Global Earthquakes 2000 – 2013
Category: Nature
The Crushed Kakapo Egg
The Kakapo bird is a flightless, nocturnal, ground-dwelling parrot that evolved in New Zealand, where there were no ground-based predators. Its most dangerous adversary was the eagle, which usually spots its prey by movement. The Kakapo has evolved to freeze completely when startled to avoid being eaten. Over the eons it has given up flight in favor of weight, and the birds now weigh up to 8 or 9 pounds.
Here is a picture for scale:
Things went well for the Kakapo in the New Zealand islands for eons.
Then white settlers came a couple of hundred years ago and brought cats and other ground-based predators. Now there are 125 Kakapo birds left.
125.
Conservationists in New Zealand decided they are worth saving. When an extremely rare Kakapo egg was accidentally crushed, presumably by the mother, they stepped in and saved it with tape and glue.
Here is the picture story of the survival of the cracked egg chick.
Our Sun and Our Moon
My friend Cynthia’s house is on a north-south ridge in Poway, California. From her front yard she can look east over the mountains. From her back yard she can see far into the distance over the Pacific, on a clear day. She posted these two pictures a couple of days ago when the moon was full. At the same time she saw the rise of the full moon and the sunset over the ocean. Here are her pictures:
They won’t believe we have such a big moon for such a small town!
We don’t just have a big moon for a small town in Texas, we have a big moon for a small planet. Scientists have speculated that the fact that we have a big moon is one of the most important contributing factors to life having started on Earth. A big moon causes strong tidal forces. Tides cause tidal pools. And tidal pools, for a billion years early in the life of our planet, provided just the right environment exposing microscopic amino acids to alternating periods of dry and light and darkness and wetness – an environment conducive to the formation of life.
And then there is the size of our moon as it relates to the sun. The moon and the sun on Earth look about the same size, and they are. The moon appears sometimes just a bit smaller than the sun. That occurs when it’s farther away in its elliptical orbit. If a solar eclipse happens at that time, there is a ring of fire around the dark disk of the moon. This type of eclipse is called an annular eclipse. The English word annular comes from the Latin word anulus, which means ring. At other times, when the moon is closer to the Earth in its orbit, it appears slightly bigger than the sun, and if an eclipse occurred then, the moon would cover the sun completely.
The fact that the sun and the moon appear the same size in our sky is completely and amazingly coincidental. The moon just happens to be 400 times smaller than the sun and the sun is 400 times farther away from us than the moon. So they just happen to look the same.
This wasn’t always the case in the history of our Earth. Since the Earth spins faster than the moon orbits, the tidal bulge raised on the Earth pulls on the lagging moon. This gradually raises its orbit and it slows down our day. Every year the orbit of the moon grows by about 3.8 centimeters and our day lengthens by about 0.000015 seconds.
This means that when the velociraptors, thought to be one of the most intelligent dinosaurs, ruled about 70 million years ago, when they sat on their back porches sipping their Cretaceous cocktails and watching the moon, the moon appeared much bigger. It was 2,660 kilometers closer to the Earth than it is now. Velociraptors would never have experienced an annular eclipse.
Likewise, in a few million years hence, the moon will be much farther away and it will therefore appear smaller. The days of the full solar eclipses on Earth are numbered.
We humans are lucky to be here on Earth just during this short astronomical time window where the moon and the sun appear to be the same size. The odds of that happening in our solar system are – well – astronomical. The odds of a big moon on another small planet, where the moon appears the same size as the star, are – well – astronomical astronomical.
Visualizing the Solar System
We think of our planet Earth, our home, our only world, as if it were the center of the universe. For us, of course, our planet is huge. It takes a day to travel by jet plane between continents.
When we see drawings, artist’s conceptions of our solar system, we usually see a huge sun, surrounded by more or less small planets.
If our son was the size of a basketball, about 9.5 inches in diameter, the planet closest to the sun, Mercury, would be about the size of 1/30th of an inch, kind of like a poppy-seed. It would be 33 feet away from the basketball that is the sun.
