Thursday, August 27, 2009

One of our seas is missing

The Aral Sea (actually a lake) was a landlocked body of water in Central Asia. A half century ago, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea. It was fed by two rivers, the Syr Daria and the Amu Daria (the ancient Oxus). Beginning in 1959, the Soviet Union began a series of large irrigation projects aimed at increasing amount the amount of commercial crops, mostly cotton, grown in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

As less and less water reached the sea, it began to dry up. As the shoreline receded, fishing villages became landlocked. Soon, that ceased to be a problem as increasing salinity killed most of the fish in the sea. Dust blowing off the lake bed, carrying with it salt and various pollutants, has become a public health hazzard. With the loss of the moderating effect of a large body of water, the summers have been getting hotter and the winters colder in that part of Central Asia.


By 2000 the sea had separated into three, barely connected, parts. The larger, southern, part had divided into a shallow eastern lobe and a deeper western lobe. The northern part of the sea, which had always been somewhat seperate from the rest, was an independent lake. In 2005, Kazakhstan built a dam between the lake’s northern and southern parts to stop the loss of water from the north. While the northern lake has returned to a degree of health, this doomed the south. The eastern lobe completely dried up earlier this year. Ironically, the northern lobe, which was once called the Small Aral Sea, may soon be the only Aral Sea.




Last week

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Mammoths had no appendix

I'm not aware that anyone has confirmed that in a frozen mammoth, but that's what I conclude from this article on the distribution of appendixes among mammalian species. Only platypuses, echidnas, some marsupials, most glires (rabbits and rodents), and most primates have them. None of the other mammals, including the order Proboscidea, have them. If anyone had a theory that the mammoths went extinct because of an epidemic of untreated appendicitis, you'll need to develop a new theory.

Stay classy guys

The Republicans have thought of the same thing that I did on hearing of Kennedy's death. That is, that the proper way to honor him is to pass the health bill. Whereas I think that it is a good idea, they're scared that the idea will catch on and are taking preemptive action against it.

Jeb Hensarling
(R-Texas) was direct in opposing the idea:
Certainly people honor Sen. Ted Kennedy for all of his work, but at the end of the day, this is a democracy, and I think the voice of the people have [sic] been heard quite loudly in the month of August.

Michelle Malkin was a little more oblique, merely accusing the Democrats of planning to do it:
[T]here will be a nauseating excess of MSM hagiographies and lionizations — and crass calls to pass the health care takeover to memorialize his death.

Ann Althouse said the same:
Teddy Kennedy's death will be used to rekindle the old argument that we need to shut up and hurry up about health care reform.
So I assume.

There's some projection there. They wouldn't hesitate to use a death for political advantage, so they assume we will. I only hope we will, but fear the usual Democratic death wish will make our leaders decide it would be unfair to capitalize on the moment.

John J. Pitney, at National Review's "The Corner," managed to use Kennedy's death to bring up the specter of death panels:
He and the other Kennedys loved one another and looked out for one another. There was no cost-benefit analysis in their family life, no sense that age, illness, injury, or disability would diminish their value.

Scott Johnson at Powerline managed one of the least gracious editorials. He follows a pro forma "We extend our sympathies to his family upon his death" with "In one respect, Senator Kennedy's contribution to our public life has been indisputably negative." he then goes on for 657 words to rant about Kennedy opposing the Bork nomination which he calls "a template for liberal attacks" which "we have seen ... on display this month in the White House/Reid/Pelosi attack on the opponents of Obamacare."

Ed Driscoll complains that "ABC ... attempts to spin Kennedy’s passing as an advertisement for socialized medicine," and then whines that they didn't give enough prominence to Chappaquiddick.

We crazy bloggers are allowed to be a gracious or ungracious as we want; that's the prerogative of having your own site. We should, however, expect a little more class from people who position themselves as serious pundits or who are office holding politicians. Of course, the right has reason to fear the effect Kennedy's death might have on the healthcare debate. Kennedy spent his entire public life pushing for national healthcare. The proper way to honor him is to pass a good bill. No amount of sentiment or refocusing of the debate is going to budge the Republicans. The real hope for Kennedy's legacy is that it will budge the right wing of the Democratic Party to act like Democrats. It's time to call, write, fax, or send smoke signals to every Democrat in Congress and tell them to stop compromising and do it for Ted.

Update: Kennedy's death brings out the conservatives who put the twit in Twitter.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Do it for Ted

The news is telling me Ted Kennedy just died. He spent his whole career trying to get some kind of universal health coverage enacted. The thing that kept him going for the last year was his wish to get it done before he died. He would have too, except that Baucus, Nelson, and the blue dogs thought it was necessary to go slow and appease Grassley and the medical/insurance industry. Maybe we can use Ted's death to shame them into acting like Democrats. I'm sure he would have approved.

