For the LOLZ

I’m going to make you click some links.  Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

Writers will squeal “That’s me!” and non-writers will gain great insight into the writer’s mind from The 4 Stages of Writing.  (via @NPalmby)

I endorse SMBC’s proposal: Screw “Real Life Applications”.  Want Kids to Learn Science?  Put This In Every Textbook.  (via about 5 billion people on Twitter, who promptly got buried under a flood of #scio11 tweets and are now beyond my ability to excavate.)

And lastly, this isn’t an LOL, except LOLing in delight: a new science aggregator has launched!  Please do visit ScienceSeeker.org.  If you’re a science blogger, submit! 

Do enjoy, my darlings!

For the LOLZ
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Celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Click the link for his “The Other America” Speech.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Don’t go silent.  

On this day, we remember the power of dreams.  We remember the power of a great many good people all coming together for a just cause.  And we remember that the right words, symbolic actions, and a refusal to back down from demands for justice can remake the world.

Thank you, Dr. King. 

Celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Tree of Liberty

There has long been a horrible concern in the back of my mind: that this country, founded on violence, couldn’t get away from violence.  How do you reconcile a country born in revolutionary war to governance by peaceful means?

When our Founders fought the Revolution, it was because they had no alternative.  They didn’t have representation.  They weren’t allowed to be part of England’s political life.  They were simply exploited and used.  They weren’t allowed a peaceful solution.  They couldn’t say these things they hated were the will of the country.  They couldn’t lose an honest political fight because they weren’t allowed a political solution.  So they fought.

I still question the wisdom of going to war, sometimes.  A country born in violence can find it hard to escape future violence.  But I can understand why our Founders felt driven to it.  They had tried and failed to obtain representation.  They had no other way to take their destiny into their own hands.

We don’t have that excuse now.  We have a democratic system, however imperfect, and we have a ballot box.  If the majority of your fellow citizens can’t be brought around to your views, it’s not a license to pick up a gun and achieve by violence what you couldn’t achieve by democracy.  This is not a dictatorship.  We are not ruled by a tyrant.  We’re ruled by a duly-elected government, and if we don’t like it, we can vote in a different one.  If we don’t manage that, well, too fucking bad.  Just because we have the right to vote doesn’t mean we’ll win.

Just because we don’t win doesn’t mean we get to turn to assassination.

And the right doesn’t understand that.

No, they take Thomas Jefferson a little too seriously.  They use his “tree of liberty” remarks as a blank check, a license to preach all the violence they want.  It’s too bad we can’t dig Jefferson out of the ground, bring him back to life, bring him up to speed, and ask if inciting unstable people to gun down senior citizens and children is what he had in mind when he wrote, “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?”  I’m not sure that this sort of blood is what he had in mind for his tree.

We have extreme gun violence in this country.  And yet we have a Constitution that we’re assured won’t allow us to control guns.  But what if that’s not true?  Jerry Coyne voiced an important thought:

Right-wingers, gun advocates, and the NRA use the Second Amendment as justification for Americans owning all sorts of guns, including automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And that’s the way the courts have interpreted it, too.  That Amendment says this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well, we have a militia now—it’s called the military.  How can anyone, even an originalist, say that this Amendment justifies untrammeled access to weapons by everyone? It’s about a militia!  And a “well-regulated” militia, not a bunch of unorganized Americans with rifles.  And if you respond that without guns, ordinary Americans couldn’t overthrow the government and the military like our ancestors overthrew the British, well, I’ll take that risk.

How did we go from “well-regulated militia” to “let the deranged have all the semiautomatics they want”?  How do we pull back from that brink?

I wonder if the Founders’ attitudes would be a little more nuanced in this age of hate radio, propaganda television, and weapons whose destructive power they couldn’t have imagined?  I hope this isn’t what they wanted for this country.

But I think it’s time for us to admit that, if we had the power to free slaves and give them rights as full human beings even though the Constitution originally didn’t, we surely could do something to end the right to bear Glocks.  If we fail in that, we at least need to find a way to push the eliminationist rhetoric that gives deranged people with Glocks an idea for a mission to the fringes where it belongs.

And we need to remind our fellow citizens on the right that failure to impose their will on the country by convincing the majority they’re right does not then give them license to impose it by force.

The Tree of Liberty

Cantina Quote o' The Week: William Blake

“When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.”

