On this day in 1980, an earthquake beneath Mount St. Helens got everyone’s attention. Within two months, much of her summit would be lying on the North Fork Toutle River valley floor, the lush forests stripped away, and our views of her changed forever.

My dear friend Suzanne took the above photograph during one of our visits. Perspective makes the grass look almost as tall as me -but it’s waist-high at best, possibly shorter. I was completely entranced by the mountain, so I didn’t notice the exact height. But I’d probably remember slogging through something trying to poke me in the eyeballs. And, of course, the volcano towers over us all, even though it’s off in the distance up and across the broad valley.

It’s not just perspective that makes Mount St. Helens look so huge. It is so huge! To give you an idea of how huge, even with nearly two thousand feet of its summit missing, check this out:

Can you see the helicopter in that photo I took? No? Let me crop that for you:

Yep, that wee spec is a Bell JetRanger, which is about 40 feet long. Here’s one parked at Hoffstadt Bluffs:

And to give you some additional perspective, here are some people standing beside one.

Alas, I have no photos of a helicopter right in the middle of the crater, but here’s a lovely shot from one of the trails at Johnston Ridge, showing you what’s inside.

That mound of lava in the crater that looks like a blister? That’s around 1,000 feet tall. This pdf has a lot of stats on how big the dome is, all concluding: it’s huge. Yet it doesn’t even fill the crater left by the May 1980 eruption.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Originally published at Rosetta Stones.

The post The Mind-Boggling Scale of Mount St. Helens’ Crater appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

In light of Shaq claiming the earth is flat, I figured it was time to publish this article here. Is it always a bad idea to make a wager with a flat earther? Cuz I’d love to bet Shaq that a high-altitude flight would prove the earth’s quite round.

In January of 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace found himself on a collision-course with a group of creationists who fervently believed the earth is flat. The father of biogeography, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, seems an unlikely sort to be mixed in with religious fanatics on a question of geography settled since the 3^rd century BC. Why was such a venerable 19^th century man of science accepting wagers from flat-earthers regarding the shape of our planet?

Simply put: It looked like easy money.

Really, ten minutes and a telescope should have done it. Alas, nothing is easy when it comes to creationists, as Wallace would learn to his sorrow:

The next matter was a much more serious one, and cost me fifteen years of continued worry, litigation, and persecution, with the final loss of several hundred pounds. And it was all brought upon me by my own ignorance and my own fault—ignorance of the fact so well shown by the late Professor de Morgan—that “paradoxers,” as he termed them, can never be convinced, and my fault in wishing to get money by any kind of wager. It constitutes, therefore, the most regrettable incident in my life.

Sir Charles Lyell, father of modern geology, shared Wallace’s ignorance. They may have steered a much different course had they known the history of the men they hoped to defeat.

***

19^th century Britain was one of the epicenters of the scientific revolution. But with progress comes pushback. Alarmed believers strove to shore up the Bible’s authority, some going much further than others. Not many of them went to greater extremes than Samuel Birley Rowbotham.

Known as Parallax, he was a Biblical literalist, young earth creationist, and quack who believed in a flat, disc-shaped Earth. The North Pole stood at its center, and that was it; in his cosmology, there was no such beast as a South Pole. He backed his contentions with bad math, bogus experiments, and Bible verses. He revived the ancient flat-earth idea and gave it a modern patina of “science,” then used the result to stir up controversy for cash.

One of his many popular lectures on the subject converted William Carpenter, who loved the idea more for its poke in the eye it gave to the scientific establishment than for reasons of biblical fealty. Determined to rid the world of round-earth ideas, he wrote a scathing book called Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed under the (mis)nom(er) de plume Common Sense.

This book soon came to the attention of the man who was to vex Alfred Russel Wallace so sorely. John Hampden, a Protestant rector’s son and all-round arch-conservative, had plenty of leisure time for engaging in argument. His father had left him independently wealthy, although, perhaps suspecting his eldest son would prove prone to causing controversy, stipulated in his will that John would be reduced to a meager £50 per year if he ever did anything to sully the venerable name of Hampden.

John Hampden wasted little time doing just that. After dropping out of Oxford, he occupied himself by publishing various tracts demanding that the Church of England be reformed “on strict Protestant lines.” A staunch biblical literalist “bent on defending Genesis to the hilt,” he was ripe pickings for Carpenter’s flat-earth crusade. Upon reading Theoretical Astronomy, he became convinced the earth was flat, and he had the Bible verses to prove it. Putting his tract-making skills to work, he quickly produced pamphlets such as The Popularity of Error and the Unpopularity of Truth: Shewing the World to be a Stationary Plane and Not a Revolving Globe, purporting to prove the pancake-osity of the planet.

This was the era of steam-powered printing presses and vastly expanding public interest in science, fed by vigorous journalism – a veritable Information Age rather like our own. Like our modern creationists, John Hampden looked on in horror as the masses slurped up all the science they could hold, including the round-earth heresy. He made it his mission to eradicate such ideas from the public consciousness, even when his bombastic techniques horrified his flat-earth grandfather Parallax. Sounding like the Borg of Hampden, he declared that spherical earth theories had to go: “All further resistance is useless.”

And he was willing to wager his money on it.

***

On January 12^th, 1870, Hampden threw down his gauntlet in the weekly journal Scientific Opinion.

