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

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

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

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $3,356.90/3,358.90
Silver $33.45/33.57
Platinum $1093.00/1103.00
Palladium $976.00/1016.00
Rhodium $5,180.00/5,630.00
FRNSI* 161.487-
Gold:Silver 100.057-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $3,288.30/3290.30
Silver $32.96/33.08
Platinum $1052.00/1062.00
Palladium $957.00/997.00
Rhodium $5,300.00/5,750.00
FRNSI* 159.168+
Gold:Silver 99.465-

I’m making a minor change here. Before, I quoted “ask” prices; i.e., the spot price corresponding to what you would pay a precious metal seller (if they actually paid attention to the spot price). The other price is “bid,” what they nominally pay you. The “bid” prices are what usually show up in the news. So from here on out it will be bid/ask, with the part after the slash corresponding to what I used to post. I’ll still use the ask prices to compute gold:silver and FRNSI.

Gold stayed above 3300 this week, but finally took a hit on Friday. Similar with the other metals. On the plus side for silver people, silver gained half an ounce (of silver) against gold.

*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.

Volcanoes

I’ve talked about streams. I’ve talked about glaciers (and judging from reactions, that was a better effort than the one on streams). Now it’s time–and we have the background–to talk about volcanoes.

Isaac Asimov was famous as a science fiction writer (most famous works being the Foundation Trilogy and the Robot stories and novels–he popularized the putative three laws of robotics) but he also was a biochemist and science popularizer. (In other words, when I read his work I realize how bad a job I am doing at this.) For decades he wrote a column for the monthly magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction. The editors gave him free rein. He usually wrote about some scientific topic. These got collected into books which I read, and oftentimes remember.

One of the essays I remember to this day is one he wrote in 1959. Asimov considered some of the most vital elements for living things (chlorine, sodium, potassium, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, zinc, cvopper, molybdenum, cobalt and iodine). That list isn’t complete, obviously, but he was focused on soil and land life. He then compared the abundance of each in the soil to the abundance in living things. For instance, soil he lists as being five percent iron, but living things are 0.0027 percent iron (this is presumably before the IRS bleeds you dry and gets all your hemoglobin). The idea being that land life will never run out of iron, because it’s actually more strongly concentrated in dirt than it is in living things. But work it the other way around: sulfur is 0.052 percent of all dirt, but 0.104 percent of living things–it’s twice as concentrated in living things as it is in the soil. Conceivably, life could be fruitful and multiply…until it weighed half as much as the upper layers of earth and there was no more sulfur left. OK, that wouldn’t happen, would it? We’d never have that much living stuff on Earth. The king though was phosphorus, which is concentrated 5.9 times in living things, versus the soil. Given how little of the Earth’s upper layers is living things, there should be no issue with running out of phosphorus, though, right?

Well, no. If it’s locked up in solid rocks, it’s useless; plants can’t use it and therefore, we animal types won’t be able to either. Add to that the fact that these elements aren’t distributed uniformly, and well, after a lot of discussion he states that phosphorus is “life’s bottleneck.” (And that is the name he gave the essay.) Then he pointed out that phosphorus tended to wash out into the oceans (3 and a half million tons per year), and there was no way for it to come back other than in waterfowl poop, which recovers maybe 3 percent and in any case (let’s face it) won’t help Kansas out. Furthermore, the ocean water was already saturated in phosphorus, so it’s carrying as much life as it can, and so what phosphorus washed out of the land would settle to the bottom of the ocean in sediment.

(There, I just used the “S” word so now you might be thinking there’s actually geology coming up sometime.)

He actually suggested trying to capture some of that phosphorus so it wouldn’t be lost forever; given enough time the Earth’s land would be nearly lifeless simply for lack of usable phosphorus.

Actually, it’s not a bad argument. He sounded more worried about that than about running out of oil and coal (but then, he liked nuclear power). As he said at the end, “We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat [ick!]…but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.”

But there was one factor he didn’t take into account, and that’s no surprise whatsoever, because as I said before he wrote the article in 1959. No one could have taken that factor into account because we were only beginning to get a glimmer of it.

And the factor is (drumroll): Volcanoes…fed by plate tectonics.

Volcanoes can be thought of as Earth-scale zits popping, and thus regarded as a big negative, especially since they can be hazardous, but in fact they play a vital role, as they bring back to land what gets washed into the ocean. It’s by no means a fast process, since ocean crust can last up to two hundred million years, but it’s there.

Most volcanoes (I say most) appear either over subduction zones, or at divergent zones. The latter of these is the more intuitive, and the signature example is Iceland. As the plates move further apart, magma wells up to fill the gap and becomes ocean floor, literally hot off the conveyor belt. Magma welling up to the surface will of course make one think of volcanoes.

The first diagram shows the mid-Atlantic ridge from above, and also a profile, showing that the ridge comes comparatively close the surface, then slopes away to the more level bottom of the Atlantic ocean.

If that mid-ocean ridge should happen to break the surface of the ocean, it will form a volcanic island, and indeed we see this happen at Iceland, but also Jan Mayen, Pico island in the Azores, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough Island and Bouvet Island in the Atlantic ocean. In other oceans, the Galapagos islands are on a divergent boundary in the Pacific, and Rodriguez, St. Paul, Amsterdam, MacDonald, Heard, and Kerguelen islands in the Indian ocean.

(St. Paul and Amsterdam islands, by the way, are antipodal to Colorado; directly on the opposite side of the Earth from here. Kerguelen–a much larger but still-small island–is antipodal to the Montana/Alberta/Saskatchewan border. The rest of the Lower 48 is opposite of water.)

Why are there islands at these particular locations and not other places on the ridges? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.

But most volcanoes are on convergent boundaries, in particular subduction zones, which pretty much ring the entire Pacific ocean. To refresh memories, here’s a picture:

Why would there be volcanoes there? New crust isn’t forming, it’s disappearing. The ocean floor is basically being pushed down deep below the surface of the earth, presumably never to be seen again.

What’s happening is that the lighter continental rock sediments on the ocean floor are being heated, melt, and force their way upward through the denser rock until they reach the surface…and there they form volcanoes, usually not right on the subduction zone (which generally forms a deep oceanic trench like the Marianas trench) but a ways “downstream” from it; the sedimentary rocks need time to heat up and melt.

So this is how we get our continental crust (including phosphorus) back after it washes into the oceans! Asimov had no idea in 1959.

These account for almost every volcano out there, but of course there are two famous exceptions, Hawaii and Yellowstone. What accounts for them? Hotspots. Which I’ll get there later.

Volcanic lava tends to determine how explosive a volcano is. The more basaltic, the better; basaltic magma is very fluid and doesn’t have a lot of water trapped in it, so mid-ocean ridge volcanoes tend not to go “kablooey!” when they erupt. Near subduction zones, the magma is less basaltic (it has all that melted continental sediment in it after all) and has water trapped in it, so it tends to be explosive. As soon as that magma gets close to the surface the water in it flashes to steam and…well…(cued to 13:02):

Mount St. Helens was likely the largest landslide in recorded history. Worldwide. But it was by no means a superlatively large eruption as eruptions go. Big, but not humongous.

