Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
One of the things I love about science is how it provides answers to questions that are so ordinary that few of us appreciate how strange they are.
I remember how surprised I was when I first heard a question about our vision that had honestly never occurred to me. You know how images jump around when you're filming with a hand-held videocamera? Even steady-handed people make videos that are seriously nausea-inducing, and when the idea is to make it look like it's filmed by amateurs -- such as in the movie The Blair Witch Project -- the result looks like it was produced by strapping a camera to the head of a kangaroo on crack.
What's a little puzzling is why the world doesn't appear to jump around like that all the time. I mean, think about it; if you walk down the hall holding a videocamera on your shoulder, and watch the video and compare it to the way the hall looked while you were walking, you'll see the image bouncing all over the place on the video, but won't have experienced that with your eyes. Why is that?
The answer certainly isn't obvious. One guess scientists have is that we stabilize the images we see, and compensate for small movements of our head, by using microsaccades -- tiny, involuntary, constant jitters of the eyes. The thought is that those little back-and-forth movements allow your brain to smooth out the image, keeping us from seeing the world as jumping around every time we move.
Another question about visual perception that I had never thought about was the subject of some research out of New York University and the University Medical Center of Göttingen that was published in the journal Current Biology. Why don't you have the perception of the world going dark for a moment when you blink? After all, most of us blink about once every five seconds, and we don't have the sense of a strobe effect. In fact, most of us are unaware of any change in perception whatsoever.
By studying patients who had lesions in the cerebrum, and comparing them to patients with intact brains, the scientists were not only able to answer this question, but to pinpoint exactly where this phenomenon happens -- the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain immediately behind the forehead. What they found was that individuals with an intact dmPFC store a perceptual memory of what they've just seen, and use that to form the perception they're currently seeing, so the time during which there's no light falling on the retina -- when you blink -- doesn't even register. On the other hand, a patient with a lesion in the dmPFC lost that ability, and didn't store immediate perceptual memories. The result? Every time she blinked, it was like a shutter closed on the world.
"We were able to show that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in perception and in context-dependent behavior," said neuroscientist Caspar Schwiedrzik, who was lead author of the study. "Our research shows that the medial prefrontal cortex calibrates current visual information with previously obtained information and thus enables us to perceive the world with more stability, even when we briefly close our eyes to blink... This is not only true for blinking but also for higher cognitive functions. Even when we see a facial expression, this information influences the perception of the expression on the next face that we look at."
All of which highlights that all of our perceptual and integrative processes are way more sophisticated than they seem at first. It also indicates something that's a little scary; that what we're perceiving is partly what's really out there, and partly what our brain is telling us it thinks is out there. Which is right more often than not, of course. If that weren't true, natural selection would have finished us off a long time ago. But that fraction of the times that it's wrong, it can create some seriously weird sensations -- or make us question things that we'd always taken for granted.
Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whose passion for history (coupled with an understanding of how fragile and easily lost books are) led him to compile a 53-volume set of transcripts of the writings from historians of antiquity. His work preserved accounts for which we have no other copies, so without his tireless efforts, huge chunks of the history of early Europe would now be unknown and unknowable.
And that's even taking into account that of his original 53 volumes, only four of them survived.
So many works of ancient writers are lost forever, some to natural disasters like fire, flood, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but others to deliberate destruction -- often motivated by religious fervor, or the desperation by rulers to discredit their rivals and predecessors. This latter, which was all too common after there'd been conflict over succession, led to the systematic purging of works painting previous regimes in a positive light.
The loss of primary sources makes the job of modern historians hard enough. But a further complication arises when you consider the question of what happens when one of the documents that did survive is unreliable.
This is exactly the situation with regards to a major source of our knowledge of the later Roman Empire, from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117 - 138 C.E.) to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carinus (283-285 C.E.). The document is called the Historia Augusta and seems to have been written during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (285-305 C.E.). Diocletian himself was looked upon early in his reign as a usurper -- he wasn't of royal blood, but was a soldier who rose up through the ranks -- so it's no wonder that a writer during his reign would be motivated to dig up all the dirt he could on the preceding dynasties.
"Okay, they may have been royals, but a lot of 'em were loonies," seems to have been the approach. "Diocletian, on the other hand, will Make Rome Great Again."
