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.

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 $2,858.10
Silver $31.20
Platinum $953.00
Palladium $945.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 137.261-
Gold:Silver 91.606-

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

Gold $2,911.50
Silver $32.60
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $934.00
Rhodium $6,000.00
FRNSI* 139.844-
Gold:Silver 89.310-

Palladium is below platinum again…but look at rhodium, which has gone up nine hundred bucks!

The people who bloviate on this sort of thing for a living (if this is all I did I’d starve to death) claim the precious metals are “consolidating” with gold in the 2910-2920 range while the stock indices go down. At least silver is up relative to 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.

Latest Flerfer Goofiness

OK unlike last week I’m going to try to supply some actual content. (Last week was nonstop busy.)

Our friend Fkatzoid is back. Watch him duck and weave when he’s asked where the south pole is (at 16:45).

Will Duffy is trying to make the point that whether you head south from Africa, South America, or New Zealand, you end up at the same place when you get to the south pole. According to the Gleasons’s Map, however, the South Pole isn’t a point, it’s a circle approximately 60,000 miles in circumference, so that shouldn’t happen. Either Fkatzoid is an even bigger idiot than he showed himself to be last time, or he’s trying very hard to evade having this pointed out to his audience.

Later on at about 2:31:45…apparently Lisbeth (who went to Antarctica) is on the verge of joining Mark Sargent’s channel; MC Toon begs her not to ruin her life doing so.

Just a few minutes later, you see someone named JK trying to find a video proving that people who try to go to Antarctica will be intercepted by any of a number of different navies and turned back as soon as they sail across 60 S latitude. He claims there are many of these videos; he eventually finds the one Will Duffy expected–taken in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia, nowhere near Antarctica. Listen to McToon’s rant at 2:45:22.

Here’s another debate with Duffy destroying someone I’ve never heard of named Nathan Thompson. (Not to be confused with Nathan “where are the guns” Oakley.)

Two Birds…One Stone

OK this one is going to seem like geology…then physics…then back to geology. It’s a good illustration of how all of human knowledge about the natural world is interconnected. Sometimes great progress is made when people in two different fields get together; sometimes a new discipline even is formed–recent work has done much to highlight the effects of living organisms on the geology of the Earth…yes, our rocks would be different if there were no life on earth (and there’d be no geologists to notice, of course).

An Extremely Inadequate Intro to Mineralogy

Let’s take a very brief and incomplete (and likely incompetent, as I am out over my skis here) look at mineralogy.

I’ve talked about rocks a lot but not so much about what they’re made of. If you look closely–perhaps it will take a microscope–at an igneous rock (one that cooled from the molten state) you’ll see it’s made up of a bunch of different kinds of crystals. Crystals form when a chemical compound comes out of solution and the individual molecules line up in a regular array.

Some rocks are just one big crystal. Others are multiple crystals of the same thing.

The compounds that make the crystals are minerals (and one of their characteristics is how the crystals are shaped).

What are those compounds? Let’s set the stage a bit. If you take the outer layer of the Earth, the Earth’s crust, and analyze a completely average piece of it…it’s 46.1 percent oxygen by weight. Oxygen! There is much, much, much more oxygen beneath your feet than above your head in the air. Oxygen is also the third most abundant element in the universe as a whole–after hydrogen and helium.

Coming in second at 28.2 percent is silicon. Then aluminum at 8.23%, iron at 5.63%, calcium at 4.15%, sodium at 2.36%, magnesium at 2.33% potassium at 2.09%, titanium at 0.565%…and everything else is at 1/7th of a percent or less. At the bottom end you have rhenium at 7/10ths of one part per billion. (However two gases, krypton and xenon, also show up at even lower percentages, and a bunch of transient radioactive elements are lower still than that.)

The ones at the top of the list don’t ever show up in pure elemental or “native” form; they’re pretty reactive. Minerals will be largely (but very luckily for us, not completely) formed of these elements.

The elements in general are divided into groups according to the “Goldschmidt Classification.” The groups are “lithophile” (rock loving), “Siderophile” (iron loving), “chalcophile” (bronze loving), and “atmophile” (atmosphere loving). The group an element is in is a huge determiner of its fate. Lithophile and chalcophile elements both appear predominantly near the Earth’s surface, in the crust; with the chalcophile elements often combining with sulfur. Siderophile elements largely sank, with almost all of the iron, towards the Earth’s core.