Venus would be 1/12th of an inch in diameter, the size of a very small pebble, about 62 feet away. That’s it. There is a ball in the middle, and these two grains of sand or pebbles circle at 33 feet and 62 feet away from the basketball.
Earth would be just a smidgen bigger than Venus, another tiny pebble, at a distance of 86 feet. Our moon would be a mote of dust circling our pebble at a distance of about 2.5 inches. A college basketball court is 84 feet long. So if the sun, the basketball, is under one net, the earth, grain of pebble 1/10th of an inch in diameter, would float at the other end of the court.
Let’s speed this up now.
Mars would be a grain of sand at 130 feet.
Jupiter would be a one inch marble at 445 feet.
Saturn would be a 3/4 inch marble at 820 feet.
Uranus would be a 1/3 inch, about the size of a pea, at 1,645 feet.
Neptune would be another pea, at 2,580. That’s almost half a mile.
These are all the planets. they would circle pretty much in a plane. Up and down in the imaginary sphere of the solar system there is nothing but dust, occasional comets coming in and leaving again. In addition, the planets don’t all just line up in one direction away from the sun, as I just described. They are in very different positions all around the son, so Uranus can be on one side, and Neptune on the other side of the sun and the two will then be almost a mile apart from each other.
The next star system, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away, would be about 4,400 miles away. So if the sun were a basketball in New York City, the next star would be another basketball in Moscow.
Once I realize how little “stuff” there is in our solar system, and how far away the next one is, it gives me a feeling of awe of the size of our universe.
I wonder what I’d think about humanity if I were an alien traveler just coming around Neptune half a mile away from the sun, thinking about that little blue speck of 1/10 of an inch circling 86 feet from the sun – as all that humanity has got.
Our Earth is the only planet around for a very, very long distance.
We have to make it here.
Land Mammals of the Earth and their Wild Brethren
Randall Munroe used data from Vaclav Smil’s The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (“plus a few other sources”) to create a visualization of all of Earth’s land mammals, which include us, by weight.
According to Smil’s data, the animals in the world are humans and their food. Humans, cattle, pigs goat and sheep make up the almost all the mammalian biomass on earth. All other mammals, the wild animals of the world, all of them together have less biomass than the goats. 34 million tons of wild animals versus 39 million tons of goats.
When I see this, suddenly I am just a bit more proud for being a treehugger at heart. I want to do more to help preserve nature for the wild animals to have a chance.
An interesting concept to keep in mind when looking at this: Should something happen to humanity, like a major disease or an apocalyptic war, our food animals would quickly disappear. Sheep, goats and cattle are not independent and smart enough to survive on their own in the wild, and their populations would quickly be decimated to a minor role or possibly even extinction. They only exist in their current form because humans created them that way. Massive amounts of habitat would open up again for the wild animals, their predators would thrive again, and the world would quickly become “wild.”
This reminds me of two books: Stephen King’s The Stand and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, both excellent books, by the way, dealing with what the world would be like after humans are decimated.
Here is an example of wild animals returning to nature that recently made headlines. An excellent video of the effect of wolves in Yellowstone, how the literally change the flow of rivers.
Eagle Talons
- [click for picture credit]
I had no idea how big they were.
.
One Very Smart Crow
I cannot say anything to add to the impact of this video.
This shows abstract thinking, planning, problem solving and creativity all at once – in an animal. It represents a powerful argument and example against human exceptionalism.
I believe humans are not the only animal that uses tools, that thinks, that has a sense of identity and self. I don’t believe that humans are different in kind from all the other animals.
California Brown – and not the governor
This shows California on January 13, 2013 (left) and January 13, 2014 (right).
This is a picture I took in the Anza Borrego Desert a few weeks ago. There isn’t a green leaf to be found.
We’re in trouble.
Our Brown Southern California
The average rainfall in San Diego is 10.34 inches per year. In 2013, we only had 5.57 inches, just about half of normal.
