approaching pavonis mons by balloon (utopia planitia)

A few days ago, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured this collapsed opening in a shield volcano (Peacock Mountain) in the Martian Tharsis region—originally discovered during the Mariner 9 mission in 1971 with the gentle rise and general topography near the planet’s equator making the feature a good candidate for the anchor of a space elevator, tethered to the captured asteroid of Deimos—and teased that the protected environment within the cavern could be a promising refuge for hold-out Martian life forms. Long before being imaged again by a Mars orbiter in 2011, it was the subject of the eponymous Flaming Lips’ song from their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The next phrase of the exploration programme, due to land February 2021 includes a rover called Perseverance equipped with a drill to extract and study core samples and an aerial drone, which could peer down into such places.

daytrip: milseburg

Bright through very windy, H and I took a trip to another of the nearby peaks of the Rhön highlands (Mittlegebirge, mountain ranges that tend to not rise above the treeline and are forested the entire way up) and hiked up the Milseburg with views of the Wasserkuppe and the valleys beyond. This trapezoidal massif and extinct volcano is most significant for the remains of its ancient Celtic settlement—oppodium, which was one of the first well researched and preserved sites of its kind in central Germany and led to the establishment of societies to maintain places of cultural heritage and accord them protected status, beginning nearly a century and a half ago.
Though now covered in moss, the basalt stones still in parts comprise the base of defensive walls (see also) and foundations of domiciles and the abrupt abandonment of the fortress, first in 1200 and then again in 400 BC, suggests that the site set the scene for a clash of cultures between the Celts and the Germanic tribes of the area. At the top of the mountain is a chapel dedicated to Saint Gangolf, a Burgundian knight and wealthy landowner under King Pippin the Short, whom was killed 11 May in 760 for his express wish to renounce his worldly possessions by his wife’s lover.
Prior to his martyrdom, however, Gangolf had several heroic exploits including, reportedly, no less than vanquishing the giant Mils, who in league with the devil was preventing people from taking the sacrament of baptism by a monopoly of water sources—and generally causing crops to fail by withholding irrigation access. They shall not pass—Gangolf fought valiantly but had no refreshment to regain his strength for the next attack, and a local farmer, himself desperate, refused the knight any relief unless he paid an exorbitant price, which for all his wealth Gangolf could not muster. Resigned to defeat, he removed his helmet and on the spot where he laid it down, a new spring broke forth, still flowing to this day, and gave the knight the resolve he needed to finish off the giant and furnish the locals with a new source of clean water.
The devil entombed the defeated Mils and hence the Milsburg. No recent excavations have been undertaken but the mountain is protected from an archaeological standpoint as well as a being a nature preserve that welcomes visitors and remains a popular destination. Being stormy, it wasn’t the best conditions to be exposed on a summit but it is one that we’ll be able to explore again soon.

daytrip: schneekopf

Wanting to see a bit more snow, H and I travelled back through Oberhof and beyond to the summit of the second highest (only falling short of the neighbouring Beerberg by a few dozen metres) mountain in Thüringen, the Schneekopf, whose summit—owing to a strong wind storm in 1946 that uprooted all trees has been an open space since and presently hosts a communications and weather station and observation tower with a panoramic view and a climbing wall on its exterior that pushes the elevation just above that of its neighbours and just barely places the site into the class of a thousand metres above sea-level (Normales Null).

The peak and the range it is a part of are extinct volcanoes active in the Permian Epoch and are composed porphyry. We had a nice stroll through the forest and enjoyed watching the snow and ice whipped up by the wind glint in the noon sun.