What is to be said of the pretended philosophy of the 19^th century, when not one educated man in ten thousand knows the shape of the earth on which he dwells? Why, it must be a huge sham! The undersigned is willing to deposit from £50 to £500, on reciprocal terms, and defies all the philosophers, divines and scientific professors in the United Kingdom to prove the rotundity and revolution of the world from Scripture, from reason, or from fact. He will acknowledge that he has forfeited his deposit, if his opponent can exhibit, to the satisfaction of any intelligent referee, a convex railway, river, canal, or lake. JOHN HAMPDEN

Alfred Russel Wallace saw the ad. Though it must have seemed like the easiest of easy money, he was cautious, and consulted a man whom he held in the highest esteem.

Before accepting this challenge I showed it to Sir Charles Lyell, and asked him whether he thought I might accept it. He replied, “Certainly. It may stop these foolish people to have it plainly shown them.”

Poor Wallace, like Lyell, thought that Hampden only needed to be shown some proof in order to accept the plain fact that the earth is round. He knew nothing of Hampden and his ilk, or he may never have accepted the wager. But in addition to wanting to win a cool £500, he believed “that a practical demonstration would be more convincing than the ridicule with which such views are usually met.” He was about to find out that practical demonstrations have absolutely no effect on these truest of true believers.

The first signs that Hampden was determined to win by crook if he couldn’t manage a victory by hook came when Wallace wrote in response to his advertisement, graciously accepting the challenge. Wallace offered to prove the earth’s curvature by measuring “the convexity of a canal or lake.” As for where this was to be done, he was amenable to any suitable stretch of water. “A canal will do if you can find one which is nearly straight for four miles without locks; if not, I propose Bala Lake, in North Wales, as a place admirably suited for the experiment.” He thought any of the editors of several popular science or sporting journals could would be suitably unbiased referees; if not them, then perhaps “any well known Land Surveyor, or Civil Engineer, or any Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.”

Hampden at first seemed quite above-board about the thing, agreeing that Mr. John Henry Walsh, editor of the Field magazine, should serve as referee. Walsh was an ideal choice, as he knew neither of them, was a non-scientist with no skin in the globe-vs-flat-earth game, and had prior experience deciding wagers. But shortly after funds were placed in Walsh’s hands to guarantee the wager, Hampden demanded a referee of his own.

Wallace didn’t see a problem with this, writing back:

Your wish to have a second referee is quite reasonable, and I accede to it at once, only stipulating that he shall not be a personal acquaintance of your own, and shall be a man in some public position as Editor, Author, Engineer, &c.

Hampden, having no scruples in his crusade to prove the earth flat like he was certain the Bible proved, wasted no time in choosing William Carpenter. Yes, that William Carpenter. The one who had converted him to flat-eartherism, with whom he was monetarily entangled, and who could only just be called an author. Having thus secured a referee biased wholly in his favor, Hampden proposed a straight six-mile stretch on Old Bedford Canal for the location of the experiment.

Wallace didn’t know that this same stretch had already been used by Parallax in his own attempts to prove the earth flat – which feat he’d managed by holding his telescope a mere eight inches above the water, thus allowing refraction to interfere with his measurements and give the impression that he was sighting along an utterly flat stretch of water resting on a flat earth. It was a classic example of a poorly-designed experiment yielding invalid results. Hampden was loading the dice as much as he could manage.

So that was how Alfred Russel Wallace, venerable naturalist and science legend, ended up that March on a cold canal in Norfolk, England, squinting through telescopes in a valiant but vain effort to prove the shape of the earth to committed creationists. Since Walsh couldn’t be there for the whole week of experiments, a surgeon and amateur astronomer named Mr. Martin Wales Bedell Coulcher acted as Wallace’s referee. All the interested parties watched Wallace’s painstaking experiment, which had been designed to correct for refraction.

The iron parapet of Welney bridge was thirteen feet three inches above the water of the canal. The Old Bedford bridge, about six miles off, was of brick and somewhat higher. On this bridge I fixed a large sheet of white calico, six feet long and three feet deep, with a thick black band along the centre, the lower edge of which was the same height from the water as the parapet of Welney bridge; so that the centre of it would be as high as the line of sight of the large six-inch telescope I had brought with me. At the centre point, about three miles from each bridge, I fixed up a long pole with two red discs on it, the upper one having its centre the same height above the water as the centre of the black band and of the telescope, while the second disc was four feet lower down. It is evident that if the surface of the water is a perfectly straight line for the six miles, then the three objects—the telescope, the top disc, and the black band—being all exactly the same height above the water, the disc would be seen in the telescope projected upon the black band; whereas, if the six-mile surface of the water is convexly curved, then the top disc would appear to be decidedly higher than the black band, the amount due to the known size of the earth being five feet eight inches, which amount will be reduced a little by refraction to perhaps about five feet.

This experiment showed curvature, as it could not fail to do. Hampden’s mentor and referee Carpenter signed the sketch of the results produced by Mr. Coulcher, affirming it indeed showed what they both had seen.

However, he declared those results were unable to prove the earth was a globe “because the telescope was not leveled, and because it had no cross-hair!”

Wallace, being at pains to ensure that there would be no doubt about the results, proceeded to recalibrate the experiment to Carpenter’s specifications, and ran it again.

