anthropoclastic rock cycle (12. 624)

A couplet of recent postings about synthetic geology caught our eye—first about the accelerated process of material formation reduced to decades instead of the usual millions of years in the cases of slag heap debris fusing into sediment along the English coast and colourful industrial waste prepared with concrete to solidify and stabilise it—allowing for easier disposal without the normal caretaking required for liquid toxic waste and instead leech it out over aeons. We wonder what future archeologists will make of this anthro-littoral strata.

inatsisartut (12. 296)

Though a referendum for independence is not explicitly on the ballot, forty-thousand of the island territory’s population of fifth-six-thousand residents have cast their vote in what could be consequential election of the autonomous region with geopolitical overtones that extend far beyond local politics. Characterised as a “fateful choice” for Greenlanders by the Prime Minister Múte Inequnaaluk Bourup Egede (incidentally a descendant of eighteenth century missionary Hans Poulsen Egede who founded the capital as Godthåb, now known as Nuuk, documented one of the earliest encounters with a sea-serpent and had challenges translating the Lord’s Prayer as the populace had no concept of bread and first tried to convey “Give us this day our daily seal”) of the democratic socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit pro-independence party, previously lobbied successfully to leave the EU over fishing rights, while recognising how the strategically located landmass is a point of contention for polarised powers seeking a foothold in the Arctic and mid-Atlantic. Results, once the tally is complete—an arduous task on the world’s largest island (granted home rule since 1979 with the above titular unicameral parliament—“those who make the law”) to collect ballots from isolated communities and general not subject to immediate speculation—will indicate whether Greenland wants to rehabilitate relations with Denmark or move towards integration with the United States with overtures to “buy” (or annex) it outright for its geographical vantage point and mineral wealth. Sentiment suggests that Kalaallit would prefer to be prefer and allowed self-determination and reject becoming another colony, especially given US imperial ambitions and its disrespectful and untrustworthy treatment of supposed allies and partners.

selenology (11. 356)

From the Amusing Planet’s archives, we are directed towards the 1874 work of engineer and hobbyist astronomer and photographer James Nasmyth of Edinburgh through his speculate volume on lunar geology called The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, a compendium of research and observations, supplemented by a number of highly detailed photographic plates produced during a time when it was not technically possible to take such striking images directly through a telescope. Instead, Nasmyth improvised by making sketches from what he could see through his self-made observatory and transforming them into plaster relief scale models and photographing those under electric illumination to highlight the shadows and contours of his topographic globes. This work carried out after retirement from heavy industry, having invented the hydraulic press and the steam hammer and other machine tools, an impact crater (he had incorrectly theorised volcanic origins, though later research confirms lava flows) on the Moon is named in honour of Nasmyth himself, just to the west of the pictured Wargentin, for his lifetime of accomplishments.

ausflug thüringenersee (10. 107)

H and took a summer’s end quick excursion to the dammed Saale river valley to tour the landscape that developed around the reservoirs (Stauseen) and how the natural intersects the artificial.

First we stopped to take a guided tour of the Saalfeld Fairy Grottos (die Feengrotten), a set of caverns in a former mine for alum shale (see previously) remarkable for their colourful mineral veins, called speleothems, owing to the porous soil.

Commercial operations halted in 1850 (the use of potassium aluminate as a preservative was antiquated) and was opened to tourist as early as 1914 due to the reputedly curative properties of the ambient radiation present, after the discovery of the third chamber, the Märchendom—the Fairy Tale Kingdom and the Grail Castle after various interpretations of the sedimentary creations.

Seeing this tableau inspired Siegfried Wagner to pattern the set design for his father’s opera Tannhäuser for the Bayreuth Festspiele in the 1920s.

erlebnis bergwerk (10. 073)

Decommissioned since 1993 but revitalised since as a living museum and working mine and venue, I had a chance to visit with H’s father the salt and potash (Kalisalz, used as an important agricultural fertiliser) extraction operation near the village of Merkers on the Werra river not far from Bad Salzungen.  

 Aside from the long history of mining and a comprehensive lesson on the enterprise and geology that bores under the Rhön mountains, the location is also the hiding spot for hundreds of tonnes of gold, silver and paper currency (amounting to around eighty percent of the holdings of the Reichsbank at the end of the war) and many priceless works of art looted by the Nazis, discovered per chance by the advancing United States army (tipped off by slave labour transporting treasures to the mine) who then worked quickly to clear it out of Soviet occupied territory before the borders were demarcated.