(There is a very slick wikipedia graphic for this, a periodic table colored by Goldschmidt classification…but it’s actually a table rather than an image and I was unsuccessful in getting it copied over here. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification )

There are officially 6,118 mineral species known to man today. Minerals must be naturally occurring and forming by natural or geological processes, must be a solid substance (with the exception of native mercury). Water and carbon dioxide are not minerals even when they show up embedded in rocks, but water ice in glaciers is a mineral. A mineral must have a well defined crystal structure. (This ends up excluding things like obsidian which don’t have a crystal structure.) And the chemical composition must be well defined. However, that could include mixtures of similar compounds; sometimes one element will substitute for another of similar size and chemistry to one extent or another.

There are a number of different ways minerals can be classified, based on hardness, color, crystalline structure, cleavage (i.e. which planes it will split on most cleanly), specific gravity (galena, a lead ore, is very dense, for instance–over seven times that of water whereas the typical rock is in the 2.5-3.5 range)…and by chemistry. But this is far from straightforward, since nothing is pure. For instance a mineral whose structure is largely silicon will often have an aluminum atom substituted for the silicon; sometimes this is a regular substitution, making a distinct chemical series.

Minerals fall into a number of different groups; the most common by far is silicates; these are minerals formed by different arrangements of the [SiO₄]^4- tetrahedron, one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms.

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, after all oxygen and silicon make up most of rocks. There are a simply staggering number of ways to combine these tetrahedra at the corners (where an oxygen atom will end being shared by two tetrahedra); chains, rings, lattices…just for instance:

The most basic of these is quartz, consisting of nothing but silicon and oxygen. Since each oxygen atom is shared by two silicon atoms, the formula ends up being SiO₂.

Quartz, when absolutely pure, is clear as glass. Different impurities will give it colors, smoky quartz and amethyst being examples, but there are many more.

And in some cases other elements are interspersed with the tetrahedra, or sometimes the silicon is partially replaced by other elements. This can alter the structure as well as the composition.

The most common of the silicates are a grouping called the feldspars, where Al3+ substitutes for the Si4+, but this creates a charge imbalance that requires other elements added in as cations. You end up with [AlSi₃O₈]^– or [Al₂Si₂O₈]^2-. In other cases silicates can form in sheets, like mica.

If you haven’t realized this by now, it turns out that silicates are bewilderingly complex. For a deep dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicate_mineral.

In other groups we have native elements. For example gold, silver, and copper appear in native form as nuggets. There are also platinum nuggets. But also there are diamonds and graphite, both forms of native carbon. Sulfur also appears near volcanic vents. And in many cases the nuggets aren’t pure but are alloys, but still a lump of metal, rather than a “rock.”

Next we have sulfides, compounds of metals and sulfur, famously iron pyrite (fools gold), red cinnabar (a mercury ore). Sometimes tellurium, arsenic, or selenium will substitute for some or even all of the sulfur.

Oxides are metals combined with oxygen, such as hematite (iron), bauxites (aluminum), magnetite (iron again).

Halides are those where a halogen (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine) is the main anion; table salt is the most common example, with chlorine combined with sodium.

Carbonate minerals have a carbonate [CO₃]^2- group in them. They will react with acids; so field geologists will often have a small vial of acid to test for them. The most common is calcium carbonate…also known as calcite, the main component of limestone. This is weakly soluble in water, leading to the formation of cave systems.

There are sulfates (distinct from sulfides mentioned above) with the sulfate anion, [SO₄]^2-, combined with something else.

The last common group is the phosphates, with a [PO₄]^3- unit, combined with something else. These minerals are what our bones and teeth are made out of.

It’s a gigantic mess, honestly; and it gets more and more complicated when it turns out that a mineral can be a mixture of, say, two different sulfates mixed together; the formula ends up including a bracket with two or three different atoms specified because they are intermixed in some proportion.