As most of the nation is deeply stuck in ice and snow right now, I was able to go on a bike ride in 84 degree F weather this afternoon. Here are some pictures of what this side of the country looks like. [click to enlarge photos]
Here is a shot of our neighborhood from a bike path. Normally all the hills are green at this time of the year. But this year we haven’t seen any rain worth mentioning yet.
Another view. Not a green blade of grass.
This is a pedestrian and bike bridge across Lake Hodges. The post in the middle is about 30 feet tall. When this was built about five or six years ago the lake was full. There was a barge with a crane that helped construction. They had to dig a dry well, pump out the water, to put in the two concrete posts. It cost $11 million at the time. They could have waited until now, and it would have been much cheaper, since they could just drive the cement trucks down there. When the lake is full, the water comes up about two thirds on that post.
The view from the bride, now standing right on top of where that post is, facing west. In the very distance there is still a trace of water visible in Lake Hodges. What we see below is usually under 20 feet of water. Fishermen drive their motor boats around down there. There is even a sign on the bridge that says “No Fishing From Bridge.”
And now I am going to work that rain stick for a while.
Der Panther – A Poem about Wild Animals in Captivity
When I was in grade school in German class, my teacher had us memorize poems. One of the poems I can still recite flawlessly today. It is “Der Panther/The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke, written in 1902, and it goes like this:
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
Poetry, as always, is exceptionally difficult to translate, if not impossible. Here I found a surprisingly good translation, credit Wikipedia, that provides the content. It does not have the powerful and profound impact of the original German, not by a long shot, but it gives you an idea of the message:
His gaze against the sweeping of the bars
has grown so weary, it can hold no more.
To him, there seem to be a thousand bars
and back behind those thousand bars no world.The soft the supple step and sturdy pace,
that in the smallest of all circles turns,
moves like a dance of strength around a core
in which a mighty will is standing stunned.Only at times the pupil’s curtain slides
up soundlessly — . An image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs —
and in the heart ceases to be.
Here is a website that shows the original and several different translations by different authors, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. I am apparently not the only person who loves this poem and has tried to convey its essence to English speakers.
SeaWorld Stock Drops
SeaWorld’s stock is down 25% from its high point. The company blames it on “bad weather” affecting theme park attendance. However, the company is aware of the negative publicity brought by the surprise hit movie Blackfish. Before going public, the company described the risks to its business:
An accident or an injury at any of our theme parks or at theme parks operated by competitors, particularly an accident or an injury involving the safety of guests and employees, that receives media attention, is the topic of a book, film, documentary or is otherwise the subject of public discussions, may harm our brands or reputation, cause a loss of consumer confidence in the Company, reduce attendance at our theme parks and negatively impact our results of operations. Such incidents have occurred in the past and may occur in the future. In addition, other types of adverse publicity concerning our business or the theme park industry generally could harm our brands, reputation and results of operations. The considerable expansion in the use of social media over recent years has compounded the impact of negative publicity.
Statements by the company try to discredit the movie, calling it “shamefully dishonest.” SeaWorld recently took out a full-page advertisement in seven major newspapers condemning “inaccurate reports” while reiterating its advocacy for killer whales and their humane treatment.
But the facts tell another story. There are no records of killer whales in the wild ever attacking or killing humans. Of course, humans have a difficult time getting near the animals, so that alone does not really say much.
However, I have seen elephants, tigers and bears in zoos perform repetitive motions in their cages, wandering back and forth in the same pattern, wearing down the concrete beneath their feet. I have recently seen the dolphins at Dolphin Encounter in Hawaii circle their little enclosed habitats over and over again.
It is no surprise that an animal weighing up to 10 tons that is kept in a tight tank, fed on a diet of thawed fish, might exhibit similar stress. Like circus animals, they have to perform regularly, and often they are separated from their cubs or relatives against their will.
Between 1960 and 2012 there have been 114 cases of orcas in captivity attempting to harm their handlers or trainers.
