Dog tales

People who know me are well aware that I consider our two dogs, Guinness and Cleo, to be family members, not just pets.

They're kind of an odd couple.  Guinness ("Dorkus Maximus") is a big, lumbering pit bull mix, whose thick coat and curly tail comes from some husky and chow ancestry turned up by DNA analysis; Cleo ("Dorkus Minimus") is a tiny, one-eyed pure-bred Shiba Inu rescue, whose personality supports the contention that Shibas are dogs for people who really wanted a cat instead.  Despite the fact that they seem to have nothing in common, they are best friends.  When they play tug-of-war, even though Guinness outweighs Cleo by a factor of four, he lets her win sometimes, as a good big brother should.

I've dealt here before with the fascinating questions surrounding how dogs were domesticated, and how since then they've coevolved to live with (i.e. manipulate) their owners.  So it was no surprise that a recent piece of research in the journal Anthropozoologica caught my eye.  The author, Julian d'Huy of the Collège de France, has been studying the mythology that has grown up around dogs in cultures across the world, and found some fascinating commonalities -- suggesting that our mythologizing dogs has as long a history as our domesticating them.

d'Huy found that there were three themes that seemed to be universal: (1) dogs as faithful companions to heros/heroines; (2) dogs as protector spirits and guides to the afterlife; and (3) an association between dogs and the star Sirius (the "Dog Star," the brightest star in the night sky, in the constellation Canis Major -- the "Big Dog").  

The first one is hardly surprising, given the fact that humans have had dogs as companion animals for thousands of years.  The second I find a little more puzzling.  Neither of our dogs is what you might call an effective guard dog, unless you count their mortal hatred of the Evil UPS Guy.  When the Evil UPS Guy shows up, both Guinness and Cleo go berserk, running around and barking, Guinness's booming "WOOF" punctuated by Cleo's comical and high-pitched "Ruff!", until finally the Guy gets scared and intimidated and leaves.  At least that's how they interpret it.  What seems to go through their heads is "we barked and he ran away, go us!"  Then they high-five and go back to sleep, so worn out that they wouldn't even twitch if an actual burglar were to show up.  In fact, if the burglar had some chunks of cheese in his pocket, Cleo would probably show him where the valuables are hidden.

I do think it's kind of fascinating, though, despite my own dogs' failings in the Guardian of House and Hearth department, that so many cultures associate dogs with being protector spirits, many of them shapeshifters who were thought to continue their loyal defense even in the afterlife.  Part of the elaborate tattoo on my back, shoulder, chest, and arm contains a design of two Celtic-style dogs, a tribute not only to my personal furry friends but to their role as spiritual guides and protectors.

But the oddest of all is the third of d'Huy's observations -- that apparently, Sirius was associated with dogs by more cultures than just the ancient Greeks.  Given the dubious resemblance of the constellations to the things they're supposed to represent, I always figured that most of them were completely arbitrary, and our current designations were probably the result of some ancient Greek guy looking up into the night sky at a random cluster of stars, probably after drinking way too much ouzo, and saying, "Hey, y'ever notice that bunch o' stars over there?  Looks just like a dude pouring water out of a pitcher."  And that's how "Aquarius" was born.

d'Huy's contention is that the association of Sirius with dogs isn't because there's anything especially doggy about it, but that the connection goes way back -- so much so that it's been passed down in many different cultures, and maintained even as populations traveled all over the world.  I don't know how you'd prove such an assertion, but in any case, it's kind of a strange coincidence otherwise. 

So dogs have worked their way not only into our hearts and homes, but into our stories, lore, and mythology.  I guess it only makes sense that these creatures who have become so close to us would show up in the tales we tell.  Dogs have made appearances in my own books, most notably the characters of Ahab (in Signal to Noise) and Baxter (in Kill Switch), the latter of which was the cause of one of the funniest interactions I've ever had with a reader.  I was walking down the street in my home village, and a guy I barely know came up to me and said he was reading Kill Switch, and so far, enjoying it.

"I just wanted to let you know one thing, though," he said.  "I know it's a thriller.  I know people are gonna die.  But..." -- and here, he grabbed me by the arm and looked me straight in the eye with a grim expression -- "... if you kill Baxter, I will never speak to you again."

We care deeply about our pets, even fictional ones, I guess.

