Kenorland

Not to be confused with Kennerland, a theme park (based on a toy company) I just made up when I stumbled across the name of this supercontinent.

Kenorland was one of the earliest supercontinents, having formed about 2.72 billion years ago. It accreted some cratons that already existed, but also found some new continental crust to merge with. Pieces of it would later become Laurentia (most of North America and Greenland), Baltica (todays’ Scandinavia and Baltic regions), Yilgarn (Western Australia), and Kalaharia (large portions of South America and Africa).

It is known that Kenorland sat in low latitudes until great underground magma surges started to cause tearing of the crust about 2.48 billion years ago. At about that time, Baltica straddled the equator and was connected to Laurentia (Canadian Shield), Kola and Karelia (2 pieces that have since rejoined with Baltica).

It is thought that the breakup of Kenorland may have been when the Earth shifted from tearing caused by magma plumes to the modern plate tectonics we know today. However, the discovery of an earlier continent and a supercontinent may indicate this transition occurred even earlier.

By 2.45 billion years ago, Yilgarn (Western Australia) was no longer connected to the other cratons, and Kola and Karelia cratons were also drifting away. Therefore, there was longer a supercontinent, and this was about the same time as the Huronian glaciation, which lasted up to 60 million years. Indications are that atmospheric oxygen rose from 0.1% to 1%. This increase in oxygen caused the virtual disappearance of the gas methane, which was oxidized into carbon dioxide and water.

Furthermore, the breakup of Kenorland generally increased continental rainfall, reducing the other greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Also, the solar output at that time was less than 85% of its current power, and all these circumstances together produced a runaway “Snowball Earth”, where average temperatures planet-wide fell to below freezing.

Wow, that’s a pretty drastic response to a supercontinent not being able to hold itself together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenorland

Everybody’s Heard of Gondwana

Gondwana existed from about 550 million years ago until 180 million years ago. It is one of the most well known super-continents, in the sense that more people have at least heard of it, rather than individual cratons like Avalonia or Baltica.

If I’m reading the information correctly, Gondwana existed both before and after Pangaea. Before Pangaea, it came into being when several cratons stuck together, beginning about 800 million years ago with the formation of the East African Orogeny, which involved the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa. Between 600 to 530 million years ago, this group added South America, Australia and Antarctica, in that order. Thus Gondwana was born.

Eventually, it merged with Laurasia and became Pangaea, sometime around 335 million years ago. But it wasn’t an easy relationship, you might say. Pieces of what had formerly been Gondwana kept breaking off, drifting north to join the former Laurasia section, such as bits of China and Indo-China. The western edge of Pangaea was beginning to break up while the eastern edge was trying to collect itself together.

Meanwhile, the formation of Pangaea and its mountains greatly impacted sea levels and global climate, producing glaciers and continent-wide sedimentation.

But what about Gondwana? About 175 million years ago, it had had enough and broke away. But it didn’t come out of it unscathed. Besides the bits that had already drifted to ‘the other side’, Florida, southern Georgia and Alabama stayed attached to North America.

Once it separated from its partner, Gondwana just kept falling apart. About 132 million years ago, Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar broke off and then broke up, going their separate ways. South America slowly broke away from Africa, starting in the south and going north, but the exact timing is uncertain. It could have started as early as 190 million years, and finally finished around 85 million years ago.

So, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that most of the cratons that formed Gondwana now inhabit the southern hemisphere. Its remnants account for about 2/3 of today’s continental area, including Africa, Antarctica, Arabia, Australia, Indian Subcontinent and South America.

If I were a paleo-geologist, I might have made more sense out of the wiki articles I consulted on this subject. The writer of these articles - particularly the one on Gondwana - seemed to think that anybody who was looking up this subject must be a student, for he/she/it kept using names and terms that I - as a lay person - did not know, leading to much confusion on my part. It seemed far more detailed than I felt I could fit into a blog, anyway, so I skipped lightly through most of it, looking for the important details without bogging down the blog.

Paleo-geology was going to be an elective of mine in college, but I didn’t get that far. Hmm, anybody got a good used textbook on the subject?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

A Brief Study of Euramerica

Sometimes it’s called Euramerica, sometimes it’s known as Laurussia (not to be confused with Laurasia). It’s called a minor supercontinent because it consisted of several (3) cratons, which are pieces of crust that include land.

About 410 million years ago, the Laurentian (most of North America), the Baltica (Baltic states) and Avalonia cratons all slammed together to form Euramerica. Avalonia was the smallest of the 3; a microcontinent that was long and skinny and sat along the southern border. Euramerica appears to have sat pretty squarely on the equator and was mostly covered with tropical rainforests.

Around 300 million years ago, the climate changed rather abruptly. Many of the lycopsids - such as clubmosses - were replaced by ferns. There was a great loss of diversity in amphibians while the reptiles diversified.

Later, Euramerica became part of the major supercontinent Pangaea. When Pangaea broke into two continents - Gondwana and Laurasia - Euramerica was a part of Laurasia.

Eventually, Laurasia split into the continents of North America and Eurasia. The Laurentian craton became a big portion of North America. Baltica became part of Eurasia. Avalonia ceased to be a long skinny microcontinent as bits of it became some of the east coast of North America, and bits became parts of Ireland, England and other areas of southern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euramerica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalonia

Poor Science or Poor Writing

The other day, my husband and I watched a movie we’d never heard of. The setting of the story was that Earth had been in winter for the past 300 years, and it would continue for thousands of years. The only humans that still existed lived 10 kilometers under the surface, where they used geothermal energy as their power source. They had created a race of ‘humans’ to do their work for them, including sex workers, but nobody ever indicated what type of work this ‘inferior’ race did, except for the one sex worker.