Cover of an eighteenth-century edition of the Historia Augusta, from Ettal Abbey, Germany [Image is in the Public Domain]
To be fair, there was a lot to be critical of, especially in the last half of the period the Historia covers. The fifty-year time period between the assassination of the Emperor Severus Alexander (235 C.E.) and the accession of Diocletian is known to historians as the "Crisis of the Third Century" because it was marked by chaos, lawlessness, and one short-lived ruler after another.
The problem with the Historia is that for a lot of the period, there's nothing to cross-check it against. There are chunks of material that have no attestation anywhere else; it's literally the only source that's survived. There's an ongoing debate amongst historians about its accuracy, and some believe that even many of the sources the Historia cites are themselves made up. The historian Anthony R. Birley, of Universität Düsseldorf, did an analysis published in the journal Classica called "Rewriting Second- and Third-Century History in Late Antique Rome: the Historia Augusta" in which he estimates the total amount of reliable historical information in the document as only seventeen percent -- from a high of thirty-three percent in the section on the life of Marcus Opellius Macrinus all the way down to a flat zero for the accounts of the usurpers Firmus, Saturnius, Proculus, and Bonosus, all of whom immediately preceded Diocletian's rise to wearing the purple.
Probably not a coincidence, that.
Historical research always runs into the problem that accurate records are no more likely to survive than inaccurate ones. Also, there's the whole "history is written by the victors" thing, which complicates our understanding of any period of history where there was regime change. But considering the problem of the Historia Augusta has made me wonder how historians of the future will read the documents from the United States of 2025. Not only are the members of the Trump regime lying their asses off about what's going on, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson's claim that the economy was tanking under President Biden, and that Trump's repeatedly playing Tariff Peekaboo with Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. is somehow going to get it back on track, they're actively destroying documents having accurate information about what's happening.
My fear is that the Crisis of the Twenty-First Century won't end up any better understood by historians than the Crisis of the Third Century is.
A criticism sometimes aimed at us science types is that our obsession with naming, classifying, and explaining everything in the universe robs us of its wonder. Why, they ask, do we have to get so damn technical about everything? Why can't we just look at the stars, or the flowers, or a bird in flight, and appreciate their beauty?
Well, needless to say, I disagree with that pretty strenuously. My understanding of science -- which, admittedly, is that of a reasonably well-read layperson's -- only adds to my sense of wonder. For me, it's a case of the more you know, the more amazing it gets.
Let me give you an example of that -- a piece of research out of the University of Arizona that used the James Webb Space Telescope to peer far out into space (and thus, far back in time), and found something astonishing. Something, in fact, that would appear quite mundane, meriting only a "So what?', if you didn't know some science.
Here's a capsule summary of the research -- then an explanation of why it's way cooler, and more surprising, than it appears at first.
The JWST just released a spectral analysis of a galaxy called JADES-GS-z14-0, which is about 13.5 billion light years away. That's a pretty impressive feat; this means the light from it left on its journey to us when the universe was only two percent of its current age. This, in fact, means the galaxy itself formed not long (in astronomical terms) after the cosmic microwave background radiation, the earliest remnants of radiation released when the universe settled down enough to allow photons to travel unimpeded.
Just seeing JADES is amazing enough. "Imagine a grain of sand at the end of your arm," said Jakob Helton, who led the research. "You see how large it is on the sky -- that's the size of the region we looked at."
The shocker came when they did an analysis of its spectrum, and found that it had high amounts of oxygen. But why this is surprising -- why, in fact, it's going to force a rethinking of our understanding of how stars and galaxies form -- is where you have to know some background.
When heated or otherwise energized, each element emits a characteristic fingerprint of frequencies of light known as its emission spectrum. The fact that these specific frequencies and no others are emitted was key to the development of quantum theory; energy levels in atoms are quantized, or exist in discrete steps, and an atom can no more emit a different frequency of light than you could go down a step-and-three-quarters on your staircase. Because of these spectral fingerprints, it's now possible to determine the composition of distant stars by looking for the characteristic spectral lines of common elements in the star's spectrum. This is how Helton et al. figured out that JADES contains large amounts of oxygen.