(The remainder of the video covers four other eruptions around the world, caught on camera.)

Also worth watching, the Smithsonian making itself useful (though you will want to stop it before it plays the next video):

Lava Types

There are two major types of lava flow, readily identifiable when they solidify. Logically enough they have Hawaiian names; the Hawaiians deal with lava like Inuit deal with snow.

The first is ‘a’a, roughly pronounced “ah, ah”. It tends to look chunky and jagged; the lava is a bit viscous. Then there’s pahoehoe (“pa hoy hoy”) which is much more smooth; it can look ropy because the top layer will get compressed and “scrunch up” as the still-liquid lava below it continues to flow. Here’s a picture of a new ‘a’a flow making its way across an older pahoehoe surface. The blocky chunks it is solidifying into are called clinkers.

Because lava tends to solidify at the top of the flow while the lower layers remain liquid, lava tubes can form, essentially caves through which lava once flowed. Here’s one in Hawaii:

you can see “step” lines in the walls, as later lava flows that didn’t fill the tube, used it as well.

Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho is probably one of the best places to see these sorts of things. It has cinder cones, lava fields that stretch to the horizon (it’s eerie to see almost no signs of life as far as you can see), pahoehoe and ‘a’a lava all over the place, and lava tubes. (And those are extremely unforgiving; I managed to bang my knee up pretty well tripping over something when I walked through one of the tubes–which was not nearly as smooth as the one in Hawaii; it was ‘a’a lava.)

Other Volcanic Stuff

Volcanic ash is the dusty stuff that gets ejected high into the atmosphere. It may not travel very far. When it comes down in thick layers it can consolidate into fairly soft rocks called tuff. (Tuff is sometimes erroneously called tufa, which is actually the name of a kind of marble.) Ash particles are 2mm or smaller, larger stuff gets labeled lapilli, at least until it reaches a diameter of 64mm.

Blobs of lava sent flying through the air are called volcanic bombs or lava bombs when they are more than 64 mm in diameter. They can fly many kilometers if they’re that small, but ones five to six meters across have been recorded, flying a few hundred meters. Here is an example from Kilauea:

If the eruption sends an already-solid rock through the air that would otherwise be a bomb, it’s a volcanic block. This example is from Cotopaxi in Ecuador.

Types of Volcanoes

There are quite a number of different types of volcanoes, including a number of types for volcanoes in the ocean–and I mean in the ocean, not above it–but the major ones are:

Cinder Cones. These are basically piles of small cinders, ash, clinkers that have spewed up vertically and fallen back to earth in a fairly neat, conical pile. They can range from tens to hundreds of meters tall. Mount Capulin in northeastern New Mexico is an example, they are also present in Craters of the Moon national monument in Idaho. (What’s a volcanic field doing in Idaho, nowhere near a plate boundary? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.)

Quite possibly the most famous cinder cone is Paricutin, in Michoacan State in Mexico. Picture this, a farmer in 1943 minding his own business when a vent in the ground opens up and starts spewing cinders. His name was Dionisio Pulido, and his account is:

At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened . . . and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter. I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself 2 or 2.5 meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen . . . Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.

He–along with two whole towns–was SOL, his farm is now under a 424 meter tall cindercone (which did spew some lava). This happened over the span of nine years, and it has been dormant since then. Luckily only three people were killed.

Next we have the shield volcano. These will form when a volcano consistently erupts highly fluid, low viscosity lava, and have very gentle slopes. They’re named shield volcanoes because they reminded someone of one of those round hoplite shields (like Leonidas had), laying flat on the ground…just a low mound.

Hawaii is an example of a shield volcano. Here’s another in Iceland, named Skjaldbreidur…

…which is considerably easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajökull, a troublemaker underneath a glacier. (Iceland Air, by the way, names its airplanes after Icelandic volcanoes.)

Mauna Kea/Hawai’i is the largest shield volcano on Earth, but Olympus Mons on Mars beats it handily. The total area within the escarpment is roughly the same as the country of Poland, and it is 21,900 meters tall (compare to Everest which is less than 9000, and to Hawai’i which measured from its base on the ocean floor, is 9330 meters tall.

And we can do combinations. Here’s a cinder cone that is in the San Francisco volcanic field near Flagstaff in Arizona…a nice symmetrical one, but the big black blotch upwards from it in the photograph is a basaltic lava flow from before the cindercone formed. (This field contains volcanoes anywhere between 1000 and 4 million years old. Mt. Humphreys (12,600 ft) is part of this field. The field is considered active, but likely not due for an eruption for a couple of thousand years.)

But probably the one you form a mental image of when you hear the word “volcano” is the stratovolcano…the type Mount St. Helens, and Ranier, and Shasta, and Hood, are.

Here is Mount Ranier:

It’s very prominent, when I first laid eyes on it on a road trip I immediately thought of “Fist of God” from Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels.

The internal structure will look something like this (vertically exaggerated):

Key to the diagram: 1) Large magma chamber 2) Bedrock 3) Conduit (pipe), 4) Base 5) Sill 6) Dike 7) Layers of ash emitted by the volcano 8) Flank 9) Layers of lava emitted by the volcano 10) Throat 11) Parasitic cone 12) Lava flow 13) Vent 14) Crater 15) Ash cloud.

These volcanoes tend to have a layered structure and in fact this is Broken Top, an eroded volcano in Oregon:

The crater at the top is often also known as a caldera, particularly if it’s big.

Another famous eruption in the Pacific Northwest is that of Mount Mazama. If you’ve never heard of that one, that’s because it is much more famous as Crater Lake. The 12,000 foot mountain erupted 7700 years ago–and it erupted so much that the magma chamber under the mountain was now empty. The peak of the mountain collapsed into the magma chamber, forming a caldera six miles across. The highest point on the rim of the crater is now 8,157 feet above sea level.

From the outside it’s an unassuming line of tree-covered peaks (they look like hills to me, honestly, since they don’t bust the tree line). From the inside, on the other hand:

I can attest that that is what the water actually looks like. This image has not been enhanced to exaggerate the color. The rim is hundreds of feet high or more. In the center is Wizard island, the result of a much smaller eruption a few thousand years ago.

Add it to your bucket list. I’m not joking, add it to your bucket list.

Volcanic Eruptions Ranked

Scientists will measure absolutely anything on a scale, and for volcanic eruptions they have the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, largely based on how much stuff the eruption spewed into the atmosphere.

Each step in the scale is ten times as much ejecta. Ten thousand cubic meters is a 1, a hundred thousand cubic meters a 2, and so on; at this rate when you get to a 5, that’s a cubic kilometer. The scale runs up to 8, 1000 cubic kilometers. When you realize that’s a cube six miles on a side, you realize that’s a LOT of crap spewing into the atmosphere.