I have not even scratched the surface of this topic (and those familiar with hardness testing will see the pun). I may not have said anything wrong in this section, but even if we’re that fortunate, I’m sure a real mineralogist would find much to complain about, important things left out, inconsistent “depth” of the dives I took, and so on. I know I said next to nothing about crystal structure and I may try to rectify that some day.

Back to the Historical Narrative

OK so back to the story: By the mid 1800s geology had made huge strides to systematize the variety of rocks and landscapes we see here on Earth. Geologists had even developed the ability to describe what had happened in the past in some arbitrarily picked location. Glaciers, lakes, oceans, desert…all had left telltale signs in the rock. They saw a world of mostly slow change…but with the occasional disasters, local in scope not worldwide.

They had even realized the Earth must be far older than previously thought; the events they could read in the rocks simply could not have happened fast enough to fit within a few thousand years of time.

Impressive work. There were obviously a lot of unsolved problems (like how it could be possible that former sea floor bottom ended up high in the Alps), but still a lot learned.

Physics and astronomy (closely associated with each other) were pretty much the most successful and advanced branches of scientific knowledge. Were astronomers and physicists at least somewhat impressed with what geologists had come up with?

Perhaps but in one key respect the answer was probably more like, “You gotta be shitting me.”

You see the physicists and astronomers of the mid 1800s couldn’t possibly see how the Sun could be old; if the Sun weren’t old neither could the Earth be old. There was simply no way to power the sun for those lengths of time. However the geologic evidence was simply overwhelming.

Beyond suspecting that geologists were smoking something that was distinctly not a mineral (and vice versa from the geologists’ point of view), there was little that could be done. Tons of hard evidence (i.e., rocks) vs. quite well established kinetics and thermal physics. Neither of them could be shaken.

So what was the cause of this disconnect?

In 1862, William Thomson (1st Baron Kelvin…after whom the Kelvin scale is named), published calculations that assumed the Earth had started out completely molten, then computed how long it would take to cool to what we see today. His answer was 20 – 400 million years. OK, that seems a bit low to geologists, but not horrifically so. (He did not account for convection inside the Earth, which would increase the number…nor for other factors he simply couldn’t have imagined, which I’ll get to.)

The big problem was that he also computed how long the sun could have been shining at its present brightness, if it derived all of its energy from gravitational contraction. And that answer was 20 million years. It agreed with his Earth calculation at the low end so that made sense–Thomson probably reasoned that the Earth therefore had to be 20 million years old, but geologists (and biologists) simply couldn’t believe the Earth was that young. Other physicists (Hermann von Helmholz and Simon Newcomb) got similar values of 22 and 18 million years, respectively.

Other possible sources of solar energy were combustion and impacting comets and asteroids. The first was ridiculous. If the entire Sun, huge as it is, were a burning pile of coal, it would be gone within a couple of thousand years at the rate it would have to be burning to be as luminous as it is. This is not even long enough to carry us from the Great Pyramid to Julius Caesar, much less to today. Asteroid impacts sounds more promising, until one realizes there’d have to be so many of them that surely Earth would be catching a lot more of them than we actually are getting. And it was only good enough for a few hundred thousand years. The other flaw was that the sun would be increasing with size as more matter accumulated in it, and that imposed a strict time limit too…after a certain amount of time the Sun would simply be bigger than we see it.

Another tack taken by physicists and astronomers was to use the moon. George H. Darwin (son of Charles “the” Darwin) was an astronomer, figured out that if the Earth and Moon had split apart while still molten, tidal forces would have created our current situation with a 24 hour day after 56 million years. This may not look like it to you, but given the sorts of approximations that both Darwin’s and Kelvin’s calculations enailed, that’s actually close enough to Kelvin’s number that it appeared that both of them were likely on the right track. (When two totally different methods of computation give similar answers, that’s a powerful argument that the actual answer is pretty close to the ones we computed.) Yet another tack, computing how long it took for the oceans to accumulate the salt they contain, based on erosion of rocks, gave an answer of 80-100 million years for the age of the oceans.

When you see an apparent contradiction like this, something is missing from your mental picture. Or perhaps you have a wrong premise. Because an actual contradiction cannot exist.