At his request to have a spirit-level in order to show if there was any “fall” of the surface of water, I had been to King’s Lynn and borrowed a good Troughton’s level from a surveyor there. This I now set up on the bridge at exactly the same height above the water as the other telescope, and having levelled it very accurately and called Mr. Carpenter to see that the bubble was truly central and that the least movement of the screws elevating or depressing it would cause the bubble to move away, I adjusted the focus on to the distant bridge, and showing also the central staff and its two discs…. We then fixed a calico flag on the parapet to make it more visible, and drove back with the instruments to Old Bedford bridge, where I set up the level again at the proper height above the water, and again asked both the referees to make sketches of what was seen in the level-telescope. This they did. Mr. Carpenter’s was rather more accurately drawn, and Mr. Coulcher signed them as being correct, and both are reproduced here.

This new setup showed the same thing as the first: the earth was indubitably curved. No reasonable person could doubt it. Alas, Wallace was not dealing with reasonable persons. They responded in true creationist fashion: by completely refusing to deal with reality.

Mr. Hampden declined to look through either telescope, saying he trusted to Mr. Carpenter; while the latter declared positively that they had won, and that we knew it; that the fact that the distant signal appeared below the middle one as far as the middle one did below the cross-hair, proved that the three were in a straight line, and that the earth was flat, and he rejected the view in the large telescope as proving nothing for the reasons already stated.

They were at an impasse. At first, Hampden refused an umpire to decide between the referees. Eventually, he agreed to have Walsh review the results, and both sides sent in sketches and reports. Walsh weighed the evidence, decided it did indeed prove the earth was spherical, and published both materials and his conclusion in the Field.

Hampden threw a fit. Carpenter wrote “a long argument to show that the experiments were all in Mr. Hampden’s favour.” This diatribe didn’t sway Walsh. He declared Wallace the positive winner, and, despite Hampden demanding his money back, gave the winnings to Wallace.

Unfortunately, British law didn’t protect gentlemen’s interests when it came to bets, even if the wager was strictly along scientific lines, and would eventually force Wallace to give the money back. Of course, by then, that amount was offset by the judgements entered in Wallace’s favor against Hampden, who had embarked on an extraordinary 15-year campaign of abuse and libel that landed him in both jail and court several times. He sent vitriolic letters to everyone he could think of, including Wallace’s wife:

“Mrs. Wallace,—Madam, if your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason. Do you tell him from me he is a lying infernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace he never dies in his bed.

“You must be a miserable wretch to be obliged to live with a convicted felon. Do not think or let him think I have done with him.

“John Hampden.”

Death threats were beyond the pale of English law, as were various and sundry libelous statements and a refusal to desist when court-ordered to. Wallace won several actions, but Hampden declared bankruptcy, probably to prevent him from collecting damages. In the end, with all the court costs, and despite being the wronged party throughout it all, Wallace’s woeful wager cost him several hundred pounds and no end of trouble.

Still, he’d done his best to, as Lyell said, “stop these foolish people.” He’d learned a valuable lesson we would be wise to heed today: don’t accept wagers from men who are religiously motivated to believe in easily-disproved notions such as the idea of a flat earth. And he’d shown with an elegant little experiment that the earth is definitely round, which our images from space gorgeously support.

Flat-earth belief didn’t die with Hampden. You can read all about it in Christine Garwood’s remarkable book, Flat Earth: the History of an Infamous Idea.

References:

Garwood, Christine (2007): Flat Earth: the History of an Infamous Idea. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books.

Wallace, A.R. (1905): My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. London: Chapman and Hall. Volume 2.

Wallace, A.R. Reply to Mr Hampden’s Charges Against Mr Wallace. The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 22

Originally published at Rosetta Stones

The post Wallace’s Woeful Wager: How a Founder of Modern Biology Got Suckered by Flat-Earthers appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Over at Rosetta Stones, I’ve got an article up talking about phreatic eruptions and the recent excitement on Etna. I of course had to have a photo to go with it. The glorious problem in selecting said photo is that I run across so many awesome photos that don’t really illustrate the article, but are too good not to share. So it’s my great pleasure to share them with you here. And stay tuned at the end for some awesome video footage of phreatic eruptions and what happens when people get caught in them!

That is some hot lava there. Seriously hot. I mean, it’s not a big eruption, but it’s still enough to turn the entire sky orange…

The craters of active volcanoes are marvelous. Look at those brilliant patches of yellow sulfur all over the place! Look at the shapes and textures! Gorgeous.

I love how this eruption looks all soft and fuzzy and pastel. Still violent, though.

I am a complete sucker for these night shots. This one is particularly spectacular. Look at that tentacle of fire!

Gorgeous long-exposure shot of Etna erupting at night. I love how the cloud layer looks like a soft, fluffy blanket over the volcano, and those lovely orange streams of lava leisurely descending the slopes.

It’s easy to believe why the Greeks came up with stories about a monster trapped under the mountain, and a god using the fire of its struggles as a forge:

And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men’s art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire.

Volcanoes are utterly enchanting. I’m so glad we now have the photographic equipment to do them justice.