Suspicious similarities

Joseph Farah, publisher of the ultra-right World Net Daily wrote an editorial last week about the amazing similarities between Hitler and Obama. As shocking and explosive as his revelations were, I think he missed some important parallels. Fortuanately, I'm here to fill the gap.
  • Hitler was born in a different country (Austria) than the one he ruled (Germany. Obama was born in Hawaiokenyastan.
  • Hitler had dark hair. Obama has dark hair.
  • Hitler was a (National) socialist. Sothern Republicans think Obama is a socialist.
  • Hitler had a dog. Obama has a dog.
  • Hitler's followers wore brown shirts. Obama's friend, Al Gore, wore a brown suit.
  • Hitler didn't smoke. Obama is tring to quit smoking.
  • Hitler fought a two front war in Europe. Obama is fighting two wars in Asia.
  • Hitler was a crazy rightwinger. Obama drives rightwingers crazy.
  • Hitler's mother was a white woman. Obama's mother was a white woman.
  • Hitler wrote a book. Obama wrote a book.
  • Hitler had a beer hall putsch. Obama had a beer summit.

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!11!

Breaking news: The ties between Hitler and Obama run deeper than we ever suspected.

Today is my birthday

How on earth did I get this old?

Monday, August 24, 2009

Mammoth in the news

Siberia isn't the only place where you can stumble over mammoth parts while minding you own business.
Patrick Walker, a groundskeeper at Morrison Lake Country Club, says he's glad he paid attention in high school science classes.

That's how he knew he was probably looking at the tooth of a 10,000-year-old mammoth while grooming the course last week.

"Mr. (Douglas) Schmuck always told us to keep your eyes open, you never know what you'll find," said Walker, a 2009 graduate of Lakewood High School. "He's into archaeology and taught us about that kind of good stuff."

[...]

[Scott Beld, a research assistant at the Ann Arbor museum] said the mammoth probably lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age. It was probably a young adult or a female -- about the size of a circus elephant -- and weighed more than 2,000 pounds.

Mr. Schmuck deserves a lot of credit for producing a student like this. And Walker is a pretty classy kid for giving Mr. Schmuck that credit. This is the kind of thing that can change a kid's life and send him off into a life of science and dirty fingernails.

I are smart

I know as much about science as Greg Laden and he's a real science guy.


How much do you know?

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Why we love Barney Frank

Barney does a town hall:
You want me to answer the question? Yes. As you stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.

More like this, please.

More social networking

Brad told me I need to have a public Facebook page so my many blog fans can be my friends. I thought that's what the blog was for. Still, as part of my bold experiment in social networking I've decided to give it a shot. The name is John J. McKay. The middle initial is important because, according to the census, there are more than three thousand John McKays in the country. I've never lived in a city with fewer than two. So far there is nothing on page except for a few pictures. I suppose I'll use the page for blog and book news.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Social networking

I'm suspicious of the whole social networking thing. First off, I'm not very sociable. Secondly, I'm pretty private, I don't want to tell the whole world about my every action. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I don't really need another time suck, I'm a blogger. Still I'm told there are some practical uses for it--publishers like prospective authors who can contribute to the marketing of their books--so I'm giving it a shot. I just set up a Facebook page. If I'm feeling especially bold, I might even try Twitter later this week.

Friday, August 14, 2009

I've heard...

Obamacare means the National Endowment for the Arts will create death panels to decide which new teevee shows get canceled next fall.

Eat the rich

The federal income tax was enacted by constitutional amendment in 1913 at the peak of the progressive era. It was enacted to meet several goals. The first goal was simply to raise money to cover government expenditures, such as the cost of building a larger navy. The second goal was finding a better source of revenue. Tariffs and consumption taxes, for a variety of reasons, were not meeting the needs of government. The third goal, and the most idealistic of the three, was to reduce income inequality. For over a decade, populist farmers and laborers had been demanding an end to the concentration of wealth into the hands of banking and corporate elites. In part, it was the popularity of the social engineering aspects of an income tax among farmers and laborers that made it possible for thirty six state legislatures to pass bills in favor of an income tax. Did it work?

In a word, yes. There is a chart floating around the blogosphere today showing the increase in income inequality over the last thirty years. The chart comes from an update of a paper by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at Berkeley. Since 1978, the amount of the national income controlled the top ten percent of the population has risen from thirty-four percent to fifty percent. the rise in the wealth of the top one percent and the top one one-hundredth of a percent has risen even faster. Saez's chart for income share of the top ten percent is in black below. I've added the top tax rate in red.