And, as it turned out, one mineral, when it was discovered, turned out to be the beginning of the path not just to resolving this, but fulfilling another thing that was on the geologists’ wish list–one they never thought they’d get. Like the kid who doesn’t bother asking Santa for the really expensive toy for Christmas…but Santa read his mind and he gets it.

The mineral is an oxide, one called pitchblende. This was first described in 1772 by F. E. Brueckmann. In 1789 M. Klaproth worked with this stuff and discovered the element uranium.

[Uranium oxide has been in mosaic glass from Roman times; clearly they’d found some of the ore and experimented to see what it would do to color glass. However, we don’t have written records of the Romans recognizing it as a distinct material.]

Here’s some nice big crystals of pitchblende:

Uranium was nothing special, just another of a bunch of metals being discovered around this time. Along with such other favorites as cobalt, nickel, manganese, tungsten, niobium, tantalum, and chromium. Curiously, pitchblende also includes some lead, without fail. No such thing as “pure” uranium oxide pitchblende. That seems kind of weird because lead and uranium are chemically quite different.

Flawed analyses led to uranium’s atomic weight being calculated at 156 or so; later on the mistake was realized and the atomic weight was corrected to 238, far above anything else known at the time. Kind of interesting to geeks; no one else cared.

In 1895 this changed. And so did the world.

Henri Becquerel was trying to see if uranium salts, known to fluoresce in visible light, also fluoresced in X ray frequences. (X Rays had been discovered the year before by Röntgen.) [As a reminder, fluorescent things will glow in bright colors for a while after being exposed to ultraviolet light. This can actually be used to identify some minerals. Becquerel wanted to see if they also emitted X-rays alongside the visible light.] He’d expose the compounds to sunlight, then set them next to wrapped photographic plates. If the plates fogged, he would conclude the uranium compounds were giving off X-rays after being “charged” by the sun. Then he had days of cloudy weather, so he put the uranium salts and wrapped plates in a drawer while he awaited sunny days. Ultimately he decided, what the Hell, and developed the plates without exposing the uranium salts to sunlight, and found that they had fogged anyway. Well this was new!! Further experimentation established that uranium emitted strong radiation, all the time, no matter what.

Even more experimentation established that the uranium was turning into lead as it did this. Which is why pitchblende always has some lead in it, even though lead is very different from uranium, chemically.

This led to our current picture of the structure of an atom–which up to then had not been proven to exist. (The final piece of proof was supplied by Albert Einstein in 1905, the Annus Mirabilis)

That is a very long story. Detailed here (9 – End of Classical Physics (Rays & Radiation)):

2021·06·26 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (13 – Ernest Rutherford):

2021·08·07 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (17 – Nuclear Physics Finds a Hammer):

2021·09·04 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (19 – Antimatter):

2021·09·18 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (20 – The Little Neutral One (Neutrinos)):

2021·10·02 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

One key thing to note is that this new “radioactivity” was extremely energy intense, far more so than burning coal, and now we had a hints of a power source that would allow the sun to shine for hundreds of millions–even BILLIONS–of years.

And this is indeed the case, as described here (22 – Powering Stars):

2021·10·23 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And the world was never the same, because this ultimately led to nuclear weapons.

But for our purposes here, the main effect is that now there was no more contradiction about how old the Earth might be. The Sun could indeed be old enough for an old Earth.

And Now We Can Measure It

Surprise! We also now had a way to measure the age of some rocks, to put actual numbers on things.

To explain this adequately (given the fact that there are charlatans out there who try to fling mud on this, and some of you believe them), I’m going to try to do a Science For Senators review of radioactivity and nuclei. It’s a bit densely packed since I’m not telling a story here. (The story was in all those posts above.)

Matter is made up of atoms, very roughly a hundred picometers (a picometer is a trillionth of a meter) across. Most of this volume is taken up by electrons (which have a negative electrical charge) that are bound to a positively charged nucleus (plural, nuclei). The nucleus contains almost all of the mass of the atom yet occupies a space only a few femtometers (a femtometer is a quadrillionth of a meter across); roughly 1/10,000th the diameter of the atom as a whole.

