What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one fifteen weeks ago, just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”

You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.

What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.

This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.

The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.

Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!

The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.

Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.

So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.

People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.

And we have had enough of this.

They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.

This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.

And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.

And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.

He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Martin Luther King

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice

President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).

[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]

….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.

He was one hundred percent correct on that.

Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.

But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.

That is as it should be.

I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.

I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)

How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,936.30
Silver $32.53
Platinum $980.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 141.044-
Gold:Silver 90.265+

Gold dipped a tiny bit Friday from its Thursday high mark. Silver dropped 46 cents. Par for the course; silver just can’t keep up with gold for whatever reason. As a result the gold:silver ratio just busted 90, again (it was this high a few weeks ago).

And of course the FRNSI is up, having handily busted the 140 mark.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

A Canadian Talks Back

Here’s a video from a Canadian’s Youtube channel. That channel normally is about urban planning or something like that, but he’s stressed out about the “51st State” stuff. And the tariffs.

If this person’s attitude is typical of the Canadian in the street…well, it’s interesting.

I admit I can’t understand what PDJTs play is here. (I think I may have figured out Greenland.) I understand the tariffs; I don’t understand the “51st state” even though I’m aware he might not actually want to take over Canada and then give it statehood. At first I thought he was simply trolling TrueDope, but if so that would have ended when TrueDope announced he was stepping down. Anyhow, maybe someone reading this has ideas that make some sense of this.

The Final Experiment: More Hypocrisy from the Flerfs

The Flerfs have been going over the videos taken in Antarctica with a fine-toothed comb, and when one of them thinks they’ve found an irregularity, he trumpets it.

And then the others mindlessly echo it. In other words they hold normal people up to a microscope and apply zero critical thinking to claims made by their own side.

Up to 14:06, Jeran allegedly said the sun set in Antarctica, while there. No amount of denials on Jeran’s part will sway them. After 14:06 the clowns don’t know how to read a file listing.

Meanwhile Flat Earth Dave, a/k/a Dirth a/k/a Potato finds his bluff called discussing things with an MIT physicist, who wants to set up a big formal working group to design experiments (starting at 2:38:30 and running through 3:50:00 at least though it gets good at about 3:40:00–at 3:55:00 Flat Earth Dave realizes he’s fucked). Throughout this whole conversation MC Toon analyzes Dave’s cult recruiting techniques.

And his leaking-like-a-sieve app is about to get him in BIG trouble in multiple countries.

Potato was moderating the chat in a livestream Witsit was holding, and people started coming in to say his app leaked, and he spent a half an hour banning those people, starting around 17 minutes in, picking up steam at about 26 minutes.

Glaciation

Another method of wearing down the landscape that we often see today is glaciation. And it leaves behind very obvious signs, enough so that we can chart the extent of glaciation during the geologically recent Ice Age.

Though to be sure we are still in the ice age. We just happen to be in the middle (I hope it’s the middle and not the end) of an “interglacial,” a temporary retreat of the glaciers. The interglacial started in roughly 10,000 BCE (I usually see 9,700 BCE) and that is the beginning of the current epoch, the Holocene. (As a reminder, an epoch is the largest subdivision of a period; a period is something like the Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Quaternary (the one we’re in), and periods are the third level of subdivision of geologic time after the eon and era.)

[As a complete aside, some advocate for changing our year numbering, by adding 10,000 to them, which would make this the year 12,025. The advantage is that there would be no negative dates throughout human recorded history, yet any idiot can convert the new date back to the old for anything that’s not “BC”. Doing so would pretty closely align with the Holocene, so this is called the “Holocene Calendar.” NB that the year 10,001 is 1 CE, and the year 10,000 is 1 BCE (there was no zero in our current system). Using this system: Julius Caesar was assassinated in 9957 HE; Alexander the Great died in 9678 HE, and the Great Pyramid was built in about 7400 HE, but most importantly Trump began his second term in 12025 HE.]

OK so how do we detect past glaciation? It helps to understand what glaciers are. They are ice, but they start out as snow falling in places where it never has the chance to melt; today that’s high up in mountains, in Greenland, and in Antarctica. Even in those latter areas, though it tends to start in the interior high areas of those landmasses.

As the snow piles up it compresses and gets packed into ice. Ice is not particularly hard stuff (compared to rocks), and will eventually start to flow under the pressure, once it’s about 30 meters (100 feet) thick. There’s still some trace of the layered structure of the snow and these layers are relatively weakly bonded to each other. So a glacier is in many ways like a super-super slow river. A typical speed is about one meter per day though that can vary greatly. Imagine a glacier forming way up in a mountain valley, and then flowing downhill.

