Remnants of lost oceans

A few days ago I ran across some new research out of Utrecht University about the Pontus Plate, which because (1) I was raised Catholic, (2) I have a thing for Roman history, and (3) apparently I need new glasses, I keep misreading as "Pontius Pilate."

The Pontus Plate has nothing to do with New Testament Bad Guys.  It's a remnant of a (very) old tectonic plate that mostly vanished on the order of 120 million years ago, during a time when the Pacific Ocean was a great deal bigger than it is now, and the Atlantic Ocean had just started to form, rifting apart North and South America from Europe and Asia.

To see what's going on here, first a bit of background.

In general, there are three kinds of boundaries you find on the edges of plates.  A real geologist (not just a dilettante layperson like myself) would tell you it's way more complex than this, which is certainly true, but this is at least a broad-brush categorization:

1. Divergent zones, also called rifts, which are where magma is upwelling from the mantle, creating drag that moves plates apart.  Examples are the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone and the East African Rift Valley, the latter of which was the subject of a post here at Skeptophilia only a few days ago.
2. Convergent zones, where plates move together.  When one or both of the plates is an oceanic plate -- which are thinner and more brittle -- one will dive underneath the other, causing a trench or a thrust fault.  The plate that dives down (subducts) eventually melts, giving rise to volcanoes, such as the ones in Japan, Indonesia, the Caribbean, and the Cascade Range.  When both of the colliding plates are continental plates -- thick, stiff, and cold, kind of like Ron DeSantis -- the two simply pile up against each other until friction slows them down.  This is the process that formed -- and is still forming -- the Himalayas and the Alps.
3. Transform faults, also called strike-slip faults, where two plates slide more-or-less parallel to each other.  An example is the San Andreas Fault in California, amongst many others.

New oceanic plate is constantly being formed at divergent zones and destroyed at convergent zones, so the entire tectonic map of the Earth is always shifting, the pieces breaking up and reassembling a bit like sheets of ice on a flowing river in March.

Sometimes, when the process of destroying a particular plate exceeds the process of forming it, the plate is doomed to disappear eventually.  This is happening right now to the Juan de Fuca Plate, off the northwest coast of North America:

The Juan de Fuca Plate, sandwiched between the much larger Pacific and North American Plates. The blue line is a convergent zone, the red lines are divergent zones, and the green lines are transform faults. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alataristarion, JuanDeFucaPlate, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Juan de Fuca Plate is one of five small chunks that are all that are left of the enormous Farallon Plate, which once extended under much of the eastern half of the Panthalassa Ocean, the enormous mega-ocean covering seventy percent of the Earth's surface when the continents were locked up as Pangaea.  (The other four pieces are the Explorer, Gorda, Nazca, and Cocos Plates.)

The rather roundabout point I'm trying to make here is that the plates don't last forever, and there are some of them that have undoubtedly disappeared entirely.  Which makes what geologist Suzanna van de Lagemaat and her team did pretty astonishing.

Using data on remnants of oceanic rock in  Japan, Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand, van de Lagemaat was able to reconstruct one of the huge oceanic plates that was on the opposite side of Panthalassa from the aforementioned Farallon Plate, a now mostly-vanished plate she christened Pontus.  The biggest hints came from the northern region of the island of Borneo and from the highly active plate margin near the Philippines (which is responsible for the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that strike the island chain with clocklike regularity).

"We... conducted field work on northern Borneo, where we found the most important piece of the puzzle," van de Lagemaat said.  "We thought we were dealing with relicts of a lost plate that we already knew about.  But our magnetic lab research on those rocks indicated that our finds were originally from much farther north, and had to be remnants of a different, previously unknown plate...  The Philippines is located at a complex junction of different plate systems.  The region almost entirely consists of oceanic crust, but some pieces are raised above sea level, and show rocks of very different ages."

