A wolf, a disk, and a lighthouse

Because here in the United States, many Americans are looking at tomorrow's election the way a man walking in a railway tunnel sees the headlights of an approaching train, today I'd like to direct your attention away from the Earth entirely, into the cold, desolate voids of outer space.

Which, all things considered, seem like a pretty congenial place by comparison.

In the past week we've had three cool astronomical discoveries announced, highlighting the exciting fact of how much more we have left to learn about the universe in which we live.  The first comes from the European Southern Observatory, which got some fantastic new images of a nebula in the constellation Scorpio called the Dark Wolf Nebula, which (fitting to its name) they released on Halloween:

[Image credit: European Southern Observatory]

The Dark Wolf, and other dark nebulae -- such as the famous Coalsack Nebula in the constellation Crux -- are aggregations of dust and gas that shroud stars behind them.  They're far from being passive light-blockers, however; dark nebulae are often the sites of rapid star formation, as the material collapses into clumps and fusion starts.  Once this occurs, the radiation pressure from the newly-formed stars blows away the extra dust, revealing the newborn star cluster, such as what we see now in the Orion Nebula and the Pleaides.

The second study is a bit of a puzzle, and involves the star Vega, a bright star in the constellation Lyra easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year.  Vega is only 25 light years away, and was made famous as the origin of the alien signal in the movie Contact, which remains my all-time favorite movie.

Vega is a young A-class blue-white star about twice the Sun's mass, forty times brighter, and almost 4,000 C hotter (surface temperature).  Because of its luminosity and proximity, it's one of the most intensively-studied stars in the sky, and a recent announcement by NASA (based on data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes) indicate that it's got a feature that's peculiar by any standards -- and suggest that one scene in Contact was downright prescient.

In the movie, astronomer Ellie Arroway intercepts a transmission from an advanced technological species which contains instructions on how to build a device that warps space and time, allowing a passenger to cross interstellar distances and drop in for a visit.  When Arroway (after many twists and turns and setbacks) ends up taking a ride in the device, it brings her to Vega, where she sees a massive debris disk -- but no planets.

And that's exactly what Hubble and the JWST found.  Having a debris disk isn't at all unusual; after all, current models indicate that planet formation occurs by gravitational clumping from a flat disk surrounding the parent star (much as stars coalesce from dust and gas in dark nebulae).  But what's strange is that Vega's disk is almost entirely homogeneous, made up of a circular sheet of similar-sized particles.  No planets at all.

"Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega," said team member Andras Gáspár of the University of Arizona. " It's a mysterious system because it's unlike other circumstellar disks we've looked at.  The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."

There appears to be a trend toward gradually decreasing size at the edges of the disk, thought to be because radiation pressure tends to blow small particles outward more efficiently than larger ones.  But other than that, the disk is relatively featureless, which is something not seen in other stars of similar ages and characteristics, such as Fomalhaut in the constellation Piscis Australis.

"Given the physical similarity between the stars of Vega and Fomalhaut, why does Fomalhaut seem to have been able to form planets and Vega didn't?" said team member George Rieke, also of the University of Arizona.  "What's the difference?  Did the circumstellar environment, or the star itself, create that difference?  What's puzzling is that the same physics is at work in both."

The last story will appeal to anyone who likes to think about the extremes which nature can sometimes achieve, and has to do with something that's pretty astonishing all by itself -- neutron stars.  Neutron stars form from the gravitational core collapse of a star greater than about 1.4 solar masses; the outer atmosphere gets blown away in a supernova, and the core falls inward, overcoming electrostatic repulsion and electron degeneracy pressure, which has the effect of crushing electrons into atomic nuclei, forming (in essence) a gigantic ball of neutrons.

This means neutron stars are some of the densest known objects.  A matchbox-sized chunk of a typical neutron star would weigh three billion tonnes.  But they have another wild characteristic, which is why the topic comes up today; most of them rotate like crazy.

The reason is conservation of angular momentum -- the same reason that a spinning figure skater increases her rotational speed as she brings her arms inward.  When a neutron star collapses, this reduces its effective radius (what physicists call the moment of inertia), and the rate of rotation increases to compensate.