After being lowered in safety gear—like actual miners beginning their shift—in a hoisting cage that descended into the dark, and driven in flatbed transports from five to eight hundred metres below the surface through a network of tunnels that covers an area the size of Munich. 

Though the vehicles were only taking the dips, curves and ascents at under twenty kilometres an hour, the darkness, wind and narrowness of the shaft made it seem much faster, like a roller coaster ride stretched out for some two hours, with intermissions, lastly in the above Goldraum, a pair of excavated former bunkers that now serve as a machine exhibit, theatre and a concert hall with uncommonly good acoustics and unique crystal grotto with accompanying bar for refreshments—the deepest in the world.  

It was definitely worth the visit and would drag H along next time.
 

8x8

wayfinder: Polynesian palm frond and seashell navigational charts  

zoned for resimercial: reaction offices and the future of the workplace  

the final nail in the coffin: a proposal for a casket one drills in the ground  

such freedom: a convoy of truckers whose grievance is less clear picks up some hitchhikers along the way in the form of a la carte conspiracy theories 

fashion forward: RIP to Elsa Klench (*1930) host of the long running Style segment on CNN  

don’t know much about geology: James Sowerby’s 1884 illustrated study of catastrophic British mineralogy  

the neutra house: the hilltop compound that belongs to Red Hot Chilli Pepper Flea has strong evil villain lair energy—and is on the market—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links  

glonass: mapping tools and satellite imagery as a prelude to the information war over Ukraine

for what it’s worth

Via Kottke we are directed to a highly compelling project from Dillon Marsh that visualises mines in South Africa with a scale model representing the specie, minerals or gemstones extracted from it—like in this composite photograph of the Jubilee Mine in the Namakwa District and the sixty-five-hundred tonnes of copper ore dug from the Earth. Gains seem particularly marginal, inefficient and pathetic in comparison to all the hardships in cost of human toil and exploitation and environmental damage. More at the links above.

sveafallen

After finding a campsite by Möcke Lake in Degerfors, we went to the Cultural Centre with an ensemble of boutiques for handicrafts and local artist that was also the location of a micro-geological nature reserve that compressed various landscapes, miniature canyons, boulder-strewn forests, marsh-land into one compact park created by glacial erosion over the aeons and a rushing river under a primordial ice-sheet—though some more dramatic theories posit the environment was formed by an extinct massive waterfall, many times bigger than Niagara. 

Parts reminding us of home, there were also remarkable examples of weathering including glacial potholes called giant‘s kettles. In the end, we found the Bergteich—and though the trail was a bit of a parkour with climbing and jumping that was a fun challenge and treacherous at times, the markings were a bit wanting for first-time visitors, disorienting like the way-out markings in an IKEA that leads one through the entire store before one can find the exit. A bit of a hike for sure but a fine comparative introduction to the plant life and geology of the country.

After finding a campsite by Möcke Lake in Degerfors, we went to the Cultural Centre with an ensemble of boutiques for handicrafts and local artist that was also the location of a micro-geological nature reserve that compressed various landscapes, miniature canyons, boulder-strewn forests, marsh-land into one compact park created by glacial erosion over the aeons and a rushing river under a primordial ice-sheet—though some more dramatic theories posit the environment was formed by an extinct massive waterfall, many times bigger than Niagara.

seashore—never more

Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, we learn that during his life time, Edgar Allen Poe’s most popular and best-selling work was the field guide “The Conchologist’s First Book.” In the 1830s, geology, due to the rising interest in coal as a fuel source, and its sister-science of conchology (see previously) were the hottest commodities as combined, it allowed one to expound on Earth’s history through studying successive strata, and Poe’s slim and portable contribution to the discipline was well-received and had the poetic and evocative subtitle: A System of Tesataceous Malacology—that is, the study of small, soft-bodied creatures by exhuming their hardened ruins. Though perhaps not the most expressive vehicle, some of the author’s flair and license does manage nonetheless to shine through. Much more to explore at the links above.

