So, you know how I am: if I haven’t got more irons in the fire than I’ve got fire, I’m not content. Always need to ping between projects like a SuperBall (remember those?) in an octagonal room. Thus, in the midst of Mount St. Helens (new posts already written and coming soon!), and Discovery Park (which we’re finishing, never fear!), and Pioneering Women in the Geosciences (I shall never abandon them!), and Men and Work-Life Balance in STEM (if you men start sending me your stories again, I’ll be able to publish them), I have begun a new project: confronting creationism.
At the risk of sounding flippant, I wish to share a bedrock truth of the Pacific Northwest. Only, it’s more like a harsh woody truth. The fact is that, on the seaward side of the great mountain chains, you can’t see much geology. It’s covered in trees. Whenever I go out looking for some nice geology, say an outcrop or a vista or a wee bit o’ bedrock, all I seem to encounter is trees. I find an apt quote from Rocko’s Modern Life scrolling through my brain: “Stupid trees everywhere!”
In the vicinity of Mount St. Helens, trees have not been a problem for the last 33 years.
Mount St. Helens from Johnston Ridge, September 2011. Note the shattered stump in the foreground.
When the directed blast roared from the abruptly-unroofed cryptodome, it annihilated trees within 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of the volcano. The the thick gray volcanic deposits, the roaring mudflows, the soaring ash clouds were awe-inspiring enough, but one of the most lasting impressions is acres upon acres of trees, lying stripped and bare. Vast old-growth forests and thriving younger ones vanished in minutes. If you’ve ever stood under those trees, experienced their enormous height and girth and their ability to block out the sky, what the force of a lateral blast did to them should leave you speechless. Continue reading “The Cataclysm: “A Horrible Crashing, Crunching, Grinding Sound””→
Ah. I see someone’s living in a fantasy world. Via Steven Newton at the NCSE blog, I’ve learned that Time Magazine has a wretchedly ridiculous article up entitled “Why There Are No Atheists at the Grand Canyon.” Now, I know editors sometimes affix inaccurate and frankly absurd titles to perfectly good articles, but this one appears to be stoopid all the way down. Steven quotes the author, Jeffrey Kluger, as saying, ““there’s nothing quite like nature—with its ability to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe—to make you contemplate the idea of a higher power.”
I can’t bring myself to click on the damned thing. It’s for the same reason I don’t click on links to articles proclaiming the discovery of Bigfoot and other such nonsense. I know it’s nonsense, and I’m busy.
How do I know Jeffrey Kluger is full of the brown, sticky, and stinky end product of bull digestion? Because I have photographic evidence of an atheist at the Grand Canyon:
An atheist, namely moi, at the Grand Canyon. Photo courtesy Cujo359.
Actually, there were two of us there that day: myself, and Cujo. We were atheists then, and are atheists now. I do remember salivating heavily over all those lovely rocks, and being captivated by all that natural beauty, but not for one moment did it make me “contemplate a higher power.” The only time I did so was when I contemptuously contemplated the imagined existence thereof when I found a creationist book infesting the science section at one of the gift shops, and dropped it in disgust.
Seeing incredible natural sights like these are part of what made me an atheist. The gods many of my fellow humans currently babble about don’t seem like they could design something like this with a supercomputer and a tutor with 14 billion years in the business. And science had a bit to say about how this got here (hint: nowhere will you find a genuine scientist proclaiming god did it in the scientific literature). What geologists had pieced together and are still discovering is a fuck of a lot more interesting that any dull tingle in the human religious imagination.
I’ll tell you something: nature used to be pretty, and sometimes made me feel all numinous and tingly and stuff, but until I became an atheist, it didn’t have the power “to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe.” I mean, seriously, I was bored with the Grand Canyon until I gave up religion, folks. Big fat fucking hole in the ground, seen it once seen a thousand times etc. Now, I look into that chasm and see billions of years stacked up and cut through. I see nearly half the age of the earth, right there at my feet. And this is real. You might imagine you’re touching gods or something, there, Jeffrey, but I’m laying my hand on a rock and I’m touching ancient oceans. I’m touching worlds that were and will never be again. I’m a part of that saga of eons, and I know that rock and I are both made of star-stuff, and I know that none of this was ever here by divine fiat, but because from the Big Bang to the dawn of this day, things happened. The universe managed this all on its own, with no help from a divine mind, and it could’ve spun itself out in any one of a billion trillion ways, but this way happened to happen, and here we are, and it’s marvelous. And the really incredible thing, the thing that leaves me speechless with astonished delight, is the fact that we jumped-up apes are just smart enough to figure it out, all on our own.
Your gods are paltry and poor compared to that.
So yes, just as there are atheists in foxholes, there are atheists at the Grand Canyon. Sorry you missed us! We were there the whole time. You just probably couldn’t see us with that god muck fogging up your glasses.
Here’s a word you don’t often apply to a forest: eroded. We don’t expect live trees to be eroded. The slope they’re standing on, sure: that can erode. Maybe the soft alluvial soil down by the river erodes in a flood, leaving roots exposed and trees more prone to fall in the wind. But would you say wind or water or slope failure is “eroding timber”? Probably not.
But it turns out that the force of a directed volcanic blast is very good at eroding timber. There’s really no other good way to describe what a hot, incredibly fast, powerful flow of gas and debris does to forests. It’s not just that it knocks trees down: it fragments and drags them, incorporates them into itself, doing to them what water does to earth and stones, and leaving behind patterns that can be read by geologists as they determine what the directed blast did.
I see Bora’s decided he’s spent enough time in the penalty box, and has returned to the social media world. This move was classic: mention you moved your blog from Scientific American, but fail to mention why, as if sexually harassing several women is just a minor whoops you needn’t bring up, then paste on a butthurt addendum saying you had no idea you should apologize again. That, combined with the fact he’s so pleased to have his balls lovingly sucked in public by his good buddy Anton Zuiker and assorted harassment-denying hangers-on, tells me he hasn’t learned a damned thing. Continue reading “Unfollowing Bora”→
Greetings, patient patrons of this fine establishment! I do hope your winter holidays were fantastic. I return from the cantina’s midwinter break no closer to catching up on email (quite the contrary, alas), but I’ve got some amazingly cute kitties and some updates for ye, at least.
Let us begin with Luna’s first Christmas. It was a glorious day, and we let Luna out into the back yard for an adventure, where she promptly zipped up a tree after squirrels. I’ve not seen many cats so confident in trees as she – she’s practically a squirrel herself, but just can’t quite manage the spectacular leaps they do. Warned by the adorable little bell jingling on her collar, they took off for safer parts, leaving her to linger in the tree looking for other interesting things to do. Staring down at the idiot human photographing her seemed to be a popular choice.
Luna perched in a fork on a mossy branch, avidly watching the goings-on below.
In our previous installment regarding the effects of the May 18th, 1980 Mount St. Helens directed blast on vehicles, we learned a valuable lesson. I will call upon commenter Angusum from Boing Boing to sum up: “The main thing we learn from studying vehicles trapped in the path of a volcanic eruption is that you should try very hard not to get trapped in the path of a volcanic eruption.” Indeed. Ah, but I see Pip_R_Lagenta’s hand is still waving: “If we learned anything from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, it is that volcano research is, like, *totally* stupid.” Absolutely. Governor Jindal is completely correct. No need to do any sort of volcano monitoring whatsoever. Volcanoes don’t kill people, people with volcanoes kill people. Or something like that. Anyway, it’s a proven fact if we ignore things, all danger from them magically disappears. Besides, the private sector. And stuff.