Here’s an example, from Denali Mt McKinley. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has not changed the name yet, but searching for “Mt. McKinley” redirects to “Denali.”)

You’ll note the flat area on the left that sort of looks like a river; that’s the top of a glacier. And if you look closely, you’ll even see tributaries on the right hand side, smaller glaciers flowing from smaller valleys into this glacier, with black stripes marking the boundaries. The color differences are generally due to stuff falling onto the top of the glacier; if that happens more in one “tributary” than another, there will be a color difference when they merge.

Some glaciers are actually lubricated by a thin layer of meltwater where they touch the ground; this can be from geothermal activity, or just the sheer mass of the glacier melting the ice, the same way the blade of an ice skate will momentarily melt the water under the skate. This helps the glacier “flow” more quickly.

The upper layers of a glacier have less stress on them than lower layers and don’t want to flow. They’re essentially being carried along by the layers underneath, and will actually crack if the glacier goes over some irregularity in the terrain below, creating crevasses, like here:

If snow should happen to fall on this sort of thing and obscure it, it can be deadly. In fact, the Union Glacier camp in Antarctica is marked off by flags; if you go beyond those flags you could step onto a hidden crevasse and at that point you’re likely dead before you can be rescued. On the other hand geologists will sometimes deliberately descend into crevasses to take samples. Not for the faint-hearted.

So…how can we tell a glacier used to be somewhere but has since melted away?

One way, that works in mountains, is to note the shapes of the mountains and valleys. Glaciers tend to leave wide, U shaped valleys. They also tend to leave pyramidal-shaped mountains, because they will eat away at the mountain and often there are several glaciers off the same mountain. As they eat back into the mountain they will leave sharp edges between adjacent glaciers. Both of these can be seen in this notional diagram:

A cirque is a depression formed by a glacier, if and when it melts, a lake or pond called a tarn may be left behind. Cirques seem to form at the very heads of glacial valleys (I can’t quite find a statement that straightforward, but all the diagrams I see imply it). Neighboring glaciers leave sharp ridges called aretes, the ends of fingers of rock can be ground away by a main glacier to leave a truncated spur, and the mountain at the middle ends up becoming a horn…as in Matterhorn.

Compare a picture of the Southern Rockies in Wyoming:

To the Northern Rockies well into Canada, Banff Park:

Notice that the Canadian peaks are much sharper (and OhByTheWay note the blatantly obvious layering of the sedimentary rocks in those mountains); they’ve been worked over by glaciers and the Southern Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming have not. In fact the lake is Moraine Lake because it appears in a moraine.

When a glacier is doing it’s thing there are two ways it can grind down the terrain it’s on, plucking and abrasion.

Plucking is where the glacier actually uproots rocks–even parts of bedrock–as it passes over them. It’s aided in doing so by having subglacial water get into cracks in the rock and then freezing; that breaks up rocks fairly quickly. Rocks of many different sizes get plucked and incorporated into the underside of the glacier.

Here is a landscape that had much of its rock plucked away at some time in the past, the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea.

Which leads to the second method, abrasion: Now the bottom of the glacier is like rough grit sandpaper and as the glacier flows grooves or striations can be cut in the underlying rock, as shown here in Mount Rainier national park:

Here’s an illustration showing the two at work. Note that as the glacier goes over the hump, crevasses open up as the top layers flex.

The rock ground away in this fashion becomes fine powder a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.

All this suspended rock, the stuff that fell on top of the glacier and the stuff it picked up through plucking and abrasion, eventually gets out of the glacier.

If the glacier ends on land, it can dump a lot of its load as it melts and retreats; this is called glacial till. This ends up as fine sediment with larger rocks in it, in moraines. Also quite a bit can be carried by the stream coming out from under the glacier–all that subglacial water is now released.

The furthest a glacier got before beginning is often revealed by a ridge called a terminal moraine, which can often be seen long after the glacier is completely gone. These are used to determine the extent of the last glaciation that covered much of North America and Europe.

A melting glacier will drop the large stuff it contains, too. If the glacier was particularly large, it might have carried things hundreds of miles, such as these rocks from Norway found in the Netherlands; these are called “glacial erratics”:

However it’s much more common to get smaller rocks appearing in a matrix of finer-grained rock, like this:

When a geologist sees this, it practically screams that a glacier left this behind.

If the glacier gets out over water and starts calving icebergs, those boulders melt out and drop right down into what would otherwise be a nice orderly layering of sediment. This photo is of just such a dropstone and is iconic.

Here’s another…from Namibia. Remember this; I’ll get back to it.