burg stolpen or under the rainbow

H and I decided we would let our vacation be at the mercy of the weather and it started raining without pause from midnight Monday onward, so after decamping, soggy, we started on our way back, making a detour to see Burg Stolpen, the town and a thirteenth century castle at the foot of a mountain of the same name and hewn out of basalt columns.
The mineral was first classified and described at this particularly rich quarry by local natural philosopher Georgius Agricola in a 1556 treatise.
The pictures are of the residence and prison of lady-in-waiting and mistress of Augustus II the Strong (der Starke) Anna Constantian von Brockdorff—eventually styled Countess of Cosel (Reichsgräfin von Cosel, *1680 - †1765)—who eventually earned the displeasure of her lover, imperial elector and king of Poland by her advocacy for the rights of Polish subjects.
Anna was banished from court and placed under house arrest in the tower for just under fifty years.
Adaptations of her biography in the 1980s rehabilitated her image and revived interest in the life and times of this defiant and inconvenient woman.
We couldn’t find any historic marker in the town but Stolpen was also the birthplace, we learned, of an arguably more famous—at least in contemporary terms in the West—quartet of siblings: the Doll family.
Born with the surname Schneider at the turn of the century up to the outbreak of World War I and first adopting and performing under the name Earle—after their manager and agent that brought them to America, Gracie, Harry, Daisy and Tiny were a formidable force as a sideshow and then as a screen act—always working together and insisting that they all have roles.
Terrors of Tiny Town and Tod Browning’s Freaks, all four were also Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, with Harry (*1902 – †1985) performing as a representative of the Lollipop Guild.
Commercial fortunate allowed them to retire comfortably and purchase an estate in Sarasota, Florida—including a compound called the Doll House were all lived together, complete with custom furniture build to their scale.  Something strikes me in common about their stories—one a very vocal inmate of the town and others sent away without regard because of their difference.  What do you think?

alley oop

Though not the first or most famous of its class, learning that the mildly mysterious Coso Artefact was discovered on this date in 1961 by some rock-hounds in California’s Owens Valley did impel us into the strange and contentious realm of out-of-place archaeology. While prospecting for geodes, the group found a spark plug from the 1920s encased in a rock that was estimated to be a half-a-million years old.
Though geological processes could account for the concretion and nodule formation around the clear anachronism, proponents of time-travel, prehistoric alien visitation and lost civilisations of course carried the day—as they do for other anomalous found objects, deemed in the wrong chronological context, that are categorised as OOPArt (Out-of-Place Artefacts). While not all are haunted with the blight of pseudoscience and sometimes there is a honest misinterpretation, wishful-thinking or confirmation-bias over a pet theory, most claims are dubious and tend to be a demerit to human ingenuity and accomplishment, like the Nebra Skydisk or the Antikythera mechanism being the artifice of extra-terrestrials or even gods, pareidolia due to suboptimal inputs and of course outright forgeries and hoaxes meant to embarrass or strengthen an agenda or alternate point-of-view.

saltern

For his upcoming coffee table edition of Habitat, Augsburger crop-dusting photographer and graphic designer Tom Hegen, we learn via My Modern Met, has scoured the Earth capturing one of humanity’s oldest forms of environmental interventions—harvesting salts and other minerals through evaporation. The intermediate and legacy effects of these pools and ponds yield vibrant and brilliant abstractions from a privileged perspective—hosting high concentrations of different halophilic algae and bacteria at various stages that looks like a Mondrian composition, and hopefully stirs the observer to consider our intrusions and mediations in a different manner as well.   Be sure to visit the links above more explosively colourful landscaped gradients.

origin story

Not to be outdone by Turkey’s demagoguery in restricting instruction on evolution in public schools, the state of Florida, as Boing Boing reports, has passed legislation that grants any resident, regardless if they are a pupil or the parent of a student or not, the right to request an official hearing into the propriety of classroom teaching materials.
With proponents already advocating the merits of the statue as a means to countermand lessons in evolution, unflattering histories, sex education, the science of climate change and anything else deemed other than anodyne and orthodox, school distinct will be required to retain the services of an “unbiased” inquiry officer—a sort of devil’s advocate to judge the educational merits of text-books, documentaries, film and literature on a case by case basis. It is rather a challenge to strictly compartmentalise disciplines when it comes to the sciences and I can see archeology, geology and cosmology being struck down along the spectrum as well.  By its nature, teaching is not without controversy and has always been under the assault of cowards but never before in modern times was one allowed to lodge a grievance that’s to result in binding censorship without legal standing (locus standi)—that someone not directly affected or has a stake in the matter can indict a class curriculum for everyone.