William Blake

Of course, Blake was a visionary, a poet and artist who saw art as life and science as death, so his truth can’t be understood as scientific truth.  Still, an excellent and useful quote, especially when it comes to dickish arguments.

If you’re a metal fan, you really mustn’t miss Bruce Dickinson’s The Chemical Wedding, which is not only superb metal but injects Blake right through the soundstream into your brain, which isn’t a bad way at all to spend an evening.

Cantina Quote o' The Week: William Blake

Los Links Addendum

I’m behind on my normal rounds and almost missed this post by Dan McShane: A Cautionary Chapter in Washington State Public Power.  If you read no other post on the Giffords shooting, read this one.  Dan does an amazing job illustrating the consequences of violent rhetoric:

The lies told about John Goldmark in that campaign combined with toxic rhetoric regarding issues in the 1980s and led to the murder of his son Charles, Charles’ wife and children more than 20 years later. Neither John Goldmark or his son Charles had ever been communists, but the lies that had been spread in the Okanogan Valley funded by a corporation opposed to public power for monetary reasons had confused a member of an anticommunist group years after the fact to commit a senseless murder. The rabid rhetoric of that group further inflamed the killer.

There are consequences, and there are precedents, something all too many would like us to conveniently forget.

And the most chilling lesson is that our insane political discourse may continue to inspire violence decades down the road.

Los Links Addendum

Los Links 1/14

This week, there’s going to be a rather heavier focus on politics than usual, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  

Meanwhile, major bits of Queensland are underwater.  Information on the disaster is available at the Australian Red Cross site, and you can donate there or at the Queensland government’s Flood Relief Appeal site.  In light of what’s happening in Queensland, I’m putting Anne Jefferson’s post on flooding front and center:

A flood is a disaster when people are in the way: “So while our hearts go out to those who are losing lives and property in Australia, let us not forget that there is a flood tragedy still unfolding in Pakistan, largely out of the media spotlight. Let us also remember that when we see increases in the human impacts of meteorological and geological phenomena, it’s usually not changes to the size or frequency of the phenomenon that drives the trend, but the increasing number of people in nature’s way.” (Highly Allochthonous)

Politics:

Who is responsible for the murder?:  “Mohammed Hanif asks who is responsible for the murder of Salman Taseer? (And who is responsible for the multiple deaths and critical injuries in Arizona? Who is responsible for the attempted assassination of a Congressional representative and the successful assassination of a federal judge outside a Safeway in Tucson? The questions are related. It’s not just a single assassin in either case – it’s also a society, a culture, a discourse, a world view, a rhetoric, a climate, a mindset, and the people who help to create them.)” (Butterflies and Wheels)

Beware Compulsive Centrists and ISlate-esque Contrarians Bearing False Equivalencies: “Because a diary, out of hundreds posted every day, on a blog site is just like the political ads created by a former governor and vice-presidential candidate who has a potential audience of millions. Bai has to know enough about the internet to understand how diaries work (and that most probably aren’t even seen by regular visitors to the site). But this narrative is part of the Village’s Compulsive Centrist Disorder.” (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Gabrielle Giffords’ brain surgery: Decompressive hemicraniectomy: This surgery is known as a decompressive hemicraniectomy. I’ve published research with people who have had this procedure, blogged about that work, talked about it a TEDxBerkeley last year, and even got picked up by Mind Hacks and Wired for it.  (Oscillatory Thought)

The Absence of Civility Is Not the Problem: Lying and Inaccuracy Are the Problems: “We’re now seeing all of the civility trolls coming out of the woodwork. If by civility, one means ‘not engaging in violent eliminationist rhetoric’, well, then I’m all for it. But what I’m concerned about is that honest criticism will be silenced. While I’m not as sanguine about political rhetoric as, let’s say, Jack Shafer, the fact is a lot of people in political life are habitually…counterfactual. That is, they’re liars. Others are ideologically blinkered, while yet others, sadly, are either just kinda dim or else stone-cold ignorant. (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Tea party in the Sonora:  “But there is, in fact, one place where the results of Tea Party governance has already been tested: Arizona, where the Tea Party is arguably the ruling party. Less driven by issues of national security, on the one hand, or moral values on the other, Arizonan conservatives are largely obsessed with taxes and immigration—also the twin fixations of Tea Partiers, who, like Arizonans, are disproportionately white and older. So it comes as little surprise that top Republican elected officials in Arizona eagerly seek the Tea Party’s support and make time to speak at the group’s rallies. Should the Republicans succeed in retaking power nationwide over the next four years, the country might start to resemble the right-wing desert that Arizona has become.” (Harper’s Magazine)