I’m also pretty damned excited we’ve got video cameras and time-lapse cameras that can catch events too dangerous for us to film in person. Check out these delicious phreatic eruptions at Poás volcano:

And here’s the ABC report on what happened to the BBC crew. I like the interview they do with one of the women involved.

Very awesome! Terrifying, but awesome.

The post Gorgeous Shots of Mount Etna in Eruption appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

People. You have to meet these geoscientists! They are awesome. Their work is fascinating. And they are ensuring that we have a whole new generation of kids who will adore the good science of rock-breaking.

So. Head on over to Rosetta Stones, and meet John T. Leftwich, Zelma Maine Jackson, Bernard Hubbard, and Estella Atekwana. And, while we’re at it, have this lovely view of Mount Nyiragongo at night. It’s part of the African rift zone, which Dr. Atekwana is currently researching.

The post New at Rosetta Stones: Four Fantastic Black Geologists appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

My conservative Christian former best friend used to say that too much prayer rots the brain. Earth Science 4th Edition provides clear evidence of this right from the blurb at the start of the “Oceans and Seas” chapter. They begin talking about desalination by saying wow, there’s more people on Earth than ever! Yay! “God didn’t place a limit on how many people should inhabit the earth.”

I really wish the Bible had a verse placing strict limits on the total population, and ordering dominionists like the BJU believers to adhere to a strict “One child, no conversion, no evangelizing, and for My sake put a condom on that thing!” policy. Because it seems they believe that God wants as many people stuffed onto the planet as possible, limited resources be damned. They acknowledge the fact that a huge population makes things like having enough drinking water for everyone a serious issue. But they pretend that’s all fine, since we invented desalinization plants. Breed away! God placed no limits on population, so let’s have humans stacked a dozen deep over every square inch of the planet! Fuck logic and sense, yo!

Fools like this are why I’m one of those atheists who thinks we really need, as a species, to do away with the idea of holy books* all together. We can’t be trusted with it.

Dominion is a strong theme at the beginning of this chapter. “Oceans for Man’s Use” is the very first section. After giving us lots of facts about the oceans, like their size and how they help regulate the earth’s temperature, and how most of our oxygen “comes from photosynthetic organisms living in” them, they tell us it’s important to exercise dominion over them.

Oy. These people are massive control freaks. Instead of caring for or partnering with things, they want to exercise jackbooted thuggery over it all. In a “good and wise” manner, they hasten to assure us. Considering they think it’s a bonza idea to fill Earth with people until there’s no room for anything else, I’m not believing they’re qualified to judge what’s good or wise.

And they’re encouraging students to pursue careers in oceanography in order to exercise said dominion.

Their description of what oceanographers are includes engineers. NOAA, on the other hand, is under the impression that oceanographers are scientists. I know engineering comes under STEM, but let’s get real folks: I’m pretty sure the BJU folks are including marine engineering under oceanography because there’s faint hope for a faithful creationist BJU grad to get a job as an honest scientist. But you can design useful boats and things even if you think the book of Genesis is a science treatise.

Next, we’re told about ocean basins. They’re very excited that oceanographers say that technically there’s only one ocean, since all oceans are connected. A little text box to the side informs us that Genesis 1: 9-10 totally called it, yo. Yes, very wow – aside from the fact it also implies there should be only one continent. Much impressive.

Another text box attempts to define parts of an ocean. A public school sixth-grader could probably do better than “Bays are generally smaller than gulfs.”

Let me just take a moment to remind you that this is an 8th grade textbook. Supposedly.

The patented BJU “both sides” method of playing old-earthers against young-earthers comes next, as they tell us what everybody thinks was the “Origin of the Oceans.” I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn they don’t really know what scientists think. “Old-earth geologists believe,” we’re told, that the oceans may have even formed “right after [Earth] condensed from the solar nebula.” Ha ha ha no. Earth at birth was too bloody hot for oceans, folks. Whether our oceans formed from water already present within the rocks, or whether it was delivered later by comets, we can be pretty confident based on the evidence we have that Earth didn’t have oceans until it was around 300 million years old at the earliest. I’ve never, in all my copious science reading, seen a geologist claim oceans were fully formed from the start.

For some reason, probably due to obstinate ignorance, they believe we secular scientists think that “the current Atlantic, India, and Arctic Ocean basins began forming 300 million years ago.”

How they can fuck that up, and yet understand that we know the “Pacific Ocean basin is all that remains from an earlier global sea called Panthalassa,” is beyond me. This info isn’t obscure, and yet they apparently couldn’t peek at Wikipedia or Britannica to get the appropriate ages. Three hundred million years ago, Pangea was just formed: there was only one continent and one ocean, and it would stay that way for nearly 100 million years. The Atlantic and it’s companion Arctic are 180 million years old. The Indian is around 125 million years old, although its history is a bit complex. Really not hard to get right – unless you’re a creationist, in which case the facts mean bupkiss to you.

Of course, the BJU writers have their own history of the earth’s oceans, pulled in part from Genesis, with the rest extracted from their asses – which sure as shit ain’t Biblical:

Young-earth geologists believe that the earth began as a water planet. God created what was probably a single supercontinent on the second day of Creation (Gen. 1: 9-10) around 7000 years ago. That supercontinent was wrenched apart during a one-year flood and its catastrophic aftermath around 5500 years ago. The shapes and sizes of the present-day ocean basins are the result of that single event in Earth’s history.