So how do some famous eruptions stack up? Mt. St. Helens was a 5 (one cubic kilometer). Vesuvius in 79 CE was also a five. Pelee in 1902 was “only” a 4…but that volcano, on Martinque, destroyed the town of St. Pierre, killing 29,000-30,000 people almost without warning, the worst loss of life to a volcano of the 20th century. There were, by the way, three survivors. (That is not a typo. 3. Out of 30,000.)

Krakatoa, 1883, and Pinatubo, 1991, were VEI 6s, 10 cubic kilometers. Remember when the Phillipines kicked us out of the bases we had there? Well one of those bases got destroyed by that eruption.

Mazama was a 7, roughly 100 cubic kilometers of spew. Santorini in 1600 BCE was also a 7, and it was suggested it may have destroyed the Minoan civilization, but the timing isn’t quite right. There are Minoan ruins on what is left of that island, formerly Thera, now Santorini. And then there is Tambora, 1815. Tambora is on Sumbawa island, east of Java and Bali. Tambora’s eruption was heard 2600 kilometers away in Sumatra. In the northeastern US the next year, there was a persistent “dry fog” in the atmosphere from sulfur kicked up by this volcano, it dimmed the sun enough that people could see sunspots with their naked eyes. And that was the year without a summer; so much dust was in the upper atmosphere that massive crop failures were the result…world wide. It snowed June 6, 1816 in Albany, New York.

That was the biggest eruption in recorded history, but it is by no means the biggest eruption ever.

At a VEI of 8 we have Toba, on Sumatra, 74 thousand years ago, Taupo in New Zealand 26.5 thousand years ago, and, America is not to be outdone! Yellowstone, 2.1 Ma, and 640,000 years ago. (We’re due, folks…and the only safe place is Mars.)

Volcanic Plugs

One more thing I’ll cover, and that’s the subject of volcanic plugs. This is where lava hardens in the conduit of a volcano, and then the rest of the mountain erodes away.

By far the most famous of these is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Aliens not included. [The wikipedia article on volcanic plugs hedges a bit and says many geologists believe that Devil’s Tower is a volcanic plug. Which means at least some do not.]

The striated look is because basalt likes to shrink and fracture into hexagonal columns, like this (the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland):

Wrapping Up

I said I’d talk about hot spots. And that’s true. I thought I’d do it today but I realized that subject is closely tied to a slightly deeper look at plate tectonics that I wanted to take. So I will (hopefully) do both next time. In the meantime I’ve given you quite a bit to digest already.

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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Fun Quote

(HT Aubergine)

This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.

From Kurt Schlichter, who can certainly write a good rant (https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/30/trumps-winning-streak-is-totally-discombobulating-the-democrats-n2651308)

Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.

And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.

Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.

[WOLF EDIT – for whatever reason this YouTube video no longer embeds, even as the shortened URL (below), so I have converted both URLs to links which open up in a new tab.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp;pp=ygUfc293IHRoZSB3aW5kIHJlYXAgdGhlIHdoaXJsd2luZA%3D%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $3,325.30
Silver $32.81
Platinum $1,009.00
Palladium $1,002.00
Rhodium $5,675.00
FRNSI* 159.861+
Gold:Silver 101.350+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $3,203.70
Silver $32.26
Platinum $998.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $5,825.00
FRNSI* 153.979-
Gold:Silver 99.309-

Gold spent the last two days below $3200 before managing to claw its way just over that line at the very end of the day Friday. The current lower prices are attributed to less economic fears with respect to ChinaIsAsshoe.

Silver is now worth more than one percent of gold. I saw an interesting quip about it; it gets the worst of both its worlds. When the equity markets are panicking, silver is seen as an industrial metal…so it goes down. When the equity markets are booming, silver is seen as a precious metal so people want to sell off and put their money in stocks, so it goes down.

I remember back when Canada helped us out with three embassy people in Iran (1979) a Canadian comedian being featured on Nightline; he said that our two dollars were tied together. “When your dollar goes down, our dollar goes down. When your dollar goes up, our dollar goes down” said the Canadian.

Similarly it seems that gold and silver are tied together; when gold goes down, silver goes down, when gold goes up, silver goes down.

Buying opportunity for the white metal?

*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.

It Didn’t Start With Wegener

And now for the one at least some people have been waiting for.

It really started with Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) a cartographer from what was, back then, the Spanish Netherlands–which is to say he was a Dutchman who had a Spaniard for a king. He was the publisher of the first modern atlas in 1570 so he knew what the continents looked like as much as anyone did then. Here is a map from that atlas:

He published a book on ancient geography in 1587, the Thesaurus Geographicus, then revised it in 1596. Apparently, in that 1596 edition he described America (regarded as one continent back then, not two) as “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods.” Furthermore: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”

This is the first known mention of the continents possibly having rifted apart. And it was totally forgotten until the late 20th century.

However, other people had the same thought, among them Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others.

We have an illustration by Pellegrini:

There were arguments among geologists over just how much the Earth had changed culminating in the mid 1800s. I can’t write this better than wikipedia did, so I’ll just paste it in:

In 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarked, “It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth’s surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had, again and again, changed places with each other.” He quotes Charles Lyell as saying, “Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.” and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James Dwight Dana in 1849.

In his Manual of Geology (1863), Dana wrote, “The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. This has been proved with regard to North America from the position and distribution of the first beds of the Lower Silurian, – those of the Potsdam epoch. The facts indicate that the continent of North America had its surface near tide-level, part above and part below it (p.196); and this will probably be proved to be the condition in Primordial time of the other continents also. And, if the outlines of the continents were marked out, it follows that the outlines of the oceans were no less so”. Dana was enormously influential in America—his Manual of Mineralogy is still in print in revised form—and the theory became known as the Permanence theory.

The Challenger expedition, 1872-1876, showed that rivers dumped their silt–eroded from continents–onto continental shelves, not the deep ocean, which made it appear that oceans were permanent features, not something that could “change places” with the continents.

Eduard Seuss (1831-1914) proposed a supercontinent “Gondwana” (1885) consisting of pretty much all of today’s southern continents, plus India. In fact it was named after the Sanskrit name for a location in India. He also noted that the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas, and Indian Ocean may once have been connected; that he named the Tethys Ocean (1893) (it’s often called the Tethys Sea). But Seuss was not a proponent of continental drift. He believed that South America and Africa (and the other present day pieces of Gondwana) had been separated by the land subsiding and being flooded to form oceans. Presumably the dry areas that used to be the Tethys are the result of land that rose at some time in the past.

He brought evidence: Glossopteris (Gk: Tongue fern) was a widely distributed genus of plant across all of the present day southern continents, New Zealand, and India. It lived in the Permian Period (298.8 – 251.902 Ma). [Yowza, thousand year precision for the end of the Permian and Paleozoic!] They appeared to have died out during the Great Dying, the biggest mass extinction event since multicellular life began. (Compared to this, the end of the dinosaurs pales.)

Otto Ampferer (1875-1947) was a geologist who believed that mountains were uplifted by convection in the asthenosphere.