Hubby had difficulty with Arizona being covered in snow and ice, with daytime temperatures of -60° F. In the latest ice age, the glaciers never reached the sw states. To me, that said the the earth was not just in an ice age, but had entered a ‘snowball earth’ ice age, where the entire globe is frozen.

How did the ice age winter begin? The characters gave 2 theories, but didn’t know which was right. The first theory was that an asteroid had struck the earth, throwing up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that most of the sunlight couldn’t get to the ground. The second theory was that it was a bomb that threw up all that dust and debris.

Okay, yes, a lot of dust and debris in the atmosphere can reflect enough sunlight to produce some very chilly results. Large volcanos can produce enough dust to chill the entire globe as the dust rides through the atmosphere. BUT, such dust doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

What about the asteroid that ‘killed the dinosaurs’? you may ask. Yes, that threw up a lot of dust and debris. But what killed so much of the flora and fauna was the firestorm produced by the heat released when the asteroid hit. Think of it as a huge explosion, so hot the heat wave raced around the globe, burning almost everything it touched. There may have been a long winter afterwards, but all that dust and stuff did settle out in a fairly short amount of time.

The plot was that a squad of ‘normal’ military-type humans had to go out into the world to track down a renegade ‘inferior’ made human. The squad's DNA was changed to allow them to survive in the far-below-zero temperatures, but that would only last for 48 hours. I had a little trouble accepting that, but... okay, let’s see what they do with it.

The scene that got me was right after they arrived on the surface. It had been stated that ‘all the animals’ were gone. But what they see right after they arrive on the surface was a man fishing. He had chopped a hole in the top of a small rivulet of water racing over the snow/ice, and had actually caught a fish, but seeing that he was going to be interrupted, he put the fish back.

I really couldn’t accept that. If all the animals had died, where did this fish come from? Okay, maybe they were mistaken. But at the temperatures they were talking about, I would expect that little rivulet to be frozen solid, and the fish with it.

It didn’t help that long after the main character had been on the surface for 48 hours, the main character was still chasing the renegade, with his head bare and no gloves. Frostbite was completely ignored.

It was not a good movie. If you are going to change the rules of life (daytime temperatures of -60F), then you (the writer) have to follow those new rules. And it is easy to have characters who don’t know what happened to end the civilization we (the audience) are familiar with. It’s easy for the writer, but it’s not satisfying to the audience.

Thoughts About Laurentia

Okay, Laurentia is not a super-continent, although it has been involved in those. It is today known as the North American Craton, because it is a bit of crust that makes up about the eastern 2/3 of North America. Originally, this craton included Greenland and a piece of Scotland, but those have split off.

The base of Laurentia is composed of metamorphic and igneous rocks formed 1.5 to 1 billion years ago. Above that are younger sedimentary rocks that were deposited when most of the craton was covered by a shallow (with a depth of no more than 200 feet) tropical sea where much marine life lived and died, settled to the bottom and eventually became rock such as limestone and dolomites.

During the Cretaceous Period, this type of sea - known as the Western Interior Seaway - ran from today’s Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, diving North American into eastern and western land masses

The southwestern area of Laurentia has been deformed by continental collisions and has been stretched up to 100% of its original width. This area has experienced numerous large volcanic eruptions.

Laurentia sat on the equator some 458-444 million years ago.

About 1.82 billion years ago, Laurentia was part of the supercontinent Columbia. But by 1.35-1.3 billion years ago, Laurentia was an independent continent.

1.3 billion years ago, Laurentia joined other bits to form the supercontinent Protorodinia, and by 1.07 billion years ago, enough bits had joined to become the supercontinent Rodinia. This article didn’t mention when Rodinia broke apart.

750 million years ago, Laurentia had again joined others to form Protolaurasia, but Laurentia very nearly drifted away from the others. Still, it stuck around at least until 600 million years ago, when they formed the supercontinent Pannotia. (I’ve already written about that.)

419.2 to 358.9 million years, Laurentia and Baltica collided, forming Euramerica.

298.9 to 252.1 million years ago, all the ‘big boys’ got together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. That lasted until 201.3 to 145 million years ago, when Pangea broke into 2 supercontinents: Laurasia and Gondwana. Laurentia was part of Laurasia.

145 to 66 million years ago, Laurentia was again an independent continent. And about 23 million years ago, North America (Laurentia) crashed against South America, forming the minor supercontinent America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentia

The Dorset culture

Starting around 500 BC and lasting 1500 to 2000 years, the Arctic area of North America was inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo culture. It is named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut in Canada, where the first evidence of it was found. It is said to have 4 phases due to differences in the technology related to hunting and tool making. Dorset artifacts include triangular end-blades, soapstone lamps, and burins, a specific type of stone tool.

The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. They appear to have been extinct by 1500 AD at the latest, and possibly as early as 1000 AD. At some time during the 1000s, the Thule people (a pre-Innuit group) began migrating east from Alaska, and eventually spread through all the land previously inhabited by the Dorset. There is no evidence that the Inuit and the Dorset ever met. In fact, genetic studies show that the Dorset were distinct from later groups and that there is virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and Thule peoples.

Inuit legends say that they did encounter people they called ‘First Inhabitants’. According to these stories, the first inhabitants were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but they were afraid to interact and were easily frightened off. There is also a controversial theory of contact and trade between the Dorset and the Norse.