When the neutron star is emitting jets of radiation, this creates an effect like the beams from a lighthouse -- which is how we get pulsars.

The nebula surrounding the pulsar PSR B1509-58, which glows because of the radiation jets from the neutron star [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

And now, a team at the Technological University of Denmark has found a neutron star with a spin rate of an almost unimaginable 716 rotations per second, putting it in a tie for the fastest spinning astronomical object known.

"We were studying thermonuclear explosions from this system and then found remarkable oscillations, suggesting a neutron star spinning around its centre axis at an astounding 716 times per second," said Gaurava K. Jaisawal, first author on the study, which was published last week in the Astrophysical Journal.  "If future observations confirm this, the 4U 1820-30 neutron star would be one of the fastest-spinning objects ever observed in the universe, matched only by another neutron star called PSR J1748-2446."

So those are our cool discoveries in outer space for today.  And now, I suppose that we should reluctantly turn our attention back to the planet we live on.  If you live in the United States, please please please vote tomorrow.  If you live elsewhere, you might direct a prayer to whatever deity you happen to favor.  I know I've been a disbeliever for a good long while, but hell, at this point we need all the help we can get.

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Time to act

I know we really don't need anything else to worry about.  World events have been depressing enough, and here in the United States we've got an election on Tuesday that is making me pop Xanax as if they were Skittles.  But I ran across something in a book I'm reading that was absolutely jaw-dropping, and not in a good way, and I knew I would be seriously remiss in not writing about it here.

I mentioned a few days ago (in a post about some bizarre volcanoes in the East African Rift Zone) that I've been reading Tamsin Mather's wonderful book Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves.  Mather's specialty is monitoring gas production from volcanoes, and using the composition of offgassed material to gather information about magma characteristics and the likelihood of eruptions.  She's traveled all over the world collecting and analyzing samples, comparing hotspot volcanoes (like the ones in Hawaii) to rift volcanoes (like Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania) to trench/subduction volcanoes (like Etna, Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Fujiyama, the Andes, and the North American Cascades).  Her research puts her in position as one of the world's foremost and most knowledgeable experts on volcanic offgassing, and what it means for our understanding of what is going on inside the Earth's mantle.

In her book, she not only references currently-active volcanoes, but prehistoric eruptions -- and one of those she discusses is the astonishingly huge Siberian Traps.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons OlgaChuma Ольга Чумаченко, Плато Путорана-3, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This eruption, of a type known as a large igneous province or flood basalt, happened 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period.  Flood basalt eruptions occur when something rifts the crust of the Earth and deep-source, extremely hot basaltic (low silica content) lava flows out.  This lava is incredibly fluid, and fills up valleys like water fills a bowl.  In the case of Siberia, it was a quantity that beggars belief; current estimates stand at around four million cubic kilometers of lava.  The disaster this caused was amplified by the fact that prior to the eruption, the Earth had had a long period of warm, wet climates pretty much worldwide, facilitating the growth of widespread swamps and rainforests.  The age when this occurred is called the Carboniferous Period, so named because all that dead compressed plant matter locked up gigantic quantities of atmospheric carbon, forming enormous seams of coal.

When the Siberian Traps erupted, the lava ripped its way through those massive coal deposits, and the carbon they contained was suddenly returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Mather writes:

Estimates of total carbon dioxide emissions over the million-year-scale lifetimes of these basaltic floods are in the region of tens to hundreds of trillion tonnes...  Estimates of varying emission rates over the very long lifetimes of these provinces are harder to make than the totals, but one recent study put the maximum emission rate during the Siberian Traps at around eighteen billion tonnes per year.

The result was widespread disruption of the climate, global marine anoxia, and the largest mass extinction ever -- the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out on the order of ninety percent of life on Earth.

The kicker comes in the very next paragraph, when Mather tells us that the rate of carbon dioxide production from the most massively devastating volcanic eruption on record, the rock from which covers an area of seven million square kilometers, is half the rate our current fossil fuel use is currently churning out carbon dioxide.