In fact, Ampferer is the real founder of what is called the “modern” view of continental drift, since a lot of his work was done in the 1900s (i.e., the 0s of the 20th century). He even largely won the argument about convection and mountains by 1906–and those concepts would eventually play heavily in modern plate tectonics theory.

Roberto Mantovani between 1889-1909 proposed that the continents had rifted because the Earth had expanded. In other words the Atlantic was basically a stretch mark. (This has long since been recognized to be…well, frankly, ridiculous though Wikipoo just says “now discredited.”)

Frank Bursey Taylor in 1910 proposed “continental creep” caused by tidal forces. He was among the first to realize that continents’ motions could have a lot to do with raising mountains, such as the Himalayas being formed as India and Asia came together. [We now know that India is still moving into Asia; the Himalayas continue to grow as a consequence.]

Then Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) came along, and published in 1912, January 6th of that year to be precise, in a presentation to the German Geological Society. He proposed that all continents, not just the southern ones, had once formed one supercontinent which he called “Pangaea” which had broken up into pieces that had since drifted to their current locations.

Wegener brought a lot of evidence, rock formations from the Permian or Triassic that matched up but were now on separate continents, for instance.

Wegener considered Taylor’s ideas the most similar to his own, and in the mid 20th century for a time you’d hear the term “Taylor-Wegener hypothesis.”

Wegener actually invented the term “continental drift.”

However, despite the evidence which might seem compelling, there was one gigantic fly in the ointment.

Wegener couldn’t explain how this could have happened. What force could possibly plow the continents through oceanic crust? No one had any idea. And unfortunately, this idea was deemed more ridiculous than having to find some other explanation for Wegener’s evidence. (And to be honest, given what they knew, geologists were right to reject it. Continents plowing through ocean floor crust was absurd, and it still is.) Another issue is that he estimated the speed at 2.5 meters per year. This was (and still would be) considered implausibly high, and is about a hundred times faster than what we actually measure today.

Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) in 1931 championed continental drift, when it was profoundly unfashionable. We have him to thank for radiometric dating, but also for suggesting mantle convection as a mechanism. This was the first hint of sea floor spreading.

In 1947, a team led by Maurice Ewing showed that there was a rise in the central Atlantic ocean, based on soundings laboriously collected up to then. They were also the first to note that ocean beds were essentially basaltic rock, unlike continents which were mostly granites. Over the next years, an entire system of mid-oceanic ridges all over the world was found.

Meanwhile, we had noticed magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor, using devices originally designed in World War II to detect submarines. As more and more data was collected, we began to realize that these weren’t “anomalies” at all, but rather formed a pattern. Here’s Wikipedia again:

In a series of papers published between 1959 and 1963, Heezen, Dietz, Hess, Mason, Vine, Matthews, and Morley collectively realized that the magnetization of the ocean floor formed extensive, zebra-like patterns: one stripe would exhibit normal polarity and the adjoining stripes reversed polarity.^[58][59][60] The best explanation was the “conveyor belt” or Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis. New magma from deep within the Earth rises easily through these weak zones and eventually erupts along the crest of the ridges to create new oceanic crust. The new crust is magnetized by the Earth’s magnetic field, which undergoes occasional reversals. Formation of new crust then displaces the magnetized crust apart, akin to a conveyor belt – hence the name.^[61]

Without workable alternatives to explain the stripes, geophysicists were forced to conclude that Holmes had been right: ocean rifts were sites of perpetual orogeny at the boundaries of convection cells.^[62][63] By 1967, barely two decades after discovery of the mid-oceanic rifts, and a decade after discovery of the striping, plate tectonics had become axiomatic to modern geophysics.

The plate tectonics revolution is regarded as having occurred between 1957 and 1967.

We now had our mechanism. The continents don’t plow through the ocean floor. Rather, the ocean floor behaves like a conveyor belt; the oceans spread and push the continents ahead of them.

[Technically that’s not quite right–it’s more accurate to say that the ocean floors are pulled along behind the continents–but I’ll have to defer that explanation a bit. Suffice it to say continents don’t plow through ocean floors.]

And it’s not called “continental drift” any more, it’s called “plate tectonics.” Because we have come to realize that the crust of the Earth consists of distinct plates which move around, sometimes spreading from each other at mid-ocean ridges, in other places one plate is being submerged under another.

What does this word “tectonics” actually mean? It’s ultimately from Greek tektonikos, “pertaining to building.” [As an aside, in the original Greek, Jesus is described as a “tekton”, someone who made things with his hands. Not necessarily a carpenter in particular.] As for plates, here are the sixteen principal plates:

Note that most boundaries are in the ocean. Boundaries are drawn in different colors for a reason. Deep red are “spreading centers”–i.e., places with a ridge where magma is surfacing to make ocean crust. The slightly lighter red (e.g., through east Africa) is an “extension zone” though unless the distinction has something to do with mid-ocean ridges, I can’t figure out what the difference is. In both cases spreading is happening. Here’s what they look like in general (this diagram seems to be represending one on a continent, like the rift running through East Africa).

Blue is a subduction zone, where one plate is an ocean floor, and the other is a continent; the ocean floor is subducting under the continent. Notice these on the edges of South America, between the northern pacific and the North American plate at Alaska and the Aleutians; also between the Juan de Fuca plate and the US’s Pacific Northwest, and running through Indonesia and Polynesia. And right through the Mediterranean, too.

What do these places all have in common? Volcanoes!! As it happens, volcanoes are almost always caused by subduction zones. Notable exceptions are Hawaii and Yellowstone. There are also some volcanic islands on mid oceanic ridges, like Iceland, St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha in the Atlantic Ocean. Volcanoes form along subduction zones as the ocean plate melts and basaltic magma rises, eventually forcing its way to the surface.

[Please note, Pat, it’s “subduction” not “seduction,” no matter how volcanic those seductions can be when handled correctly.]

The Pacific “Ring of Fire” is now explained; the Pacific ocean is shrinking as continents encroach on it. My childhood book on volcanoes was out of date just a couple of years before I read it.

Subduction zones tend to have the worst earthquakes, e.g., Chile 1960, Alaska 1964, Sumatra 2004, Tohoku 2011 (Fukushima), Kamchatka 1952. These are the five strongest earthquakes in recorded history and all were at least a Richter 9. [Three more earthquakes estimated to be over 9.0 happened in Chile before we had good instruments to measure them; and two more in Kamchatka. A few more with estimated ranges straddling 9.0 happened in those locations, plus one more in Sumatra. Plus, one more, in 1700 in the Pacific Northwest. (This should worry people who live there. A similar quake there now would be the worst natural disaster in US history.)]

One more thing to note about subduction zones. The ocean floor almost always subducts below the continent. Why? Because the ocean floor is mafic or basaltic, and that makes it denser than the continents (I told you the greater density of mafic rocks would turn out to be important). Another detail related to density is the fact that the slope up to a mid-oceanic ridge tends to be fairly gradual, which is to say the ocean drops away from the ridge at a shallow slope. That too is an effect of density; the inside of the ocean floor “slab” is hotter nearer the ridge; that makes the rock take up more volume (solids expand when hot), which makes it less dense; it rides higher on the mantle than does the cooler ocean floor farther away from the ridges (near the continents).