It will be interesting to see if the business model of SeaWorld can survive this severe blow.
Orca Tries to Communicate with Humans
Here is an orca exhibiting strange behavior. I can only assume it’s one of these possibilities:
1. The orca is trying to communicate with humans, and it’s using the only sounds that humans consistently seem to produce under water. He thinks it’s our way of communicating and he’s answering in “our language.”
2. The orca is simply “parroting.” A parrot has the ability to hear complex sounds and reproduce them.
3. The orca is being funny, mimicking us and essentially laughing at us.
If any reader has other suggestions, I’d be glad to listen.
New Palm Grove 2010 – 2014 with Bighorn Sheep
I have been hiking Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego Desert every year right after New Year. This year I went today, January 1, 2014.
Starting out, on January 3, 2010, I noticed a brand new stand of palm trees developing. I took a picture and marked the spot (click to enlarge):
When I came back two years later on January 7, 2012, here is the identical view:
Then I came back on March 10, 2013. This is what it looked like:
Today I went out again to Palm Canyon. When I got to the trailhead, there was a sign warning that there had been a severe flood during the summer in 2013, and that the trail had been obliterated in a number of places. Indeed, as I hiked in, I noticed that I found myself hiking off-trail quite a few times, but since the canyon narrows toward the oasis, there is no way to miss it.
When I got to my little experimental palm grove, I hardly recognized it. Here is what it looked like today:
The trees that were formerly where I placed the blue and green arrows are completely gone. The water pulled them out completely and washed them away. There is not a trace of them left. The center grove is still there, but it has hardly grown since last year, and it is severely bent at the root, obviously from the rush of the creek downstream.
When I got to the main oasis, I also didn’t recognize some of the terrain. Huge boulders and giant trunks of dead palm trees had been moved around.
If you have never seen a “real” oasis, the oasis at Palm Canyon is perfect. It’s 1.5 miles from the trailhead. After about a mile of desert hiking through extremely hot and dry terrain up the canyon, a small trickle develops in the stream bed, and within a few minutes it turns into a real creek. Then the oasis becomes visible from the distance.
These palm trees have been there for a long time. Their trunks are gigantic, and the boulders around them massive. It takes some real scrambling to get in there.
Here is a view from “inside.” The oasis is so large, there is no good way to take a picture once inside.
Then, on the way back out, I was treated to an exceptional surprise. I looked up and suddenly I saw a bighorn sheep right in front of me on the cliff. I got a few pictures to share here:
Seeing the sheep so close to me, and being able to watch it climb down the cliff and then prance away was a magnificent way to end my annual visit to Palm Canyon at Borrego Springs.
The Unbroken Line of My Ancestry
I am here today because of an unbroken line of ancestors that reaches from the earliest mammals all the way to me today. More specifically, and astonishingly, I am alive today because:
- None of my ancestors ever decided not to have any children.
- None of my maternal ancestors ever miscarried or aborted any of my ancestors.
- Every one of my ancestors lived long enough to grow to adulthood and procreate before getting killed by disease, war, accidents or old age.
- Each sexual intercourse of all my ancestors resulted in a sperm actually reaching the egg, and the exact sperm that reached the egg was critical for me to be here today. Of those millions of generations of ancestors, any one different sperm, and I would not be I today – and I would probably not exist.
- If any of the sperms just in the last 100,000 generations of hominid ancestors I have had carried an X instead of a Y chromosome, or the other way around, I would not be here today. The exact order in which it happened was necessary to make me possible.
- All the possible permutations of what could have happened count in the trillions, yet only this one permutation actually occurred, that is me today.
This line of thinking caused me to think back to the earliest primate we know about, the purgatorius that lived about 65 million years ago.