The match isn't perfect because things other than the federal income tax influence the distribution of wealth. There are other taxes that the red line doesn't show including state income taxes. In boom times, the middle classes do well. The lowest percentiles will have a larger share of the national income during times of low unemployment. In addition, how that top bracket is applied has changed over the years. But in general, the trend is clear; if equality is our goal, the progressive income tax is a proven success.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Make mine a triple

Two months ago, on June 10, the asteroid 1994 CC passed the Earth at a distance of 2.52 million kilometers. That's about six times the distance of the moon, which is pretty damn close as astronomical distances go. Since our killer laser defense systems aren't ready yet, all we could do was watch as 1994 CC flew by, but it turned out to be well worth the look. Asteroid 1994 CC is a triple system. What that means is that the asteroid that we were aware of has two tiny moons.

The central object is about seven hundred meters (less that half a mile) in diameter. If it hit the Earth, it would be big enough to cause a nuclear winter, but not big enough to kill the dinosaurs. Some estimates put the frequency of such impacts at around one in a million years. The satellite asteroids are estimated at least fifty meters across. If either one hit the Earth, it would cause a Tunguska sized explosion--big enough to destroy a large city. Its affect on the climate would be equivalent to a medium sized volcanic eruption--somewhere between Mt. St. Helens and Krakatoa. We have a couple volcanic eruptions in that range every century. Asteroid strikes of that size happen maybe once a century.


The impact danger isn't what's interesting about 1994 CC, there are enough dangerous asteroids that this one doesn't particularly stand out. It's the triple nature and small size of 1994 CC that makes it interesting. This only the second triple near earth asteroid that we've discovered. The first was discovered just last year. The first triple asteroid anywhere was only discovered in 2005. That asteroid, 87 Sylvia, is much larger that 1994 CC--a half million times larger, or large enough to have a name. Sylvia's satellites are each at least a thousand times larger that 1994 CC. The idea of something as small as 1994 CC having its own system of tiny moons was cartoon material when I was a little kid.

This isn't life changing news, but it's pretty cool.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What's with all the Moms?

Obama Asks Moms to Return to School

Learn How a Stay at Home Mom Discovered a Trick to Whiten Teeth for less Than $10!

Seattle-Tacoma Moms! Makes $67/Hr Online

Mom lost 47 pounds of belly fat with 1 simple rule!

Moms Get Business Degrees

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Friday, August 07, 2009

Help save a family farm

Here's a good deed you can do that is not only a mitzvah, but yummy as well. The Get Mint Farm in St. Johns, Michigan has been in the hands of the Crosby family since 1912. In 2005 the current generation of Crosbys took out some loans from Greenstone Farm Credit Services to finance some new equipment and cover operating expenses. Then the economy went south. The Crosbys had trouble making payments and Greenstone decided to call in the loans. Since they are having trouble even making the scheduled payments, calling in the full value of the loans essentially means Greenstone wants to seize the farm. The Crosby's lawyer tells them Greenstone has a history of this kind of behavior. The family has already sold off equipment, secured another loan from a different source, and is trying to sell off some of their land, but that still leaves them $325,000 short of what they need to keep the farm. A bill is pending in the Michigan legislature that will declare a moratorium on foreclosures, but, even if it passes, it will be too late to save the Get Mint Farm. That leaves us.


The Crosbys need to sell 77,009 dram bottles of mint oil in the next week to raise the money they need. However, if you buy a bigger bottle, their costs for packaging will be lower. Go to the site, look around, and buy a few bottles. Don't let the fact that their site pushes the aromatherapy and herbal medicine uses of mint oil turn you off (if such things turn you off). This is plain old edible mint oil that can be used in cooking. Make some butter mints and take them to work, put a few drops in your cake frosting or in your tea, churn up some mint chip ice cream, or make your own creme de menth. If you need recipes, I'll post them. If you don't feel like cooking, buy their toffee, honey, or scented candles. Here is the link to their product page.

Do it now, we only have a week to save the Crosby stills.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Mammoth illustrations

While hunting for images to use in my post on the motif of the life-like mammoth frozen in a block of ice, I came across two related illustrations purporting to show Ossip Schumachoff discovering his mammoth. Schumachoff's mammoth, which came to be known as the Adams mammoth, holds a special place in paleontology. It was the first relatively intact mammoth excavated and the first extinct animal whose soft tissue was made available for examination by modern scientists.*

The first image comes from page 222 of the 1920 expanded edition of Marshall Gardner's hollow earth book Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?.


Discovery of the Mammoth Encased in Ice

The second image is from page 637 of James William Buel's 1884 The World's Wonders As Seen by the Great Tropical and Polar Explorers...