“Don’t politicize this tragedy!”:  “Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation. The people who are complaining are a mix of lefty marshmallows whose first reaction to the fulfillment of right-wing fantasies by a lunatic is to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness for thinking ill of people who paint bullseyes on their political opponents, and right wing cowards who are racing to their usual tactic of attacking their critics to shame them into silence. This is NOT the time to back down and suddenly find it embarrassing to point out that right-wing pundits make a living as professional goads to insanity.” (Pharyngula)

Who Profits from Violent Rhetoric? Can We Reduce The Profit?:  “KSFO/ABC/Disney/Citadel, as employers, can tell their hosts not to talk about killing people on the air as a condition of their employment, just like they can tell them not to swear. Management doesn’t like swearing because swearing earns them fines up to $500,000. However saying:

We’ll trace you back, run you down and kill you like a mad dog.‘ (audio link)
–Lee Rodgers about a Ron Paul supporter
Had no instant effect on Lee Rodgers’ finances. Rodgers eventually was fired. Part of the reason was he wasn’t generating as much revenue via advertising as he had in the past — before my advertiser alerts.” (Firedoglake)

Tucson Heroes: Unarmed People Who Stopped the Armed from More Killing: “The unarmed kept the armed from killing more people. Deal with it, America.” (Firedoglake)

Being Wyatt Earp: “And you don’t have to be an expert to understand this without having to have it acted out on the streets of Arizona. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that people wading into gunfire with a gun will just be adding more bullets to the chaos. This rationale for arming everyone to the teeth has been nonsensical and absurd from the beginning and the fact that anyone has ever taken it seriously is a sad comment on our culture.” (Hullabaloo)

Wednesday’s Mini-Report: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), reflecting on Saturday’s shooting, said, “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person.” (There was — the man holding that gun very nearly shot an innocent man.) (Washington Monthly)

The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy: “Extremist shouters didn’t program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.” (Slate)

Arguing Tucson: “In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.” (Interesting Times via Kevin Drum)

Since When Do Conservatives Believe Words Don’t Have Consequences?: “The same wingnuts who are insisting today that there’s absolutely no connection at all between speech and actions have spent an awful lot of time over the past several decades saying exactly the opposite.” (Firedoglake)

Mental illness expert: We should be asking whether political climate helped trigger shooting: “A leading expert in mental illness tells me that asking whether the Arizona shooter’s violent behavior might have been partly triggered by the nation’s political climate is a wholly appropriate line of inquiry — even if the shooter is found to be insane.” (The Plum Line)

Sarah Palin and the Blood Libel:  “She’s trying to avoid taking any responsibility for the shooting. That’s
fine – she isn’t responsible for the shooting. But the way that she’s doing it is by falsely presenting herself as the victim in this situation. And to make matters worse, she’s doing that by cluelessly presenting herself as the victim of a historic anti-semitic slur that falsely accuses Jews of being murderers. She’s trying to distance herself from the attempted murder of a Jewish woman by presenting herself as the victim of an anti-Jewish slur.” (Good Math, Bad Math)

Required Reading: “Wouldn’t it be nice if national tragedies inspired everyone to band together to take an unflinching look at the causes and to determine what each of us can contribute to keep them from happening again? Yes, DrugMonkey, I am a dreamer. Still, it is important to recognize that how we react determines where we go from here, and a number of people are finding the public reactions to the Tucson shooting sadly wanting.” (Almost Diamonds)

Science:

The Slippery Slope of Anti-Vaccine Complacency: “What if a family decided that they didn’t want to confine their baby in a car seat? The baby cries whenever they strap him into it, and besides, accidents are rare. They’ve done their research, and they feel the baby is safe enough in the mother’s arms. Would my friend be as sanguine about that decision?”  (Musings of a Dinosaur) (h/t)

I’ve Been Selected for the Open Lab 2010 Anthology of Science Blogging: “I am pleased to announce that I’ve been selected as one of the 50 finalists for the Open Lab 2010 compendium of science blogging. I’m absolutely thrilled to be included in this group of talented and enthusiastic communicators of science. Below is the post that will appear in the volume (to be published in a few months).” (Clastic Detritus)

Experimental vs. historical science, and environmentalism:  “Experiments inform our understanding of nature, but nature comes first. Parts of our understanding may be decoded in a lab setting (e.g., isotopic dating, strain ellipse analysis, or groundwater chemistry), but the data are collected outside and must then be processed indoors. In geology, the big experiment has been run: its result is the planet we see before us. As archaeologists, cosmologists, and crime scene investigators must do, geologists use subtle clues to interpret the past.”  (Mountain Beltway)

More on Wakefield’s descent: money, money, money!: “The BMJ has just published Part 2: how Wakefield stood to make not just millions, not just tens of millions, but actually hundreds of millions of dollars by promoting the false link between the MMR vaccine with autism and Crohn’s disease.”  (Bad Astronomy[Editor’s note: can I just say I love it when Phil’s being a dick!]