Some of the artifacts that indicated a culture different from the Inuit included sophisticated pieces of art. Carvings featured uniquely large hairstyles for women, and both sexes are depicted wearing hoodless parkas with large, tall collars.

Not only do scientists not know for certain what happened to the Dorset people, they aren’t sure where they came from, either. Some have suggested that they may have developed from a previous culture, perhaps the Pre-Dorset, the Saqqaq or - even less likely - from the Independence I. However, these earlier cultures all had bow and arrow technology, while the Dorsets did not. Possibly they set aside the bow and arrow as they switched from land to aquatic hunting.

Another piece of technology that the Dorset lacked was drills. There are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Whatever holes they created, they painstakingly carved or gouged into the artifact where it was needed. This was even true of the bone needles that are so common in Dorset sites. It is confusing, since the Pre-Dorset and the Thule had and used drills to great effect.

However little has been discovered about the Dorset people, their history is divided into 4 periods: The Early (500-1 BC), Middle (1-500 AD), and Late phases (500-1000 AD), as well as the Terminal phase from 1000 AD onward. The Terminal phase would have been closely related to the Medieval Warm Period, which began to warm the Arctic around 950 AD. Under those conditions, the sea ice became far less predictable.

The Dorset were adapted to a very cold climate, and it is thought that much of their food consisted of sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice. A massive decline in sea ice would have forced the Dorset further north. Most agree they disappeared at some point between 1000 and 1500 AD, possibly because they could not adapt to the climate change or perhaps because they were introduced to diseases they had not known before.

I wish the article had included some type of rendition of the triangular end-blades. I have a series of stories in the works about a culture that is based on the number 3, and I keep imagining them developing 3-sided blades of all sizes, even arrow-heads. But I don’t know enough about bladed weapons to know if such a shape would be feasible. Anybody have any ideas about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

Baltica

Despite my confusion over the location of ‘the Baltic States’, they are right where normal people would expect them; along the Baltic Sea. Somehow, over the years, my mind had decided that the otherwise-un-named Baltic states were located immediately north and northwest of Greece. However, I looked them up (for the sake of this blog), and boy, was I wrong. I had put these states in Eastern Europe, but way too far south.

The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are in Eastern Europe, snuggled up east of the Baltic Sea and west of the Ural Mountains of Asia. And that places them right on the protocontinent of Baltica!

So, yes, this is kind of related to the Supercontinents blogs, but I’m only going to explore this one little piece of crust. Sometimes it roamed around on its own. At other times, it gathered together with other pieces of crust. Right now, it is smooshed between NorthEastern Europe and NorthWestern Asia. Will it succumb and eventually be pushed under these larger plates, or will it somehow break free again? I don’t know. But let’s see what is known about it.

The thick core of Baltica is also known as the East European Craton and is more than 3 billion years old.

About 2 billion years ago, small pieces of crust started colliding. These included Sarmatia (which was the Ukrainian Shield and Voronezh Massif*) and Volgo-Uralia. That seemed to work pretty well, so about 1.8 billion years ago, they added Fennoscandia, which included the Baltic Shield.

Now, if I’m reading the articles right, about 750 million years ago, Baltica and Laurentia (most of North America) both rotated clockwise, bumped each other lightly and headed for the south pole. At some point (possibly 650 million years ago), it is postulated that Earth became completely covered in snow and ice. (Yes, Snowball Earth.)

It turns out that Siberia was located fairly close to the South Pole, too, and it apparently didn’t take long for Siberia to completely lose its cool. According to one theory, Siberia started having some severe volcanic eruptions, and the build-up of green house gases in the atmosphere from that source resulted in a complete melt-down of all that snow and ice in as little as 2,000 years.

Anyway, Laurentia beat feet and headed north, but Baltica remained in the south at least long enough to hang around Gondwanaland. After that, Baltica drifted north and approached Laurentia again. However, around 425 million years ago, Scotland-Greenland and Norway all collided together, forcing Baltica to look elsewhere for new continental buddies.

Just when you thought you’d found a friend. Poor Baltica.

* Now a piece of Central Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltica

https://www.google.com/search?q=baltic+states&oq=Baltic+states&aqs=chrome.0.0l6.4638j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Super Continent 2

As I stated before, Earth has experienced a number of super-continents, which is when all or most of the land masses are in the same place. Pannotia was one of those super-continents. It was fairly short lived, forming about 650 million years ago, and starting to break up 560 million years ago.

In this particular case, most of the land is south of the equator, centered around the south pole. There were a few ‘islands’ stretching towards the equator. Pannotia also included several seas trapped between batches of land, and one long skinny bay that looks like it might actually reach the south pole, according to the drawings.

Only South America and Africa - and possibly Australia - are recognizable land masses in the drawings. All the other continents are apparently unformed, bits and pieces scattered across the drawings. For instance, Siberia and Baltica have not yet joined with a lot more pieces of land to form Eurasia. Laurentia - which apparently will eventually become most of Canada - is a long piece of land located along (the current west coast of) South America. Most of the pieces of land on the drawings have no names attached to them at all.

I know we’re talking millions of years here, but how fast have these land masses been accumulating and then dissolving? And in between coming together, they just seem to zip all over the place, meeting up with other bits of land in new and different patterns.

Kind of makes me think of a kaleidoscope, where all the different pieces of colored crystals form new and intriguing patterns with every slight twist of the barrel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannotia

Fireweed

Somewhere I heard about ‘fireweed’, and my imagination immediately jumped to a vision of a weed with flowers that were bright yellow and red, with long slender petals that stuck up in the air and ‘flickered’ in the breeze.