don’t know much geology, don’t know much psychology

In Chichibu Japan there is a lovingly curated collection of stones that resemble faces—and not just your usual run-of-the-mill pareidolia either but specific celebrities—amassed over a half a century.
I know that the forces that shape evolution and stuff that looks like things is very different and human agency is limited—though bias is magnified—in both, but taking a brief tour of this museum made me think of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and his particularly convincing though gentle as one arrives at the conclusion all on one’s own of the fishermen and the samurai crabs of the Heike clan. Haunted by superstition and ancient lore, people were compelled to toss back any of their catch whose shell resembled a human face and over the centuries, human intervention helped select for this trait. What do you think? It’s interesting how we will automatically prise out patterns.

stadials and glacials

Listening to a really engrossing panel discussion of geologic ice ages and the usual state of affairs of the planet Earth—how the drama has gone on for æons without of intervention or influence and what level of detail can be teased from the rock and sediment of how the inaccessible past looked, I felt a little sad that although those taking part in the discussion saw no need for some moralising postscript because it still felt rather grubby and contrarian to be talking about the topic, though strictly in the framework of billions of years and the science of geology, without addressing the weather—and made one feel like a climate-change denier. People tend to shy away from taking about vaccines, evolution or the politics of race, irrespective of the setting, to avoid controversy and being tagged with such a label and science suffers, as does the way such things are debated and understood in the public sphere.
The language of academics seems almost more relaxed than the choice words of journalists and pundits, and I was delighted to be instructed. For the past fifty million years or so to the present day, the Earth has been experiencing an ice age, by the definition that there is permanent ice at one or both poles, and the Earth has been making the transition from Icehouse to Greenhouse conditions for all its history. Though the intensity of the cycles have varied and have gotten somewhat less extreme out of consideration for the living organisms there to witness these shifts (and the Earth has been mostly a hot-house—with only some fifteen percent of the geological record attesting to a colder climate), researchers believe that it’s the cusps of these changes that drive evolutionary development, the emergence of the creatures that would become us corresponds with switch that began about fifty million. The imbalance of climatic change—or the reason there are such variations in the first place, has to do with geography driven by tectonic shift: without a landmass near or at the top or the bottom of the world there is no polar ice and oceanic currents also play a big role, like the blockage of the Isthmus of Panama or the massive southern sea that encircles Antarctica that keeps warmer water at bay. Whereas Icehouse Earth has presented in the distant itself more like icy Europa and Greenhouse Earth has been a far more watery and steamy place, the carbon-dioxide that human industry and occupation has released into the shrinking wilds has pushed our greenhouse gases beyond the levels that Nature can tolerate in an Ice Age—as my sanctimonious coda. I wonder how the New North will fare?

genesis or æolian dust

The always intriguing Æon magazine invites us to imagine an ecosystem that’s parallel to our own familiarly flourishing one but possibly quite independent—not quite like the writhing, invisible world of microscopic beings that Anton van Leeuwenhoek saw for the first time in the 1670s as this discovery did not have immediately recognisable and world-shattering consequences, since these animalcules seemed to have less to do with the majesty of man than anything imaginable—and along side the life that we know in such a radically different and unorthodox way so as to be completely alien in organisation and expression.
I think there are good indicators that our prejudice is slowly succumbing to surprise and serendipity—the resourcefulness of biology, as the search continues for extra-terrestrial intelligence and we find niches of creeping and reproducing beings in the most unexpected of places, but for all these positive developments, we still could fail if our criteria for thriving only cleaves to what we know and expect. Of course it would be more exciting and apparent to be confronted with the mute artefacts of an otherworldly civilisation or megafauna lopping across far-away plains—rather than enigmatic crystals, sludge, erosion, curious matter circling the drain, or creatures perpetuated by human belief in numerology or patent medicines and are happy hitchhikers. One concrete example given of a seemingly biogenic phenomena (that may have originated in a genesis before the one that’s our creation narrative or afterwards, like viruses, plasmids and preons that seem to prey on our weaknesses) is in the patina called desert varnish, debated since before the time of Darwin whether vegetable or mineral, of a sheen that forms on the surface of rocks, that’s extremely hydrophobic and contains elements not native to the local environment. The varnish, however, is inchoate, endemic to deserts around the world, from Africa to the Antarctic, and is even that verdigris that was scrapped away by our ancestors to produce the most ancient and enduring petroglyphs as signs that we were here too.