Purple boundaries (note the one along the northern edge of India) are where two continents are colliding; this forces mountains upwards. That diagram above is technically of this case rather than an ocean floor subducting, but the idea is the same. (I don’t know why they don’t show sea floor diagrams in the Wikipoo article, unless they think the “big picture” diagram further down the page covers it. That diagram, alas has other stuff in it I want to cover later, so I didn’t use it; I found a different diagram below

Orange and green boundaries are “dextral” and “sinistral” transverse faults, respectively. These are places where the plates move sideways at the boundary, no encroaching. “Dextral” means if you are standing on one of the two plates looking at the other, it appears to be moving to the right. Sinistral, means the apparent motion is to the left. The San Andreas fault is the most famous of these, and is dextral.

Putting convergent and divergent boundaries together you get something like this: You can think of the ocean as the Pacific, up near Seattle. The plate at the far left is the Pacific plate, the one in the middle, that is subducting, is the Juan de Fuca, and the continent is North America.

Not shown is North America’s eastern edge, where it continues down into an ocean floor; the floor of the Atlantic is attached to the continents surrounding it. Yes, the ocean floor between the mid-Atlantic ridge and the US is part of the North American plate. I found a much smaller diagram of the Atlantic between South America and Africa, which is essentially the same:

Iceland sits directly on the Atlantic ridge, which means part of the island is on the North American plate, and part is on the European plate.

Iceland has a national park, Þingvellir Park (As near as I can tell that’s pronounced “Thing-vet-leer”), and there is actually a rift through the park; in some places it’s filled with water and you can scuba dive in it and put one hand on each side, touching Europe and America.

If you think about it, there are a couple of predictions this theory makes that can be checked.

First, we should be able to measure the motion, and indeed we can. The following is a collection of measurements (that seem to line up along great circles), the longer the arrow the faster the motion.

Second: Ocean floor should be younger than continental rock, because ocean floor is of recent manufacture. And indeed this turns out to be the case; the oldest ocean floor rock we have ever tested (other than the occasional bits of ocean crustal rocks that end up on top of continents) is about 200 million years old, age established by radiometric dating and absolutely no surprise to anyone in the field. Even the pacific floor is new; there are “midocean” ridges making fresh ocean floor in the Pacific, too. (They’re closer to the Americas than to Asia but they are there.)

OK, so the next few times I cover this in more detail.

But here’s a couple of parting shots.

Other worlds have “tectonics” that rework the surface, but not necessarily plate tectonics. Io, for instance just has a lot of volcanic activity and no plates. Venus probably has great episodes of volcanism every few hundred million years (based on counting how many craters it has unit area; a way of dating planetary and moon surfaces). Even ice moons like Europa and Enceladus can have tectonics of some sort or another.

I mentioned that the Atlantic is spreading at about 2.5 centimeters a year–this is based on GPS measurements. It’s commonly compared to how fast your fingernails grow.

How long has this been going on? 2.5 centimeters is an inch; so the Atlantic widens by a foot every 12 years, or a mile every 60,000 years (I’m rounding here because the original yearly number is itself not very precise). The Atlantic is very roughly 3,000 miles wide, so that should be…180,000,000 years to have attained its current width. And wouldn’t you know, that’s the early Jurassic, about when the rocks indicate the split happened between South America and Africa based on dating those rocks. So we have two totally different lines of evidence pointing to roughly the same time for that event.

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

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

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

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $3,329.00
Silver $32.65
Platinum $976.00
Palladium $984.00
Rhodium $5,750.00
FRNSI* 160.040+
Gold:Silver 101.960+

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $3,320.30
Silver $33.17
Platinum $982.00
Palladium $970.00
Rhodium $5,825.00
FRNSI* 159.620-
Gold:Silver 100.099+

Gold went on QUITE a ride this week!. It came within a loud shout of $3500 but then plummeted, dropping all the way into the 3200s, and ended up almost where it began. Silver didn’t drop as hard, and Gold:Silver dropped below 100, but again it seems almost as if silver really wants to be right there at 1/100th of an ounce of gold.

*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.

Carbon Dating

Carbon dating is when you date identical twins, one of whom is a carbon copy of the other. Generally available only to people as cool as the Fonz (who IIRC dated triplets at one point). Alternatively it is defined as dating having reached the point where a diamond is involved, possibly because uranium-lead dating or potassium-argon dating got out of hand.

OK, more seriously…it involves the isotope ¹⁴C or carbon-14 or C-14, depending on who’s writing the stuff you’re reading and how lazy they are. I’m lazy enough not to bother with the first, most technically correct, notation.

Carbon dating is generally not relevant to geologists, but is very relevant to archaeologists, who dig up human remains and/or human artifacts. Why? Timescale. The half life of carbon-14 is 5700 years (give or take 30 years). This makes it worthless for geological time; they generally don’t want to push it past 50,000 years. But it’s eminently suitable for modern humans and gets us well back into the prior ice age which ended roughly 12,000 years ago.

Even though this is supposed to be a geology series, I decided to cover carbon dating anyway because it has a number of features that make it a contrast to the other methods used. And also hopefully to immunize my readers against the next earnest-sounding ignoramus who complains about carbon-dating the age of the Earth.

Carbon, element 6, has two stable isotopes, carbon-12 (6 protons, six neutrons), and carbon-13 (6 protons, 7 neutrons). And then there is carbon-14, with six protons and eight neutrons. As noted above, it’s unstable with a half life of 5700 years (give or take 30 years). It undergoes regular ol’ beta decay and turns into an atom of nitrogen-14, which is quite stable.

Carbon dating is sometimes conflated with radiometric dating in general, especially by the general public. They talk about dating rocks, or determining the age of the Earth, with carbon dating, oftentimes with a sneer because they don’t believe the result. Ironically, they’d be right to do so if we actually tried to use carbon dating for these purposes. (It’s much more hilarious when a professional young earth creationist makes this particular blunder.) Carbon dating is radiometric dating, but not all radiometric dating is carbon dating.

Carbon-14 is not used to date rocks, it’s used to determine when something organic died. Living things ingest carbon-14 with their carbon dioxide, food, you-name it, when they die, they no longer bring carbon-14 in and the radiometric clock starts ticking.

For a number of reasons, carbon dating is the oddball method of all the ones I’ve discussed, because it does not depend on a primordial isotope. Uranium-235 and -238, thorium-232, rubidium-87, potassium-40 are all primordial isotopes, meaning what we see out there today was “with us” when the Earth formed.

Obviously this won’t be true for carbon-14; the Earth is way too old for that. So carbon-14 must be getting created today.