Meteorites and Geology: big holes in the ground: “Putting it another way, on average over the last 542 million years, over 700 big asteroids would have hit a part of the earth with a subsiding basin covered by a shallow sea. This is rather cool, I suggest, particularly the idea that many of these craters may already have been surveyed, but the seismic data has yet to be appropriately analysed. It’s a nice thought that most examples of what happens when something very big falls out of the sky are to be found deep underground.”  (Earth Science Erratics)

On scientism: BioLogos‘s big meeting, in which Francis Collins embarrasses himself and the NIH: “As for the rest of the phenomena, ‘beauty’ (an evolved neural response), ‘love’ (probably a neural and chemical condition evolved to facilitate bonding), ‘friendship’ (ditto), and ‘justice’ (a byproduct of morality, which we’re working on, and social organization), the statement fails to show why religion provides a ‘source of knowledge’, especially because different religions have different—and mutually exclusive—solutions.  All they can say is ‘God made them.’” (Why Evolution is True)

A rant on the evolution of religion: “To the people of Iron Age northern Europe, garotting members of their community and dumping their bodies in the bog probably seemed like a damned fine idea. No doubt it appealed to a host of human mental biases. It also seems to have been successful in building communities (at least, in relative terms) – after all, the culture survived for millennia.

“And yet, it’s an approach to life that most people would frown upon today.”  Epiphenom (h/t)

Los Links 1/14

Building a Better World: Ice Caves

Welcome to the first installment in what promises to be a very nearly endless series.  I’ll be bringing you the fruits of my research as I build Xtalea from the core up.  We’ll be exploring everything from geology to biology to all sorts of interesting tidbits that come up.

Before we get to ice caves, I suppose we should break some ice.  Those of you who’ve become Wise Readers and follow my writing blog already have a general idea of what I’m up to, but the rest of you all are probably a bit lost.  For two decades now (no, that is not an exaggeration or typo), I’ve been working on a series of SF novels that span many worlds and thousands of years of time.  We begin sixteen thousand years ago, on Xtalea, which is the world I’m building now.  And since the world itself will end up being a major theme throughout the series, it’s got to be done right.  The world itself is something of a character.

It will be an Earth-like planet, so I can take several cues from our very own world.  This is fortunate.  It makes the research a lot easier.  PZ’s going to hate it, because it’s essential to the ultimate plot-line for it to be quite similar to Earth.  But aside from tetchy biologists who want their aliens more alien, everyone else should be relatively satisfied, and that’s all that ultimately matters.

Right, then.  We should all be on the same page, or at least in the same book.  So let’s start building a world, shall we?  Get your spelunking gear on and descend.  There will be much science and lovely photos!

Before I ever really knew anything about Xtalea, I knew there would be ice caves.  They came up in a short story I wrote by way of figuring out some of my main characters.  One is remembering the ice caves where young soraani slept.  (As to why young soraani slept in extremely cold caves, you’ll just have to sign up to be a Wise Reader to find out.  Email me at dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com if you haven’t already.)

This was approaching a decade ago, and they’ve stuck in my mind since, in a vague sort of way.  As more pieces came together, I got more of a sense of them: they were somewhere beneath the main Academy buildings at Aa’radaan.  Aa’radaan was set in a valley strongly reminiscent of something you’d find in the Alps.  But they were always just a gleam in the darkness, although I knew they’d become an essential piece.

I knew nothing about ice caves.  I just knew these were caves with ice in.  Sum total of experience I’d ever had with ice caves in my life: a lava tube in Flagstaff, Arizona, which was nothing like what I was envisioning for Aa’raadan.  Lava tubes these weren’t, but what were they?