Discovery of the Frozen Elephant

Neither book gives the name of their artist. The title page of Buel's book tells us that it contains "beautiful engravings from designs by the explorers themselves," but I have been unable to determine who the explorer is that Buel's illustration refers to. Buel's illustration appears above an account of the discovery and recovery of the Adams/Schumachoff mammoth (Gardner's appears above a blockquote of that same section of Buel's).

I'm not aware of any illustrations attached to Adams' report (he published French, German, and English versions; I've only been able to locate the English account). As it was a scientific report, I think it's safe to say that, if he had commissioned illustrations, he would have made them of anatomical details of the mammoth and not a romantic representation of his eyes meeting the mammoth's across a crowded room.

Buel places his retelling of the Adams/Schumachoff mammoth inside a larger discussion of John Cleves Symmes' hollow earth theory. This may be one reason why Gardner chose Buel's account to quote rather than one of the dozens of other tellings available to him. The main telling of Symmes' hollow earth theory was a novel called Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery by Capn. Adam Seaborn (probably a pseudonym for Symmes). The book has no illustrations--or mammoths, for that matter--so it isn't the source of Buel's illustration.

We may never know the original source of the illustration, but it's clear that Gardner's illustration is based on Buel's. The main elements of each are the mammoth in the glacier face and the explorer, with his dog team in the background. The Buel illustration is more detailed, better composed, and better executed. In making his illustration wider, Gardner stretched the elements and changed their size. The most obvious change is that Gardner's explorer stands further away from the mammoth and further back in the picture. He smaller than Buel's explorer, making the that much relatively larger.

However, Gardner's changes are based on more than a bad eye for art. Gardner was trying to sell his hollow earth concept. In his version of the hollow earth theory, the inner earth could be reached through polar openings several hundred miles across. The Arctic ice pack was just a ring surrounding the hole. Because the inner earth was lit by a tiny sun at its center, we, on the outer skin of the earth, could see its light shining out of the polar opening. We call that light the auroras. Mammoths enter the story by straying too close to the hole where our cold air freezes them and they drift in icebergs over the edge and onto the coast of Siberia.

Gardner's image illustrates these concepts. In spreading the image, Gardner shows the the unobstructed path to the pole. He has removed a range of hills in the background of the Buel image to show us that the mammoth has come directly out of the sea. The light of the inner sun streams out of the polar hole just over the horizon. The picture might look crappy to us, but it told the story Gardner wanted it to tell.


It's full of star.

Stealing an image is even easier today than it was in Buel and Gardner's day--and it was easy then. Sometimes, it's hard not to steal. The above image is on a dozen or so websites. I would love to credit the artist, but none of the sites I've checked say who the artist was.

* A case could be made that Steller's sea cow was the first extinct animal to provide soft tissue for examination. Georg Wilhelm Steller was the naturalist assigned to Bering's second expedition in 1741. While in Alaska, he was the first European to describe several plants and animals, including the lovely blue jay that bears his name. On the way back to Russia, the expedition was shipwrecked in the Comandorski Islands. Bering and about half the crew died during the winter that they were stranded there. Steller didn't allow this to interrupt his work; he explored the island and wrote detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna. One of the animals he discovered was a large, slow moving sirenian unique to the islands. Within thirty years of Steller's return, whalers and trappers on their way to Alaska hunted Steller's sea cow into extinction. Technically, the sailor who butchered the last Steller sea cow was also conducting the first disection of an extinct species.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Mammoth on ice

This is too fun not to share. While looking for some pictures to use in another post, I came across this.


Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Herbert Thomas, Les fossiles, empreinte des mondes disparus (Fossils, imprint of vanished worlds) 1987

According to the back cover (and Google Translate), it's a short history of paleontology. The current edition (2000) has a non-frivolous photo of an Ammonite on the cover. This is, apparently, what the publisher's art director thought was an appropriate representation of the science of paleontology in 1987. He was probably recycling the artwork from an out-of-print adolescent adventure story.* Gayrard-Valy and Thomas must have been thrilled by the choice.

This got me thinking about the old mammoth in an ice cube motif.** It's an old staple of boy's adventure stories. Usually, the mammoth is seen deep in an surprisingly transparent glacier--real glaciers are not at all clear--standing upright while looking both life-like and sinister.