I don't exaggerate when I say I had to read that passage three times before I was convinced I'd understood her correctly.

I've all too frequently heard laypeople give a sneering chuckle at the climatologists, saying stuff like, "What a lot of bullshit.  One volcanic eruption emits more carbon dioxide than all the cars on Earth do."  They rarely cite a source, and when they do it's from something like the fossil-fuel-industry-funded Heartland Institute, but -- because this opinion is a great excuse for continuing to do stuff the same way we always have -- they almost never get challenged on it.

It's astonishing how easy it is to accept a false viewpoint when it gives you a comforting reason not to do anything inconvenient to your lifestyle.

But here's the straight scoop from Tamsin Mather, who (allow me to reiterate) is a volcanologist who specializes in analysis of volcanic offgassing:

Despite the wide error bars in our estimates of the global rate of volcanic carbon degassing, what we can know is that these natural emissions pale into insignificance compared to what humans produce.  In 2019, human fossil-fuel burning released over 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.  This is seventy times more than even our most generous current estimates of global magmatic carbon degassing.  In 2022, the aviation industry alone emitted 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, eclipsing estimates of that from our planet's background tectonism before even considering other sectors of human industry.  We cannot look to Earth's volcanism today to reassure ourselves that our rate of carbon emission might not be too much of a change in terms of our planet's natural cycles.  Powerful as the forces of tectonics that daily drive the slow creep of plate movement and volcanic activity across the globe are, the human race has currently surpassed them in terms of its carbon dioxide flux to the atmosphere.  It is apposite to reflect upon the level of responsibility that should appropriately come with the level of power attained by our species that, by this carbon metric, overwhelms all Earth's volcanoes.

Despite this, we have a candidate for president here in the United States -- I doubt I need to tell you which one -- who has stated he wants to discontinue investment in renewable energy and withdraw from the Paris Accords, and frequently says "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!" to cheering crowds.

Anyhow, I'm sorry to post alarming stuff, but perhaps now isn't such a bad time after all.  We have the chance to make a difference not only by our actions and choices, but in the voting booth.  It put me in mind of a conversation that occurs in my novel In the Midst of Lions, which seems a fitting way to end this post:

Mary Hansard's face registered near panic.  "It's not just here.  It’s everything we know.  Soon it’ll all be gone, and if we don’t find a way out, us with it.  We've got to do something, now.”

Soren glanced at Dr. Quaice.  “Okay, this is scaring the shit out of me.”

Mary tightened her grip on Soren’s sleeve.  “Good.  Good.  You should be scared.  Scared people act.” She hitched a sob.  “Complacent people die.”

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Wrongness

I get a lot of negative comments.

It comes with the territory, I suppose, and I knew when I started writing this blog fourteen years ago that I would have to develop a thick skin.  Given the subject matter, there's hardly a post I do that won't piss someone off.  Here's a sampling of comments, and a brief description of the topic that elicited them:

• You are either ignorant or just stupid.  I'm putting my bet on the latter.  (after a post on machines that are supposed to "alkalinize" water to make it more healthful)
• Narrow-minded people like you are the worst problem this society faces.  (after a post on "crystal healing")
• I am honestly offended by what you wrote.  (after a post on alternative medicine)
• I can't say I warm to your tone.  (after a post on ghost hunting)
• That is the most ignorant thing I have ever read.  I could feel my IQ dropping as I read it.  (after a post in which I made a statement indicating that I think recent climate change is anthropogenic in origin)
• I hate smug dilettantes like you.  (after a post on mysticism vs. rationalism)
• You are a worthless wanker, and I hope you rot in hell.  (from a young-earth creationist)

My skin isn't thick enough that some of these don't sting.  For example, the one that called me a "smug dilettante" has a grain of truth to it; I'm not a scientist, just a retired science teacher, and if my educational background has a flaw it's that it's a light year across and an inch deep.  Notwithstanding that in a previous century people like me were called "polymaths," not "dabblers" or "dilettantes," the commenter scored a point, whether he knew it or not.  I'm well-read, and have a decent background in a lot of things, but I'm not truly an expert in anything.