The real fireweed isn’t like that. The flowers are a solid purple or pink that don’t look a thing like flames. It gets its name because it is probably the first plant to establish itself in an area that has been burnt.

Since then, I have also discovered that the parts of the plant that occur above ground can be used as a natural medicine. Would it surprise you to hear that fireweed has been used to treat fevers, inflammation and infections? It is also used to treat pain and swelling, tumors, wounds and an enlarged prostate. Certain forms of it have been used as an astringent and as a tonic.

And it’s edible! New shoots can be cooked like asparagus, while young flowers and leaves can be eaten raw. (They are slightly sweet and mildly astringent.) Older stems can be peeled and enjoyed as a snack. Older leaves and the flowers can be cooked as a vegetable, and will both flavor and thicken soups, stews, and the like.

If that’s not enough, you can stuff a doll or start a fire with the stuff contained within the seed pods. The seed pods are about 3 inches long, and when they pop open (with or without any help from you), the minuscule seeds are released, each with its own feathery tuft that allows it to ride the breeze to a new home. I’ve also read the adjective ‘cotton-like’ in reference to the seeds and tufts, which made me think it could be used to stuff a child’s doll. Or, use the stuff inside the seed pods as kindling to make a fire.

I like the concept of a fireweed. I think I might use the term for a plant on some other planet in one of my stories. Only I think my version of fireweed will have those red and yellow flickering flowers. And maybe those flowers are ghost-pepper hot!

Now, that strikes me as a real fireweed, in all ways.

http://wildfoodsandmedicines.com/fireweed/

https://medium.com/invironment/wild-edibles-fireweed-is-everywhere-8ea22e6d0a0e

https://www.rxlist.com/fireweed/supplements.htm

Super Continents 1

In geology, a supercontinent is when all or most of the Earth’s continental blocks form a single landmass. But earth scientists may use a different definition; ‘a clustering of nearly all continents’, which leaves room for interpretation.

The land masses have conjoined and separated several times. The most recent mass that joined them all is called Pangaea. This conjoining began about 335 million years ago, and began to break up about 175 million years ago.

Pangaea looked more or less like a crescent or the letter ‘c’. The Eurasian continent sat at the top, with the area now forming southeast asia stretching south and east. To the southwest lay North America, and along the NA ‘east coast’ lay the west coast of the big hump of Africa, which was pushed clockwise a bit off its southern tip. The bump of Brazil of South America lay snuggled against North America and Africa. India and Antarctica rested along the southeast of Africa, from the ‘Red Sea’ area south. Australia nestled against India and Antarctica.

I used the words ‘lay’, ‘snuggled’ and ‘nestled’, but the drawing I looked at indicated all sorts of irregular-shaped bits and pieces scattered between all these known continents. I didn’t see anything that resembled the Arabian Peninsula, so I can’t say where that particular piece was hiding at the time of Pangaea.

Pangaea stretched from the south pole to within spitting distance of the north pole. It was a solid body of land that would not have allowed any ocean currents to go around the globe horizontally.

Pangaea began to break up about 175 million years ago. Once India broke away from its neighbors, it raced toward Eurasia at 6 inches a year. Is it any surprise that when they slammed together, they formed mountains like the Himalayas? India (as well as Australia) is still moving northeast at 2-3 inches per year. In a few million years, Australia could scoop up bits and pieces of Indonesia and then head for the northern Pacific. Will it?

I don’t know. Isn’t there a trench somewhere along Indonesia? Seems like a deep ditch would slow Australia down or something. Something else for me to look up and think about.

By the way, this is the first of probably several blogs on super-continents. How long they take me and how often other subjects insinuate themselves into the lineup of blogs remains to be seen. Thems the chances you take when you decide to read my blog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

Head Wrapping

Have you ever tried to understand something, but you just couldn’t quite understand it? Maybe you hadn’t had enough caffeine yet that particular day, or there were too many squirrels playing outside your window, but the facts as they were presented did not make sense to you.

It happened to me with math. In high school, as a junior, I took Algebra II, where we studied (among other concepts), how to graph equations, and that took us into the realm of sin and co-sin, tangent and co-tangent. As a senior, I took Trigonometry, which dealt with polar graph and other stuff. Then I started college, taking Calculus I, and were back to sin and co-sin, but there wasn’t any refresher week to wake up those memories, we just shot off in a whole new direction, and I simply could not wrap my head around any of it.

It happened again today when I thought I would look up ‘quantum entanglement’ and see if I could try to simplify it enough to write a quick blog. The results?

My tummy hurts.

I’m also hungry for cake, and maybe an explanation for that will come in a little bit.

The first article I read was going to ‘simplify’ the concept of  entanglement, and I think it tried too hard. It wanted me to imagine I had 2 cakes. (Hence my hunger for cake.) The cakes were either round or square, either red or blue. In a normal state, you could look at one cake, see its shape and color, but you wouldn’t know anything about the other cake. Let’s say you have a red round cake. The other cake could be red or blue, round or square. You wouldn’t know.

Ahh, but IF the cakes were entangled, you could know that if the first cake was round, the 2nd cake would also be round. But you wouldn’t know anything about the color of either cake, because in the realm of quantum physics, you can’t know everything. Apparently.

Then he moved into round and red being good but square and blue was evil... and I was totally lost. Cake is evil? Never! I don’t care how bad it is for me.