Samuel Scoville's "The Boy Scouts of the North; or, The Blue Pearl," was serialized in issues of St. Nicholas Magazine, in 1919-20. In the story, three plucky scouts and a token grown-up/side-kick head into the Arctic looking for the legendary blue pearl. Along the way they are tested by sporting and hunting competitions, are adopted by blond Eskimos, and fend off attacks by bears, walruses, killer otters, cougars (the feline variety not the feminine one), and a giant squid. Chapter 10 (August 1920) brings them face to face Mahmut, the monster.
As the boy looked up at the wall of transparent ice which towered above them a strangled cry of alarm broke from his parted lips. There, frozen in a solid block of clear ice, towered a monster such as had not walked this earth for ten times ten thousand years. Unburied from the grave where it had rested, untouched by time, and intact as when some unknown fate had overtaken it when the last Ice Age overwhelmed the earth, the monstrous creature, standing erect, seemed ready to step forth out of an age-long sleep. ... There was something sinister and menacing in the great beast's appearance. The wicked little pig eyes were set much farther back than those of an elephant; and they were wide open, seeming to threaten the boy as he looked at them. Almost he expected to see the huge trunk upraise and to face the terrible charge of those curved tusks, as when the mammoth fought the hairy rhinoceros on those northern plains...


Mahmut, the monster. "The Boy Scouts of the North; or, The Blue Pearl," was serialized in issues of St. Nicholas Magazine, August 1920, p. 897.

H. Rider Haggard, in one of the last of his Allan Quatermain stories gave us his frozen mammoth in Allan and the Ice Gods, published posthumously in 1927.
Deep in the face of the ice, the length of three paces away, only to be seen in certain lights, was one of the gods who for generations had been known to the tribe as the Sleeper because he never moved. Wi could not make out much about him, save that he seemed to have a long nose as thick as a tree at its root and growing smaller toward the end. On each side of this nose projected a huge curling tusk that came out of a vast head, black in colour and covered with red hair, behind which swelled an enormous body...

The SciFi channel gave us one of the most memorable contributions to the genre in the movie Mammoth. In which a zombie mammoth escapes from crystal-clear block of ice to prowl the Louisiana bayous is search of blood. How that block of ice came to be Louisiana is never explained, but fortunately, Summer Glau and Tom Skerit are there to re-freeze the zombie mammoth.


Dr. Frank Abernathy (Vincent Ventresca) checks out the zombie mammoth

Those stories and a hundred others like them are fiction. None of you will be surprised to hear the mammoth in an ice cube motif is common in pseudoscience and forbidden history circles--the next best thing to fiction. In an essay on crypotozoology, J. Rainsnow chose to remain neutral on whether or not their were still mammoths in the world--real ones, not zombies like in the movie--by saying:
Regardless of whether or not living mammoths still roam the earth, Siberia has produced numerous examples of frozen mammoth carcasses, which are periodically yielded by the ice of melting glaciers, disinterred by the sun and returned to the world of the present.

In the internet age, the glacial mammoth has made its way into various chat rooms and fora. In its most recent incarnations the motif is used a a straw man argument about the dumb things orthodox scientists, or "scientists," believe. This one comes from a 2004 thread about the Beresovka Mammoth on the conspiracy and UFO site Above Top Secret. In the first post, BlackJackal writes:
Here is how scientists have attempted to explain the amazing freezing mammoth.

Theory # 1

Huge herds of mammoths used t [sic] roam the tundra feeding off the grasses, reeds, and other plants that still cover the land in summer. Every now and then one of them would get trapped in ice or would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcass would freeze and be preserved almost unchanged forever.

BlackJackal wastes no time in demolishing that straw man. His victory was so impressive that SpicyGirl decided to repeat it at 4Forums.com Political Debates and Polls in a 2008 thread on "Fluid Mechanics, The Fossil Record and the Flood" (you knew creationists were going to get into this, didn't you?):
Now lets get into some of the quoted claims that others have made.

1. We have the claim that huge herds of mammoths would roam in the tundra feeding off of the grass, reeds and other plants that cover the land in the summer. And every now and then one of them would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcases would freeze and be preserved.

SpicyGirl takes more time than BlackJackal to kill the straw man, but her victory is just as complete. Unfortunately, this particular straw man is like the villain of a slasher movie; just when you think he's finally, really dead, he gets up one more time. Project Avalon Forum, a site dedicated to defending against Illuminati type conspiracies, including the plot by environmentalists to covertly kill off most of the human race. On a climate change denial thread, this was posted by Jack:
Theory # 1

Huge herds of mammoths used t [sic, again] roam the tundra feeding off the grasses, reeds, and other plants that still cover the land in summer. Every now and then one of them would get trapped in ice or would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcass would freeze and be preserved almost unchanged forever.

I'm going to assume that Jack is the same person as BlackJackal and not a plagiarist like SpicyGirl. Apparently, he wasn't satisfied by the response he got at Above Top Secret and decided to try it again. The Project Avalon crowd didn't have any more to say about than the Above Top Secret crowd, so we will probably see this assault on Mr. Strawman show up again.