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to find out.  I engaged in a bit of Google-fu, and found out that it’s bloody damned hard to find anything useful on ice caves written for the layperson.  It’s mostly tacky tourist stuff.  One Wikipedia article that didn’t take me far enough.  Plenty of images that meshed with what I’d been envisioning, though, which told me that what I needed for my world had analogues on Earth, and that meant there had to be information out there somewhere.  I picked a cave to focus on: the Eisriesenwelt.



Perfect!  And, miracle of miracles, one of the sites I found wasn’t strictly tacky tourist.  In fact, it’s one of the only sites for a popular tourist destination I’ve ever found that actually has a link to really solid scientific information, in-depth stuff that wasn’t afraid to use large words.  It’s just unfortunate those words were all  German when I clicked for the .pdf.  And that inspired me to dip my toes into actual scientific papers on Google Scholar.

Did you know there’s lots that are freely available?  I didn’t, until I realized if there’s a link to the .pdf to the side of the search results, ordinary folk like me can read the original science without having to cough up substantial cash to a journal. This. Is.  Wonderful.

I spent an instructive few nights poring over the scientific literature, and came out with a treasure trove of information that will be essential for building a better Xtalea.

I had a few specific questions to answer starting out: were the kind of caves I envisioned plausible for the kind of terrain and climate Aa’radaan is in?  How are they formed?  Why do they have ice in them?  What sort of rock do they tend to form in?  And can they be as large as what I’d need them to be?  (Some of you might be thinking: Dana, you’re writing speculative fiction.  You can have things any way you want.  But that’s not strictly true, and besides, reality is one hell of a springboard for imagination.  So yes, these sorts of questions have to be asked, and yes, I’m willing to spend several nights reading peer-reviewed papers to answer them.)

We’d answered the first question when we stumbled upon Eisriesenwelt.  Absolutely, these kinds of caves can be found in that sort of valley.  Excellent.  Ice caves are real.  That will add some reality to the fantasy.

It helps to define what we’re talking about when we discuss “ice caves.”  I don’t mean the kinds of caves that form in glaciers and are formed completely of ice.  Those are more properly termed “glacier caves.”  Here’s a great definition: “‘Ice caves’ are rock-hosted caves containing perennial ice or snow, or both”  (Luetscher and Jeannin 2004 .pdf).  In other words, they’re like the caves we’re all used to, only they’ve got constant ice in.

Why have they got ice in?

This is where it gets interesting.  There’s different sorts, you see.  And you don’t even need them to be in a super-cold region: they can form just fine in temperate regions where the mean annual temperature isn’t even below freezing.  We’ll see why in a moment.

From Luetscher and Jeannin 2004

Let’s talk about types.  First, there’s the static ice cave, where warm summer air doesn’t get much of a look-in.  Remember the basics about how air moves: warm air rises, cold air sinks.  So if you’ve got a cave that slopes downward, and its opening is at the top, all that lovely cold winter air sinks right down into the cave and stays put.  In the winter time, when the outside temperatures are colder and the outside air thus denser, you get yourself a fresh infusion of freezing cold air.  In the summertime, the less dense warm air hasn’t got a chance to oust all the cold air that’s sunk down to the bottom.  And since the bedrock makes good insulation, there’s not much chance all that cold air lurking down below is going to heat up.  Voila, icy cold cave, in which you can enjoy freezing temperatures at the height of summer.  In fact, there’s a delightful description of this in Ice-caves of France and Switzerland by George Forrest Browne

We placed one of Casella’s thermometers on a piece of wood on one of the wet stones, clear of the ice, and it soon fell to 34°. Probably the temperature had been somewhat raised by the continued presence of three human beings and two lighted candles in the small cavern; and, at any rate, the cold of two degrees above freezing was something very real on a hot summer’s day, and told considerably upon my sisters, so that we were compelled to beat a retreat,- not quite in time, for one of our party could not effect a thaw, even by stamping about violently in the full afternoon sun.

Quite cold!

From Luetscher and Jeannin 2004

Our second sort of ice cave is a dynamic one.  It’s got more than one entrance.  The key is relative elevation: one entrance has got to be higher than the other.  This allows all that nice air with its different densities and pressures to get a move on.  Air flow follows the seasons.  In the winter, cold air is drawn in through the lower entrance; water there finds itself frozen, and the warm air that swoops down in summer isn’t strong enough to melt it again.  These caves have not one, but two, thermal anomalies: one at the lower bit where it’s colder than you’d expect, and one at the upper bit where it’s warmer.