Other disagreements on this list have been resolved by discussion, which is honestly what I prefer to do.  The comments that came from the posts on alternative medicine and ghost hunting generated fruitful discussion, and understanding (if not necessarily agreement) on both sides.

Most of the time, though, I just don't engage with people who choose to use the "Comments" section (or email) as a venue for snark.  You're not going to get very far by calling me ignorant, for example.  I make a practice of not writing about subjects on which I am ignorant, so even if I make an offhand comment about something, I try to make sure that I could back it up with facts if I needed to.  (Cf. this site, apropos of the individual who thinks I am ignorant for accepting the anthropogenic nature of recent climate change.  Plus, I once had the amazing Bill McKibben give me a thumbs-up for one of my climate change posts, which counts for a great deal.)

That said, what a lot of people don't seem to recognize about me is the extent to which my understanding of the world is up for grabs.  Like anyone, I do have my biases, and my baseline assumptions -- the latter including the idea that the universe is best understood through the dual lenses of logic and evidence.

But everything else?  My attitude is, if you want to try to convince me about Bigfoot or chakras or crystals or astrology or your particular take on religion or anything else, knock yourself out.  But you'd better have the evidence on your side, because even if I am a dilettante, I have read up on the topics on which I write.

I am as prone as the next guy, though, to getting it wrong sometimes.  And I am well aware of the fact that we can slide into error without realizing it.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz said, in her phenomenal lecture "On Being Wrong" (which you should all take fifteen minutes and watch as soon as you're done reading this):

How does it feel to be wrong?  Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing.  Those are great answers.  But they're answers to a different question.  (Those are) the answers to the question, "How does it feel to realize you're wrong?"  Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that, and a lot of other things.  It can be devastating.  It can be revelatory.  It can actually be quite funny...  But just being wrong?  It doesn't feel like anything...  We're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we still feel like we're on solid ground.  So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago: it does feel like something to be wrong.  It feels like being right.

To those who are provoked, even pissed off by what I write: good.  We never discover our errors -- and I'm very much including myself in this assessment -- without being knocked askew once in a while.  Let yourself be challenged without having a knee-jerk kick in response, and you have my word that I'll do the same.  And while I don't like having my erroneous thinking uncovered any more than anyone else, I will take a deep breath and admit it when I screw up.  I've published retractions in Skeptophilia more than once, which has been a profoundly humbling but entirely necessary experience.

So keep those cards and letters coming.  Even the negative ones.  I'm not going to promise you I'll change my mind on every topic I'm challenged on, but I do promise that I'll consider what you've said.

On the other hand, calling me a "worthless wanker" didn't accomplish much but making me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee all over my computer.  So I suppose that the commenter even got his revenge there, if only in a small way.

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Pearlin Jean

Appropriate to the day, I thought I'd tell you about an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange about ghosts I got into with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, one hundred percent of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never meant to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued by her vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage as he was leaving Paris fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.

• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.

• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean.  (Both of them were solidly Scottish, however, not French.)  His first marriage was to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and his second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.  Sorry if that diminishes the frisson of the season, but that's the way I see it.  On the other hand, if when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, you see the apparition of a bloody-faced woman dressed in tattered gray lace step out of the shadows -- well, good luck to you, too.

  

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The oddest volcano on Earth

As far as we've progressed in our understanding of science, we still have a long way to go.

This is true in every scientific endeavor, but I was thinking about it apropos of geology while reading volcanologist Tamsin Mather's wonderful recent book Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves.  Mather's fascinating and often lyrical narrative takes us all over the world, describing her studies of volcanoes in Nicaragua, Greece, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Indonesia, Wyoming, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.  It was this last-mentioned that got me pondering the gaps in our understanding, because she described seeing the bizarre Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in the northern part of the country.

Ol Doinyo Lengai is strange by any standards.  It sits in the middle of the East African Rift Zone, which extends from Ethiopia to Mozambique, and is one of the Earth's only above-water divergent zones, places where two pieces of crust are moving apart.  The Rift being on land won't last forever, of course; ultimately a crescent-shaped chunk of East Africa will cleave off from the rest of the continent, the ocean will flood in, and afterward the rift will (like most of the others) lie at the bottom of the sea floor.  The separated piece will then creep off to the east, becoming an island -- or, depending on how you define it, a new continent.