SpicyGirl wasn't the first creationist or flood geologist to call the frozen mammoths to her aid. She probably won't be the last. Dr. Walt Brown, the founder and director of the Center for Scientific Creation in Phoenix, is an old school Young Earth creationist. He's fond of issuing debate challenges accompanied by elaborate lists of conditions. He explains his version of flood geology in his online book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (you can order a nice hardbound copy of the book from his ministry). Naturally, frozen mammoths are evidence for his theory. The mammoth in the glacier, however, shows up in the straw man role to show what silly scientists believe. He believes the mammoths were killed and frozen by a forty day and forty night hailstorm. He lists nine theories which include Hapgood's pole shift theory and the flood geology idea preferred by Kan Ham's group, Answers in Genesis.
Lake Drowning Theory. No catastrophe occurred. The well-preserved mammoths, with food in their stomachs and between their teeth, died suddenly, probably from asphyxiation resulting from drowning in a partially frozen lake, river, or bog. Such burials can preserve animal—and even human—tissue for thousands of years.

Crevasse Theory. Some mammoths fell into ice crevasses or deep snowdrifts. This protected them from predators, while ice preserved them for thousands of years.

The list of competing theories is followed by a table showing how real science--meaning his science--proves each theory wrong.

My personal favorite pseudoscience/forbidden history idea has always been the hollow earth. For those not familiar with the idea, the hollow-earthers believed that the Earth and other planets are hollow balls with giant openings at the poles lit by their own tiny suns in the center. The inner surface has gravity similar to the outer surface and is inhabited. A pedigree for the idea can be constructed that goes back to the underworld found in most mythologies. The direct lineage of the idea as a supposedly scientific concept springs from an attempt by Edmund Halley to explain variations in the Earth's magnetic field by visualizing the interior of the Earth as a series of onion-like, rigid concentric shells that each rotates at a slightly different speed.

Marshall Gardner's 1913 self-published hollow earth book Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? placed the mammoths in drifting icebergs, which were, of course, proof positive for Gardner's theories.
We further claim that the fresh remains of their bodies which have been found in Siberia are those of mammoths which in their wanderings came a little further south than usual-for the climate around the polar openings would be quite warm enough for them, and that these animals fell in to ice crevasses in places from which they were carried to the present situations by the movements of the ice-by those great glaciers which have from time to time been referred to in accounts of Greenland.

Gardner's idea about the mammoths was that, first of all, they were tropical animals just like elephants. They came to Siberia by wandering too close to the North Polar hole, where they were flash frozen into ice bergs and drifted out to the Siberian coast. Gardner's idea was adopted by most later hollow-earthers.


Gardner's Hollow Earth. Mammoths in icebergs drift out through the North Polar opening. From Gardner's Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?, p. 324.

The best selling hollow earth book is Dr. Raymond Bernard's (real name Walter Siegmeister) The Hollow Earth which came out in 1964 and has been reprinted by a half-dozen different publishers since. Bernard's consists largely of enormous block quotes from Gardner, William Reed (Phantom of the Poles, 1906), and Ray Palmer's various UFO magazines. Bernard makes explicit the iceberg theory and uses a straw man version of what orthodox scientists believe:
Inside the icebergs, the mammoth and other huge tropical animals, believed to be of prehistoric origin because never seen on the Earth's surface, have been found in a perfect state of preservation. ... The usual explanation is that these are prehistoric animals which lived in the Arctic region at the time when it had a tropical climate, and that the coming of the Ice Age, suddenly converted the Arctic from a tropical to a frigid zone and froze them before they had time to flee southward.



An Arctic explorer is amazed to discover a mammoth in an iceberg. From Gardner's Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?, p. 222.

As an actual case study of a mammoth in an iceberg, Gardner cites the Adams Mammoth, the first complete mammoth carcass recovered and one of the most famous mammoths of all time. For most of the story, Gardner uses a block quote from an 1884 book The World's Wonders As Seen by the Great Tropical and Polar Explorers... by James William Buel***. Here's what Buel had to say:
In 1799 a fisherman of Tongoose, named Schumachoff, discovered a tremendous elephant—perfect as when, a thousand years before,death had arrested its breath—encased in a huge block of ice, clear as crystal. This man, like his neighbors, was accustomed, at the end of the fishing season, to employ his time in hunting for elephant tusks along the banks of the Lena River, for the sake of the bounty offered by the government... [S]uddenly there appeared before his wondering eyes the miraculous sight above alluded to. But this man was ignorant and superstitious, and instead of hastening to announce his wonderful discovery for the benefit of science, he stupidly gazed upon it in wonder and awe, not daring to approach it. ... At last he found the imprisoned carcass stranded on a convenient sand-bank, and boldly attacked it, broke the glittering casing, and roughly despoiling the great beast of its splendid tusks, hurried home and sold them for fifty roubles.

