Collision of worlds

Recently I've done posts about exploding lakes and colossal solar storms and places where continents are being torn in two, so it seems fitting to end the week on an appropriately cataclysmic note with the discovery of the remnants of a collision between two giant ice planets.

The coolest part of all of this is that one of the people who first realized something weird was going on was an amateur astronomer named Arttu Sainio, of Järvenpää, Finland (who is listed as an author and credited as "Independent Researcher" in the paper that appeared in Nature this week -- how awesome is that?).  Matthew Kenworthy, of Leiden Observatory, was scouring the data looking for evidence of rings around stars that might be involved in planet formation, which would be indicated by a periodic dimming and brightening of the light from the parent star.  Kenworthy found a candidate -- a sunlike star called ASASSN-21qj, 1,800 light years from Earth -- and posted his find on Twitter, saying, "It's amazing, this star is fading!"  Sainio saw his tweet and responded, "But did you know that it is brightening in the infrared?"

Sainio had been looking at data from NASA's NEOWISE orbiting telescope, and found that nine hundred days before the star had begun dimming, it had shown a strong uptick in the infrared region of the spectrum.  This clued in Kenworthy that his hopes of finding a ring were dashed -- but that maybe there was something even cooler going on here.

He assembled a team of astronomers to analyze the data, including Sainio's peculiar discovery, and they came to the conclusion that the best explanation for the anomalous brightening in the infrared and dimming in the visible light region was the collision of two Neptune-sized planets -- leaving an incandescent cloud of debris orbiting the star which radiated in the infrared as the heat from the collision dissipated, but partially blocked the star's visible light at the same time.

Artist's conception of the planetary collision around ASASSN-21qj [Image courtesy of artist Mark Garlick]

What will happen to the debris cloud next is a matter of speculation, because this is the first time anyone's seen an event like this occur.  While planetary collisions aren't uncommon -- our own Moon, for example, is thought to have formed when a huge protoplanet slammed into the Earth, blowing a blob of molten rock into space that eventually coalesced as the Moon -- no one's ever watched it happen more-or-less in real time.  It's probable that the debris will pull together gravitationally and eventually form one or more planets, but there's no certainty about how long that'll take.

"It will be fascinating to observe further developments," said Zoe Leinhardt, of the University of Bristol, who co-authored the paper.  "Ultimately, the mass of material around the remnant may condense to form a retinue of moons that will orbit around this new planet, but whether that will take ten years or a thousand, we don't yet know."

So a sharp-eyed amateur astronomer tipped off a whole bunch of professional astronomers and astrophysicists to take a closer look at a star that was behaving oddly, and ended up discovering something no one had ever seen happening before.  Just goes to show what a dedicated enthusiast can accomplish.  I've often felt awkward about my lack of credentials in the field I worked in -- I taught biology for over three decades with a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's in historical linguistics -- but I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a deeply curious, passionate-if-uncredentialed amateur.

Dilettantes FTW!

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Hair apparent

One of the most frustrating things about being a skeptic is that you're never truly done putting nonsense to rest.

And I'm not even talking about nonsense in general.  Of course, humans will continue to come up with goofy ideas.  It's kind of our raison d'être.  I'm talking about specific pieces of nonsense that, no matter how thoroughly or how often they're debunked, refuse to die.

We saw one example of that last week -- the ridiculous "your name's deep meaning" generators -- but there are plenty of others.  And just yesterday, I ran into one of the most persistent.  I've seen various forms of it for years, but this time, it took the form of a jpg with a photograph of a young, handsome, long-haired (presumably) Native American man gazing soulfully out at us, and the following text, which I've shortened for brevity's sake:

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Vietnam War.

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hairstyle is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue.  Back in the Vietnam War however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical Hospital.  He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government.  He was in shock from the contents.  What he read in those documents completely changed his life.  From that moment on my conservative husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again.  What is more, the VA Medical Center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.  As I read the documents, I learned why.  It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain.  They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities.  Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’, their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas.  Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests.  They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut.  Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores.  Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores...

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years.  Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural.  Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive.  Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.  The body has a reason for every part of itself. 

 Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ’feelers’ or ’antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment.  This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out.

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems.  It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.  It contributes to sexual frustration.

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error.  It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us.  When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Well.  Let's take a closer look at this esoteric information hidden since the Vietnam War that is so incredibly top-secret and arcane that you'd only find it if you did a fifteen-second Google search for "the truth about long hair."

First, the alleged controlled experiments using Native trackers in the military never happened.  F. Lee Reynolds, of the United States Army Center for Military History, was asked to look into the claim and see if there was anything to it, and responded that the story was "pure mythology." 

The whole thing apparently didn't originate anywhere even remotely military.  It was dreamed up in toto in 2010 by one David "Avocado" Wolfe, an American conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, alt-med proponent, and raw food advocate, who is also noted for saying that "gravity is a toxin" and that "water would levitate right off the Earth if the oceans weren't salty" and that solar panels drain the Sun's power.

So we're not exactly talking about someone with a shit tonne of credibility, here.

There's no doubt that in a lot of cultures, men wear their hair long, and forcing them to cut it can cause some distress, but it has nothing to do with stopping them from "receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment."  If this was true, bald people would be significantly stupider than people with full heads of hair, and all you have to do is compare John Fetterman (bald) with Marjorie Taylor Greene (full head of hair) to see this can't be true, because you will find that Fetterman is a pretty smart guy while Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have the IQ of a PopTart.  