The violent geology of the region has created a topography that in a post last year I referred to as "a beautiful hellscape."  The Dallol Depression is already 48 meters below sea level; the only thing keeping the water out is the Afar Highlands to the east acting as a barrier.  It's not only filled with bubbling mud pots and hot springs, but its position near the equator and the surrounding mountains creating a rain shadow make it blisteringly hot -- think Death Valley in midsummer -- so despite the otherworldly beauty of the brilliantly-colored rocks, it's not a place most people would ever think of going.

But even by comparison to the strange landscape that surrounds it, Ol Doinyo Lengai is peculiar.  It is the only active volcano on Earth that produces carbonatite lava, which (as you might surmise) is rich in carbonate minerals like calcite, dolomite, sodalite, apatite, and ancylite.  The magma is cool by volcanic standards, at only around 500-600 C, and yet produces some of the most fluid, low-viscosity lava flows known, moving at around five meters per second -- so about a typical human running speed.

Staying out of the way when Ol Doinyo Lengai erupts is a really good idea.

The lava comes out dark brown or black, but once it freezes and is exposed to the air for a few days, carbonate minerals crystallize on the surface and turn it a frosty white.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thomas Kraft, Kufstein, Lava lengai, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the entire cone has a snow-covered appearance, but there's no snow there -- it's all mineral deposits.

The weirdest thing is that we don't really understand where all this carbonatite magma is coming from.  My first guess was that somehow the plumbing of the volcano was moving up through a limestone or marble deposit, and picking up the carbonates as it went, but geochemical analysis of the rocks produced from it seems to have ruled that out.  Right now, it's thought to be some kind of weird fractionation -- the source magma deep underground is separating into high-carbon and low-carbon bits, and the high-carbon bits are the ones feeding this particular volcano -- but the fact is, this is a guess, and the word you see most often attached to its mineralogy and chemistry is "peculiar."

So what's happening here in northern Tanzania -- and even more apposite, why it isn't happening anywhere else on Earth -- is a mystery.  The strangeness, though, only increases its fascination, and there are geologists who are devoting a lot of time to figuring out what is going on in this odd and inhospitable place.  Strange, too, that the East African Rift Valley is where humanity got its start; Oluduvai Gorge, where some of the best-preserved hominin fossils were found, is part of the Rift complex. 

Perhaps there's a reason we're drawn to this mysterious spot.  Our roots are here -- in one of the most tectonically-active places on the planet.  That it still leaves us with unanswered questions only makes the draw stronger, bringing us back to the place our distant kin left a hundred thousand years ago, to use the tools of science to finally understand our own ancestral home.

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Watching the clock

I've posted before about the phenomenon of dart-thrower's bias; the tendency of humans to notice outliers, and therefore give them more weight in our attention (and memory) than the ordinary background noise with which we are constantly bombarded.  And once we notice a particular outlier, we're more likely to notice it next time -- further reinforcing the effect.

I remember having an experience of this a while back.  On two consecutive work days, I noticed, when I glanced at the clock after finishing breakfast, that it was 6:43.  On the face of it, this wasn't that odd, since my alarm was always set for the same time, and I did more-or-less the same sequence of actions to get ready for work, in more-or-less the same order, every day.  But I did notice it.  And subsequently, every time I glanced at the clock after breakfast and it was 6:43, it registered.  I was less likely to pay any kind of serious attention if it was 6:46 or 6:39, because I'd already primed my brain to be more aware of one particular time.

But if you think this exemplifies dart-thrower's bias, you ain't heard nothin' yet.  There's a guy named Jordan Pearce who posted over at SpiritScience and has had a similar experience, but doesn't chalk it up to a perceptual bias in the human brain...

... he thinks it's evidence we're going to have a "planetary shift of consciousness."

