have a liquid ocean:

If alien fishes may live in the underground oceans of other planets, then why not fish-men hybrids like the Apkallu?  If such beings from other planetary or stellar systems arrive on the Earth, wouldn’t they prefer to build their habitat in an environment similar to their home planet or star?  Which, in this case, would be the subterranean aquifers of the Earth.

I read this whole part with the following expression:

But it only got worse from here.  He brought in the fact that lots of other cultures have traditions of gods or spirits or creator-beings coming from the water as support for the fact that our agricultural aquifers might be home to fish people from Europa, and then launches into where else in the universe they might be from.  His conclusion, after studying the Indian Vedic literature, is that the most likely place is the Big Dipper, known to astronomers as the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).  Even though the Big Dipper isn't really a place you can be from because it's composed of stars all at greatly varying distances from the Earth, and that only appear to be near each other because of our perspective:

The Big Dipper as seen from Earth (top) and as seen after a ninety-degree rotation around the bottom-left star in the constellation

We're then told that the Pope's funny hat has the shape it does because it's supposed to be an open-mouthed fish, so secretly commemorating the super-intelligent fish-men, even though the history of the papal headgear is pretty well documented.  But "damn the facts, full steam ahead!" seems to be this guy's motto, as we find out shortly thereafter when he talks about the Wandjina, rain gods that were part of the belief system of the Indigenous Australians near Kimberley, and says that the -djin- part of Wandjina is connected to the Arabic djinn, variously translated as "spirits" or "demons" (anglicized to "genie").

But here the author breaks a fundamental rule, to wit: do not fuck around with a linguist.  Just because the same four letters occur in Wandjina and djinn does not mean they are cognates.  Linguistics is not some kind of weird combination of free association and the Game of Telephone, something I would be happy to expound upon at greater length, given that this was basically the take-home message of my master's thesis.  The languages of the native Australians have zero connection with Arabic, and in fact, damn little connection with each other; there are at least 250 non-mutually-intelligible languages in Australia, which (as far as recent scholarship tells us) belong to thirteen different language families and isolates.

And none of them are related to Arabic.

Well, my response to the article is rapidly approaching the length of the article itself, and I haven't even gotten to the comets and the pine cones and Masaru Emoto's happy ice crystals.  I guess you'll just have to slog your way through the article yourself if you want to find out more.

Me, I'm ready to think about something else for a while.  After I finish my glass of wine and figure out how to get this seatbelt unbuckled.

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Seeing in a different light

One of the most influential teachers I've ever had was my high school biology teacher, Jane Miller.  She had a way of making just about everything interesting, from biochemistry to the parts of the cell to the parts of the human body.

I still recall one time she completely boggled my mind.  It was when we were studying the anatomy and physiology of the eye, and she told us that the human eye could only perceive a tiny little slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The rest -- radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays -- are all light, just like visible light, differing only in frequency and wavelength.  It's just that our eyes aren't built to be sensitive to these other parts of the spectrum.

Further, because of the way light refraction works, the structure of our eyes would have to be different if they could detect different frequencies.  To see in the radio region of the spectrum, for example, we would need to have eyes larger than wagon wheels.  Which would be a little cumbersome.

Nevertheless, there are animals that can see at least some parts of the spectrum we can't.  Mosquitoes can see in the infrared region -- one of several ways the little buggers find you in the dark.  Bees can see into the ultraviolet, and in fact some bee-pollinated flowers have coevolved to reflect in the ultraviolet region.  These flowers might look white or solid-colored to our eyes, but to a bee, they're spangled with spots and stripes -- advertisements that there's nectar inside.

"But... does that mean there are other colors, ones we can't see?" I asked Ms. Miller.  "What color would ultraviolet light be?"

"No one knows," Ms. Miller said.  "You'd have to be a bee to find out."

Mind = blown.

While we still don't know what these other regions of the spectrum would look like to animals that can perceive them naturally, we now have devices that can take photographs sensitive to different frequencies -- effectively converting this invisible (to us) light into visible light so we can see the patterns made by light sources emitting in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  This, in fact, is why this subject comes up; just last week, the James Webb Space Telescope returned stunning photographs of the Phantom Galaxy (M74), not only in the visible light region of the spectrum, but in the infrared.  Here's what it looks like to our eyes:

And here's what the same galaxy would look like if our eyes could see in the infrared:

We really are only sensing a vanishingly small part of what's out there -- and we are fortunate to live in a time when our devices are allowing us to get a glimpse of what the world would look like to eyes different from our own.

I don't know how anyone wouldn't be awestruck by the photos being taken by the JWST.  We need to be reminded of the grandeur and majesty of the universe, not only for our aesthetic appreciation, but to force us to realize the pettiness of our own small concerns against the backdrop of the galaxies.  A little humility goes a long, long way.