Fine, creationists. That’s your story, you feel free to stick to it despite the endless lines of evidence that say the old-earth geologists are right. But answer me a few things, here:

1. Why didn’t God bother to mention dates when he was dictating Genesis? He could have said, “I told Noah to build the Ark cuz I was pissed at people. That was 1428 After Creation. Can you believe it took that incompetent ass nearly eighty years to finish it and get it stocked? Sheesh. Anyway, I was finally able to start the Flood and the mass murder in 1504. Good times!”

Instead, we get people at Answers in Genesis making all sorts of assumptions and tables trying to figure out how long it took Noah to build the Ark, and none of you can seem to agree on just when all of this happened – despite the fact you claim to have an omniscient and infallible eyewitness!

2. Ya’ll claim there was some super-accelerated, wild-n-crazy tectonic movement going on during the Flood years. Why didn’t god say so? I’ve read Genesis 6, 7, and 8 in both the KJV and NRSV, and I can’t find a single hint all this was going on. God couldn’t fit a line in about a supercontinent breaking up? At least suggest something more than just a flood (and genocide, not to mention ecocide) was going on? Noah didn’t notice anything different about the topography? Really?

3. If the animals all come from one continent, and there were now several when they got off the boat, how’d they know which continents belonged to whom? How’d the ones who were now supposed to live on other continents like North and South America and Australia get there? Do you think they swam entire oceans? Even the sloths?

4. Did you calculate the amount of heat that would’ve been released by all that tectonic activity? All that mountain building, volcanic eruptions, ocean crust formation, subduction? Tell me, how do you think a bunch of critters, eight humans, and a wooden boat survive without boiling or bursting into flames?

5. Why did God find it necessary to make every single bit of evidence – from the ages of the ocean crust, to continental sutures where bits of Pangea came together, to the distribution of rock layers and fossils, to evidence of even older supercontinents that existed long before Pangea, to the age of asteroids, even to the cosmic microwave background – match an old earth/ancient universe interpretation, rather than making a young earth an inescapable conclusion?

I have plenty more questions, but I’ll let ya’ll ponder those for a bit. Good luck with ’em.

*Not the books themselves, mind. Just the idea that they’re sacred messages direct from god or gods, infallible and so forth.

The post (Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education VIII: Two Salty Tales of Ocean Origins appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

All righty, then. Where were we? Ah, yes: when last we delved Earth Science 4th Edition’s pages, the authors were trying to tell us about their One Magic Ice Age Wot Explains Away the Physical Evidence and that Job Really Probably Lived Through Cuz He Mentions Snow a Few Times. Next on their agenda: they’re gonna tell us about The Diluvial Geologic Column.

We know that there was at least one continent where everything lived when God created the earth. Creationary geologists think that the continent foundation or basement was probably the rock we call granite, which makes up the deepest rocks under the continents today.

Hoo nelly. So much evidence here they don’t at all understand how rocks or continents work. Folks: continents are heavy. The roots under the thickest crust run deep. What happens when rocks are under tremendous heat and pressure? Well, they don’t stay cheerfully unaltered. Granite is not the deepest rock, kids. I don’t think these folks even grok what basement rocks are.

They yammer about how they can totes see the “key geologic phases of the earth” if they just look at the strata “from a biblical viewpoint.” They think they see the vast majority of rocks either forming in or being redeposited by the Flood. They have no real idea how minerals precipitate from a solution to form masses of rock. They don’t know how consolidation happens. The things they think happened in a single Flood year don’t happen that fast and/or in those kinds of conditions (here’s one example). We’ve studied this. We’ve done experiments. We know.

Of course, they admit the Flood didn’t create the entire geologic column. There was that mythical post-Flood ice age, carving valleys and dumping glacial detritus all over the place. Never mind that we have evidence for multiple ice ages – just put on your Biblical Blinders, kids, and you’ll see there’s only one!

Gah.

Anyway, then they give us Tasman Walker’s idea of a geologic column. It’s microscopic compared to the geologic column those icky secular scientists have put together after centuries of research. It goes, from oldest rocks to youngest:

• The Creation Event. You know how the stuff at the bottom of our column has no fossils because life hadn’t evolved yet? Creationists handwave that absence by saying there was no death. Also, Tasman Walker seems to be completely unaware of metamorphic rocks, since he says those strata are mostly “the basement granite rocks and any original soils that remained undisturbed and covered during the next two phases, then turned to rock.”
• The Lost-World Era. So, this is after Adam and Eve partook of the wrong produce. So yeah, shit was dying, but there are still no fossils cuz “sediments rarely collected fast enough to rapidly bury dead things to form fossils.”
  
• The Flood Event. The Top Galah of the creationist column. They think the vast majority of the geologic column formed here. Yep. Most of those miles upon miles upon miles of sandstone, limestone, mudstone, coal beds, volcanic rocks, and more all were deposited and lithified in less than a year. And they claim most of the fossils come from these layers “because all land animals and plants alive at the time of the Flood (and not in the Ark) were killed and many were quickly buried.”
• The New-World Era. They think most of the rocks after the Flood were formed “by local catastrophic processes such as volcanoes and local flooding.” And there are “very few fossils,” which will shock the shit out of paleontologists who keep finding abundant fossils of things like Pleistocene mammals that even creationists claim existed only after the Flood.
• Recent Sediments. Modern loose sediments. Oh, hey, there are fossils in it! Whoops! They forgot to mention that volcanoes are still catastrophically creating rocks.