For him, the time was 11:11.  Despite my feeling that 11:11 is simply the most convenient way to get from 11:10 to 11:12, Pearce thinks that this time is deeply meaningful.  Here's what he has to say:

I’ll bet that if I asked publicly how many people saw 11:11 regularly, we’d probably see a huge sea of hands popping up all over the place. Its [sic] pretty common nowadays, there’s something to it, and its about time we decoded it.

In case you answered that you’ve never noticed 11:11, I would remind you that you’re reading a blog about it right now.  Welcome to the beginning of your 11:11 synchronistic voyage.

There was a time only a few years ago when I hadn’t heard a thing about 11:11.  It was brand new to me, until it wasn’t anymore.  Interestingly enough, my 11:11 synchronicities started right around the time when I began learning about a planetary shift of consciousness… The Shift.

Okie-dokie.  But isn't something being "new until it isn't anymore" kind of the usual way things work?  Anyhow, the upshot is, if you notice 11:11, you're heading toward enlightenment, or something.  So yay for you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, Big Ben Clock Face, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then he throws in a lengthy quote from Uri Geller, who I really wish would go away.  You'd think Geller's popularity would have waned after his conspicuous inability to telekinetically bend spoons on The Tonight Show decades ago, but no, he's still around, and still making grandiose statements about psychic stuff and global consciousness and spiritual ascension.

So Geller doesn't really add anything to Pearce's credibility.  But Pearce goes on, undaunted, and tells us that it all... means something:

11:11 is a wake-up call of sorts, an initiation into the “aha” of realization that something big was going on.  Something that connected everyone.  In truth, the numbers are only a representation of what’s really going on.  A symbol for the connection taking place all over the world.  The numbers aren’t significant, but their meaning.

Well, it would certainly be a wake-up call for me, because if I rolled over in bed and saw the time was 11:11, it would mean that I'd overslept by six hours.  But that's not what he's driving at, of course.  And what sort of meaning does he ascribe to all of this?

When you observe 11:11, you notice some interesting things.  The first thing that I see is that it is a balanced equation.

Actually, it's not an equation at all, given that an equation needs an equals sign somewhere.  But do carry on.

Not only is it two elevens, but two elevens with a : in between.  Two sides of a balanced equation, that equal out at zero.  They have a stable equilibrium were they a mathematical equation.

Yes!  Two elevens with a pair of dots!  And that equals zero!  Except when it equals four:

They also come down to 4.  I feel it like a 4 elements equation, a perfect balancing of a yin and yang energy.  If you know anything about Tarot, you might think of the 4 leaders.  Prince, Princess, Queen, and King/Knight.

I thought that the Tarot cards had a King, Queen, Knight, and Page, but what do I know?  I mean, he's basically making shit up as he goes on, so may as well make this up too, right?  But it gets even better:

Now, the magic about 11:11 is not just that it’s happening to you, but it’s happening everywhere.  11:11 is a global event, it is something that people all over the world, including you right now (because you’re reading this) is experiencing.

Well, I agree that 11:11 is a global event.  In fact, it happens twice a day, no matter what time zone you're in.  That's got to be significant somehow, don't you think?

And he ends with a bang:

You are not alone.  We are all growing and learning different things, and in truth we’re really all learning the same thing.  How to love.  What is love, what does love look like, and what it means to embody Christ.

So 11:11 = 0 = 4 = synchronicity, and therefore Christ?

I mean, this is taking dart-thrower's bias and raising it to the level of performance art.  Sometimes patterns are meaningful, and sometimes they just... aren't.  Imposing some kind of cosmic significance on something that is a random occurrence doesn't make it real.

So anyhow, there you are.  I just glanced at the clock, and it's 5:36, which as times go, is all higgledy-piggledy and unbalanced, and probably points to the fact that I am feeling particularly unenlightened at the moment because I haven't had any coffee yet.  Maybe I'll feel better at 5:55, although by then I'll probably be in the shower.

Maybe I'll see what happens at 6:43.  That's bound to be interesting, right?

Of course right.

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The man in the well

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named Unås and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  Unås's brother Roe was the bishop of Streymoy, and once the boy was old enough Roe saw to it that Sverre was educated, intending that he would eventually be ordained as a priest.