Buel never uses the word "iceberg," but his description of a "huge block of ice" that becomes "stranded on a convenient sand-bank" can't be mistaken for anything else.

The imperial nineteenth century didn't treat the memory of Ossip Schumachoff very well. Besides the gratuitous insults heaped on him by Buel, he was almost completely deprived of credit for his discovery. History and paleontology know the mammoth as the Adams Mammoth, after the man who bought the mammoth remains from Schumachoff and took them to St. Petersburg. We only know Schumachoff's name because Adams was gracious enough to give his full name and quote Schumachoff's version of the story of the discovery in his (Adams') report on recovering the remains. An English language version of his report was published in The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal in 1807 soon after he filed the French original with the St. Petersburg Academy. In reading Adams' report, we can see that Buel's purple prose introduced some incorrect details into the story including the iceberg image. Adams makes clear that the block of ice that encased the mammoth had broken off from a ridge at the center of an isthmus several versts (kilometers) wide. Adams also mentions seeing other mammoth bones "frozen between fissures of the rocks." While Adams' terminology isn't always clear, what is clear is that he was not describing a drifting iceberg.

None of the hundred or so frozen mammoths discovered in the last three centuries was found in a glacier or iceberg. They were found in frozen soil, indicating that they were covered with mud soon after death. If no mammoth was found in that condition, what is the source of, what can only be called, the urban legend of the mammoth in an ice cube. I can identify a couple of possible suspects.

Adams' report might share a large part of the blame for the myth. As I said, his language isn't always completely clear. Adams describes the block in which the mammoth was found and the ridge from which the block fell as "rock ice." Later in the century, after the concept of ice ages caught on, "rock ice" (or stone ice or dead ice) was the term used to describe stagnant parts of glaciers that had become buried by wind-blown soil. The insulating qualities of the soil preserve the ice for centuries, even millenia, after the rest of the glacier has melted away. Explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Baron Toll, as well as textbook authors like Sir Archibald Geikie, all described that specific section of the Siberian coast as being underlain by rock ice and specifically mention that rock ice as containing mammoth remains. The problem is, that part of Siberia wasn't glaciated during the ice ages. The wind that carried the moisture to form the ice sheets was completely snowed out by the time it reached that part of Siberia and the Siberian mammoth steppe was actually drier than at present. What Adams may have been trying to describe was a large ice lens. An ice lens is an layer of solid ice that forms on the border between true permafrost and the surface soil that seasonally thaws. An ice lens, while still cloudy, is much clearer than the surrounding frozen soil. Whatever it was that he was trying to describe, the Schumachoff/Adams Mammoth was the best known mammoth for the entire nineteenth century and impressions gleaned from his report decisively influenced the formation of popular images of frozen mammoths.

Another, and probably quite important influence on the persistence of the legend, is public's general unfamiliarity with the Arctic. While most people do know what permafrost is--frozen earth--they're missing an understanding of what permafrost does to the surface of the far north. If the ground is frozen a few feet beneath the surface is means the water from melting snow can't soak in. It stays on the surface. All lowlands are muddy bogs and in the Springtime the rivers flow all over the place, carving new channels and burying things in mud which freezes and gets added to the permafrost. Cartoon stereotypes of a land of snow and ice don't involve any soil at all. For most people, the first image that comes to mind when they hear the word "frozen" is ice. Therefore, "frozen mammoth" means "mammoth in ice." In the nineteenth century, explorers and scientists were just beginning to understand the nature of the Arctic and the processes that had created it. Even they would have occasionally made that association.

A third suspect, is the Benkendorf Mammoth. Gardner and Brown both call on this infamous mammoth to support their theories. The story of the Benkendorf Mammoth is that it was discovered standing upright and bobbing up and down in a river by an engineering survey team. Although the mammoth wasn't described as being in block of clear ice, the image of a life-like frozen mammoth, standing upright, and bobbing up and down in the water, just like a block of ice would, fits very nicely into the mammoth in an ice cube myth. The punchline to the Benkendorf Mammoth is, that although it has been cited by various writers both fringe and reputable (Donald Prothero for one), it never existed. The engineer Benkendorf and his mammoth came out of a German children's book.

Walt Brown, while demolishing the Creavasse Theory straw man, placed blame for the idea on Charles Lyell, one of the most important geologists of the nineteenth century. This attribution serves a double purpose for Brown, he makes his straw man more credible by attaching a specific name to it and he discredits orthodox geology by going after one of its founders. Brown accuses Lyell in two places.
Charles Lyell, the most influential founder of modern geology, advocated this theory to explain some frozen mammoths.

[...]

Mammoths are encased in ice. Their preservation is complete. Charles Lyell popularized this myth by writing that mammoth remains are found in icebergs and frozen gravel.