The research is pretty impressive.  "Eleven years ago, we thought that the remnants of Pontus might lie in northern Japan, but we’d since refuted that theory," said Douwe van Hinsbergen, Van de Lagemaat’s Ph.D. supervisor, and senior author of the study.  "It was only after Suzanna had systematically reconstructed half of the 'Ring of Fire' mountain belts from Japan, through New Guinea, to New Zealand that the proposed Pontus Plate revealed itself, and it included the rocks we studied on Borneo."

[Image from van de Lagemaat et al., Nature, October 2023]

The whole thing is fascinating.  Geologists studying what are now widely-separated rock formations are able to reconstruct the remnants of a lost oceanic plate from over a hundred million years ago, a time when our ancestors were still small, scurrying furry creatures, and the asteroid collision that would end the dinosaurs' hegemony was still a good sixty million years in the future.  Reconstructing a puzzle of that magnitude is an amazing feat -- making me wonder what pieces of the past still lie undiscovered, waiting for some brilliant researcher like Suzanna van de Lagemaat to reassemble.

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

The exploding lakes of Cameroon

Dear Readers: I'm going to be taking a couple of days off just to catch my breath.  Keep those topics coming!  The next Skeptophilia post will be on Wednesday, October 11.  Cheers!

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

Prompted by yesterday's post, about the bizarre, beautiful, and deadly hot springs of Dallol, Ethiopia, a reader commented, "Yes, but have you heard about the exploding lake of Cameroon?"

Being a bit of a geology buff, I had indeed, but I don't believe I've ever written about them here.  So, without further ado, meet Lake Nyos:

Its peaceful appearance belies its behavior.  It's a crater lake, a water-filled depression in the middle of the remnant of a (in this case, very active) volcano.  Lake Nyos is part of the Oku Volcanic Field, a relatively poorly-studied geological feature in the Cameroon Line.  The latter is (as you'd guess) a nearly straight line of faults and volcanoes running the entire length of Cameroon from southwest to northeast.  This, in turn, appears to be part of the Central African Shear Zone, a region of unexplained thin crust and high torque that is prone to catastrophic ruptures.

So at first glance, it seems like nothing more than a seismically-active fault zone, which (after all) are nothing unusual.  But the Oku Volcanic Field, and the part of it under Lake Nyos, has a feature that is nothing short of wild.

The magma underneath Oku holds tons (literally) of dissolved carbon dioxide.  Why this is so is not understood, but it's probable that the magma has been in contact with layers of carbonate rocks, such as limestone.  When magma contacts carbonates, the intense heat breaks them down -- the metal ions (usually calcium and magnesium) bond to the aluminum and silicon oxides present in the magma, forming pyroxenes, while the carbon is released as carbon dioxide.  

As long as this carbon dioxide is under pressure, it remains dissolved (whether in the magma or in water the magma is in contact with), and all is well.  But the problem with Lake Nyos is twofold.  First, the bottom of the lake is very deep, and has seams and cracks extending far down toward the magma chamber.  Second, its water is highly stratified -- the top is warm and buoyant, the lowest layers cold and dense.

And it's into that cold, dense layer at the bottom that the carbon dioxide has been seeping for centuries.

The result is something like a bottle of champagne.  Keep the cork on, and nothing happens.  Shake it, then pop the cork...

The shake came with a relatively small underwater landslide on August 21, 1986.  This jostled the water in the lake -- as you'd expect -- and in an ordinary lake, this probably wouldn't have caused anything other than some bottom mud being stirred to the surface.  But remember that the lower strata of the water column in Lake Nyos were supercharged with carbon dioxide, with the pressure of all the upper layers keeping it in solution.  As soon as it started to rise, the dissolved carbon dioxide came bubbling out.

Bubbles expand as they rise.  Disturbing the water more, and bringing more water up.  Releasing more carbon dioxide.  The result?

The lake exploded.

An enormous blast of carbon dioxide blew out of the lake, and as carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it filled the valley and then poured over the margin, rushing downhill at an estimated one hundred kilometers an hour.  Within minutes, over seventeen hundred people living in villages downhill from the valley rim had been smothered to death.