From Luetscher and Jeannin 2004

The third type of cave is called a “statodynamic” ice cave, and if you’ve been paying attention to terms, you can probably figure out it’s got features of both static and dynamic caves.  You get a bit of the “chimney-effect” seen in dynamic caves, where air can get a move-on, but it’s also got a static area where air stagnates. 

The ice in ice caves comes mostly from snow that, like snow on a glacier, recrystallizes into ice, or from water that dripped, flowed or otherwise found a way inside and froze.  Hoar frost is also a
contributor.  If the cave is near a glacier, you might also see the glacier ice coming in for a visit.

Hoar Frost in an ice cave

Now, here’s a little detail that will blow your mind: one place you’re not likely to find an ice cave is in a place with permanent permafrost.  That’s right.  If the ground’s always frozen and has been for some time, there’s just not enough free water wandering around to form a decent ice cave.  Oh, it’s cold in there, and you might get yourself some nice hoar frost, but as far as those lovely sheets and columns and streams of ice, you can fuggedaboutit.  Is that, or is that not, an awesome little factoid?  Dazzle your friends and win bets in bars with it.

There are several conditions other than the elevation of entrances and chimney effects that influence ice in caves: mean annual temperature is one (you’re not likely to find ice caves in areas with no winter), which slope the cave entrance is on (south-facing is, after all, warmer), even tree cover (Citterio et al 2004).  So there’s a lot that goes in to forming an ice cave, and that puts constraints on where I can site the buggers on Xtalea.  You’re not likely to find one in the Siaan, for instance, which is closer to the tropics and is one of those regions that believes snow happens to other people.  Might be able to sneak one into the highest mountains there, but if I put one close to the coast, geologically-savvy readers will know I’m completely full of shit, and that will rather kill the semblance of reality, so we shall just avoid that.

Right.  So there we are: we have an idea of what ice caves are.  Not a lot of info on the type of rocks yet, although most of what I’ve seen is limestone.  As I dig deeper into the geology of Aa’radaan, I can determine what we’re dealing with.  Limestone?  Possibly marble?  I’ve got a whole new big book on caves I’m about to read that will help me determine what the bedrock shall be.  And now I know roughly where those caves will be located, and where their entrances must be, which means they may not be beneath the Academy proper after all.  I also have new decisions to make: static, dynamic, or statodynamic?  Only more treks through Google images will answer that, but so far, it seems the caves that most closely match my mind’s eye are the dynamic ones.  We have Eisriesenwelt, of course.  There are also a few more that provide great inspiration.  There’s Demanovska in Slovakia:

Demanovska Cave of Liberty

In various parts of the cave, you can see enormous ice formations, pools of water, and typical cave formations – absolutely exquisite.

Glacière de Monlési in Switzerland:

Glacière de Monlési

“Glacière” is actually the proper term for an ice cave, but it hasn’t caught on all that well in English, probably because everybody thinks it means “glacier,” which it doesn’t…  Regardless, it’s an absolutely gorgeous cave.

We’ll continue this discussion later, as I delve further into the world of ice caves.  We haven’t even gotten to the cryogenic carbonates yet.  Caves have ice formations just as they have stone formations.  And there’s doubtless much more to explore.

References: 
Marc Luetscher and Pierre-Yves Jeannin, “A process-based classification of alpine caves.”  Theoretical and Applied Karstology, 17 (2004), pp. 5-10

Luetscher, M., B. Lismonde, and P.-Y. Jeannin (2008), Heat exchanges in the heterothermic zone of a karst system: Monlesi cave, Swiss Jura Mountains.” J. Geophys. Res., 113, F02025, doi:10.1029/2007JF000892
Building a Better World: Ice Caves

Oregon Geology Parte the Third: Hug Yer Geology North

Seems like only last year I was promising you I’d get to the next installment of Oregon Geology anydaynow.  Heh heh heh whoops.  Well, better late than never, right?

For those of you just joining or wanting to refresh yourselves on the series to date, Parte the First ’tis here and Parte the Second ’tis there.  When we left off, we’d just watched the Columbia River flood basalts hit the ocean, and things had got a bit steamy.  Were this metaphor to be extended, Hug Point would have to be rated as XXX geology.  Here, basalts and sediments got really intimate.

Hug Point, viewed from Austin Point

There’s something for everyone here.  You want sedimentary rocks?  Gots ’em.  Basalts?  Yup.  Fault?  Even so!  Hydrology, check.  Coastal wave processes, oh check.  And if you’re with non-geo types, you can distract them with the pretty scenery, the nice historical wagon road to the north, and the tide pools, while you go get your rocks on.