Hair does increase your skin sensitivity some, but it is not an "extension of the nervous system," much less "exteriorized nerves."  Hair is made of strands of keratin -- i.e., not living cells.  Can you imagine how much getting a haircut would hurt if it was actually living tissue?

And if anecdotal evidence counts for anything, I can vouch first-hand for the fact that long hair does diddly-squat for your perceptivity.  I've had long hair during three periods in my life -- like, down to the middle of my back -- and I can state authoritatively that during those times, I was not receiving magical signals from the Earth Spirits or whatnot, nor was my rather abysmal sense of direction any better than usual.  Mostly what it turned out to be was a confounded nuisance, because my hair is really thick and gets curly when it's long, so in even a mild breeze I ended up looking like this guy:

Well, I have better teeth than he does.

I now have my hair really short, which is far more comfortable when it's hot, and I haven't noticed any significant impairment of my spatial awareness.

Oh, and Kirlian photography is not picking up "electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain."  It's a photograph of the static electrical discharge emitted by an object when you place it in contact with a high-voltage source.  You can take a Kirlian photograph of a dead leaf, and last time I checked, dead leaves (1) are unable to send and receive transmissions from the environment, (2) have very poor tracking skills, and (3) don't have hair.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter.

Anyhow, the claim is patently absurd, but that hasn't stopped it from circulating, and (like the fake name meaning generators) seems to be coming around once again.  It'd be really nice if you see it posted somewhere, you'd send them a link to this post, or at least respond "This is bullshit" (feel free to reword if that's a bit harsh for you).  I don't know if my feeble efforts to stop the flow of nonsense online will do much good, but you do what you can.

Even if you're all "numbed out" from wearing your hair short.

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Lights out

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall a post I did about a year ago about the Miyake Events, seven wild solar storms that occurred over the past ten thousand years that were powerful enough to alter the atmosphere's carbon-14 balance, leaving distinct traces in the composition of tree rings.  The last, and the only one that occurred during modern times, was the 1859 Carrington Event, which (even though it was one of the weakest of the recorded Miyake Events) was bad enough to short out telegraph lines, causing sparking and numerous fires, and triggered auroras as far south as the Caribbean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arctic light - Frank Olsen, Aurora Borealis I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If anything like this happened today, it would be nothing short of catastrophic for the entire technological world, and I can say with little fear of contradiction that we are completely unprepared for any such eventuality.  A Miyake Event would very likely cause a near-total collapse of electrical grids, massive failure (or complete destruction) of satellites, and power surges in electrical wires that would almost certainly trigger widespread fires in businesses and residences.  Computers -- from home computers to massive mainframes -- would be fried.  Airline navigation systems and air traffic control would shut down pretty much immediately.  The disruption, and the cost, would be astronomical.

Well, a paper last week in The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences describes evidence of a solar storm 14,300 years ago that makes the known Miyake Events look like gentle spring zephyrs.

The study focused on a site containing partially-fossilized tree trunks along the banks of the Drouzet River in Hautes-Alpes département, France, up in the Alps near the city of Gap, the location of which is coincidentally only ten miles from the tiny village (St. Jean-St. Nicolas) where my great-grandfather was born.  The carbon-14 levels in one ring in the tree trunks indicate the most powerful solar storm on record, consistent with a coronal mass ejection hundreds of times more powerful than the Carrington Event.

The worst part is that no one knows what causes solar storms.  They show no apparent periodicity -- the spacing between the known Miyake Events varies from a little over two hundred years to well over four thousand.  Even more alarming is that solar astronomers don't know if there's any warning prior to the storm occurring, or if we'll just be sitting here on our computers looking at funny pictures of cats, and suddenly be engulfed in a shower of sparks.

The damage from even a weak Miyake Event -- not to mention the one 14,300 years ago that was the subject of last week's paper -- is hard even to guess at.  "Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth," said Tim Heaton of the University of Leeds, who co-authored the study.  "Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts...  They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable.  They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts."

Also unknown is how long it would take to repair the damage.  A conservative estimate is months.  Can you imagine?  Months with no computers, no email, no cellphones, no texting.  No online banking or business transactions.  No travel by airplane except for short hops.  No GPS.  No satellite contacts for television or radio... or national defense.  Restoring electrical grids would undoubtedly be first priority, and they'd likely be easier to repair, but still -- probably weeks with no electricity.

The result would be chaos on an unprecedented scale.

We've become so dependent on our high-tech world that it's hard to imagine what it would be like if suddenly it all just... went away.  I'm reminded of the last scenes of the brilliantly funny (if dark) Simon Pegg movie The World's End, where it turns out that the whole technological shebang is being run by a moderately malign intelligence (played to weary, long-suffering perfection by Bill Nighy) called The Network, who argues that humans need someone smart in control because we're just too idiotic to manage on our own:

The Network:  We are trying...

Gary:  Nobody's listening!

The Network:  If you'd only...

Gary:  Face it!  We are the human race, and we don't like being told what to do!
The Network:  Just what is it you want to do?

Gary:  We wanna be free!

Andrew: Yeah!

Gary:  We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!

Andrew:  Yeah!

Gary: We wanna get drunk!

Steven: Yeah!

Gary:  And we wanna have a good time!  And that's what we're gonna do!

The Network:  It's pointless arguing with you.  You will be left to your own devices.

Gary (incredulous that he's actually won the argument):  Really?

The Network:  Yeah.  Fuck it.

At which point The Network shuts down -- taking all of the world's technology with it.

Well, it looks like we might not need to fight The Network to destroy the whole superstructure of electronics we depend upon -- all it'd take is one good solar storm, and it'll be lights out for the foreseeable future.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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