Which is embarrassing, because that was one of their big points on the previous page:

I’m so sorry. I should have warned you to remove liquids from your mouth before viewing. I hope no one’s keyboard was destroyed. Look, now that you’ve already got that out of the way, let me quote their coup d’état before you take another drink:

The Bible provides a much more logical and orderly explanation for a changing Earth, rather than describing an endlessly changing planet with no direction to its history.

You poor silly creationist gits. It does have a direction: forward. Everything’s moving from the past to the future. I’m sorry you can’t deal with the fact it hasn’t got a particular destination in mind, but that’s not reality’s problem.

Anyway. You may have noticed that Tasman Walker’s work bears no resemblance to a professional geologist’s. That’s because he isn’t one. He’s an electrical engineer. Now, geology is quite friendly to laypeople, and plenty of folk whose degrees are in other fields have made important contributions to it, but if you’re intending to overthrow the entire established geologic column, you’d best be doing some serious studying in the discipline first. Otherwise, you end up with nonsense like the above.

I’m not going to debunk it in detail. That’s been done by a really-real geologist. And I’m not going to point out all the ways even creationists with professional degrees in the geosciences fail to make their models work. It’s all right here in this lovely paper, where you can sit back and watch Flood Geology get defeated by… Flood Geology.

Better Christians than these have already shown how the fossil record can be reconciled with creationist claims. They’ve already shown how these rocks couldn’t possibly all form in that Flood. I don’t have to do a damned thing except point and laugh.

Next, they’ll be telling us what they think we think of tectonics. Oh, joy.

The post Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XLIV: Wherein We’re Layered in Nonsense appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

January is Volcano Awareness Month. I haven’t had much opportunity to be aware of volcanoes, considering the raging garbage fire currently trashing the White House, but now seems like a good time to repost this article I originally published at Scientific American. Enjoy!

United States volcanoes sure have been busy grabbing our attention this spring! Both Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood have experienced earthquake swarms (which, darn it, is completely normal activity and not a sign of imminent eruptions). Kilauea had some exciting new lava breakouts recently. And Mauna Loa just got bumped from normal to advisory status due to an increase in seismic activity (although it’s not quite signalling an eruption – yet).

These volcanoes are quite different from each other, but they share two things in common: they’re pretty popular, and their eruptions can have some pretty serious effects on urban areas.

You may have these or other volcanoes as neighbors. It pays to be aware of what they’re up to and what they’re capable of. You’ll definitely want a plan for coping with any of their shenanigans!  So here are six easy steps all of us living near active or potentially-active volcanoes can follow to keep safe and happy.

1. Look up your nearest volcanoes on your country’s geological survey website.
2. Check out the hazards map. Don’t have a hazards map? Bug your politicians for one!
3. PANIC!
4. No, wait, DON’T PANIC. Stop that panicking. You’re fine. Everything’s fine. Seriously, it is. Hazard maps look scary, yeah, but you can cope with this.
5. Come up with a plan. Check with your local and state/provincial emergency management folks for evacuation routes and other necessary info. Have your important stuff, your communications, and everything else you’ll need for fleeing an eruption scoped out and ready to go for when your friendly neighborhood geologists say, “Oh, bugger, she’s gonna blow!”
6. ♥ volcano monitoring. Make sure your government knows it’s important. That’s how you’ll know to put your plan into effect in plenty of time to stay safe.

See? Easy-peasy! Now you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the dangerous but beautiful and exciting fire mountains near you.

The post Dealing With Volcanoes in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Here’s how to deal with the fact that a great orange buffoon is getting sworn into our highest office: go see Hidden Figures. Just go. Go see black women fighting misogyny and racism and Jim Crow while doing badass math. You need to see that right now.

*This review is mostly spoiler-free*

Take your children to go see it. Yes, even the young ones. Yes, even the teens. Look: I was in a theater full of little kids and teenagers, and they were sitting there beside unrelated adults up to the age of probably-watched-John-Glenn-orbit-live-on-teevee-with-their-own-kids, and apparently they were all riveted. I have never been to a movie that full of young folk who were so extraordinarily quiet. I’ve never been in an auditorium packed with nearly 400 people of all ages and had such an uninterrupted experience. The kids will do fine, and they need to see this.

Hollywood put out a movie about black women doing math, and it was spellbinding. I never thought they’d try. And since they tried, I never thought they’d do it with so much math and so few explosions. They had exploding rockets, but seemed almost embarrassed to mention them. There was a love story, but only because one of the real women this movie is based on actually got married in the middle of our race to space. It wasn’t shoved in just to hook our emotions, and you get the feeling they’d rather be doing more math. The movie stayed remarkably true to actual, historical events.

You’ll get to meet three of the most extraordinary women in our country’s scientific history: Katherine Goble (later Johnson), Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. You will get to see them be math nerds. You will get to see them have interests other than marriage and children. Hell, you’ll even get to see one of them fix a car. In a dress. Did you know women could fix cars while wearing dresses? Well, now you do.

