Viewshed

By: | October 23, 2019

First must have come listening
to the wind or regarding
the movements of animals,
then monitoring the stars
and sometime after that
scrutinizing fire;
but somewhere in there belongs
watching the progress of a river…

Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes”

Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough to watch palaces of cottonwood trees go from green to gold. It happened fast, high desert washes flaring in a matter days.

Watching is something we’ve been doing since the beginning, one of the traits of being human. Something catches our eye, not predator or prey, but a swirl in water, a turning of stars, and we stare at it, enchanted. It is like waking up for the first time, seeing where you are. Watch for long enough and you witness change too slow for the human eye. Horsetails breeze from one side of the sky to the next as veins in leaves tighten, pigment brightening while chlorophyll dies.

Part of these couple of weeks, I was co-teaching an archaeological field program in southeast Utah, days of marching up and down canyons, reaching rock horns hundreds of feet in the air. We looked at petroglyphs dating back hundreds to many thousands of years. The co-instructor was Hopi archaeologist Lyle Balenquah, and he offered theories as to a sandstone wall with a 15-foot line of small human figures pecked into it, all going the same direction, some with hands, some with gear on their backs, some with penises, most without, one playing a flute, and, intermittently, a figure bigger than the others, with a bent-neck staff as if driving them. The line had 179 figures. Slaves on the march, migrants moving east to west, a village visiting another and commemorating the moment.

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Apocalypse, in costume

By: | October 22, 2019

I have what might best be classified as ‘manic costume joy.’ You’ve even heard about it here on this blog. I try to be the scariest thing I can think of for Halloween. One year, that was “Your Biological Clock.” Another year, the year humans hit 7 billion in number on October 31st, I tried to be overpopulation by burying myself in tiny homemade dolls with articulating, poseable limbs. Instead, I gave up after making just 30 and decided that “I am Being Attacked by Tiny People.”

Last week, my journalist friend Cally asked me when I was going to be the “Sixth Mass Extinction.”

Great idea, right? Really scary! But how does one dress up as a geologic-era scale event? You can’t just walk around in a onesie covered with CO2 molecules telling people that you’re the “Apotheosis of the Anthropocene,” can you?

Fortunately (but actually, quite unfortunately), the news has recently been full of inspiring headlines, so before the big day, I worked up some options:

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Science Writers on Twitter: Comforted By the Dying Universe

By: | October 21, 2019

@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf

@nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta.  “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years.  The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the whole universe will change “over time scales which greatly exceed the current age of the universe.”  That is, take the present planets, stars, galaxies, and universe and fast-forward them into the far future, farther into the future than the Big Bang was in the past, in fact, all the way to the end. It doesn’t end well. The paper starts small, though, with stars.

@shannonmstirone Replying to @nattyover: Today is one of those days when I’m comforted by knowing that one day our sun will die and our galaxy will merge with Andromeda and there’s no escaping, this is all temporary.

@shannonmstirone is Shannon Stirone, and she is also a science writer. The sun — after it blows up like a balloon and fries the earth along with most of the solar system — will shrink back down into a barely shining cinder. Our galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are going to collide and merge and become an entirely different galaxy. Our cosmic identities are temporary, change is inescapable.

@nattyover: Nothing more soothing than the thought of a neutron star sublimating

I read this and had to go look it up, and oh my goodness. Sublimation is when a solid goes straight to gas, no liquid melting in between; dry ice is solid carbon dioxide sublimating. Neutron stars are a stage in the deaths of stars much bigger than ours, so big they don’t shrink down to cinders but keep shrinking until their atoms are all jammed into nuclei, no atoms any more, just mostly neutrons, a billion tons in a teaspoon of degenerate solid neutron star. And then their neutrons decay, as neutrons do, into other particles, which decay farther until the stars have evaporated. They’ve sublimed.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the galaxies turning redder and redder until they finally blonk out. 

Stars live by burning gas and when the gas runs out, stars turn red; so when galaxies full of stars also run out of gas, they also turn red. Eventually all the gas in the universe has been used up as fuel and has pretty much dissipated, and no stars ever form again, neither do galaxies. What’s left is the black holes that had been at the centers of galaxies, and finally, via Hawking radiation, even the black holes evaporate.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the heat death of the universe.

Meanwhile, the universe which has always been expanding, keeps on expanding. In the end the warm, moving, shining universe is cold and still and dark.

@shannonmstirone: Deep-death-time makes me happy.