The emission spectrum of oxygen [Image is in the Public Domain]
Thing is, it shouldn't. We have lots of oxygen here on Earth because the primordial cloud from which the Solar System condensed had a bunch of it; so, in fact, does the Sun, since it formed from the same cloud. Alien astronomers could look at the Sun through their telescopes and figure that out the same way that we do. But oxygen, it turns out, doesn't form all that readily. The Solar System is oxygen-enriched because the Sun is (at least) a third-generation star. In the very early universe, when there was nothing much around but hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium -- the atoms that were formed during the Big Bang itself -- stars had vanishingly small "metal content." (To astrophysicists, "metals" are any elements heavier than helium.) As those first stars underwent fusion in their cores, hydrogen was converted to helium, then helium to lithium and carbon; at the end of their lives, those stars that were heavy enough went supernova, and the pressures and temperatures of those colossal explosions not only generated "metals" but distributed them back into space.
Second-generation stars formed from the debris left behind by the explosion of first-generation stars. Those second-generation stars, during the course of their lives and deaths, would have produced more "metals," and the cycle repeated, ultimately leading to the richness of composition we see in our own Solar System.
But it takes a while. The amount of oxygen even in early third-generation stars is pretty small. So where did all the oxygen in an extremely early galaxy like JADES come from?
We don't know. "It's a very complicated cycle to get as much oxygen as this galaxy has," said study senior author George Rieke. "So, it is genuinely mind boggling."
So there's evidently something about star formation and galaxy evolution we're missing. Stars forming only three hundred million years after the Big Bang should be just about entirely hydrogen and helium. And chances are, JADES is almost certainly not the only anomalous early object. "The fact that we found this galaxy in a tiny region of the sky means that there should be more of these out there," Helton said. "If we looked at the whole sky, which we can't do with JWST, we would eventually find more of these extreme objects."
For me, it's lovely to look up into the sky on a clear night, but my enjoyment is much enhanced by the fact that I know a little bit about what I'm looking at. The stars are stellar forges, creating all the matter around us -- we are truly, as Carl Sagan famously said, "made of star stuff."
In short: science itself is beautiful. Understanding how the world works should do nothing but increase our sense of wonder. If scientific inquiry isn't accompanied by a sense of "Wow, this is amazing!", you're doing it wrong. I'll end with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? had the following to say:
I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. … There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
When educational budgets are cut -- which they are, every year -- inevitably what is hit the hardest are programs for the arts, music, theater, and other electives.
This is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who spent thirty-two years teaching science, a so-called "core" subject. And I don't mean to criticize the importance of having a good "core" education; we all need to be able to read and write, do mathematics, understand the history of humanity, and have a basic and broad grasp of scientific principles.
But that's not the be-all-end-all of education, or at least it shouldn't be. I mean, consider not what gets you a job, what allows you to do mundane chores like balancing your checkbook, but what actually brings joy to your life. What are your hobbies, things you spend your spare time doing, things you'd spend much more time doing if you had the leisure? My guess is very few of us fill our free time doing chemistry experiments, even admitted science nerds like me. No, we paint, sculpt, garden, play an instrument, sing in the choir, play or watch sports (or both), cook elaborate meals, write stories. And while those do take a basic 3-Rs education -- I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I had a lousy vocabulary or didn't know how to write grammatically -- for many of us, our real fascinations were discovered in the classes that go under throwaway names like "electives" and "specials" and "optional courses."
So cutting these subjects is, for many students, taking away the one thing about school that makes it tolerable, and robbing them of the opportunity to find hidden talents and undiscovered passions that will bring them joy for a lifetime.
But a study has shown that it's more than that. Research by Katherine Sledge Moore and Pinar Gupse Oguz of Arcadia University, and Jim Meyer of Elmhurst College, has found that music education correlates strongly with the development of flexible intelligence -- and that those gains translate across disciplines.
In "Superior Fluid Cognition in Trained Musicians," published in the journal Psychology of Music, the researchers found that the degree of experience a person has in playing music (or singing), the higher they score on a variety of metrics -- episodic memory, working memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed.
It's hardly surprising when you think about it. As the researchers put it, fluid intelligence skills "are highlighted in musical training," which involves "quickly comprehending a complex symbolic system, multitasking, reasoning, and more." I can say from personal experience that performing music -- not just playing it at home for your own entertainment -- takes those skills up an additional notch. I was a performing musician for years, playing flute in a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence. Being up on stage requires that you think on your feet, and often make lightning-fast alterations to what you're doing. As an example, most of what my band played were medleys of three or four tunes, and we almost never planned ahead how many times we were going to play any one of them (nor who'd be playing melody and who'd be playing harmony). Our fiddler, who was more-or-less in charge of the band, just gave me a wiggle of the eyebrow if she wanted me to take a solo, and said "hep!" if we were switching tunes. Sometimes the inevitable happened -- the fiddler and I both jumped to harmony at the same time, or something -- but almost always, one of us recognized it in under two seconds and slipped right back into playing melody. Despite the complexity of what we did, the times we had a real crash-and-burn on stage were very few and far between.