The 2nd article I tried to read was even worse. Not because it tried too hard to simplify the concept, but because it didn’t seem to simplify at all. Or maybe my head was spinning, trying to get a grip on the idea of evil blue square cakes.

So I’ve retreated from the battle, so to speak. I kind of half-way understand the idea of entanglement, but I just can’t wrap my head around the entire concept. I’ve been here, more or less this exact spot, for a number of years. Someday, if I last long enough, I’ll go out and look for another simplified explanation of entanglement.

When I do, I’ll make sure I’ve had enough caffeine, and I’ll close the curtains to keep the squirrels from distracting me.

The Insidious Devil’s Claw!

I think I came across mention of this plant when I was studying the Tohono O’odham Nation of the Sonora Desert. I finally got curious enough to investigate them, mainly because of the name.

Apparently, (if I read these 2 short articles correctly), there are a number of related plants around the world that are all called Devil’s Claw, Devil’s Horn, Ram’s Horn, Elephant Tusks or Unicorn plant. There is at least one variety that grows in South Africa, and two that grow in the Sonora Desert.

All of these names come from the seed pod, which starts out green, fleshy and shaped somewhat like a small banana. Somebody must have thought that looked like a unicorn horn, so that explains that name.

The rest of the names come from the ripe seed pod, which becomes woody and develops a split starting at one end, so that it seems to form a pair of claws, a pair of horns or a pair of tusks.

One variety that grows in Sonora is annual, so once it germinates, it must form seed pods that year, or die trying. However, for both Sonora varieties, the seeds may take several years to germinate, and the perennial version does not necessarily flower every year, so that particular plant would not produce seed pods that year. The perennial version does have a large taproot, so it is less dependent on a rainy season.

There is a 3rd variety of this plant in the Sonora, but it is ‘partially domesticated’. The Tohono O’odham use Devil’s Claw seed pods in their basket weaving, and they (meaning the women) developed a strain that had larger seed pods whose seeds did not take as long to germinate.

Basket weaving was/is not the only use for these seed pods. The seeds are edible and are a source of important dietary oils and proteins. The fleshy unripe pods are also edible and can even be pickled!

When there aren’t any humans around to plant the seeds, the plants do it anyway, by ‘catching hold’ of a passing animal’s fur (such as a cow) with its claw. However long it hangs on is that much distance from the mother plant, and it’s even possible the fallen seed pod might be broken open by a hoof.

I just can’t quite get over the idea of pickled baby bananas, although there’s nothing to say that these unripe seed pods taste anything like a banana, pickled or not. Of course, when my mother decided to try pickling watermelon rinds, I thought she was nuts, but I came to like that stuff, in a weird kind of way. Wish I had her recipe.

Does anybody have a recipe for pickled unicorn horns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscidea_(plant)

https://www.desertusa.com/flowers/devil-claw.html

Cambrian Period

The Cambrian Period lasted from 541 to 485 million years ago. At the beginning of this time period, the small unicellulars that represented most life on Earth became more complex and multicellular. They also diversified quite rapidly, bringing forth the first representatives of all modern animal phyla. Indeed, there is strong evidence that all animals evolved from a single common ancestor.

Life prospered in the oceans, but the land is thought to have been relatively barren, with nothing more complex than a microbial soil crust or biofilm. A few molluscs may have emerged to browse on that biofilm, but the continents were probably dry and rocky. The global supercontinent Pannotia had just broken up during the early part of the period, and the new continents were mostly flanked by shallow seas, which were relatively warm. Polar ice was absent for much of this period.

Most land masses were clustered in the Southern Hemisphere during this period, but were drifting north. During the early portion of the Cambrian, the supercontinent of Gondwana went through some large, high-velocity rotational movements.

Trilobites (I wrote about them in an earlier post) were rampant during the Cambrian period. Possibly this was because without any sea ice, the sea level was high, which meant large areas of the continents were flooded in warm shallow seas, which is ideal for sea live. But the sea levels did fluctuate somewhat, suggesting there were ‘ice ages’, possibly meaning pulses of expansion and contraction of a south polar ice cap. Although the beginning of the period was cold, the average temperature during the Cambrian was 7° Celsius warmer than today.

Even so, trilobites were not the dominant species, as was once thought. It seemed they were, because they had hard external shells that were easy to fossilize, much easier than the thin chitinous shells of other arthropods, and so trilobite fossils were much easier to find by today’s paleontologists.

The Cambrian period is often referred to as ‘the Cambrian Explosion’, indicating a huge increase in the variety and diversity of life forms. But it seems (to me) that it might be better to think of it as ‘the Period of Great Changes’. At the start of the Cambrian, new creatures with new behaviors and lifestyles destroyed the biofilm that covered the sea floor, so all the creatures (from the previous time period) who depended on that biofilm died out.

Around 515 million years ago, the number of species dying out was larger than the number of new species coming into existence. 500 million years ago, the oceans saw a big drop in the oxygen content, and at the same time, the level of toxic hydrogen sulfide increased. Either of these events alone could produce extinctions, so imagine what happened when they came in together.

Where would hydrogen sulfide have come from? There are a few ways nature makes it, including anerobic digestion by certain biofilms in the absence of oxygen. I can’t rule that one out, but I’m somewhat more inclined to ‘blame’ volcanoes, which also produce it, probably in larger quantities and certainly can do it in oceans. Also, the heat given off by the volcano(es) would tend to drive oxygen out of the water. So, was there a series of huge volcano events 500 million years ago? I don’t know. It seems possible.