So check out the ongoing updates from NASA/JPL.  I bet you'll have your mind blown over and over again -- just like mine was back in tenth grade biology when I first realized that everyone doesn't see the world the same way.  Because that's a great thing to be reminded of, too -- that our narrow little viewpoint isn't universal.  It's what I tried to capture in the final conversation between the character of Duncan Kyle and the enigmatic Sphinx, in my novel Sephirot -- when Duncan is trying to argue that of course what he's seeing is real:

"It's a matter of practicality," Duncan said, an edge of anger in his voice.

"No," the Sphinx replied.  "It is a matter of Duncan Kyle deciding that he knows what is possible and what is impossible.  Who appointed you the Arbiter of Truth?"

"Isn't that what all humans do?"

"It's what they stop doing," the Sphinx said, "if they want to know what the Truth actually is.  You really think your puny, nearsighted eyes, your weak ears, your dull and calloused skin, can sense everything there is to sense?  That your feeble brain can know everything there is to know?  How arrogant of you."

"I never thought of it that way."

"So a man who cannot prove that he isn't a reflection of a reflection, who doesn't know whether he is flesh and blood or a character in someone else's tale, sets himself up to determine what is possible."  She chuckled.  "That's rich."

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Quack

When I saw a headline over at Science News that contained the phrase "Ancient Demon Ducks," I knew I had found my topic for the day.

The article turned out to be about some recent research into a group of birds called dromornithids, which lived in Australia for about twenty million years, only becoming extinct about forty thousand years ago (thus overlapping the earliest ancestors of the Indigenous Australians by a short period).  Besides being referred to as "the demon ducks of doom" (I'm not making that up), these birds are also called mihirungs, from the Djab Wurrung words mihirung paringmal, meaning "giant bird."

Giant they certainly were.  Stirton's thunderbird (Dromornis stirtoni) reached three meters tall and could weigh over five hundred kilograms.  This puts it in second place to the much more recent Madagascar elephant bird (Aepyornis spp.), which could reach two hundred kilograms heavier than that, and still existed only a thousand years ago.

A reconstruction of Dromornis stirtoni [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.de), Dromornis BW, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I realize this doesn't look much like any duck you've ever seen, but apparently genetic analysis of fossils has established that the dromornids are most closely related to modern waterfowl.  Once again showing that appearance is not a very good indicator of genetic relationships.

The current research finds that the mihirungs may have been done in by a trait in common with several other large bird species -- slow growth rate.  The mihirungs, along with the elephant birds, the dodo, and the great auk, seem to have reached maturity slowly, in the case of mihirungs perhaps as long as fifteen years.  Time to maturity is inversely proportional to minimum viable population, the smallest number of individuals that (if conditions remain stable) could potentially stay in equilibrium or even increase, because if something starts killing them off, the population can only recover if the remaining individuals can reach sexual maturity fast enough to reproduce and replace the ones that have died.  The remaining large bird species -- ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, for example -- are all much faster to reach reproductive maturity, and have many more offspring at a time.  The slow-growing, slow-reproducing mihirungs just couldn't deal with a spike in the death rate.

And what caused that spike seems to be the same thing that did in the elephant birds, dodos, and great auks; overhunting by humans.  Eggshells of mihirungs have been found that show signs of having been cooked, and there is Indigenous art from the earliest human settlers of Australia that appear to show mihirungs amongst other animals that were targets of hunting.  So sad to say, but the weird "demon ducks of doom" were probably themselves doomed by the arrival of humans.

You have to wonder what the world would look like if humans had never come on the scene.  It's not only weird big species like the dromornids that might still be around; right where I live we'd almost certainly have passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), once the most common bird in eastern North America, hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century; and the pretty little Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), slaughtered because of their habit of eating fruit crops and declared extinct in 1939.

What's gone's gone, of course, and we should be putting our time and effort into conserving what we still have; but I can't help but wish we'd been more careful all along.  Well over 99% of all the species that have ever lived have become extinct for one reason or another, so in the long haul, extinction is unavoidable; to paraphrase Fight Club, on a long enough time scale, the survival rate of species in general is zero.  Still, it's amazing to think of what once was -- including the five-hundred-kilogram demon ducks of Australia.

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When the volcano blows

The human-inhabited part of the world dodged a serious bullet in January of 2022, when the colossal Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption took place.

Unless you're a geology buff, you might not even remember that it happened, which is kind of astonishing when you consider it.  The undersea eruption created an upward surge of water that was ninety meters tall, twelve kilometers wide, and the wave it generated displaced a volume of 6.6 cubic kilometers.  The tsunami started out nine times as high as the one that devastated Japan in 2011.

After that, a steam explosion -- caused when cold seawater rushed into the collapsed magma chamber after the eruption -- generated an atmospheric pressure wave, producing a second (and faster-moving) set of tsunamis.

The whole thing is hard to talk about without lapsing into superlatives.

The Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai eruption [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The fact that this enormous eruption only caused five deaths and ninety million dollars in damage -- compared with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which killed twenty thousand and caused over two hundred billion dollars in damage -- is due to its remote location in the Tonga Archipelago.  Had it occurred closer to heavily-inhabited coastal locations, it could have been catastrophic.

This analysis of the Tonga eruption came out right around the same time as a study out of the University of Cambridge looking at how woefully unprepared we are for a large eruption in a populated area.

"Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years. That's a roll of the dice," said study co-author Lara Mani.  "Such gigantic eruptions have caused abrupt climate change and collapse of civilizations in the distant past...  Hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped into asteroid threats every year, yet there is a severe lack of global financing and coordination for volcano preparedness.  This urgently needs to change.  We are completely underestimating the risk to our societies that volcanoes pose."

You might be wondering which are currently considered by volcanologists to be the most potentially dangerous volcanoes in the world.  Generally, these top the list:

• Mount Vesuvius/the Campi Flegrei system in Italy, which destroyed Pompeii in 79 C. E. and threatens the modern city of Naples
• Mount Rainier, southeast of the city of Seattle, Washington
• Novarupta Volcano in Alaska, which could produce climate-changing ash eruptions
• Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which has a history of violent eruptions -- and over twenty million people live less than a hundred kilometers from its summit
• Mount Saint Helens -- famous for its 1980 eruption, this volcano has been rebuilding since then and still poses a significant threat
• Mount Agung and Mount Merapi in Indonesia, part of the same volcanic arc that includes Krakatoa
• Mount Fuji in Japan -- scarily close to Tokyo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world

The whole thing is kind of overwhelming to thing about, especially given the question of what we could do about it if we knew a massive eruption was imminent.  Consider the failure of the United States government to act effectively prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- and there we had several days to do something, during which meteorologists correctly predicted the massive strengthening that would occur prior to landfall, and knew pretty accurately when and where it would occur.  With a volcanic eruption, generally geologists know one is coming at some point, but the ability to predict how big and exactly when is still speculative at best.

Imagine, for example, the reaction of the three-million-odd residents of Naples and its environs if the scientists said, "You need to evacuate the area, because there's going to be an eruption of some magnitude or another, some time in the next six months."

So the problems inherent in dealing with this threat are obvious, but (says the Mani et al. study), that's no reason to close our eyes to it, or refusing to consider possible solutions that may seem to be outside the box.  "Directly affecting volcanic behavior may seem inconceivable, but so did the deflection of asteroids until the formation of the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2016," Mani said.  "The risks of a massive eruption that devastates global society is significant.  The current underinvestment in responding to this risk is simply reckless."

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No butts about it

The early Cambrian Period was known for having some weird-looking animals, but even by Cambrian standards, Saccorhytus coronarius was pretty bizarre.

The name is a Greek and Latin composite that means, more or less, "wrinkled bag with a crown," and as disparaging as it sounds I have to admit it's pretty accurate.  The reconstruction of it from various fossils makes it look like a design for a new Pokémon that was rejected on the basis of being too outlandish:

One thing you'll notice about it is that it has no anus.  This, by itself, isn't as odd as it sounds; whole phyla of animals, notably Cnidaria (which includes jellyfish and sea anemones) and Platyhelminthes (flatworms) only have one opening in their digestive tract, meaning once they finish digesting their dinner, they spit the undigested bits out of their mouths.  This lack of a nether orifice has made poor Saccorhytus the butt of many jokes, and in fact I was going to title this post "Assless chaps" but was informed that the more prudish members of my readership might take that the wrong way.

Be that as it may, the spikes combined with its other weird features made it hard to classify.  The first Saccorhytus fossils seemed to have additional holes near the mouth, which initially were thought to be openings for gills but later turned out to be  places where spines had broken off during fossilization.  This has altered our understanding of where it fits on the animal family tree; initially, the supposed gill slits suggested it might be related to deuterostomes (including starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and vertebrates).  The fact that this was an artifact of fossilization, coupled with some new research, has placed it instead amongst the Ecdysozoa.  Ecdysozoa is Greek for "animals that get undressed" (speaking of undignified scientific names) because of their ability to shed and regrow their exoskeletons, and includes the familiar phyla Arthropoda, Nematoda, and Tardigrada, as well as less-well-known groups like Priapulida ("penis worms"), which takes "undignified names" to the next level.

Here's the current best-supported arrangement for known animal groups, with the Saccorhytus's branch shown in red:

So that's today's news from the No Ifs, Ands, or Butts department.  (Sorry, I'll stop with the middle-school humor.  Probably.)  Saccorhytus isn't a close relative of ours, but more allied to insects and roundworms.  Still, the lack of a hind end means it's not exactly a comfortable fit in that group either.  Of course, "if you haven’t got an anus," said study lead author Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol, "you’re not going to be very comfortable anywhere."

Okay, look, that one wasn't my fault.  The scientist himself said it.

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Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely,

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos.  Predictably, like the person who sent me the links, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak."

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there.

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

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