Since then, efforts have been made toward degassing the lake -- running vertical pipes all the way down to the bottom, attached to pumps the bring the supersaturated water to the surface and allow the carbon dioxide to fountain off gradually and harmlessly.  How effective this will be in preventing another deadly explosion is unknown -- and there are at least two other lakes, Lake Monoun in Cameroon and Lake Kivu, between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, that have been shown to have supersaturated bottom strata as well.

Lake Kivu, by the way, is two thousand times bigger than Lake Nyos.

So that's a little alarming.  Especially given how many people live near these bodies of water.  It's the usual problem; volcanic soils are good for agriculture, and the gas eruptions don't happen that often... and people have short memories.

Yet another reason I'm glad I live where I do.  The climate may be a little dismal -- it's been described as nine months of expectations followed by three months of disappointments -- but I'll take that over exploding lakes any day.

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

A beautiful hellscape

One of the strangest places on Earth is in eastern Ethiopia.  Not that many people have even heard of it, for the very good reason that if you go there, there are about a million and one ways you could die.

It's called Dallol, which comes from a word in the Afar language meaning "disintegration."  The name comes from the fact that this is what would happen to you if you went for a swim there.  It lies in the Danakil Depression, and is a maze of hot springs, filled with water that gets up to 95 C and can have a pH of less than 1.  It's surrounded by evaporite plains covered with layers of magnesium, calcium, and iron oxide, crystalline salt, and elemental sulfur.

The place doesn't even look real:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kotopoulou Electra, The hydrothermal system of Dallol, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The highest elevation in Dallol is 48 meters below sea level.  The region gets ridiculously hot -- think Death Valley in midsummer -- so tourism, even if you were so inclined, is pretty much out of the question.

Where it gets even more interesting is why, if the place is entirely below sea level, it's not under water.  And this has to do with the geology of the region, and how it was created in the first place.

Dallol and the Danakil Depression are part of the East African Rift System, which formed in the Miocene Epoch on the order of fourteen million years ago.  Basaltic magma upwelling from the mantle created a crack in the Earth's crust and began to fracture the African Plate.  This generated a long rift valley running more-or-less northeast to southwest, from the shore of the Red Sea in Ethiopia, under Lake Victoria, then southward through Tanzania and all the way to Malawi.  The entire thing is seismically active, but the north end especially so, experiencing nearly constant earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- not to mention a huge amount of hydrothermal activity, such as you see at Dallol.

The water of the Red Sea is currently being held back by the barrier of the Erta Ale Range, which blocks the East African Rift Valley on its northeastern end.  Eventually, though, the barrier will be breached as the rift continues to open up, and the water will come pouring in.  At that point, all of Dallol and the Danakil Depression -- and a large part of the rest of the valley -- will be an inlet of the Indian Ocean.

That won't stop the rift from continuing to spread, though.  The entire "Horn of Africa" will separate from the rest of the continent and go sliding off to the east.  As I've pointed out before, it's only our short life spans that make us think the current configuration of continents is permanent.

For now, though, the Erta Ale Range is holding the ocean back, allowing us to take a look at one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.  What I find most curious is that a part of this same system of rifts -- farther south, in Kenya and Tanzania -- is thought to be the cradle of humanity.  Much of the history of our earliest ancestors, species like Paranthropus and Australopithecus and Ardipithecus, took place here.  Somehow they dealt with the heat and drought and seismic activity (as well as the predators), surviving long enough to evolve into Homo sapiens, who then pretty much rushed out and took over the whole planet.

Odd to think that a beautiful hellscape was where humanity first got its start.