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Window Tree

By: | October 18, 2019

This is an update to a guest post that ran on December 12, 2018.

A few days ago, I found the following letter from my grandfather, Donald Pearce, in my parents’ bookshelves. It was tucked into a copy of Medea which he sent to me when I was a high school sophomore. ( I was precisely the kind of teenager who loved Medea.)

Grampy taught English literature at UC Santa Barbara, but always said he had more fun teaching at the local adult education center. I think he found the students a little more varied in their life experiences, and more interesting.

As you can tell from this letter — all those em dashes and exclamation points! — Grampy didn’t just read. He dove into texts headfirst and swam around in them, splashing about with glee. He spread his infectious enthusiasm right up until his death, which occurred about a year after he sent me this letter.

These days, the longing I feel for my grandparents feels less like waves, and more like a wellspring. The window tree in my backyard is showering gold again, so thought I’d repost what I wrote after my Nana died in 2017. Cheers, honey. Read on!

The Window Tree

All year long I’ve been haunted by a poem. When I sit down to work or go for a walk, it drifts into my mind: 

Tree at my window, window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

There she is, wearing the tattered yellow paisley bathrobe that used to hang on my grandfather’s broad shoulders. Her silvery bob is a little wild, static electricity from her slippers raising stray hairs into a halo.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

It’s been almost exactly a year now since my grandmother died, but I still sometimes wonder if the snatches of verse in my head are a message or echo – from her, from somewhere.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

Let me explain. When I was in my twenties, I lived with my grandmother for about a year. She didn’t sleep well. One morning, after a particularly rough night, she padded into the kitchen carrying a book of verse and opened it to Robert Frost’s “Tree at my Window.”

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Old Art, Older Animals

By: | October 17, 2019
Dinosaur curator Matthew Carrano, paleoartist Jay Matternes, and museum director Kirk Johnson talk art, fossils, and lizard predation.

When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The museum used digital photography to capture them in such detail that they could reprint them at full size, took them off the walls, rolled them up, and put them in storage.

The museum also got in touch with the artist, Jay Maternes, a very influential paleoartist. He’s in his 80s now and he still lives in the D.C. area, so earlier this week they invited him to the museum’s auditorium to talk about his art, animals, and the process of painting the murals.

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Fig of My Imagination

By: | October 16, 2019

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

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Montana’s Buffalo Conundrum

By: | October 15, 2019

This post originally ran April 3, 2014. I’ve added a brief update at the end.

Yellowstone National Park spans three states and nearly 3,500 square miles, making it one of the largest parks in the US. So when I read that Montana officials are searching for a home for 135 Yellowstone bison living on Ted Turner’s sprawling private ranch, I was bewildered. Why not just put them back in the park? Anyone who has visited Yellowstone knows that it’s prime habitat. You can’t drive a mile without seeing their shaggy hulking forms. Or better yet, let the bison roam free. After all, isn’t that the definition of a wild animal?

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It All Depends Where You Look

By: | October 14, 2019

This post was first published on January 9, 2019

Last month, while on assignment in Cozumel for a story on sponges, I went diving on a beautiful reef. It was stunning – a world of color, dreamlike shapes, and life everywhere I looked. Normally, I would have just swam about, marveled at the pretty nature, and come back to my hotel with a fat grin on my face.

But I just couldn’t stop fretting over all the sponges. You see, my story was on a theory among sponge experts that sponges are secretly, quietly taking over the world. It is … wait for it … The Rise of the Planet of the Sponge. Scary, right? Except just on coral reefs, not the world. And only in the Caribbean Sea. So, I guess it’s The Rise of the Caribbean Reef of the Sponge. Wow, that really doesn’t work as well.

Anyway, the theory goes that huge coral and urchin die-offs have led to a lot of spare real estate and algae on Caribbean reefs. The sponges have stepped in, sucked up the excess sugar pumped out by the algae and filled the now-empty reefs.

And diving in Cozumel, I noticed for the first time just how much of the color on a reef is actually sponge. We all know the big barrel sponges – those giant cannon-looking things hanging off the reef – but I’d never really noticed the encrusting sponges before. These are the colorful flat sponges that sort of drizzle around the reef like splotches on a Jackson Pollack.

It turns out that very little of the life I was looking at on the coral reef was actually coral. When I asked the folks on my boat – some of whom had been diving Cozumel for decades – none of them noticed the dominance of sponge over the coral. Likewise, the dive guides hadn’t noticed it either. How could they not see it? It was so obvious!

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