And there we have the Cambrian period in a nutshell. No fascinating dinosaurs to study, but the thought of a spinning Gondwana certainly has my attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide

Boreal Forest

If you want to talk about a forest that is larger than the Amazon jungle, then you will probably talk about the Taiga, the Boreal Forest or the snow forest. They are all one thing, with different names used in different parts of the world. Some say it is one huge forest, stretching from Iceland through the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Mongolia, Alaska and Canada. It is a coniferous forest consisting mostly of pipes, spruces and larches. It covers 6.6 million square miles or 11.5% of the Earth’s land area.

The boreal forest has a subarctic climate, with a very large temperature range between seasons. Summers last 1-3 months, always less than 4 months, and any given 24 hour period during the summer will average 50 °F or less. In Siberia, the average temperature of the coldest winter month is between 21 and -58 °F. The ground being frozen for much of the year, or even permanently frozen, can restrict the growth of deep roots, thereby favoring shallow-rooted trees like the Siberian larch.

Despite these harsh condition, the plants in the boreal forest have a lower threshold to trigger growth, and thus they ‘wake up’ a little earlier than one would expect. Even so, the soil tends to be poor in nutrients. Fallen leaves and moss tend to sit on the soil for a long time in the cold climate, so their organic components are very slow to be added to the soil. Also, acids from the evergreen needles leach the soil, making it even less ‘appetizing’ for anything but lichens and some mosses. On the other hand, diversity of soil organisms is high, comparable to a tropical rainforest.

It seems surprising to me that in a world that is frozen most of the time, fire is one of the most important factors that shape the composition and development of boreal forest. Some members of the boreal forest won’t release their seeds until the pods have been exposed to fire, and I get that, but how does something covered in snow most of the time suddenly burst into flames? Obviously, there is something about the process that I don’t understand.

Most boreal forest fires are either high-intensity crown fires or severe surface fires. These are large, often more than 10,000 hectares (a hectare is 100 acres) and sometimes more than 400,000 hectares. Different areas of the boreal forest burn at different lengths of time; drier areas might burn every 50 years, while wetter areas only burn every 200 to 300 years. And when an area burns, it could take decades, even a couple centuries to get back to ‘normal’. So all that carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) that is released into the air when those trees burn takes those same decades or centuries to be absorbed into the growing forest again.

This is particularly important now, when so much of the boreal forest is burning. Even Greenland - which doesn’t have any boreal forest, but does grow grasses and scrub brushes when enough ice melts to expose ground to seeds being blown around by winds - is on fire. Alaska and Canada are experiencing horrendous fires in their boreal forestland. In northern Siberia, one fire covered 7.9 million acres (over 3 million hectares), and that’s only one fire of 11 (or more) burning in Russia.

It’s been estimated that these fires dumped over 50 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in June (2019), and they are still at it. 16 million adult trees burn in a day in Russia’s boreal forest fires. The Earth is not ready to absorb that much carbon. If we planted more trees - billions of them - it would help, but possibly not before the climate changes even more in response to that much carbon and carbon dioxide having been freed to begin with.

We really can’t sit around and wait any longer. We have to start facing this problem, and we have to do it NOW. The sky is falling, and doomsday is just around the corner.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/31/1875681/-Fire-at-the-top-of-the-world-Earth-s-largest-forest-is-burning-and-it-won-t-be-coming-back-soon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga

OrganPipe Cactus fruit

I have often wondered what kind of food chain there would be in a desert that would allow people to live there. Oh, yes, I’ve heard about certain rats, rabbits, coyotes, snakes, lizards... But the fact is that as you go down the food chain to smaller and smaller creatures, eventually you have to get to plant-life. On Earth, it seems a pretty likely bet, anyway.

I am often disappointed by authors and filmmakers who forget there needs to be some kind of food chain. In my latest viewing of “Dune” - I can’t remember which version of it I was watching - it occurred to me that the people on the planet were apparently colonists, or descendents of colonists. There was much talk about the great worms, with no talk of what they ate. One assumes that there was a mouse species on the planet, but they might have come with the colonists. One assumes there are mice, because the nickname the common people adopt for Paul was the name of a species of mice who fight back. And in one scene, I saw at least 1 beautiful butterfly. Nowhere did I ever see any kind of plantlife out in the wild. So... what did the butterflies, the fierce mice, the worms and the people eat? I don’t know. I don’t remember anything like that being mentioned in the book, either. Sigh.

By comparison, Earth deserts are veritable hotbeds of life. So let’s take a look at another desert food source that I’ve heard about.

The organ-pipe cactus grows in the Sonoran Desert and Baja California. It has a very short trunk, from which dozens of stems grow, producing what one might think of as a bush. Its root system only reaches about 10 cm (4 inches) into the ground, but are sufficient for sucking up monsoon water when it occurs. Otherwise, the plant is pretty water-tight, with a water-proof skin and plenty of thorns to keep from getting eaten. An individual cactus can live 150 years, but doesn’t produce fruit until age 35. Probably because a good growing year will see it add a whopping 2.5 inches a year to its height.

In May and June, the organ-pipe cactus develops white/creamy flowers that only open at night and usually close back up by mid-morning. That doesn’t leave much time for day-time pollinators to get to it, but bats do the job just fine during the night.

Just before the rains come in July and August, the fruit ripens and splits open to reveal bright red flesh surrounding lots of seeds. Or maybe the fruit was red and the inner flesh was purple; I’ve seen it described both ways.