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

The legend of the Bell Witch

Skeptics trying to tease apart fact from fiction in accounts of allegedly paranormal occurrences are fighting against a confluence of human tendencies, including:

• In general, our memories are way worse than we think they are.
• Some level of confirmation bias -- accepting weak or faulty evidence supporting something we already believed -- is nearly impossible to eradicate completely, even in the most rational of rationalists.
• Our sensory/perceptive apparatus is not very accurate.  We all have the unfortunate capacity for misperceiving, or failing to notice entirely, things that are going on around us.
• Recounting a tale and giving it a scary spin has way more of a cachet than telling a completely prosaic one.  If you say to your friends, "It was late at night... all was quiet... then suddenly there was a crash, and the dog started barking!  I was terrified!  I went outside..."  *dramatic pause*  "... and one of the garbage cans had fallen over," no one is going to be very impressed.  In fact, the next time you start telling a story, your friends might well suddenly realize they had pressing engagements elsewhere.
• People like making shit up.

The problem amplifies when stories are retold over and over, because all of these tendencies add up, causing the tale to grow by accretion in what amounts to a giant, free-floating game of Telephone.  By the time a few decades of this has passed, you have a legend that has taken on a life of its own, in which it is probably impossible to determine for sure which parts of it are true and which parts are not.

And there's no better example of this than the legend of the Bell Witch.

The story originates in Robertson County, Tennessee in the early nineteenth century, and centers around the Bell family, headed by John Bell, Sr.  Bell himself was real enough; he was born in 1750 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, married a woman named Lucy Williams, and moved to Tennessee in 1804.  He and Lucy had six children -- Jesse, Betsy, Richard, John Jr., Drewry (known as Drew), and Benjamin.  John Bell, Sr. died on December 19, 1820 after suffering for four years from a neurological disorder that may have been some form of Bell's palsy (the fact that the disease carries John's name is a coincidence; it was named after the first physician to study it extensively, Charles Bell of Edinburgh, Scotland, who appears to be unrelated to John.)

Artist's sketch of Betsy Bell (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problems started in 1816, when John Sr. was working in his field and saw a strange creature that looked like a dog with a rabbit's head.  Alarmed, he picked up his shotgun and fired at it, but it disappeared.  Shortly afterward John's son Drew saw a bird perched in a tree, but as he approached it, it spread its wings and "grew to enormous size" before flying away.  One of the Bell family's slaves said he'd been attacked by a dog-like animal on the way to his cabin in the evening.  Betsy Bell saw a young girl in a green dress swinging from the limb of an oak tree -- she didn't recognize the child, and like the rabbit/dog, the girl vanished when approached.

Events accelerated.  Now sounds were heard inside the house -- chains rattling, knocking inside the walls, animal growls, the grating of teeth gnawing on the furniture.  John Sr. started showing symptoms of the progressive paralysis that would ultimately claim his life.  Sheets were pulled from the children's beds at night, their hair pulled and faces scratched.  Betsy had the worst of it -- she was repeatedly slapped at night by an unseen entity.

Artist's sketch of the Bell home (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A neighbor, James Johnston, came in to help, and tried to talk to whatever it was that was causing the uproar.  A feeble voice answered, "I am a spirit; I was once very happy but have been disturbed."  When asked how it had been disturbed, it gave vague answers about Native American burial grounds, which launched Drew Bell and his friend Bennett Porter on a search for a gravesite, but they found nothing.

The spirit allegedly could quote the Bible fluently, and was aware of what was going on outside the Bell property -- it recited word-for-word a sermon given in a nearby church (the contents later verified by someone who had attended), and began recounting gossip about what was going on in other households in the area.

The story spread.  Andrew Jackson visited the Bell homestead in 1819, and is said to have "experienced the haunting himself."  One person who came to speak to the spirit asked what his grandmother would have said if there was trouble, and the spirit immediately responded in the grandmother's thick Dutch accent, "Hut tut, what has happened now?"  Another asked about his parents in England -- and later reported that the entity had visited his parents and spoken with them.

The whole episode reached its climax when one day the spirit -- now nicknamed "the Bell Witch" -- told John Bell Sr. that he was going to die in seven days, because she was going to poison him.  His neurological condition worsened steadily over the following days, and he lapsed into a coma on December 17 from which he never recovered.