Thus far I’ve been talking about glaciers termed “alpine” and “valley” glaciers, because they start way up in some valley in the mountains…somewhere. But sometimes, a glacier can completely cover a mountain or volcano, as seen in Iceland; that’s called an icecap. But there are even bigger ones; anything over about 50,000 square kilometers is called an ice sheet or a continental glacier. Today there are two of those: Greenland and Antarctica. These tend to flow outward in all directions from a center. We can detect former ice sheets by looking for all of these landforms and even tell where the center was from the direction of the striations left by abrasion. Here is the Laurentide ice sheet from the last glaciation. (For some reason, forms of the word “Laurentian” get applied to North America by geologists.) Note it’s actually contiguous with the “Cordilleran” ice sheet over the Canadian Rockies, and the Innuitian Ice Sheet over the northern Arctic Islands…and the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is still with us today albeit a bit smaller. Iceland was completely covered; its current icecap now confined to the interior of the island was larger back then. The Rockies further south had much more limited glaciation.

The weight of all of that ice (it can be thousands of feet thick) can actually push down the rocks underneath it. The rocks underlying the Earth’s crust are plastic and will flow, if you push on them hard enough and for a long enough time. Then when the ice melts, there’s not nearly as much weight there any more and the land slowly rises. The area around the Great Lakes is still undergoing “isostatic rebound” (or “postglacial rebound”) as the rock continues to rise after the weight of the ice is gone. The Great Lakes essentially fill a depression formed by the weight of the ice; depending on how much rebounding happens they may eventually empty out as the depression ceases to exist.

While a glacier is in the process of melting “proglacial” lakes can form, either dammed by ice that hasn’t melted, or in cirques (the aforementioned tarns), or behind terminal moraines. Sometimes these lakes can be very large and if caused by an ice dam, a major flood can happen when it breaks open. Lake Agassiz is an example. It has been known for quite some time; here’s a map drawn in the 19th century by Warren Upham.

(And there’s that word “Laurentian” again in the title). Note also labelings of Keewatin and Assiniboia for parts of Canada now in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. Canada tended to give “new” territory to already existing provinces.)

Lake Agassiz may even have been larger than the Caspian Sea at one point. But once enough ice melted in what is now Hudson Bay, torrents of water–a million cubic meters per second–likely poured into Hudson Bay and thence out into the Atlantic. Sea levels probably rose anywhere from 0.8 to 2.8 meters from this one event alone. But that was only the more recent formation and melting of the lake, the prior one 13000 years ago may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling worldwide.

Here is a a diagram reconstructing the history of what is now the Great Lakes. Notice 4000 years ago the Ottawa River drained Lake Huron.

Glacial lakes, while they exist and are fed by meltwater, can have sediment deposited in their beds and these are known as varves. (I see conflicting information on whether varves only happen in glacial lakes, or any lakes, but everything I read agrees they form in fresh water, not salt water.) The layers are annual, a repeating sequence every year, like the alternating light-and-dark bands of tree rings. What causes the annual structure? Springtime runoff is much more energetic and brings larger particles with the water, so one can see alternating coarse/fine layers in the sediment. The reason for thinking varves cannot form in salt water is that the salt will cause clay particles to clump together, erasing the fine/coarse/fine/coarse sequencing. It’s therefore much harder to see annual layers in ocean-deposited sediment.

Varves can be correlated over limited distances and sequences up to 50,000 years long have been assembled, in a process similar to dendrochronology, where tree ring sequences have extended back over ten thousand years. This is a recent varve formation in Japan. More ancient ones running for twenty million annual layers have been found.

One might argue that the assumption that the layers are annual, though plausible (seasonal changes in seasonal water flow are quite plausible), are unwarranted. Note though that those making this argument are arguing for a young earth, and generally they want to believe that all of the varves were laid down within one year. But that twenty million layer formation would still be 50,000 years old if the varves were laid down once a day, and the 50,000 years of the lake in Japan would have taken well over a century at that rate. And the sediments within the varves are simply too fine to have settled out that fast, so thinking about an even faster rate is even more unreasonable. But leaving that one aside, sometimes there is an event that causes a non-annual layer to form, such as a flash flood. But we’ve seen these happen, and they are invariably quite irregular (due to turbulence in the water, I am guessing) and easy to tell from a ‘regular’ annual varve–we’ve also watched those happen and they’re nice and regular. Varves laid down in the past generally look like the annual varves being laid down today, and we can account for the irregular ones that don’t. Another factor is that we can detect seasonal pollen changes in recent varves. And we can date organic fragments in recently-laid-down varves via radiocarbon dating (and I will get to such methods of dating soon), and those results are consistent with annual layers.

Not the First Ice Age

The current intermittent Ice Age began at the beginning of the Quaternary period; indeed that’s how the Quaternary is defined.