(Indeed, the mere fact that no short lived isotopes are around any more except in cases where we can demonstrate they are being created now, is evidence that the Earth is quite old. The shortest lived primordial (non-renewed) radioisotope is U-235 with its 704 million year half life. In general after about 40 half lives the radioisotope is effectively gone; roughly one atom in a trillion is still around. The next longest half life of any radioisotope after U-235 is samarium-146 at 92 million years. [That’s quite a gap! It’s surprising nothing other than U-235 has half lives in the hundreds of millions of years.] And sure enough 40 half lives of that is 3,680 million years…so it would be essentially gone after that amount of time. And guess what. It is in fact all gone [actually traces should still be around, we haven’t detected them yet], as one would expect if and only if the Earth is old.)

Most carbon-14 is generated by cosmic rays plowing through our upper atmosphere. This creates free neutrons, some of which will glom onto nitrogen-14 atoms, and kick out one of the protons; this replacement of a proton with a neutron is as if the C-14 to N-14 beta decay is run in reverse. This apparently happens (depending on who is doing the calculation) 16,400 or 18,800 times per second per square meter of the Earth’s surface, all at altitudes between 9 and 14 km. (As you can imagine this is tough to measure under those circumstances; hence the approximate calculations that do match what we observe later on in the process.)

The nitrogen (N₂) molecule becomes a CN radical and eventually the C-14 atom ends up in carbon dioxide, where it can be sucked in by plants. Once incorporated in the plant tissue it can make its way through the entire food chain as some animal eats the plant, some other animal eats the first animal, and so on. Every living thing is constantly pulling carbon-14 into its system, replacing any that happens to decay while it’s living. When it dies, this process ends and decaying C-14 is no longer replaced. We now have something we can radiometrically date, just as we can date rocks once they solidify.

In this particular case they take their sample and count carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14 atoms, and compare the ratios to what we see in atmospheric CO₂ today. After doing the same sorts of calculations I’ve highlighted in previous posts, they get a date which is reported as “Before Present.” That has become a bit of a misnomer, now, because “Present” was 1950, and 75 years have since elapsed.

And therein lies the need for an asterisk. As it turns out the C-14 to C-12 ratio in our atmosphere is not constant. Not only is it not constant over time, it’s not constant over location either. Even today we can measure it’s lower near cities than out in the middle of nowhere; that’s due to the extra CO₂ emissions near cities. Fossil fuels have essentially no C-14 in them, so when they burn they add purely to the amounts of C-12 and C-13, which pushes the ratio down. Time variation can be caused by anything from solar flares, other variations in cosmic ray flux, and even nuclear tests which tend to dump large numbers of neutrons, giving a big boost to C-14 production.

What effect does this have on carbon dating? Let me illustrate with an example, a made-up one. Let’s say that (for whatever reason) 43,000 years ago the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. At that time a Neanderthal grabs a piece of deadfall and takes it to his cave to build a fire, but for whatever reason it doesn’t end up being burned.

Today, an archaeologist finds that piece of unburned wood right next to a bunch of cave paintings, and decides he wants to know how old that Neanderthal dwelling is. So he sends it off to the lab to get it dated. What he doesn’t know is that when the tree grew, the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. 43,000 years is about 7 1/2 half lives of C-14; after each half life has elapsed, the C-14 count is still twice as high at that age as it would have been if the wood had started with today’s amount of C-14 in it.

So as far as the lab can tell, 6 1/2, not 7 1/2, half lives have elapsed since the sample was formed (because they don’t know the sample started out a half-life “behind”), so they send back: 37,300 (43,000 – 5,700) years old.

That’s quite a difference!

Scientists realized this was a potential issue at least as far back as 1955–in fact the first to point it out was Willard Lilly, who invented radio carbon dating! And it became an absolute certainty when samples of known ages started coming back with variant ages. So they started working on ways to calibrate carbon dating.

The unadjusted age number is now called radiocarbon years. That’s the “flag” to warn the reader that the date is not calibrated. In our example, the firewood came back as being 37,300 radiocarbon years old, even though we (with our god’s eye view) know it’s really 43,000 years old.

What is needed is a way to look up a figure given in radiocarbon years, and read off the corrected age. In our example, the archaeologist (or perhaps the lab that did the work) would look up in the right table (it turns out we need different tables for marine and land, and northern and southern hemisphere) “37,300” radiocarbon years and read off “43,000” calendar years.

So how do we make such a table? By radiocarbon-dating samples of known age, and seeing what the results return.

Of course, these are scientists. Why would they use a table when they can make a graph? Here’s an actual graph.

In actual fact, I chose that 43,000 number for the example fairly carefully. If you look up 43,000 on the horizontal axis (the true, calendar ages) and read up you hit one of the spots where the blue crooked line is furthest from the diagonal line where the calendar age would equal the radiocarbon age [no correction needed]. It’s almost, but not quite, off by a half life. So my example wasn’t all that exaggerated.

A graph is also handy because of another potential problem. If you look really closely where the squiggly line crosses 10,000 cal years…that bit of the line looks flat. What that means a bunch of numbers close to 10,000 cal years all have the same radiocarbon age. In fact looking at about 14,000 cal years, there’s almost a thousand year long stretch with nearly the same radiocarbon age.

So because of the variation, sometimes the age will come back ambiguous.

This is actually much more of a problem for recent times.

Consider the fact that these numbers always come out with a margin of error, e.g., +/- 80 radiocarbon years.

Here’s the calibration curve for things that date 1000-1400 radiocarbon years.

Looking over at the left, sample one returned (eyeballing it), a range of 1360-1380 radiocarbon years (blue lines). Reading across, we find a place where the calibration curve is steep, so we end up with a very narrow, 10 year calendar range, 1290-1300 years BP, which is to say 650-660 CE. Steep is good!

It’s shallow that can be a bit of a disaster. Look at sample two, 1260 to 1280 radiocarbon years (red lines), just one century newer in radiocarbon terms than sample 1.

But here the curve zigzags across our range! There are therefore three distinct age ranges that our sample could actually date from, roughly 1185-1190 years BP, 1205-1215 years BP, and 1230-1260 years BP. A 55 year spread, with gaps in it.

The third sample is maybe better, maybe worse depending on how you look at it. No gaps but an even bigger spread. Radiocarbon age is 1180-1205 BP, but because here the curve is very shallow, basically horizontal with ups and downs, the calendar age is is 1075-1175 years BP–a full century of uncertainty.

And even this method (which is called the “intercept” method is now out of date, there are much more complex probabilistic methods that require computing power, which we now have readily available. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject of radiocarbon calibration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_calibration

Ambiguity can be combated by working on ways to have the lab be more accurate but note that in case 2 even if we had the radiocarbon age to an exact number of years, we’d still have three answers.

OK, I showed curves, but how did we come up with those curves?

As it happens we have plenty of other ways to date some artifacts that can also be radiocarbon dated, enough that we can fill in a lot of the table (or plot points on the graph). This of course is very tedious work and whoever does it won’t get a Nobel prize, but they are unsung heroes of archaeology. It is thanks to them that we can have great confidence in our data, in most cases (and know when we shouldn’t, as in the case of the poor guys who had samples 2 and 3 in the graph above).