After that, things seemed to settle down, although the spirit allegedly told the widowed Lucy Williams Bell that it would return in seven years.  According to the Bells' third child Richard, it did, but "they chose to ignore it and it eventually left, discouraged."

So, that's the legend.  What parts of it are true?

What's interesting here is that all of the named players in the drama are well documented in contemporary records.  There's no doubt that the Bell family and their neighbors existed.  The rest of the legend is largely the responsibility of Martin Van Buren Ingram, who in 1890 published a book called An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, which recounts the story pretty much in the form I've described.  He claimed that he based the book on Richard Bell's diary -- which, interestingly, no one else has mentioned in any context, and doubters believe never existed at all.  The book begins with a brief description of the legend, followed by this passage:

Now, nearly seventy-five years having elapsed, the old members of the family who suffered the torments having all passed away, and the witch story still continues to be discussed as widely as the family name is known, under misconception of the facts, I have concluded that in justice to the memory of an honored ancestry, and to the public also whose minds have been abused in regard to the matter, it would be well to give the whole story to the World.

Skeptic Brian Dunning finds the delay between the events of the legend and the publication of the book a little suspicious.  "Conveniently, every person with firsthand knowledge of the Bell Witch hauntings was already dead when Ingram started his book," Dunning writes, in a wonderful piece over at Skeptoid about the alleged haunting.  "In fact, every person even with secondhand knowledge was dead."

Even the visit by Andrew Jackson is never mentioned anywhere else, and Dunning strongly suspects it never happened.

As far as the other details of the story, he thinks there's nothing to them either, other than a tale that grew by accretion -- much as I described at the beginning of this post.  "Vague stories indicate that there was a witch in the area," Dunning writes.  "All the significant facts of the story have been falsified, and the others come from a source of dubious credibility.  Since no reliable documentation of any actual events exists, there is nothing worth looking into.  I chalk up the Bell Witch as nothing more than one of many unsubstantiated folk legends, vastly embellished and popularized by an opportunistic author of historical fiction."

Ingram's retelling, though, continues to be compelling, and supposedly was one of the inspirations for the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project.  You have to admit passages like this do provide a certain frisson:

Whether it was witchery, such as afflicted people in past centuries and the darker ages, whether some gifted fiend of hellish nature, practicing sorcery for selfish enjoyment, or some more modern science akin to that of mesmerism, or some hobgoblin native to the wilds of the country, or a disembodied soul shut out from heaven, or an evil spirit like those Paul [sic] drove out of the man into the swine, setting them mad; or a demon let loose from hell, I am unable to decide; nor has anyone yet divined its nature or cause for appearing, and I trust this description of the monster in all forms and shapes, and of many tongues, will lead experts who may come with a wiser generation, to a correct conclusion and satisfactory explanation.

Not to mention the fact that it could also be a strong contender for winning the Run-On Sentence Of The Year award.

In any case, I'm inclined to agree with Dunning.  Although the people in the story were real enough, that's more than you can say for the events that allegedly happened to them.  As creepy as the story of the Bell Witch is, there's not much more here than a tall tale that probably started from a family patriarch's mysterious illness -- and after that, the add-ons came from some combination of confirmation bias, misremembering, and the pure fun of telling a story that makes the listeners shiver.

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

What's in a name?

In the way that viral nonsense always goes, every few months I see a resurgence of a post (actually a collection of similar posts) which takes your first name and purports to tell you what its "deep meaning" is.  And of course, you're always told that your particular name means something like "Joyful Soul" or "Beautiful Dreamer" or "Fierce Warrior."

It shouldn't require my pointing out that almost all of these alleged meanings are wrong.  The Deep Meaning Generator doesn't give a flying rat's ass what your actual name is; it simply takes it and randomly assigns one of a list of pre-programmed positive-sounding results that are intended to make you think, "Yes... that's me!  Courageous Friend!  I knew it!"

Most western European first names are considerably more prosaic than that.  A few do have origins that sound like they could come from the Deep Meaning Generator; Reginald, for example, means "powerful ruler," which is kind of funny because these days Reginald is not generally thought of as being the most manly name in the world.  (My apologies to any Reginalds in the studio audience.)