The purgatorius is believed to be the earliest example of a primate or a proto-primate. It was a small rat-like mammal, about five to fifteen inches long and lived in borrows underground about 65 million years ago. When the dinosaurs became rapidly extinct around that time, a niche opened up for mammals. Some scientists speculate that the purgatorius, due to its primate-like teeth, may be the most distant ancestor of all primates. Over time more advanced primates evolved from the purgatorius: monkeys, apes, and eventually, 63 million years later, some hominids started walking upright in East Africa.
So there was a rat-like primate that looked like a rodent, which burrowed in mountains of dinosaur dung for beetles and worms 65 million years ago that had a litter of babies, at least one of which survived to have its own litter, and so on, and some twenty million generations later here I am…
…typing this up.
Book Review: The Seven Daughters of Eve – by Bryan Sykes
There are seven individual women, who lived between 10,000 years ago and 45,000 years ago between the Middle East and various areas of Europe, who are the direct ancestors of 95% of all European people alive today. Yes, exactly seven women. I am European, so I am likely the direct descendent of one of those seven individuals.
How can this be possible?
In a previous post I mused about how many ancestors we all have. I made the point that going back just 28 generations, or only about 675 years, I have over 130 million ancestors. The chart in that post illustrates that. However, the maternal line, going back to my mother, and from her to her mother, and so on, moving back through time, there is only ONE in each generation. There may be a million ancestors in a given generation, but there is only ONE mother of a mother of a mother of a mother and so on.
The author Bryan Sykes is a professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford. He has done pioneering work in genetics, specializing in studying mitochondrial DNA. One of the striking attributes is that the mitochondrial DNA is not passed on by males, only by females. Therefore, my personal mitochondrial DNA can be studied and compared with that of other contemporaries. When Sykes did this, he discovered that all modern Europeans pretty much belonged to one of only seven “groups” or “clans” as he calls them. Studying mutation frequency and the base mitochondrial DNA, coupled with the anthropological record, he was able to determine that there were seven specific women that are the mothers of all Europeans. Here is an excerpt:
The seven clusters had ages of between 45,000 and 10,000 years. What these estimates actually tell us is the length of time it has taken for all the mutations that we see within a cluster to have arisen from a single founder sequence. And, by purely logical deduction, the inescapable but breathtaking conclusion is that the single founder sequence at the root of each of the seven clusters was carried by just one woman in each case. So the ages we had given to each of the clusters became the times in the past when these seven women, the clan mothers, actually lived. It required only that I gave them names to bring them to life and to arouse in me, and everyone who has heard about them, an intense curiosity about their lives. Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine became real people. I chose names that began with the letter by which the clusters had been known since we had adopted Antonio Torroni’s alphabetic classification system. Ursula was the clan mother of cluster U. Cluster H had Helena at its root. Jasmine was the common ancestor for cluster J; and so on. These were no longer theoretical concepts, obscured by statistics and computer algorithms; they were now real women. But what were they like, these women to whom almost everyone in Europe is connected by an unbroken, almost umbilical thread reaching back into the deep past? (pp. 196-197).
He then traced further back into our African roots and found one single woman, who lived about 150,000 years ago in Africa, who is the mother of all human beings alive today. He calls her fittingly Mitochondrial Eve.
Sykes writes The Seven Daughters of Eve for the non-scientist, but he goes through great pains to describe his research, the steps he went through to come to his conclusions, and the various scientific hurdles he had to jump. The book reads like a detective story, and I had trouble putting it down. After he makes his scientific points, the muses about the lives of the seven women. How might they have lived, what were the conditions of their lives like, how did they spend their days?
The roots of our human existence, our history and our unique humanness became alive for me as I read this book. Many times I was caught in reveries, dreaming about the lives of my ancestors. I was overwhelmed by the immense time periods that have elapsed, and how very unlikely our human existence actually is. 45,000 years represents about 2,000 generations. I know my grandmother. That’s three generations. However, my grandmother’s DNA comes from one of the seven daughters of Eve, 2,000 generations ago.
The Seven Daughters of Eve inspired me on many levels and has enriched my life. I will never think about humanity the same way again.
Rating: ****