So this study is spot-on. And its conclusions are further evidence that we should be expanding arts and electives programs, not cutting them.
Not, honestly, that I expect it will have an effect. Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but the educational establishment has a long track record of completely ignoring research on developmental psychology in favor of "we've always done it this way." The most egregious example is our determination to start foreign language instruction in seventh or eighth grade, when we've known for years that our brain's plasticity with respect to learning new languages peaks around age three or four, and declines steadily thereafter.
Or, as one of my students put it, "So we start teaching kids languages at the point they start to suck at it."
A close second is that researchers have been saying for years -- with piles of evidence to support them -- that children need recess or some other unstructured play time in order to improve overall behavior and attitudes about being in school. Not only that, but recess time correlates with better scores on tests, so like music, it's an investment that pays off across the board. Nevertheless, schools across the country have been gradually reducing unstructured leisure time, in some places to twenty minutes or less per week, in favor of devoting more time to preparing for standardized tests.
Now there's a way to make kids look forward to going to school in the morning.
I'd like to think that this research will influence educational establishments and (especially) budgetary decisions, but I'm not holding my breath. Any change on that count is likely to be very slow to come. But still, every piece of evidence counts. And anything we can do to foster the development of fluid intelligence, positive attitudes, and confidence in children is movement in the right direction.
252 million years ago, the Earth was hit by a confluence of Very Unfortunate Events.
First, most of the large continental land masses locked up into a single supercontinent, Pangaea. This had multiple effects, including alterations of oceanic currents, massive desertification, and the collapse of the convection cells powering seafloor spreading at mid-ocean ridges. The latter caused a drastic lowering of sea level and exposure of continental shelves, reducing habitat for marine species that live in shallow water (which is most of them).
Second, the tinder box that had formed in the Carboniferous Period -- enormous deposits of coal, oil, and limestone produced when the Earth was basically one giant greenhouse -- found its lit match when the Siberian Traps erupted. This is one of the largest volcanic events known, and produced an almost unimaginable four million cubic kilometers of basaltic lava. This ripped through all that coal and carbonate rock, releasing catastrophic amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The portion of the excess absorbed into the ocean caused acidification, killing any marine animal with carbonate shells or skeletons. The resulting temperature rise caused worldwide oceanic anoxia. It very likely also triggered the unraveling of unstable methane clathrate deposits on the seafloor, releasing gaseous methane and further boosting the temperature.
If that weren't enough, right around this time the Araguainha Impactor hit what is now Brazil. The spot where it struck was at the time mostly composed of another gift from the Carboniferous -- oil shale. This was flash-incinerated, releasing yet more carbon dioxide.
The result: the extinction of between 80% and 95% of the species on Earth, depending on how you count them and who you ask.
What there's no doubt of, though, is that it was devastating. It's the closest the Earth has come to undergoing a complete wipeout. Entire taxa went extinct, including eurypterids (sea scorpions), trilobites, blastoids, tabulate and rugose corals, and acanthoid fish; 99% of radiolarian species vanished, as well as 98% of gastropods and 97% of ammonites and foraminiferans. The entire food web collapsed.
Afterward, the Earth was an overheated, sulfur-smelling, hypoxic, largely lifeless wasteland.
And yet, somehow, it recovered. How exactly the Earth's living things made it through the largest bottleneck ever is the subject of a paper last week in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, authored by a team from University College Cork, the University of Connecticut, and the Natural History Museum of Vienna. And what it found was that the bounce-back didn't happen all at once. It was far from a linear progression toward rebuilding the biosphere -- there were further shifts and setbacks over several million years as life "found a way."