A few of the oldest names in the European tradition go back to Hebrew.  A lot of names containing el or elle come from the Hebrew El, meaning "god."  Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Elijah, Elias, and Elizabeth (and the various names derivative from those) mean, respectively, "God's gift," "God's strength," "God's healing," "Yahweh is God," "God is Lord," and "God's promise."  Other names originating in Hebrew are John/Jonathan ("God's grace"), Joseph ("Yahweh shall add"), and Mary/Maria//Mara/Miriam ("bitterness").

A lot of the harsh-sounding old Germanic names have gone out of vogue, and some of those did have meanings that come across as wishful thinking on the part of the parents.  For example, the bert part in Albert, Herbert, Bertram, Gilbert, Bertrand, Bertha, and Robert comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "bright" or "brilliant."  But there are plenty of first names that have meanings that are simply weird.

Cecil/Cecile/Cecilia means "blind."  Emile/Emily/Emilia means "rival."  "Courtney" means "short nose."  Leah means "weary."  Calvin means "bald."  Tristan means "outcry."  Rebecca means "bound" or "tied."  Bailey means "manager."  Deborah and Melissa both mean "bee" -- in Hebrew and Greek, respectively.  Cameron means "crooked nose." 

And my own name, Gordon?  Gaelic for "hill dweller."  Oddly appropriate, since just about all of my ancestors were Scottish and French peasants.

But the reason I chose to write about this goes beyond looking at some strange linguistic origins, as fun as that is.  What I'm more curious about is why those Deep Meaning Generators are so damn popular.  Do people actually believe that what they're saying is true, despite the fact that you can find the (actual) linguistic origin of your own name with a fifteen-second Google search?

Or do they know it's not real, and don't care?

I honestly suspect it's the latter, because the one time I went against my better judgment and did the "Well, actually..." thing -- I hardly ever do that, because (1) arguing online is the very pinnacle of pointlessness, and (2) it's fucking obnoxious at the best of times -- I got a response of, "I don't care if it's true, it's fun to believe it."

Which I find utterly baffling.  I don't get any satisfaction at all out of telling everyone that Gordon means "Blissful Spirit" when I know it doesn't.  Plus, the bigger concern here is one that I've addressed before, in the context of the "What's the harm?" objection to believing in stuff like astrology and Tarot divination; putting aside your critical thinking facilities in one setting makes it that much easier to put them aside in more important settings, like your health.

I get that rational thinking is hard, and that the harsh reality of evidence-based understanding can be problematic when it comes into conflict with our dearly-held beliefs or desires.  But unfortunately, credulity is a habit, and one we have to work hard against, even when it seems harmless.

So those are my thoughts for this morning.  Sorry if it makes me seem like a humorless curmudgeon.  Hopefully regular readers of Skeptophilia will know I'm not humorless; as far as the "curmudgeon" part, my wife would be happy to discuss that with you at length.  But anyhow, as a linguist and someone who is dedicated to pursuing the truth, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop reposting the fake Deep Meaning Generator things.  Because I'm tired of seeing stuff like people claiming that Wanda means "Heart of Gold" when it actually means "sheep herder."

Thank you.

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

The Flannan Isles mystery

In the classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock," the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse off the coast of England -- and find that it's under siege, and its unfortunate crew are being killed one at a time by something that appears to be able to shapeshift.

The culprit turns out to be a Rutan, an alien that (in its original form) looks a little like a cross between a giant jellyfish and a moldy lime.

The Rutans were attempting to wipe out humanity so they could use the Earth as their new home base, something that (if you believe classic Who) was the aim of every intelligent alien species in the galaxy and happened on a weekly basis, but for some reason this bunch of aliens decided the best place to launch their attack was a lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere.  Be that as it may, by the time the Doctor and Leela foiled the Rutans' evil plot, all the people in the lighthouse were dead and/or vanished, so this definitely stands out as one of the Doctor's less successful ventures (although he did save the Earth, so there's that).