I can’t do this place the justice it deserves.  It’s so rich geologically that an amateur like myself can merely stutter over some of its more outstanding features.  But I’ve got a ton of pretty pictures – so many, in fact, we’re going to have to split proceedings into a North Hug and a South Hug.  So come feast your eyes and feed your soul.

Two things drew me to Hug Point: the cave and the waterfall.  We’ll begin with the cave, since it’s right there to your right the instant you step off the stairs.

The Completely Awesome Hug Point Cave

This is one of the greatest wave-carved caves on the face of the earth, because it’s got a lot going on.  Let’s paint the broad outlines a bit.  The pale rocks are the sedimentary sandstones, mudstones, and conglomerate of the Astoria Formation.  The darker stuff is Grande Ronde basalt, which blundered into the Astoria on its mad dash to the sea around 15.6 million years ago.  And I do mean in to – dikes, sills, and breccia abound, basalt and sediments doing a mad little dance as they suddenly found themselves trying to occupy the same space.

Sediment vs. Basalt – Fight!

The cave shows a wonderful example of a basalt dike (or sill, I’ve seen it described both ways in my sources) intruding the Astoria Formation.  Here, it looks like the basalt squeezed its way in and made itself right at home.  Out in the weather, it’s that interesting reddish brown color.  Inside, it forms part of the roof of the cave, glistening black against the pale gold sandstone.

Basalt and Sedimentary Goodness

We’ll just have another view into the cave, then.  It’s too yummy not to:

Delicious Geologic Goodness

And yes, the cave’s big enough to stand up in.  You’d think it’s too small to get lost in, but there are ways of getting lost other than the geographic ones.  My intrepid companion very nearly didn’t manage to extract me.  There’s all too much to look at here, from the rocks stained by iron oxides:

Nature Red in Tooth and Rock

To the utterly intriguing contact between basalt and sandstone:

Contact Fascination

To the crazily contorted sediments:

Folded, Spindled and Mutilated

To the breccia:

All Broken Up

And the wave-plucked conglomerates:

Holy Conglomerate, Batman!

The back shoulder of the cave alone tells a long story:

Tilted Sediments and Conglomerate and Breccia, oh my!

The cave itself is like a geologic version of War and Peace.  If I was a little more geologically literate, I’d probably have been in there reading it until the tide came in and drowned me.  And then, just when you think you’re gonna make it round the headland, bam!  Another cave:

Ooo, Caves!

This one is a slot rather than a great gouge, but it’s awesome and it’s fun to nose into.

Rather Like a Baby Slot Canyon

Once you finally extract yourself from caves, you’re whacked in the eyeballs by some really incredible headlands:

Thar Be Hug Point!

If you have not yet divested yourself of heretics not fascinated by geology, now is the time to aim them north and babble about wagon trails that could only be traversed at low tide, and oh-did-I-mention-tide-pools-go-play-with-a-starfish-now-there’s-a-good-lad.  That should keep them occupied long enough for you to salivate in peace.

You’ll also notice another cave in the distance.  You will be tempted by it.  I assure you that, should you have had your fill of spelunking for the day, other things are going to drive that cave right out of your head.  For instance…

Mmm, Basalt!

…this enormous basalt shoulder now looming to your left.  Let us pause to admire this sill.

Shiny!

Here, it seems the Grande Ronde tried its damnedest to form respectable columns.  This was not an easy matter.  You know what happens to hot things when they hit cold things, and the basalt flows, still hot even after a four-hundred mile journey, had just come smack up against cool mud and cold seawater.  Had you been here, the place probably would’ve been covered in great gouts of steam.  Of course, had you been here, it’s very possible you would have gotten un-gently sauteed by hot lava, so it’s probably best you weren’t.

So, no slow and stately cooling here for the most part, and columns aren’t well-defined like they are further east where the flows could really pile up and take their time cooling down, but here we see some columnar ambitions.  And it’s so black and shiny!  Water seeps down the cliff face, making everything positively gleam.

If you stand still here, nose to rock, lovingly tracing out patterns of cracks and joints, you’ll notice you’re hearing a roar.  This is not the surf.