You’ll get to see three black women star in their own story, as heroes, not as sidekicks and inspirations to white people. This wasn’t a story about white people learning how not to be racist gits (although several white people learned this, the movie isn’t about them). This wasn’t a story about three career women trying to also balance their roles as wives and mothers (although they were). This wasn’t a story about men learning how to deal with career women, women smarter than them, and figuring out how not to be sexist gits (although this all happens).

No.

This was a story about three black women doing math, and overcoming a lot of societal obstacles in order to be able to do math. This was about women getting us into space with their incredible math skills, even though racist whites and sexist men sometimes made it much harder than it needed to be. This movie took three black women mathematicians, and made them the heroes, even though there were a couple of heroic white men it could’ve centered on. And it worked. It worked so much better by centering those women.

We need stories like this. Especially now.

We need stories that center women of color and put the men and the white people into supporting roles as helpers and/or adversaries. We need stories that center the people whose work enables us to launch ourselves at the stars. We need stories that show us how much we can overcome, and how far we can go.

This is one of those stories.

It’s also a time machine that takes us back to and drops us in the midst of an era in which white people were so afraid of black people that they wouldn’t even share a coffee pot with them. We white people need to see this. We need to see how ridiculous “separate but equal” was. Hidden Figures shows us that. And it shows us what it’s like to try to get on with your life in the midst of social upheaval and the struggle for equal rights. It shows us how you can be a part of that, even if you can’t march or picket or protest in the streets.

We need to see that.

This is another such era, and we need to see how it’s done.This movie shows us how we can be a part of that change: how minorities can demand equal rights, and how allies can support them, and why we must.

I came away from this movie with a whole new appreciation of diversity. It’s not just a buzzword, folks. It’s necessary for us to be our best. The whole nation is stronger when we all unite, when we break the barriers and let go of old prejudices.*

Hidden Figures is so much more than just a movie about some women doing math. It’s a myriad of stories beautifully told. It’s an anthem to human achievement. It’s a love story about science and exploration. And it’s an inspiration to those of us who want to make a better world.

Go see it.

Bring tissue.

Be ready to cry some of the best tears of your life.

*Note: I am speaking to the bigoted gits here. I’m not saying we have to link hands and sing kumbaya with unrepentant bigots in order to achieve diversity. Rather the opposite is true. So, y’know, if you’re a bigoted git: don’t think I’m calling for tolerance and inclusion of you.

The post Hidden Figures: Yes, Go See It Right Now appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Take your seasickness prevention pills and weigh anchor, my darlings. We are embarking on a long voyage, and I’m afraid it isn’t the lovely salt sea, but an ocean of creationist bilge we be sailin’. BJU has got a lot to say about oceanography. A good portion of it is utter bunkum. And there’s three bloody chapters of this shite.

Here. This meme may help us survive.

The wrong starts out strong with Dr. Emil Silvestru, a creationist speleologist from Romania. He started his career as a secular scientist, then jumped into Christianity with both feet and became a young earth creationist. The quality of his “reasoning” can be assessed by the following explanation:

After becoming a Christian he quickly realized that the ‘millions of years’ interpretation, so common in geology, was not compatible with Genesis. ‘Once I became a Christian,’ Emil says, ‘I knew I had to “tune up” my scientific knowledge with the Scriptures.’

‘Although philosophically and ethically I accepted a literal Genesis from my conversion, at first I was unable to match it with my “technical” side.’

Eventually, after soaking in creationist claptrap, he concluded that the Flood (which totes happened and must have been global because the Bible never exaggerates for poetic effect) made things that normally take ages happen superfast, yay, problem solved! Which is probably why the vast majority of the papers he’s got on Google Scholar are babble printed in creationist publications: next to no papers printed in mainstream journals appear, and most of his citations are him citing his own work. I suppose that’s only to be expected for someone who works for Creation Ministries International (formerly Answers in Genesis).

To be clear: I don’t get the sense Silvestru is aware he’s lying to himself and others. He strikes me as a True Believer who, when he converted, honestly figured the Bible must be 100% literal and true, and after a frantic search, grabbed the first straw he could find to shut the cognitive dissonance up.

That doesn’t make him any less wrong. Or ridiculous. Observe the tomfoolery he unleashes upon the unfortunate pupils using this textbook:

The present is not the key to the past! More than 75% of all known rocks are sedimentary rocks, most of which are believed to have been formed in the oceans. Over 90% of the rocks formed in the oceans were laid in shallow oceans. But only 10% of present-day oceans are shallow. The sediments the oceans hold are insignificant compared to the millions of tons of sedimentary rock. These facts clearly show that present processes of sedimentary rock formation are not the key to rock formation in the past!

Uniformitarianism clearly unhinges the poor man.

Wading through all that bullshit: yes, sedimentary rock is roughly 75% of the rock we see in continental outcrops. But it’s not “75% of all known rocks.” It’s more like 8%. It’s like icing spread haphazardly on a cake, glopped on thick in places, in other places thin, and some pretty extensive bits missed altogether. We know from outcrops, drill cores, seismic studies, and other methods that igneous rock makes up the bulk of the Earth’s crust, with a healthy chunk of metamorphic rock rounding out the mix. These are “known rocks” by anybody’s definition but a creationist’s.