What are some of those ways of determining absolute ages? Actually the first attempts to do this were from Egyptology. Because ancient Egyptian records sometimes reference astronomical events happening during such-and-such reign, we know when that reign happened–because we can calculate when the astronomical event happened (good ol’ astrodynamics…). If we have papyrus from that time, we can see how old it is in radiocarbon years. This has since been extended to other civilizations.

But the most famous means used (though by no means the only one) is a product of nature: dendrochronology, which is, in essence, counting and matching up tree rings. As trees grow they leave annual rings in the wood grain. (They’re rings going across the log, otherwise, running the length of the log, they have the sort of “woodgrain” pattern you see in lumber of any kind.) In fact, this pattern will tend to have thicker and thinner rings depending on whether the tree got a lot of water or less water that particular season; more growth equals a thicker ring. Different trees from the same region will show the same pattern of thick and thin rings for the same years. And it’s even possible to match up the pattern in old pieces of wood to the corresponding years in either a) newer pieces of wood or b) trees growing today. We’ve managed to construct at least one sequence that goes back 13,900 actual years BP (i.e., 13,975 years before today).

The oldest tree-ring series are known as floating since, while their constituent rings can be counted to create a relative internal chronology, they cannot be dendro-matched with the main Holocene absolute chronology. However, 14C analyses performed at high resolution on overlapped absolute and floating tree-rings series enable one to link them almost absolutely and hence to extend the calibration on annual tree rings until ≈13 900 cal yr BP.

Bard, Edouard, et. al, 9 October 2023 as quoted in Wikipedia. (Philosophical Transactions A. 381 (2261). Bibcode:2023RSPTA.38120206B. doi:10.1098/rsta.2022.0206. PMC 10586540. PMID 37807686)

In this case we can simply date the wood taking samples from (say) every tenth or hundredth ring. We know the actual age from simple counting of the rings; we can fill in the entries of the calibration table based on the uncalibrated results the lab returns to us. We can supplement this from atmospheric gases trapped in ice cores (which also have annual layers) and organic debris in varves (layers of sediment).

And this is why I left carbon dating for last. The other sorts of dating don’t need calibration, not because ratios were constant but because we have ways of accounting for variation, built into the method. With radio carbon dating we don’t have that luxury, at least not purely by analyzing the sample, so we have to calibrate. Luckily at the short (by geological standards) timescales radio carbon dating covers we have other means of correcting what we get.

As I said before, carbon dating won’t help geologists date things in the geologic column (at least not before the very topmost thin layer), but I felt I had to cover it because it gets confused with the other forms of radiometric dating. It also has the additional complication of needing calibration; someone might get the impression from this that the other methods have the very same issue. They don’t.

(And of course if you run into someone complaining about “carbon dating” dinosaur fossils, he literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’s hopefully misremembering something he heard from someone else, or [less hopefully] the someone else he’s remembering is himself clueless…or a charlatan. The good news is most of the well-funded young-Earth creationist organizations today do know better than to make this particular blunder.)

One last point to make: There are Young Earth Creationist talking points about finding radiocarbon in diamonds (up to billions of years old) or in carbon in fossils of dinosaurs (66-235 Mya). If these held up of course that would be serious trouble for old earth viewpoints, but the problem here is that there’s every sign that they’re measuring contamination. Samples are sent to multiple labs all around the world, and the reported ages are a) not far below the upper limit of C-14 dating and b) wildly different from each other, by at least a half life. Whereas what we see with properly collected samples is consistent ages. (More about this in the second video below at about 13:30.)

Bonus Videos

Here is a video by Aron Ra (as far as I can tell that’s his legal name), talking to an actual scientist (Dr. Jonathan Baker) while said scientist runs a rock sample in the lab, measuring uranium and thorium isotopes–he’s actually using a method different from any I covered, one suitable for ages less than a million years. Aron Ra is famous in atheist circles for combating creationism (all types not just Young Earth) so he does kid the scientist about his data popping out with 6000 years. Between the two of them they make the point that there are literally hundreds of studies that return consistent results.

There are some fundamental differences between this method and other methods, having to do with the fact that the daughter isotope is even more radioactive than the parent (and the parent is water soluble while the daughter is not, so it’s used for dating stalactites), but I am sure you don’t want another Saturday open devoted to that topic, so I’ll punt you over to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium%E2%80%93thorium_dating

A more general video by the same two people. Aron Ra got hit by a troll who threw a bunch of AIG talking points; he has Dr. Baker respond, and the responses are educational (not simply anti-YEC polemics). A lot of info on carbon dating here starting about 13:30 in.

Quotable line: “They do seem fascinated with carbon dating, it’s like they’re not even aware that there’s like well over a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half other radioisotopes that they would be using for dinosaurs, that they don’t use carbon dating for dinosaurs, and why they don’t. I don’t know why they insist on doing that.” Hence this “intruder” topic into a geology series.

Another line: the troll asks “Do you know that forest fires, atomic activity, volcanic eruptions, factories that produce carbon, solar flares, carbon reservoirs, contribute to the inconsistent decay rate and contamination that results to the inaccuracies in carbon dating?” and Dr. Baker responds…”uh, yes, I did know that.” But we know how to take these things into account and can often cross-check with other methods of dating (which is what he was doing in the first video).

And from Dr. Baker’s channel (Age of Rocks):

Ted Talk by a paleontologist about hunting for dinosaurs, he talks a lot about geology here (interestingly that diagram behind him in the thumbnail also appears in the prior video; I guess it’s a pretty popular graphic). Please excuse the “sixth mass extinction” stuff at the very end. (Well, at least he didn’t say “global warming.”)

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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Fun Quote

(HT Aubergine)

This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.

From Kurt Schlichter, who can certainly write a good rant (https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/30/trumps-winning-streak-is-totally-discombobulating-the-democrats-n2651308)

Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.

And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.

Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.

[WOLF EDIT – for whatever reason this YouTube video no longer embeds, even as the shortened URL (below), so I have converted both URLs to links which open up in a new tab.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp;pp=ygUfc293IHRoZSB3aW5kIHJlYXAgdGhlIHdoaXJsd2luZA%3D%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $3,038.80
Silver $29.56 (Yikes!!)
Platinum $931.00
Palladium $943.00
Rhodium $5,875.00
FRNSI* 146.002-
Gold:Silver 102.801- (Again, Yikes!!!)

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $3,238.00
Silver $32.33
Platinum $954.00
Palladium $942.00
Rhodium $5,850.00
FRNSI* 155.638+
Gold:Silver 100.155-

What a roller coaster ride these last couple of weeks have been!!

Note that gold was below 3,000 earlier this week because of the general market panic over the tariffs. Silver, alas, hasn’t been keeping up with gold. After a couple of days spent practically in lockstep with gold at about 100:0, silver is just being left behind. (Are Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the room?) That was as of Thursday; on Friday silver played some catchup so over the week as a whole it gained against gold slightly. Or you can think of it as gold falling over two ounces of silver. Take your pick which one is the measuring stick.

Even platinum had some joy this last week, but that was after dropping below $900 for a bit.

*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.

FKatzoid Out?