I'd like to say Brown is making this up, but he isn't. His reference is to the first edition (1830) of Lyell's Principles of Geology:
That the mammoth, however, continued for a long time to exist in Siberia after the winters had become extremely cold, is demonstrable, since their bones are found in icebergs, and in the frozen gravel, in such abundance as could only have been supplied by many successive generations.

[...]

When valleys have become filled with ice, as those of Spitzbergen, the contraction of the mass causes innumerable deep rents, such as are seen in the mer de glace on Mont Blanc. These deep crevices usually become filled with loose snow, but sometimes a thin covering is drifted across the mouth of the chasm, capable of sustaining a certain weight. Such treacherous bridges are liable to give way when heavy animals are crossing, which are then precipitated at once into the body of a glacier, which slowly descends to the sea, and becomes a floating iceberg. As bears, foxes, and deer now abound in Spitzbergen, we may confidently assume that the imbedding of animal remains in the glaciers of that island must be an event of almost annual occurrence.

If Lyell really did mention mammoths falling glacial crevasses, is it fair to call Brown's dismissal of the theory a straw man? I'm going to say it is fair. Brown is making an effort make his flood geology the last man standing, by eliminating all of its competitors. For Crevasse Theory to be a competitor, he would need to give some evidence that someone still believes it. Lyell only offered the theory as a possibility; he doesn't push the idea beyond this suggestion. By the third edition of Principles (1834), both mentions of icebergs had been dropped. In the fourth edition (1835), the crevasses of Spitzbergen were dropped. In most of the later editions, Lyell put forth a scenario in which mammoths lived in a warmer climate further south and that their bodies were washed to the Arctic coast by flooding rivers. He went on to say that the coast itself was further south in those days and that the general climate was warmer. It was the change in the coastline that made Siberia as cold as it is today. He added that if it was true that some mammoths were found in solid ice they could have gotten in that condition by getting frozen trapped in while crossing in the fall, or by becoming buried in snow, as in an avalanche, which later hardened into ice. These possibilities were extraordinary circumstances and not the source of most of the frozen mammoths.


What a real frozen mammoth looks like. The Berezovka Mammoth during recovery, 1901.

In the end, the mammoth in an ice cube motif probably doesn't spring from any one source. It was brewed from a combination of nineteenth century elements. Scientists in new fields struggled to assemble a basic framework within which they could even begin to define the problems they would tackle. The word "geology," as the name for various earth sciences was first used in 1778. Paleontology, as a science separate from geology, didn't have a name until 1834. Many basic concepts of the fields, deep time, organic origin of fossils, evolution, extinction, slow geologic change, ice ages, came into existence during a century or so ending in the 1840s. Adams, Lyell and their contemporaries were inventing a language for their fields. Naturally, there were communication problems. Even today, people who have never been to the Arctic have a hard time grasping the nature of the seasons, soil, climate, and sheer scale of it. In the nineteenth century, vast swaths of the north were unexplored and even the experts were still figuring the place out.

Like most bad ideas and urban legends, mammoth in an ice cube motif is impossible to stamp out. Even the people who most should know better, science journalists and educators, still fall back on it as a shorthand more complex ideas.

This is from a USA Today story that was run last year:
Anthropologist David Overstreet helped excavate the fossils from cornfields in southeastern Wisconsin. He discounts the idea that the mammoth may have become frozen in a glacier and had its meat scraped off after it thawed 1,000 years later.

This is from the class notes a 100 level Geology class taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater last semester.
Review questions for April
6. Which one of the following is NOT a fossil?
a. an insect trapped in amber 20 million years ago
b. a frozen mammoth preserved in a glacier in Siberia that died in the last ice age 1 million years ago
c. dinosaur footprints in a sandstone layer
d. an Egyptian death mask dating back to 4000 years
e. all of the above are fossils by definition

I'm sure there's a bus load of object lessons for the science communication crowd, but I'm not going to join that particular holy war. I'm an intellectual history guy. The mammoth in an ice cube motif is only a tiny part of how frozen mammoths have been used by catastrophists, creationists, and popular culture. I have lots more to say about this topic.

* It's not an uncommon practice. I remember working in a bookstore in the mid-eighties and being puzzled by a new edition of Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich that used the cover art from a mid-seventies edition of Frank Herbert's Dune.

** Remember "motif"? That's what we old people said before "meme". Does anyone except English and Art History majors still say "motif"?

*** Bernard blockquotes Gardner blockquoting Buel. These guys were natural-born bloggers.

Best new term

Flat Birthers.

I'm not sure who used it first. It appears to have been a blogger named Mark Byron last Wednesday. I think we all need to jump on this bandwagon.