I’m going to bring the outline of eons, eras, and periods in from a few weeks ago, to refresh our memories. I’m going to highlight certain things I’ll discuss below, and also expand the Cenozoic.

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
    • Quaternary
      • Holocene
      • Pleistocene
    • Neogene
      • Pliocene
      • Miocene
    • Paleogene
      • Oligocene
      • Eocene
      • Paleocene
  • Mesozoic
    • Cretaceous
    • Jurrasic
    • Triassic
  • Paleozoic
    • Permian
    • Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
    • Devonian
    • Silurian
    • Orodivician
    • Cambrian
• Proterozoic
  • Neoproterozoic
    • Ediacaran
    • Cryogenian
    • Tonian
  • Mesoproterozoic
    • 3 periods
  • Paleoproterozoic
    • 4 periods
• Archean
  • Neoarchean
  • Mesoarchean
  • Paleoarchean
  • Eoarchean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

But it wasn’t the first and it is far from being the worst. We have been able to detect the signs of widespread glaciation in the late Paleozoic (late Devonian through late Permian), an early Paleozoic ice age running from the late Ordovician into the Silurian, and a Huronian ice age, during the early Proterozoic (that’s the eon before the current Phanerozoic, so this was quite some time ago! All of these highlighted above.

But there was also a late Proterozoic ice age, and it was a doozy. As might be suggested from the fact that the name “Cryogenian” suggests “cryogenics” and other things having to do with cold.

The Cryogenian was established as a recognized period in 1990, so it’s fairly “new” in that respect.

The entire world froze over. All of it. At least, everything we can find today shows it happening–we can’t tell what was happening in the mid-oceans. Not only that this happened twice, in events called the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations (named after epochs within the Cryogenian). That Namibian rock was not dropped recently; Namibia wasn’t affected by the recent ice ages.

But with very little doubt every continent on Earth was blanketed by these two glaciations.

Here’s a map as best as we can reconstruct things that happened that long ago. You’ll note the continents are in very different locations (USA south of the equator and rotated 90 degrees clockwise, just for instance); we’ll get to that in a future post.

The Sturtian lasted most of the Cryogenian, and the Cryogenian was a LONG period, longer than the Cretaceous. (The preceding Tonian was much longer.) Before the Cryogenian, there are possible fossils of something resembling sponges. I have some difficulty imagining any multicellular life surviving what turns out to be tens of millions of years of the Earth being mostly if not entirely covered with ice, in an extreme case looking superficially like Jupiter’s moon Europa.

This was well before the Cambrian “explosion” of fossils that resemble things alive today; it’s possible that this age wiped out any multicellular life that was out there and cleared the way for things more familiar to us (except that we don’t know yet how the Ediacaran life fits in to that–so what I just said is worth exactly what you paid for it).

How do we know this happened? Because there are glacial deposits everywhere on Earth from this time period. More precisely, on every continent, if we can find Cryogenian systems, they show signs of glaciations; not like the Quaternary events where the evidence of glaciation is confined to the northern parts of Earth and, of course (duh) Antarctica. Here’s one of the right age (Neoproterozoic) from Idaho:

You should have no problem recognizing this for what it is, though of course you can’t date the rock with your eyeballs, so you don’t know from this picture when it is.

The one thing we can’t quite be certain of is whether the oceans completely froze over; no oceanic floor rocks survive from then (again, something that will be discussed in a future post). It’s also possible some thin ribbons of land remained uncovered. But if not, if the whole planet truly froze over, well, we call that “Snowball Earth.” If some parts were exposed…that’s “Slushball Earth.”

So what happened? The thing about ice ages is, at the start they are a positive feedback loop. If it gets a bit colder, and more ocean freezes over, that white ice (covering deep blue ocean) increases the Earth’s albedo, meaning we reflect more light and heat, and absorb less, so the Earth cools down more. Which creates more pack ice, which lowers the albedo again. Without some sort of counterbalancing effect, everything freezes. And this time there doesn’t seem to have been any counterbalancing effect.

In some ways the more interesting question is why, having gone global or nearly so, it ever ended. We may have volcanoes to thank for that, as they gradually pumped more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. With no plant life to consume it, it simply warmed the planet to the point where the ice could start to melt…and then the feedback now runs in the opposite direction; more dark oceans increase heat retention. So after tens of millions of years, the Sturtian is over. But the respite isn’t long, because the Marinoan began some time after that…running roughly ten million years.

One can imagine an alien exploratory vessel coming by during this period, looking at the Snowball Earth, and saying, “No point in tarrying. Uninhabitable. Nothing multicellular will ever live here.”

I’ve hinted here at some durations, and these came from subtracting two sets of absolute dates. But I haven’t actually covered absolute dating…so that’s next.