History is Long and Things Change

By: | February 24, 2025
a wooden church with an onion dome

I’m not actually much of a doomscroller, but my default choice when I want a moment of distraction is to hop over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post. And, lately, hopping over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post brings not fun distraction or even interesting diversion. Instead, it does nothing but give me new things to worry about. I have worries on so many fronts that they’re already quite hard to deal with.

So here’s what I’m trying to replace those with: Wikipedia rabbit holes.

I started the other day when I was feeling – oh, who even knows. Feeling something. And I thought, let’s try Wikipedia. It has things I can read, none of which will be formatted as a meme designed to cause me outrage, and they will likely not fill me with immediate current-events-based angst.

Not to say that a wander through Wikipedia is necessarily fun.

One day last week I started with the featured article on Wikipedia’s English homepage, which was about a mass methanol poisoning event in 2016 in the Russian city of Irkutsk. More than 70 people died. They thought they were buying a safe, cheap alternative to vodka, which had gotten prohibitively expensive. I learned about Russia’s alcohol policy in the mid-2010s. Russians drink a lot of alcohol, and it needs to be both safe and cheap.

Irkutsk, I learned, is in Siberia, not far from Mongolia, and from Lake Baikal. And, I realized, it’s the hometown of a Russian Orthodox missionary priest who is now known as Innocent of Alaska. He arrived with his family in Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, in 1924. He built a Russian orthodox church there, the second on that site. It has been replaced various times in the 200 years since; I saw the current one (built late in the 19th century) in 2009.

So what did this cruise through Wikipedia do? It showed me the importance of a government that functions well and regulates the things that you ingest. It reminded me that this world is full of cities – big cities! with hundreds of thousands of people! – that I can’t place on a map. It reminded me of a once-in-a-lifetime trip. And it reminded me that histories are long and things change.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Guest Post: Why Ice Speaks Slowly

By: | February 21, 2025

The first time I landed on the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, I immediately felt disoriented. The landscape was a monotonous flat white, with wind-scoured snow and ice extending to identical horizons in every direction. In this isolated spot 380 miles from the South Pole, the only point of reference was the pile of bags and crates that would become a camp for three researchers plus myself, a journalist.

Over the next three weeks, the sun traveled circles in the sky. Day and night blended into a uniform snow-reflected glare. Smells disappeared, except for the fuel that we pumped into our snowmobiles.  Every direction seemed the same.

Some parts of my mind gradually attuned to this unfamiliar environment, while others—strangely—did not.

During an hours-long snowmobile ride, the horizon that we’d been staring at suddenly opened up, and I realized that we had crested a barely perceptible hill. We zoomed down and down the far side—but after an hour of coasting downhill, I glanced at my GPS and realized that we had only descended 15 feet.

Since that first trip, I have made five more visits to Antarctica, each one lifechanging in its own way. On one occasion, I watched as researchers melted a narrow wormhole through the half a mile of ice beneath our boots, and then lowered a camera—allowing us to peer into a subglacial lake that no human had ever seen before.

But to this day, my first visit to the Siple Coast and the disorientation that I felt still sticks with me: a reminder that some things are too large for humans to see and comprehend.

When I look at a Landsat image captured from space, I can see the Siple Coast in a very different way.

Six massive glaciers, each 20 to 30 miles across, ooze off the coastline and merge into slab of ice the size of France that floats on the distant, unseen ocean. The individual glaciers are marked by lazily curving, riverine flow-lines that extend 150 miles along their paths. These rivers of viscous white molasses are separated by domes and ridges of ice that sit between them.

I once camped on one of those high places, called Siple Dome, and there at ground level I struggled to recognize it as a pinnacle. But when seen by a satellite camera from a low angle, these domes and ridges are large enough to cast shadows.

In the 1970s, scientists landed at dozens of locations on these glaciers and pounded metal poles into the snow. They lingered for 24 hours at each position, getting satellite fixes on each pole’s exact location with an early predecessor of GPS. They returned a year or two later to each site, found the same poles — now several feet shorter, due to the accumulation of snow — and re-measured their positions. In this way, they calculated how far each pole had moved, and in which direction, to generate a rough sketch of how these glaciers flowed.

This monumental feat of grunt-work immediately revealed a major surprise. Five of these glaciers were moving 1,000 to 2,000 feet per year, a speed that is common in large Antarctic glaciers. But one of them, Ice Stream C, was flowing at only about one-fiftieth that speed, 20 to 40 feet per year.

The surfaces of the other glaciers were scattered here and there with crevasses — the cracks that form as a glacier slides, bends, and stretches over the uneven bed beneath it.

But Kamb had almost no crevasses — because it was barely moving.

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Animal Love

By: | February 19, 2025


I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I prefer living wildlife to not. Scientific articles and important commentary pops up and I’ve gotten a few useful leads from the site, but you have to weed through thousand comments of people screaming at each other’s walls. 

One question in bold that got hundreds comments and ten times as many likes and dislikes was, simply, “WHY DO LIBS LOVE EVERY SPECIES MORE THAN THEIR OWN?”

Comment sections are hell for faith in humanity. I don’t know who the libs are exactly, but in a world of heavy industry and mounting dangers posed to most species, people who love animals more than ourselves are absolutely needed. 