The team focused mainly on the plants, given that they're the base of the food web. Some of the first recolonizers were conifers, but they suffered a reversal not even a million years after the main pulse of extinctions with the Smithian-Spathian Boundary Event, a further spike in global temperature that ultimately saw sea surface temperatures of 40 C (104 F), but which was then followed by an unexplained and equally rapid drop. The wild pendulum swings in temperature caused the collapse of the resurgent coniferous forests; ultimately they were replaced by seed ferns and club mosses (the latter were larger than the ones we have today, but not as big as the enormous Lepidodendrons that were around during the Carboniferous).
An early Triassic seed fern, Lepidopteris [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Vivi Vajd, Stephen McLoughlin, Sam M. Slater, Ola Gustafsson, Allan G. Rasmusson, Lepidopteris life restoration, CC BY 4.0]
Eventually the climate stabilized, but any way you spin it, the Early Triassic Period was a horrible time to be alive. It was largely hot and dry, but then -- with startling rapidity -- terrestrial biomes were swamped during the weird Carnian Pluvial Episode, a two-million-year-long thunderstorm which I wrote about not long ago. Then, at the end of the Triassic, there was yet another massive extinction, this one probably caused by the volcanism from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (which would ultimately open the Atlantic Ocean). Things had largely settled down by the beginning of the Jurassic Period, at which point we were heading into a period of lush forests and (mostly) stable climate -- the long, glorious Age of Dinosaurs.
But as you know, even their salad days weren't destined to last forever.
It always strikes me, when I read papers like this one -- the colossal hubris and ignorance of people who think we can mess around with Earth's ecosystems with complete impunity. They often shrug off any Cassandras with breezy lines like, "The Earth's climate has had swings in the past, and has always recovered." And in one sense, sure, that's true. Faced even with a catastrophic extinction like the Permian-Triassic, enough species made it through the bottleneck -- and the whipsawing that happened afterward, as the climate gradually restabilized -- to repopulate the Earth.
But keep in mind that a great many species didn't make it. Most of them, in fact. Then, at the end of the Cretaceous, the non-avian dinosaurs -- that had been the dominant group worldwide for two hundred times longer than humans have existed -- were completely eliminated. Okay, life recovered once again, but even for the survivors, living through the event itself was no fun.
Oh, and allow me to put this whole grim story into perspective by mentioning the second paper that came out this week; a huge study out of James Cook University and the University of Adelaide showing unequivocally that tropical forests are dying off because of human-induced climate change -- that they're not adapting fast enough to cope with how quickly we're altering the climate.
We are the first species that has sufficient brainpower to understand how our actions affect the biosphere, and (perhaps) enough power to work toward mitigating them. And instead, we're largely doing nothing, selling out the future in exchange for short-term expediency, a use-it-once-then-throw-it-away lifestyle, and enriching the coffers of corporate billionaires. The current so-called administration's mottos with regards to the environment are "Deregulate everything," "Cut down more trees," and "Drill, baby, drill."
They, and all of us, should remember: sure, it's likely that whatever we do, in a million years there still will be plenty of life on Earth. No matter the mistakes we make, the biosphere will survive.
But there is no guarantee that the survivors will include us.
He's the subject of a 1927 comic film made in the Soviet Union. Set in the time of Tsar Paul I, it's the tale of a visit by the Tsar to a military outpost. One night, the Tsar is awakened by a noise -- it's the sound of one of the officers getting a little too frisky with a young woman in an adjoining room -- and when the regiment commander is confronted about the outrage the next morning, he blames it on a (nonexistent) "Lieutenant Kijé." ("Kijé" is a slang word meaning approximately the same thing as "whatchamacallit.") The indignant Tsar demands to meet with this errant officer -- so the panicked commander says he can't, the matter is already settled, Kijé is in the brig and will be shipped off to Siberia.
Soon after, however, the real culprit's identity comes out, and the Tsar demands that the commander not only release and apologize to the wronged Lieutenant Kijé, but promote him to the rank of colonel. Repeated requests by the Tsar to meet Kijé result in more and more elaborate stories made up about him explaining why this can't happen -- first that Kijé was on leave because he was getting married to the lovely Princess Gagarina, then because he's away at battle (which, of course, results in a brilliant triumph). Finally, though, the whole house of cards can't be sustained any longer. The Tsar demands to meet this valiant pinnacle of an officer so he can personally promote him to general.
The commander and the others who are in on the lie have no choice. They invent one final story -- that the brave Colonel Kijé has tragically died a heroic death in battle. Sad as it is to have to tell His Majesty the Tsar, there will never be an opportunity to meet this exemplary soldier in person.