No, FKatzoid isn’t going glober, but apparently he took enough blowback for going after Lisbeth the way he did, that he’s rebranding himself. Note the following non-apology apology.

Potassium and Argon

Good old potassium. A very earthy element. In fact, by weight the Earth’s crust is 2.6 percent potassium. It’s common in minerals like feldspars, micas, clay minerals, tephra, and evaporites (e.g., dry lakebed salt). In other words, it’s common.

Common stuff! So why is it you never see it? It’s one of the “Alkali metals” like sodium (it’s sodium’s big brother), and thus it’s so reactive that pure potassium metal doesn’t last long. In fact, expose potassium metal to the air and it will form potassium peroxide in mere seconds on exposure to air. The layer formed will flake off, exposing more of the metal, and the process repeats itself.

If something can’t stand being in just ordinary air, you’re not going to see it lying around on the ground in lumps.

Being in that left-hand column of the table, potassium can’t resist just dropping an electron on the floor and becoming an ion. So it ends up having an important role in biochemistry as much metabolism is regulated by the concentration of potassium and sodium ions. It also shows up in various proteins and enzymes. It’s important stuff.

It’s rather famously found in bananas.

And it just happens to be just a teensy bit radioactive. Potassium, symbol K (you can thank the Germans for that), is element #19, and it has three isotopes found in nature. ³⁹K is stable, and 93.3 percent of all potassium is this isotope. ⁴¹K is also stable, and it takes up 6.73 percent of potassium. (Those numbers appear to add up to over 100 (100.03) percent thanks to a round off error.) Well within that round-off error is the natural occurrence of the third naturally found isotope of potassium, ⁴⁰K, which makes up 0.0120% of all potassium. In other words barely one atom in every ten thousand.

Potassium-40 (I’m going to go with K-40 or potassium-40–and similarly for other elements and other isotopes–from here on out, since superscripting is a slight pain in Wordpiss) has a half life of 1.248 x 10⁹ years, which means it’s one of those “primordial” isotopes that has been with us all along. And it’s a bit odd, in one respect. Up to now, everything I’ve discussed has one method of decay; it spits out an alpha particle, or maybe a beta particle. But potassium-40 has three decay modes.

89.28 percent of the time, it decays by beta radiation, which means the nucleus gains a positive charge but stays at the same mass number. Gaining one charge makes it an atom of the 20th element, calcium (Ca), and in particular calcium-40.

The other two modes are similar to each other, or rather, they have similar results. 10.72 percent of the time the potassium-40 nucleus will “capture” an electron. The inner shell electrons spend some time actually within the nucleus and that can be enough in this case, for beta decay to run backwards, essentially. The K-40 nucleus loses a positive charge but retains the 40 mass number; that makes it element 18, argon (Ar), specifically argon-40. The third mode is the nucleus emitting a positron (also known as positive beta decay); this happens 0.001% of the time. But that too lowers the charge of the nucleus, and argon-40 is the result of this decay mode, too.

All uranium is radioactive. Same with thorium. Only a tiny fraction of potassium is radioactive. But potassium is so overwhelmingly common compared to the other two, that most of the radioactive activity in the Earth is due to potassium.

So show those bananas some respect.

Given how common potassium is in minerals, K-40 seems like a good candidate for radiometric dating. And it has two distinct daughter isotopes to choose from since it can decay into either argon-40 or calcium-40.

Calcium is even more abundant in the Earth’s crust than is potassium. Furthermore its most common isotope by far is calcium-40 (at 96.9 percent of the total). [Calcium has four other stable isotopes and another, a rare one, with a half life of 19 quintillion years, which is effectively stable.] Remember that K-40 is quite a small proportion of all potassium, and you can see that its decay into Ca-40 is just not going change the Ca-40 amounts by much…so it will be really hard to see the change in ratio.

Argon, on the other hand is a very different matter! It won’t combine with anything–it’s a noble gas–so it’s unlikely to get incorporated into any mineral except possibly by being physically trapped in the magma somehow–this is not quite impossible but very unlikely. It’s far more likely to escape the magma. Various environmental factors can change how well this works, so this effects the size of the error bars when doing dating. But for the most part, if we see any argon-40 in a rock, it’s almost certainly decay product, similar to the reasoning used for lead appearing in zircons.

So we have potassium-argon dating, also called K-Ar dating.

(So for Pat Fredericks, this is the sort of dating where you wait until her parents argon, before doing anything with his potassium-rich banana. If you don’t take care wait long enough, you might end up utilizing uranium-lead dating.)

This method can work with any rock sample over a few thousand years old. It won’t work well with samples younger than that.

First, you take your rock sample and heat it enough to release trapped gases. Use a mass spectrometer to measure the argon-40. Use flame photometry or atomic absorption spectroscopy to quantify the potassium. You just want to know how much potassium is in the mineral, you don’t need to be specific as to isotope.

Here’s the basic formula.

Note that the amount of argon in the sample is divided by 0.109, which is the factor used to adjust for the fact that not all K-40 decays into Ar-40. By doing this division you get a number indicating the total number of decay products of K-40 decay (not just the argon ones). In the formula above K_f is the amount of K-40 in the sample now. Often though they simply measure the total amount of potassium and multiply by the ratio of K-40 to K-39+K-41 (0.000117/0.932581).

As with any field and lab work there are complications that must be (and are) accounted for. See here for a deep dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93Ar_dating

This is best used for dating minerals and rocks over 100,000 years old. Some of the rocks it is best used in are magnetic, so we can check the history of earth’s magnetic field by measuring the magnetism of the rocks and then determining their age.

We were even able to send a mini lab to Mars on the Curiosity rover, which was used to date a rock from Mars, ON Mars. This was very rough but the result was between 3.86 to 4.56 billion years old.

But there’s a bit more to this story.

Air is about 1 percent argon gas (0.934 percent to be precise). Almost all (99.6%) of the argon in the air is argon-40.

When we look at argon in space, though the vast majority of it is argon-36; the sun’s argon is 84.6 percent Ar-36 (based on sampling the solar wind), the outer gas giants are similarly rich in Ar-36–they’ll have retained what was in the original nebula. (This is logical because stars build up lighter elements by combining He-4 nuclei, and argon-36 is nine of those put together.) This suggests that Earth lost all of its original argon supply when it was very hot shortly after formation, and what argon we are breathing now is almost all radiogenic argon-40. Furthermore smaller worlds like Mercury, Mars and Titan all have some argon in their atmospheres, with argon-40 the vast majority of it. They too have radioactive decay going on.

If you think about it, it’s a bit freaky, you’re breathing stuff that used to be potassium with every breath. Fortunately it isn’t potassium any more because that would do a number on your lungs.

I haven’t found numbers on this, but this amount of argon in our air is yet another indication (as if not having short-half life primordial radioisotopes isn’t enough) that the Earth is old–as well as Mars, Titan and Mercury.

In fact this effect is so pronounced that if you measure the atomic weight of argon here on Earth, it’s higher than that of potassium, in spite of being before potassium on the periodic table. This was a bit confusing at first to people like Mendeleev when the periodic table was being developed.