occultation

Via Boing Boing, we are quite the privileged witnesses to a solar eclipse caused by the shadow of Io moving across the dappled clouds of Jupiter (previously). One of the Galilean Satellites discovered by the artist and polymath in 1610 and designated Jupiter I, this innermost moon is the most dehydrated body known and also the most geologically (ionically) active with over four hundred volcanoes driven by gravitation pressures and tidal heating from its host world.
The mythological figure (whose name means moon) was one of Hera high priestesses at Argos and caught the wandering eye of Zeus, whose advances she steadily rebuffed. Unhappy with the extra divine scrutiny, Io was turned out of the temple, whereupon Zeus transformed her in a resplendent white heifer in order to hide her from his wife. The deception was rather transparent and Hera dispatched an obnoxious gadfly to pester the poor cow and drive her to wonder the Earth without rest.
She crossed from Europe into Asia at the Bosporus (oxford), where she met Prometheus chained, whom despite his own torture was able to console Io was the prophesy that her humanity would be restored. Returning to Greece, prodded still ever onward, she sought relief by taking the sea route to Egypt (the Ionian), when upon arrival, Zeus was able to disenchant her. With Zeus, Io bears Apis, king of Egypt—identified with the historical pharaoh Apophis (*1575 – †1540, BC), and primogenitor of many of the ancient, semi-legendary great houses of the Mediterranean.  Among the most frequented bodies in the Solar System and well studied, inhospitable Io has been rather ignominiously described as having (the namesake—that is) the colour of pizza.

6x6

that’s like comparing apples and mass shootings: idioms updated for American contemporary culture

store brand: Christmas advertisement aimed to educate the public on habitat-loss due to palm-oil plantations banned for being “too political”

across the stars: John Williams’ fresh arrangement for the Star Wars prequels—which if nothing else continued the tradition of arch and on point scores

perhaps not forty-two after all: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything is instead one hundred and thirty-seven, the fine-structure constant that haunted Richard Feynmann and Wolfgang Pauli—via Strange Company

sacred and profane architecture: this is the church you go to when God is in the volcano forging a ring of power, a Twitter thread via Art of Darkness

bauhaus 100: the next instalment profiling Herbert Bayer who helped create a universal typographic identity for the movement

tectonics

Though the seven continents that we are best acquainted with have corresponding landmasses that rise above the waters, there’s no reason to hold landforms to this requirement, there being no universally accepted geological definition of what constitutes a continent, and there’s a movement, we discover thanks to TYWKIWDBI, to have an eighth land-mass adjacent to Australia so recognised. Most of Zealandia (or alternatively, Tasmantis) remains submerged below the surface of the Pacific with only New Zealand, New Caledonia and Norfolk Island peeking above the surface. What do you think? It struck me at first as the same sort of technicality that downgraded Pluto, but I do wonder how much sense our thresholds and naming-conventions make outside of sentimental attachments.

geodesy or tectonic fictions

The always brilliant and imaginative BLDGBlog has a feature about Danish geomancers that are getting close to unveiling an “atlas of the underworld,” won through ground x-rays and computerised tomography—that is, CT scanning.
While it’s amazing enough to be able to peer into the depths of what lies beneath (and I thought it would take the whole array of gravitational wave detectors on opposite ends of the globe to bring into any sort of focus what’s under the crust), these early images also narrate an inferred history of continental drift and whole islands, oceans and mountain ranges that are now lost to us ephemeral beings. Realising how short of a time our present map of the world has existed in its recognisable form is really humbling and it makes one wonder what other artefacts—not just fossils or treasure—might have been buried and forgot.

crucible or lacrymæ batavicæ

When one drips molten glass into a vessel of water, a little tadpole glass droplet forms that has some amazing physical properties. The bead can withstand blows from a hammer but if the tail is snipped, the whole droplet violently explodes. Previously known as Dutch tears (the Latin name above), there was a paucity of scientific investigation until they were reproduced and experimented on in the ducal court of Mecklenburg.
Prince Rupert gave British King Charles II an exciting demonstration and Prince Rupert Drops as they became known in England (called Bologneser Träne auf Deutsche—Baloney tears, however, owing to the reputation of the Italians as glassmakers) were taken up by the Royal Society for further studies in the mid seventeenth century. Though mostly taken up as a party-favour or a parlour-trick, volcanologists found the laboratory trials valuable as the drops approximated the pyroclastic forces found in eruptions and lava-flows, as did polymath Robert Hooke, whose puzzlement over the store of potential energy led to the development of the idea of elasticity, strain and compression and a scientific, predictable toolkit for ever more intricate mechanisms.