There are two curious things about this episode that are why it comes up today.

The first is that during its premier broadcast, on November 22, 1987, transmission was suddenly interrupted and replaced by a signal showing a guy wearing a Max Headroom mask babbling about random stuff (including his opinion of "New Coke" and the television series Clutch Cargo) and finally ending with him getting spanked on the bare ass with a flyswatter while a female voice shouted, "Bend over, bitch!"

The source of this transmission -- which I swear I am not making up -- was never identified.

The other strange thing about the episode is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the green jellyfish alien part, but the mysterious deaths/disappearances from a lighthouse part.  On December 15, 1900, the steamship Archtor was near the Flannan Isles in the seas off the Outer Hebrides and noticed that the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, the largest island in the chain, was not working.  They reported this to the authorities, but bad weather kept anyone from investigating until eleven days later.

When they got there, the lighthouse was abandoned, and the three crew -- James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur -- were all missing.

There were plenty of signs of recent habitation -- unmade beds, lamps cleaned and refilled, and so on -- but no indication of what might have happened to the crew.  The lighthouse logs indicated nothing amiss other than some inclement weather, which is hardly unusual off the coast of Scotland in winter.  It must be mentioned that there had been extensive storm damage downslope from the lighthouse; a metal storage box thirty meters above sea level had been broken open, presumably by the surf, its contents strewn, and an iron railing set in rock was bent nearly flat.  Robert Muirhead, superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, said some of the damage was "difficult to believe unless actually seen."

Still, it's presumed that the three missing men -- all highly experienced lighthouse operators, who had been on the job for years -- would have known better than to go out and walk the beach in the middle of a December storm.  The lighthouse itself was undamaged, so whatever killed its keepers seems to have taken place outside the building.  Muirhead's conclusion was that they'd gone out to try to secure the metal storage box that was later found damaged, and a rogue wave had swept them away.

There are two problems with this explanation.  The first is that there was only one missing set of oilskins, implying that two of the men went out into a raging winter storm in their shirtsleeves.  The second is that the worst of the damage seems to have happened after the lighthouse was abandoned; it was already not operating on the 15th, and the serious storms (the ones that prevented anyone from investigating for a week and a half) didn't start till the 16th.  It's possible they were killed by rogue surf and/or bad weather, but this doesn't really answer all the questions.

So of course, this didn't satisfy most people, and that's when the wild speculation started.  Sea serpents, an attack by the malevolent spirits of drowned sailors, abduction by foreign agents, and even that the three men had absconded so they could take up new lives elsewhere.  A logbook surfaced claiming that there had been a devastating storm lasting four days -- from December 11 to December 14 -- bad enough that all three men had "spent hours praying" and Donald McArthur, an experienced lighthouse keeper, had "been reduced to helpless crying."  The weirdest part about this bit is that contemporary weather records show no indications of an intense storm during that time -- as I mentioned, the seriously bad weather didn't really start until the 16th -- and certainly if there'd been a gale bad enough to trigger fits of weeping in a veteran seaman who was safely inside an extremely sturdy building on dry land at the time, someone on one of the nearby islands would have mentioned it.

However, the veracity of the entries has been called into question, and some investigators think the entire thing is a fake.

Then there's the fact that McArthur himself was said to be "volatile" and to have a bad temper, so another possibility is that there'd been a fight -- or perhaps a murder -- and after dumping the bodies into the ocean, the guilty party had thrown had thrown himself in as well out of remorse and guilt.  However, there was no sign of any kind of altercation inside the lighthouse, and no notation in the (real) records left by the keepers that anyone had been acting out of the ordinary.

So we're left with a mystery.  Three men in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Scotland vanished, and despite a thorough investigation at the time and a lot of speculation since then, no one has been able to figure out why.

Me, I'm voting for the Rutans.

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

Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.

• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc.

• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.

• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.

• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.

• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions

• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense

• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.

• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.

• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems particularly inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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