Fall Creek Falls

Turn around, and you shall see one of the prettiest little waterfalls in the known universe, hurtling joyfully along a NE-SW trending fault line.  Fall Creek leaps over t
he lip of Astoria Formation sandstone and goes pelting for the ocean.  You, on the other hand, probably will not.  If you’ve got any aesthetic sense at all, you’ll go sit yourself down beside the falls, right where the rush and roar of water drowns out other beachgoers’ voices, and enjoy the views.

Serenity Among the Sediments
Steams Flowing Out to Sea

As you relax there in the sun, snuggled up against warm sandstone, contemplating wave, wind and water, don’t forget to make friends with the rocks.  The sandstone’s really pretty here, full of sparkly flakes of (I’m nearly positive) mica.

Sparkly

Eventually, you might be able to tear yourself away and scramble up beside the falls for a good look at the fault.

Fault Line

Plenty of nice rock to poke around up there, including one that may still be in an amusing shape when you visit.

I Dub Thee Pecker Pinnacle

Random humans for scale.

The rocks up here form walls and ramparts – it’s rather like scrambling around in a natural-born castle.

Battlement Boulders

It feels like a very different world from the rough, tough basalts.  These rocks are smoother, rounded, but feel like sandpaper when you stroke them.  The basalt had actually been quite smooth and cool.  And yes, I do indeed spend my vacations petting rocks.  You of all people should understand.

Before you head back down, don’t forget to amuse yourself by gazing over the lip of the falls.

Falling off the Edge of the World – Whee!

Oh, to be a drop of water just now!

It’s about this time that you reluctantly wrest your eyes from the rocks and look up to see what the sun’s up to.  It’s hard to explore geology in the dark, after all.  And you see this great big blue thingy crashing into the rocks.

Oshit, That’s Right – There’s an Ocean…

It’s about that time you realize that the tide will be coming in soon, and you’ve got a whole south sector still needing exploring.  So, with reluctance, you tear yourself away from the great and glorious north, and begin your trek down the beach.  Which we will have to save for next time, because we’re already pushing it on pictures here.

You can see why, though, can’t you?  Told you this place was outstanding.  They may have named it Hug Point because wagoneers had to “hug” the cliffs on their travels, but a geologist might have named it that, too.  You want to hug it and squeeze it and pet it and love it and take it home with you.

Ye olde indispensable volumes of reference as the author was trying to make sense of it all:

Fires, Faults and Floods – one of the best roadside guides to the Columbia River Basin evah.

In Search of Ancient Oregon – simply the most beautiful book written about Oregon’s natural history.
Hiking Oregon’s Geology – chock full o’ adventurous goodness sure to help you get your rocks on.

Northwest Exposures – tying the whole shebang together in one easy-to-follow narrative.

Cataclysms on the Columbia – the book that truly helped me comprehend the incomprehensible.

The Restless Northwest – short, sweet, and yet comprehensive guide to Northwest geological shenanigans.

Roadside Geology of Oregon and Roadside Geology of Washington – indispensable references and inspirations.

Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods – not only an informative guide to the discovery and history of the Floods, but an apt title, too!
Oregon Geology Parte the Third: Hug Yer Geology North

Enough With the False Equivalence!

When Jerry Coyne said,

While it does seem that this kind of violence is whipped up more by conservatives than liberals (viz. abortion-doctor killings), conservatives too can be the targets of gun-equipped crazies. (Remember John Hinkley, who tried to kill Ronald Reagan just to get the attention of Jodie Foster?)

I realized it’s time for a handy guide to determining if the left is equivalent to the right in terms of inciting violence.  So here we go:

1.  Is the violence recent?  

Incident less than ten years oldprovisionally equivalent.  You may proceed to the next question.

Incident more than ten years oldNOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

2.  Did the violence take place in a pervasive atmosphere of eliminationist rhetoric spewed by liberal political leaders, media outlets including network news channels, and activist groups embraced by elected leaders?

Yesprovisionally equivalent.  You may proceed to the next question.

No –  NOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

3.  Is there more than one example of such violence?

Yesyou managed a miracle.  Please provide evidence to back up your assertion, because no one else has been able to find any.

NoNOT EQUIVALENT.  Full stop.

Perhaps someone with some time and more skill with graphics than I’ve got could whip us up an easy-to-use reference chart.

Outside of the false-equivalence quibble, which in this case was weak tea anyway, and the over-reliance on the “but he was ker-azy!” trope, the rest of Jerry’s post is wonderful and thought-provoking and definitely worth reading in full.  I shall be returning to it later in the week, in fact.

Enough With the False Equivalence!