I found this to be an insulting question, insulting to those who don’t vote Democrat, or whatever the definition of libs is. In my travels, I’ve found just as many conservative folks who care for and see animals as equals.

An ecologist of mixed Raramuri and Western Apache descent recently said to me, “Humans are the dumbest of the animals.”

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The Youth Singularity

By: | February 17, 2025

This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI.

Little fingers swipe and stab at the iPad screen. An arrow traverses the “slide to unlock” bar and the monitor scrolls to the third page of apps, where YouTube’s icon zooms into yesterday’s search results. My one-year-old son chooses his favourite episode of Pocoyo – an animated, Spanish children’s show that’s been translated into English and narrated by the incomparable Stephen Fry.

Before my son was able to utter the word “poco,” directing an adult to find the TV program for him, he could do this series of actions to meet his own needs. When he tired of Pocoyo, he could press the square button to close YouTube, scroll over to the videos app and press play on Curious George, restarting the movie if necessary.

Much as I’d like to attribute his ability to early signs of brilliance, a more parsimonious explanation involves the intuitive user interface, combined with his native status in this generation of technology users.

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Something Nice and Small

By: | February 14, 2025
Delectopecten thermus, Yi-Tao Lin

Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars.

So I do what I often do when I get stuck: I texted Helen to ask what she thought I should write about.

She responded almost immediately. “Something nice and small that knows nothing about the absolute [redacted] chaos around it.”

So, my friends, let me introduce you to Delectopecten thermus.

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The Idiocy of Second-Guessing Order

By: | February 12, 2025

This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next one is casting a birdy eye at us; and our leadership is objectively breaking records for human fuck-ups. Anyway, the sky is pretty orderly and predictable, and that was comforting then and still is and maybe for you too.

Last winter I was staying with friends who have a dark sky. (I don’t have a dark sky and even on clear nights I can hardly see Orion, which makes me sad but I’m used to it.) It was New Year’s Eve and as usual I bugged out early, went up to the guestroom, adjusted the blinds so that lying in bed I could see the sky, went to sleep. Fireworks at midnight, woke up, looked at the sky, watched the sparkles for a while, rolled over and went back to sleep. A couple hours later, my brain woke me up so it could look at the dark sky some more. I rolled back over, looked through the blinds at the sky, and there, sliding fast and exactly between the slats was a shining and glorious little meteor. Oh my! I thought. Oh my goodness gracious sakes alive! What an excellently superb way to start the new year, I thought.

I wondered whether my meteor was part of a shower. I didn’t know of any, though I looked it up later and maybe it was one of the Quadrantids, also maybe not. Anyway, I rolled over again, went back to sleep. But my brain had gotten obsessed with the sky and wasn’t about to give it up.

So I kept rolling over, looking, then rolling back over and going to sleep, then rolling over again, looking again and again. No more meteors. But the stars were so bright, one in particular which was maybe Arcturus or maybe Polaris, which in either case I thought was Venus because I wasn’t used to stars being so bright (Baltimore’s fault). Every time I woke up those bright stars were still there the way stars always are, always there.

Later, though, one time I woke up and looked again and the bright stars weren’t there. It must have clouded over, I thought. So I looked for clouds; no clouds. Then what happened? did something go wrong? Then I remembered that the earth turns, so the bright stars weren’t there because they had rotated behind the trees. Oh ha ha, I thought, silly you, forgetting that you should never second-guess the sky.

Which reminds me of the time years ago I got up in the middle of the night to look for an eclipse of the moon, the earth’s shadow crawling across the moon, turning it blood red. I looked out the window, no blood moon. The eclipse must be delayed, I thought, it must be running late. Then I remembered that eclipses don’t do that, eclipses are punctual, reliable, completely trustworthy. So I checked the clock again and yes, of course, I was wrong about the time. Don’t second-guess an eclipse either.

I love the mistake my brain was making — predicting the sky based on human norms. Second-guessing human events is fine, smart, a survival strategy: people are mistaken, things get delayed, situations get screwed up. When something is unexpected, isn’t going according to plan, look first for what went wrong. Our current combination of wired-in racism and a raging pandemic is a fine example, and the list of things that went wrong and are still going wrong must be setting some kind of historical world record for human fuck-ups.

For the universe, though, the standard operating procedure is order. The universe doesn’t go wrong. Even the change is orderly: the meteor follows the orbit of its disintegrated parent, Betelgeuse gets fainter and then brightens again. The universe operates lawfully on mostly-known physics.

I do love it when things that are so obvious and logical, things as widely-known as Newton’s laws, turn out to be a surprise. I love it even more when the universe continues to opt for order.

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Meteor, slightly cropped, by Tom Lee, via Flickr; Night sky, cropped, by Mathias Krumbholz via Wikimedia Commons;

Behavioral Observation

By: | February 7, 2025

Colony: Punta Tombo, Chubut, Argentina

Date: 9 November

Site: RFID B

Nest: 708H

Nest type: Burrow, northwest-facing, mid-slope, concealed from above

Penguin: Male, toe-tag no. 14113/RFID no. 37189

Device: AX3 accelerometer no. 99290, day three of a five-day deployment

Nest Contents: Two eggs

Notes: Purpose is to ground truth time-stamped accelerometry data from AX3 with observed behaviors in an effort to determine how frequently an incubating penguin goes down to the ocean to get a drink, among other things.

Start time: 1635


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