I didn’t find a lot of recipes for preparing organ-pipe cactus fruit. Apparently, you simply mash the fruit flesh and seeds into a sweet paste, which could be eaten as it was. Or you could dry it out to make a spreadable jelly. Another way would be to separate the seeds and place them in storage. Later, you could grind the seeds into a flour to make seed cakes. So, you could have your seed cakes and fruit jelly both!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenocereus_thurberi

www.nps.gov/orpi/learn/nature/organ-pipe-cactus.htm

http://www.ethnoherbalist.com/southern-california-native-plants-medicinal/pitaya-fruit/

Ironwood Seeds - Sonoran Desert Delicacy

When I researched the Tohono Oodham Nation, one of the foods they foraged in the Sonoran Desert was ironwood seeds, so I decided to find out what I could about this food source.

First, about the trees. There are many trees known as ‘ironwood’, so the version found in the Sonoran Desert is often called desert ironwood. The tree itself grows extremely slowly, and can possibly live for centuries. But even after one of them dies, it might remain a landmark for millenia. This is because the heartwood is so full of toxic chemicals that decay is practically eliminated.

The seedpods grow from the middle of a stem, not the end, and each pod can hold up to a dozen or so seeds. The pictures I saw depicted a brown pod that reminded me of a cross between a green bean and a smooth-skinned peanut pod. Or possibly a vanilla bean pod. The seeds inside seemed to have a passing resemblance to peanuts, which seems fitting, since both the peanut plant and the desert ironwood are legumes.

As with other legumes, the desert ironwood enriches the surrounding soil with nitrogen, so the area immediately surrounding this tree is richer for growing plants than the soil another couple of feet away from the tree. Did the Oodham tend to cultivate their crops by planting them in close proximity to an ironwood? I don’t know, I haven’t found any information on that. But in my mind, it would make sense for them to have done so.

Now, about those seeds.

Ironwoods generally flower from late April through May and set seed pods a few weeks later, which will dry in June-July. The flowers, fresh seedpods and dried seedpods are edible.

The pink flowers can be used in or as a salad. They can also be candied for use as a dessert, but I don’t know if the Oodham did that. Good to add to my basket of knowledge as I look for means to feed an alien culture.

The seedpods are apparently beige from the start, so how do you know when to harvest them if you want them fresh? You open up one pod and look for the seeds inside to be green. If the seeds are sweet and taste slightly like a peanut, you are good to harvest. Gently pull whole pods off the tree.

However, if that seed tastes chalky, you’ve waited too long to harvest them as fresh. Go away and come back when the pods are fuzzy, dry and dark brown. The seeds inside will now be hard and brown. Don’t bother picking the pods by hand at this point; just put a tarp or blanket on the ground and gently shake free the dry pods. But don’t harvest any dry pods that land on the bare ground.

Whether you have harvested your ironwood seeds fresh or dry, they should be cleaned and processed for storage as soon as possible after picking to reduce the chances of spoilage. Now, I got some information from a website (see below) on how to do this, but the instructions as given require things I’m pretty sure the Oodham did not have in yesteryear. Things like ice water, plastic bags and a freezer. Suffice it to say that they suggest you blanche the fresh seeds, package them in bags with as little air enclosed as possible, and throw the bags in the freezer. Even the dry seeds need to be frozen for at least 2 days to avoid bug infestation.

So I’m guessing the Oodham didn’t process them that way. I’m guessing they merely cooked them using their favorite method and ate. And the next day, somebody would go and forage again. Maybe they came back with more ironwood seeds, maybe they found something else.

All good to know when I’m trying to keep somebody alive on what seems an inhospitable planet.

https://www.desertharvesters.org/native-plant-food-guides-the-desert-can-feed-you/desert-ironwood/#desert-ironwood-harvesting-basics

Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe is Turkish for “Potbelly Hill”, and refers to an archeological site in the SE Anatolia Region of Turkey. The ‘hill’ is 49 ft tall and about 980 ft in diameter. It is located 2,490 ft above sea level.

The construction of this site is believed to date back to the 10th to 8th millenium BC. It was built before pottery was invented in this area, and contains massive T-shaped stone pillars, the world’s oldest known megaliths. Surveys have discovered more than 200 pillars in about 20 circles. Each has a height up to 20 ft and weighs 10 tons. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock.

The 2nd phase of this site was still pre-pottery, but newly erected pillars were smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors made of polished lime. The location was abandoned after that.

Dating of the site was accomplished by charcoal samples found in the lowest levels of the site. It is likely this charcoal indicates the end of the active phase of occupation, and that the actual structures were older.

The site sits on a flat, barren plateau connected on the north to a neighboring mountain range by a narrow promontory that shows evidence of human impact. In all other directions, the ridge descends steeply into slopes and steep cliffs.

The pillars were carved from the plateau edges, where several quarries have been identified, and 3 t-pillars found. The largest of these has been severed from the surrounding rock, and the other 2 are identified as t-pillars, but not yet separated.

At first I thought the article was talking about something like Stonehenge; monoliths standing on end, some with a cap stone balanced atop 2 of them, but further on, the article had details that belied that thought. A large number of t-pillars were embedded in thick walls made of unworked rock that formed a circle, approximately 8 t-pillars per circle. Four of these circles have been discovered so far, with indications of another 16 not yet uncovered. It is unknown if these walled circles had a roof.

But the t-pillars were not just used in walls; in the center of each circle, 2 taller t-pillars faced each other. Stone benches were also found inside the circles. Many of the limestone t-pillars were decorated with symbols or depictions of many animals that may have been present at the time, but which no longer live in the area today. It is likely the area was forested at the time, with a large variety of animals, but millennia of human habitation and cultivation has reduced the area to a dust bowl environment.