But now I need to wind this up, and go see why Guinness and Cleo are barking.  My guess is it's the Evil UPS Guy again.  He just never gives up, that Guy.

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Continental bombardment

One of the reasons science is so useful is that our intuition about how things work is so often wrong.

A good example is the classic physics thought-experiment about taking two bullets -- one loaded in a gun that has the barrel perfectly horizontal, the other one held in your hand at the same height.  You fire the gun over level ground, and simultaneously let go of the bullet.  Which hits the ground first?

It seems like they should take different amounts of time; the one shot from the gun is traveling much farther, for one thing.  Most people think because of that, the dropped bullet would hit the ground first.  In fact, you undoubtedly know that (omitting the effects of air resistance or uneven terrain), the two bullets hit the ground at precisely the same time; Isaac Newton showed that the horizontal and vertical components of velocity are completely independent of one another.  It doesn't matter that the shot bullet is traveling rapidly in the horizontal direction; it and the dropped bullet have exactly the same vertical acceleration, namely 9.8 meters per second per second downward, starting from rest.  Thus they take exactly the same amount of time to hit the ground.

I was reminded of another example of this by some cool new research (which I will get to presently) I ran across yesterday.  It has to do with geology, namely, what the crust and mantle of the Earth are like.  It seems common-sensical that the surface of the Earth is uniformly cool and rocky, and the interior (judging by volcanoes) is molten; and while that isn't wrong in a broad-brush sort of way, what it misses is that there's a big difference between the rocks currently under your feet and the rocks at the bottom of the deep ocean.  Continental crust is thick, and extends both upwards into the air and downward into the mantle, a little like an iceberg; the rocks that make up the continents are, on the whole, lighter than oceanic crust, which is thin, brittle, and dense.  So the continents are literally floating in the liquid rock of the upper mantle.

This, of course, is what gives rise to plate tectonics; those iceberg-like blobs of floating rock we call continents, and the thin, heavy slabs of deep oceanic crust, jostle around on the magma of the upper mantle, colliding, pulling apart, shifting, and subducting (one piece going underneath another), and that gives rise to most of the geologic processes you've heard about.

But here's where we run into a fascinating question; why is the chemistry of continental rock (and thus its density) so different than oceanic rock?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), Tectonic plates boundaries detailed-en, CC BY-SA 2.5]

A piece of research out of Curtin University (Australia), published this week in Geology, suggests a surprising answer: the material that makes up the cratons -- the large, stable blocks of rock that form the nuclei of continents -- is extraterrestrial in origin.

Chris Kirkland, lead author of the study, was looking at the age of rocks in cratons around the world, and found something curious; their production seemed to occur at (roughly) two hundred million year intervals.  The formation of these blocks of rock coincide with the points at which the Solar System was passing through an area of dense stars in the spiral arm of the Milky Way as it orbited the Galactic Center.

"From looking at the age and isotopic signature of minerals from both the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia and North Atlantic Craton in Greenland, we see a similar rhythm of crust production, which coincides with periods during which the Solar System journeyed through areas of the galaxy most heavily populated by stars," Kirkland said.  "When passing through regions of higher star density, comets would have been dislodged from the most distant reaches of the Solar System, some of which impacted Earth.  Increased comet impact on Earth would have led to greater melting of the Earth’s surface to produce the buoyant nuclei of the early continents... Linking the formation of continents, the landmasses on which we all live and where we find the majority of our mineral resources, to the passage of the Solar System through the Milky Way casts a whole new light on the formative history of our planet and its place in the cosmos."

Of course, we've known for a while that all of the rock on Earth ultimately came from the coalescence of asteroids as the Solar System formed; but it's weird to think that the rock we're currently sitting atop may have been thrown at us by the near passage of other stars to our Sun as the entire Solar System hurtled its way around its host galaxy.  Whether Kirkland's claim will bear out under scrutiny, I don't know; but what's certain is that the methods of science has opened our eyes to a myriad processes that would have been entirely opaque to our so-called common sense.  Yes, scientists do get it wrong sometimes; they're fallible, and can misinterpret data or get hung up on their biases just like anyone.  But only science provides a protocol for catching and fixing those mistakes.

So it may not be perfect -- but for getting near to the truth, science really is the only game in town.

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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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