However, Sverre had other ideas.  He had dreams that he was destined for greatness.  Then in 1175, when Sverre was about twenty-five, Gunnhild threw gasoline on the fire by telling him that his father wasn't actually the humble comb-maker Unås, but King Sigurd Munn of Norway, who had been killed by his brother Inge Haraldsson twenty years earlier, precipitating what would end up being a fifty-year civil war.

After finding out about his paternity, Sverre decided to head over to Norway and see what he could do to rectify the situation.

Historians differ on whether they accept the claim that Sverre was actually Sigurd's son.  The main source for this claim, Sverris Saga (thought to have been written by Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyraklaustur Monastery in Iceland), was certainly biased -- no aspersions meant toward the good abbot, but it was written under the direction and supervision of Sverre himself, so it's no surprise that in the saga the claim is treated as rock-solid fact.  And certainly, kings fathering children with mistresses isn't unusual.  But the whole thing definitely has overtones of mythology -- "the king's lost heir coming back to claim the throne" is a tale old as the hills.  (Interesting that most of the fictional ones, like Aragorn son of Arathorn and Taran the Wanderer, succeeded brilliantly, while the real-life ones, like Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and Kaspar Hauser, almost always came to bad ends.)

Whether or not his claim was legitimate, Sverre certainly acted like he deserved the throne.  He landed in Norway in 1176, and predictably meeting with little support, allied himself with a rebel group called the Birkbeiners ("Birchlegs," so called because they were so poor they made themselves leggings out of birch bark).  And initially, that didn't go so well, either.  Sverre and the Birkbeiners were defeated in a series of battles, eventually whittling their numbers down to about seventy.  But in a turn of fate that is astonishing by any measure, in 1179 they beat the much larger forces of King Magnus V Erlingsson, seizing control of the entire district of Trøndelag.  

Magnus wouldn't give up, however, and certainly wouldn't accept Sverre as a co-regent. Sverre had to fight for another five years before fate once again intervened on his behalf.  After yet another battle between the Birkbeiners and the Heklungs (Magnus's supporters) led to an unexpected rout, the surviving Heklungs -- including Mangus himself -- attempted to flee on ships down the long, narrow Sognefjord.  The overloaded ships sank, drowning Magnus and the majority of his supporters, leaving Sverre the uncontested king of Norway.

A marble sculpture of Sverre Sigurdsson from Nidaros Cathedral (ca. 1200)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Sverre's reign, however, was never to see real peace.  There were conflicts with landholding nobles, conflicts with the church, uprisings from rival parties, and even (ironically) a pretender to the throne who claimed to be Magnus's long-lost son.  (The pretender, unsurprisingly, didn't last very long.)  It was during one of these fights, however, that an event occurred that is why the whole topic comes up today.

In 1197, Sverre's forces were trapped in Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim, and it wasn't looking good.  In a desperate attempt to end the siege and wipe out Sverre and the Birkbeiners once and for all, the besieging forces threw the dead body of one of the men killed in a skirmish into a well -- the main water source for the castle -- in the hopes that it would poison the water and either kill them outright or force them to give up.  In the end it did neither -- Sverre would live to fight on for another five years -- and the story would have seemed to be one of those odd historical filigrees that could as easily be fabricated as true.

Except that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology believe they found the body.

The skeleton of a blond, blue-eyed man, approximately thirty years old at death, was found in a well near Sverresborg Castle that had been clogged with stones.  There were two deep cuts in his skull that are thought to be what caused his death.  From DNA extracted from a tooth, the scientists determined not only the bits about his appearance, but a surmise that he came from the province of Vest-Agder, in the very southernmost tip of Norway.

"This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," said Michael D. Martin, who co-authored the study.  "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods...  The important Norwegian Saint Olaf is thought to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral, so I think that if eventually his remains are uncovered, there could be some effort to describe him physically and trace his ancestry using genetic sequencing."

It's amazing that techniques of cutting-edge genetic analysis are being brought to bear on questions from history.  And in this case have corroborated a peculiar story from a saga long thought to be of questionable veracity -- giving us a lens into a turbulent, violent, and chaotic period of Scandinavian history.

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