The story only became known outside of Russia because of the absolutely delightful score for the film written by the brilliant Sergei Prokofiev -- the Lieutenant Kijé Suite is still a staple of the classical orchestral repertoire today.
I started thinking about the story Lieutenant Kijé this morning because of our own Tsar, Donald Trump.
If you watched the State of the Union address -- or, if (like me) you read excerpts because you can only listen to Trump's voice for about fifteen seconds without wanting to remove your ears, with a cheese grater if it's the only thing handy -- you probably know that he babbled on (and on and on) about government waste, citing eight million dollars that had been spent to "create transgender mice." I probably don't need to tell you that this was an idiotic error. The mice weren't transgender, they were transgenic. Transgenic organisms are ones that have been genetically modified, in this case to engineer their immune systems to respond more like a human's would. Transgenic organisms are a staple of medical research, especially into cancer, asthma, and autoimmune diseases.
Transgender mice, on the other hand, do not exist.
Naturally, anyone with an IQ higher than their hat size laughed directly into Trump's face for making such a moronic pronouncement (and in the State of the Union address, no less, in front of literally millions of watchers). So what do you think his advisors did in response? Issue some kind of "the President misspoke, and we'd like to correct it" statement?
Ha. Of course not. They started frantically going through every scrap of research involving mice they could find to see if they could come up with one that had anything to do with gender. There's no way they could tell Tsar Donald he'd fucked up.
All they found was an obscure 2019 study that had to do with the role of stress in sexual development in mice, and said, basically, "Here it is! This is what he was talking about!" Never mind that (1) it was definitely not what he was talking about, (2) the 2019 study itself was published during Trump's first term, so hardly can be used as an example of wasteful spending today, (3) it still has nothing to do with mice (or anyone else) being transgender, and (4) Trump is so catastrophically stupid there's no way he's even capable of reading and understanding a scientific abstract, much less an academic paper in its entirety.
Then, when people pointed out the above, they doubled down again. (Tripled down?) They put out an official statement that yes, Biden did so waste money on transgender mice. You ready for the studies they cited?
a study to find out if hormone therapy affects the immune response in patients with HIV
a study looking at how steroid hormone administration affects fertility
a study of the effects of testosterone on breast cancer susceptibility
a study of how hormone administration affects the microbiome
a study of how reproductive hormones affect neurological development in embryos
a study of how reproductive hormones affect asthma
All of that justifiable medical research. None of it having anything to do with "making mice transgender." The only connection with being transgender is that some of the hormones under study are the ones used in gender transition in humans.
So it's another reprehensible attack using the current furor over LGBTQ+ people to whip up the base, and has only a glancing connection to the truth. But Trump's cronies had to keep defending it, because how else were they to keep up the appearance that the Tsar knows what he's talking about, and appease the "Trump Was Right About Everything!" crowd?
It's the same colossally ignorant approach that "DOGE" has used -- purging projects involving keywords (or syllables) like "diversity" and "trans" and accidentally trashing projects studying things like biodiversity and transnational terrorism. There have now been at least three instances of mass firings that have led to the people in charge going "Oopsie" and trying to rehire the fired workers with only partial success -- at the FAA, the nuclear weapons oversight team at the Department of Energy, and the Center for Disease Control.
The bottom line is that the people now running the government aren't just greedy and amoral, they're fundamentally, deeply, and irrevocably stupid. And -- like the Tsar in Lieutenant Kijé -- they have surrounded themselves by sycophantic toadies who are afraid to stand up and say, "Wait a moment. You can't make that claim, it's false." Or, in the case of "DOGE," that maybe hiring a bunch of hackers and then running around the place with a chainsaw is not the way to approach pulling back the reins on wasteful spending.
But I fear that the farce will continue. When you're dealing with a man who has a bloated ego, has never been given a single meaningful consequence for wrongdoing in his entire life, has a whipcrack temper, and is in one of the most powerful elected positions in the world, we're going to see more of this kind of behavior. All we can do is to continue to use our voices as strongly as we are able, and call out this sort of nonsense whenever we see it or hear it.
And keep in mind that even the tsars, as powerful as they were, did not last forever.
It's remarkably hard to find evidence of impact craters on the Earth.