Some of the floors of the circles were made of burnt lime, while others were bedrock.

After 8800 BC, the people stopped making circles and constructed small rectangular rooms. Rectangles are a more efficient use of space than circles, and are often associated with the emergence of the Neolithic age. However, t-pillars are still present, indicating these probably served the same purpose as the earlier circles, perhaps as a sanctuary. Several adjoining doorless and windowless rooms have floors of polished lime.

No evidence of domesticated plants or animals have been found at the site. It is assumed the inhabitants were hunters and gatherers who lived in villages part of the year. Still, very little evidence of residential use has been found. It is believed that the locations may have been used as a spiritual center even earlier than the dates given here.

So, here is a site that was created before pottery, metallurgy, writing, the wheel, agriculture or even animal husbandry. It would have taken organization of an advanced order, as it is estimated that up to 500 people would have been needed to extract and move the heavy pillars. I don’t know if that number includes the people doing the hunting and gathering to feed the people doing the heavy construction.

But around 8000 BC, the site ceased to be a ceremonial center to the people. Instead of simply abandoning the site, they deliberately filled it in with whatever rubble they had at hand, including animal and human bones. It was used for agriculture from then until the present.

It has been suggested that Gobekli Tepe was a place for remembering the dead, of putting them to rest in some way. (No obvious graves have yet been found.) It seems fitting, then, that when the Neolithic people ‘moved on’, when they invented pottery, agriculture and animal husbandry, they made an effort to bury their past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Tohono Oʼodham

The Tohono O’odham are a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert, and they are recognized by the US federal government as the Tohono O’odham Nation.

After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, a competitor people (The Pima) used an insult to refer to the Tohono O’odham, which the Spanish (and later English) mispronounced as ‘papago’, but this term has been rejected by the tribal government and most of the people of the tribe.

The Tohono O’odham Nation’s major reservation is located in southern Arizona, and stretches into Sonoma county of Mexico. The Tohono O’odham share roots with the Akimel O’odham (People of the River). Both are descended from the Sobaipuri, who resided along the major rivers of southern Arizona as long ago as the 15th century.

The O’odham-speaking people were a settled agricultural people who endured raids from the nomadic Apache when the latter needed food. It wasn’t until European settlers encroached on the O’odham people’s land that the O’odham and Apache found some common ground. It was more traditional that they were at odds, each taking captive woman and children during raids on the other.

The music and dance of the O’odham lack any grand paraphernalia or ceremonies. Both the music and the dance is subdued, with the music being ‘swallowed’ by the surrounding desert floor, and the dancing featuring skipping and shuffling quietly in bare feet on dry dirt to raise dust.

The traditional O’odham diet consisted of game, insects and plants. They foraged ironwood seed, honey mesquite, hog potato, cholla cactus, acorns and organ-pipe cactus fruit. They cultivated corn, squash, white tepary beans, papago peas and spanish watermelons. They hunted antelope, gathered hornworm larvae and trapped pack rats for meat.

The land did not provide ideal conditions for growing crops, but the O’odham developed the ‘mouth of the wash’ farming method. When they detected imminent rainfall, they would quickly prep the ground and seed it as the rain began to flood the area.

It is often assumed that the desert people embraced Catholicism, but the Tohono O’odham villages resisted change for hundreds of years. During the 1660s and the 1750s, major rebellions forced the Spanish to retreat, and the desert people preserved their traditions nearly intact for generations.

Apparently, the Tohono O’odham never signed a treaty with the Federal Government, so they managed to get a reservation by conducting trades for the land they thought was already theirs. They have retained many of their traditions into the 21st century, and still speak their language. However, US mass culture has started to penetrate and erode their traditions. Diabetes has become a major health problem for the tribe as they shifted away from their traditional food sources. There is a movement to assist the group to return to their more traditional food choices, and they are advocating for access to the rivers so that they can return to growing their own crops.

The Tohono O’odham Community Action was founded in 1996 with the intent to restore lost tribal traditions. It started as a community garden and basketweaving classes. It now has 2 farms, a restaurant and an art gallery. It is estimated that the restaurant - opened in 2009, and incorporating traditional foods into each item served - serves over 100,000 meals yearly. That’s a minimum of 274 meals a day! I don’t want to cook for that crowd!

The basket weaving classes were held once a week, initially, and a single basket might take an entire year to make! The fibers that were used had to be harvested and prepared, plus they needed to create a design that represented the tribe’s history.

Before contact with Europeans, the O’odham migrated north and south with the seasons, and this continued at least until the US-Mexico border cut through their lands. Even then, much of the O’odham continued to move about as they wanted, but efforts were made during the 20th century to ‘close’ this open hole in this border. By 2000, the Mexican census indicated there were no more O’odham to be found in Sonora.

Well, as the article got closer and closer to the present, I found myself losing interest, as is often the case when I’m looking at history. Besides, this was already a long episode. And thirdly, it kept mentioning all the ways this tribe has been and still are being treated as less than full citizens, which always pisses me off. I will have to remember that when I create cultures that are not based on US culture. Heck, even if they are based on US culture, from the looks of how things are now.

The most interesting things I found were the descriptions of the music and dancing, and the information on their traditional foods. This is the kind of stuff I really want to have available in my mind when I’m thinking up new cultures for future stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%CA%BCodham

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”

It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.

Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.

Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.

In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.

I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.

The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.

Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...

The sky is falling.