Now, it’s true that lots of those sedimentary rocks were laid down in shallow seas. I don’t know if his percentages are right, but it doesn’t matter if they are. Sea level changes as glaciers melt and freeze, and as plate motions open and close ocean basins. When sea level rises, shallow seas flood the continents. Rock gets eroded, critters contribute their shells and skeletons of calcite and silica, and new sedimentary rock gets deposited. You can go to the Paleomap Project site and watch those seas rise and fall over deep time. With global warming going as it is, Emil might even get to witness the beginning of new shallow seas himself. No bets on whether that’ll light his bulb or not.

I don’t even have the stomach to quote the rest of his inanity. If I did, we’d be here til the seas advance. He thinks “most caves formed toward the end of the Flood, created by hot and very aggressive fluids called hydrothermal solutions that ate away the limestone in a matter of months.” Now, aside from the fact that by creationist reckoning, most if not all limestone formed during the Flood, but could hardly have done so in such “aggressive fluids,” he’s just boiled Noah & Co. and dissolved the Ark in order to get some holes in rock that couldn’t exist. Brilliant.

Want to know how all those cave formations which take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to form managed to happen in about 4,000 years? Don’t ask Emil. He just skips right past that problem. What an expert.

The poor schmuck thinks that the Flood “is by far the most logical source of rock-forming and rock-eroding processes.” He fails logic. Don’t take logic lessons from him unless you thrive on derisive laughter aimed squarely at you. He thinks the Flood formed all those deep canyons under the ocean. Never mind all those scientists with their silly mechanisms for submarine canyon formation like turbidity currents, underwater landslides, mass wasting, slumping, and, in special cases, rivers merrily carving into the beds of evaporated seas until said basins are flooded by seawater once again.

Do you see the amount of egregious wrong packed into three short paragraphs by one single fool? This does not bode well for the rest of this unit. I’ve peeked ahead, and it appears the nonsense-to-science ratio remains absurdly high. I’m afraid we’re going to end up like Odysseus, stuck for 10 years on a voyage that should have taken a few weeks.

We’d better make a stop for extra grog, just in case. We won’t survive this journey if we have to ration it.

The post (Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education VII: Awash in Creationist Nonsense appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Fucking magnets, how do they work? Well, Science of the Physical Creation is about to ‘splain, or at least sum up. We should invite Mssrs. Bruce and Utsler to attend the lesson. Pretty sad when creationists know more about a well-understood scientific phenomena than a couple of pathetic white boy clowns, innit?

Tell you what, I’m real sick of white people pretending they invented all the things, when people of color had actually been doing them a lot longer. And yes, I will demand better of even white evangelical creationists. The Vikings were no more Christian than the Chinese at that point, so I know the SPC folks are capable of giving credit to non-Christians.

There’s a delightful introduction to magnets, which explains that electrons, planets, and even galaxies can act as magnets. They tell us how we can detect magnetic fields with a compass, and visualize them with iron filings. Several illustrations show us what the fields of disk, bar, and horseshoe magnets look like. And they not only tell us, but show us by using more filings, that opposite poles attract and same poles repel. The law of magnetic force is shown. We learn that even magnets can “overcome the gravitational force of the entire earth” at close range. They finish up this first bit by talking about magnetic permeability, which would probably make ICP heads explode, because it’s a little weird.

Now it’s time to talk about the earth as a magnet, and they’re kind enough to finally mention that the “magnetic compass appears to have been invented independently in China and Europe in the 10th [sic] Century,” which is a little better than ignoring the Chinese altogether. But they still don’t want to give the Chinese credit for inventing it first (which we have solid evidence for), or that the Arabs likely introduced compasses to Europe after picking them up in China (which many historians think, but we don’t yet have proof of). No, they need the Europeans to be at least as clever as those non-white folk, if not more so, so they twist facts. Shame.

Sir William Gilbert reappears to discover that “the earth itself is a magnet.” Facts about the magnetic field are presented, such as that its North Pole is actually an S-pole and vice versa, and those poles are not only hundreds or thousands of meters from the geographic poles, but also wander. The writers explain that the poles of a magnet are named for the direction they seek, which is why the North magnetic pole is actually an S-pole.

Then their Eurocentrism strikes again, as they give explorer and genocidal brute Christopher Columbus credit for discovering magnetic declination (“the angle that a compass needle deviates from true north”). But the Chinese were over 700 years ahead of the Europeans on that.

They seem a bit obsessed with William Gilbert, because they circle back and give him credit for investigating magnetic dip and inventing the first dip needle, when actually an instrument maker by the name of Robert Norman had been making them first, and in fact did the first formal study of magnetic dip. I think they got so excited reading Gilbert’s book that they forgot to look any further.

Anyway, I’m sure y’all know that magnetic dip is rather important to paleomagnetism. So it’s quite neat knowing more of its history.

Now, I’m aware that creationist claptrap has been remarkably thin on the ground in SPC lately. My darlings, I promise you that dry spell is about to end in a deluge. But we are going to save that for next time, because I want to give it a post all to itself. It’s so dense and concentrated in its nonsense that I believe it deserves an actual sporking.

This will be so deeply satisfying.

And then we’ll have the unparalleled joy of watching the A Beka folks explain exactly how magnets work, thus proving creationists are less ignorant than ICP.

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