If you're thinking, "What's the difficulty? Just look for a big hole in the ground," you're probably thinking of one of two things -- either craters on the Moon, or Barringer Crater near Winslow, Arizona. The craters on the Moon stick around pretty much indefinitely because the airless, waterless surface experiences virtually no erosion; as far as Barringer, the impact that caused it only happened around fifty thousand years ago, which is the blink of an eye, geologically speaking. (Plus, it's in the high desert, with little vegetation to hide underneath.)
With older impact craters, the forces of erosion eat away at the telltale signs -- the raised, oval or circular ridges, especially. The oldest craters have been destroyed by subsequent tectonic shifts and faults, and (for ones in oceanic plates) because the damaged strata themselves were subducted and melted.
One massive impact crater that was only detected in 1983 -- despite the fact that tens of thousands of people live more or less right on top of it -- is the one left by the Chesapeake Bay Impact Event, which occurred during the Eocene Epoch, on the order of 35.5 million years ago. At that point, the impact site, on the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, was coastal tropical rainforest; the global temperature was still dropping following the massive Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, but was still a good two degrees Celsius warmer than today. The mass of the impactor isn't known for certain -- it was completely vaporized -- but it's estimated to have been about three kilometers across and traveling at eighteen kilometers per second, and punched a hole eight kilometers deep into the crystalline basement rock, blasting the sediments on top to smithereens and creating a crater over eighty kilometers across. Because at least part of the impact was in the shallow ocean, it also created a massive tsunami that travelled inland as far as the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Since the impact, it refilled -- first with unconsolidated, unsorted sediments, essentially broken up pieces of the rock that was blown out from the collision, then with eroded material as the whole place gradually settled down. Part of it was refilled with seawater. The only way it was discovered was the presence of an anomalous "fault" that turned out to be the edge of the crater wall, followed by the analysis of some rock cores that showed a huge, thick layer of jumbled junk that geologists figured out was the debris formed as the crater walls slumped inward. It also explained the North American Tektite Field, an enormous splatter field of what amounts to cooled droplets of melted rock.
But visiting the area today, you don't see much that would tell you that only thirty-five million years ago, the place got slammed by an enormous chunk of rock from outer space.
[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Geological Survey]
Even the much larger Chicxulub Impact Crater, near the Yucatán Peninsula, took a lot of work to identify. It's just shy of twice as old as the Chesapeake Bay site (about 66 million years), and is almost entirely underwater and filled with oceanic sediments. Today, the impact site that ended the 180-million-year hegemony of the dinosaurs is only visible to sensitive gravitometers and magnetometers.
Which makes the discovery of an impact crater 3.47 billion years old, in East Pilbarra, Western Australia, even more astonishing.
A paper in Nature Communications this week, authored by Christopher Kirkland of Curtin University et al., shows convincing evidence of an impact crater over a hundred kilometers wide near the northwestern coast of Australia. The center of the crater shows regions of shocked crystalline rock, along with layers of breccia (the same sort of jumble of debris found at the Chesapeake Bay site). Further stratigraphic work has confirmed that this was, indeed, the site of a "massive hypervelocity impact." This makes it the only Archaean-age crater known to have survived.
The authors write:
Despite the high modeled frequency of bolide impacts in the early Archaean, the rarity of verified impact craters of Archaean age suggests that: (a) the impact flux was much less than predicted by lunar data; (b) the evidence has been eradicated, or (c) that we have failed to recognise them. On a young Earth covered in primitive (mafic–ultramafic) crust, identifying shatter cones or impact breccias may represent the best chance of finding other large Archaean impact structures. However, these highly fractured rocks will be the first to undergo (presumably intense) weathering and erosion. Notwithstanding their fragility, we believe many more Archaean craters await discovery.
Myself, I think it's astonishing that they've found even one. For any traces to have survived for nearly three and a half billion years is staggering. At that point, life was only getting started; the first known microbes appeared 3.7 billion years ago, and when the impact occurred, it would still be another half a billion years before the first certain multicellular life. So unlike the Chesapeake Bay and Chicxulub Impacts, which were (respectively) regionally and globally devastating to life, the East Pilbarra collision probably didn't make much of... um... an impact.
But it definitely stirred things up, created an enormous crater and rain of debris, and would have been a dramatic thing to witness. From a safe distance. The fact that even today, 3.47 billion years later, geologists can detect the hole it left behind, indicates that it was one hell of a punch.
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