turn-around or partial-swing

Civilization tends to congregate around sources of energy, and the freer and less effort required the better, from hunting grounds to floodplains and navigable rivers. Maybe civilization’s problems and deficit of power arose once communities established at those naturally landscaped headlands began to dig for more, and boom towns sounded out untapped reserves. Industrial colonies grew up around mines and wells and sought out these resources in exploitable lands.

Now Germany, not alone in its aspirations, certainly, but possibly exposed to more criticism and dissection, is struggling with its commitment to wean itself away from disinterred sources of energy. This sort of business is forever dirty and not without compromise, and though not the sole source of engineering through subsidies and regulation, the government’s diagram does play an important role in achieving those ends—especially short on sacrifice and innovation.

It seems, however, that the paths to these ends are anything but well marked: progressively higher rates are imposed on consumers and put businesses in an awkward situation either to lobby politicians for tax-breaks or to quit the country over the expense of power, but these premiums are not really being held in trust, as a price maybe more reflective of the true costs. Rather than shoring up extra funds for infrastructure improvements including turning kinetic energy, surplus electricity into potential energy and finding places and means to store it all, it is mostly feuding that emerges unscathed and only contentions are fully mapped out. Each political division has paved and developed its own corridors of power, returning to those original resources of geography and geology, and have their own notions how to best approach the situation—which has the potential to over- and out-do the best intentions of their neighbours, particularly when the central government is reluctant to manage the politics of inefficiency, protectionism and patriotism. Bavaria would rather promote its own solar, bio-mass, or hydro-power than support a circuit from the windmill powerhouse of the North Sea to the voracious south.  Multinational energy companies, with different allegiances, have their own ideas, too, which all make for a weird inversion of the not-in-my-backyard mentality that for many years kept nuclear policy off of people’s minds.

run-off or terrestrial sunsets

Via The Colossal and Five-Infinity, photographer Andre Ermolaev shares some of his air-borne impressions of Iceland’s rugged and liquid landscape.
These incredible images are created by volcanic ash, vibrant and chthonic minerals that the Earth gives up on a fairly regular basis there, being scuttled away by rivers and streams.

The photographer’s eye and technical acumen, I think, are really able to capture in this series what photography was intended for and distinguished from the other visual arts by—being able to distill and communicate a sort of landslide never seen before nor will ever be seen again, like being able to capture the roiling shadows of a cloud or the play of colours in a sunset.

Be sure to check out some of the other photographs featured on these communities.  These smoky, spyrograph moments are outstandingly beautiful and makes me hopeful that I might be able to also frame such compositions as they flow downstream.

WWII week: tysk (fleirtyding)

Previously, we had seen many of the coastal fortifications, still mostly intact, along the beaches of the Baltic, in the Normandy and in the harbours of the Bay of Biscay, and we were surprised to discover what an extensive network of defenses from World War II are yet to be found with some searching in Norway.

Unlike the pillbox concrete installations that defy erosion and the slippage of the decades (at least on human terms) as essential reminders spanning much of the continent and beyond, the Norwegian continuation of the Atlantic Wall, built under the orders of Nazi German to stave off an anticipated Allied invasion, are hewn into the very geology, cut into cliffs and granite boulders, like these

labyrinthine emplacements of trenches, bunkers and batteries found at Fort Nordberg and along the trek up to Fort Varnes and spread across the beach at Ny Hellesund all in the southwest part of the country, and commanded a strategic view of important berths and navigable points, bottlenecks and hiding spots, along the unfamiliar network of fjords. The title, tysk (fleirtyding) is Nowegian for German, Deutsch (disabiguation, [Begriffsanklarung]) to signify that Norwegians do not believe that the German people are unchanged or all the same.