The nucleus, in turn consists of protons–positively charged particles–and neutrons–neutrally charged particles. Other than the charge, these two particles are very similar to each other–the neutron is just a bit more massive–and they’re collectively referred to as nucleons. (Neutrons are blue, protons red in the diagram below…but they don’t actually have color and they’re not actually shaped like little hard spheres, so the diagram is notional.)

As it turns out the number of protons in a nucleus (the “atomic number”) determines what chemical element it is. One proton: hydrogen. Six: carbon. Eight: oxygen. Twenty-six: iron. Forty-seven: silver. Seventy-nine: gold. Eighty-two: lead. Ninety-two: uranium. (Plus all of the other numbers in between of course.) In order to balance out, an atom will have the same number of electrons as protons, at least until it starts sharing or even giving or taking electrons with, to, or from other atoms–which is what chemistry is all about.

The number of neutrons, on the other hand can vary, even within an element. Just for instance, most uranium nuclei have 146 neutrons in them, but some have only 143. This has very little effect on the chemistry, but it is possible to very painstakingly sort these out. The two different types of uranium are described by their mass numbers, the total number of nucleons. 92+146=238, and 92+143=235; uranium-238 and uranium-235, respectively. These different-weight forms of the same element are called isotopes.

As it turns out radioactivity, when it happens, happens to nuclei. There are two main kinds of radioactivity that matter for our purposes here, alpha decay and beta decay.

Alpha decay is when a large nucleus basically pukes up a helium nucleus (containing two protons and two neutrons–mass number of 4). Since the nucleus gives up two protons in doing this, it changes to another element; this should therefore happen five times as uranium turns to lead, changing the atomic number from 92 to 82. Except that that’s not actually right; it turns out to be eight times. That’s because uranium-238 is becoming lead-206; that’s a difference of 32 mass units and eight alpha decays does that.

The reason the atomic number changes by ten rather than 16 (two per alpha decay) is that there is also beta decay. In this kind of radioactive decay, a neutron turns into a proton, ejecting an electron (which flies off into the distance, so you can basically forget about it) and a neutrino (which flies off away forever, so you can really forget about it). The effect is to leave the mass number unchanged…but it increases the atomic number by one (we have one more proton than we used to). To make up the discrepancy noted above, uranium, in turning to lead, must undergo six beta decays.

Technically speaking what I just described is negative beta decay, because it spits out a negatively charged particle. The reason why one might to be anal about this is that there’s actually a different kind of beta decay that may come into play, though…and that’s positive beta decay, where a proton spits out an anti-electron (“positron”–yes, this is antimatter) and turns into a neutron (the exact opposite change from the first kind of beta decay). This causes the nucleus to go down one in atomic number, again without changing the mass number.

Uranium and thorium (atomic number 90) undergo alpha decay, as do a lot of the things they turn into on the way to becoming lead (as do many of the intermediate elements in between and on the way). A lot of the intermediate products undergo beta decay. That’s all stuff at the high end of the periodic table, though.

It turns out that a lot of much lighter elements…ones we thing of as stable…are at least partially made up of isotopes that do one or the other form of beta decay (there are dozens of examples). Even potassium has a long-lived isotope (potassium-40 or ⁴⁰K) that decays, in fact it can decay two different ways: negative beta decay or “electron capture” where a proton absorbs an electron. The first turns it into calcium-40, the second turns it into argon-40.

Our atmosphere is about one percent argon, and that argon is almost all argon-40. The sun’s argon–which presumably came from the nebula that condensed to form the solar system–is almost all argon-36, which leads to the conclusion that none of the Earth’s original argon is still around, and all of the argon in the atmosphere is actually from the decay of potassium-40.

There is just one thing I haven’t mentioned yet. Alpha and beta decay occur at constant rates. The rate is different for each nucleus, but constant for that nucleus. (All sorts of attempts have been made in laboratories to change the rate…with one oddball exception, absolutely nothing happened.) It’s a proportional thing; over some period of time, half of the atoms of some radioactive isotope will decay. You’re then left with a sample half the size of your original sample…and half of that will be gone after you wait the same period of time again. And so on. This period of time is known as the half life, because half of the atoms are gone after that period of time.

Of the things I’ve touched on, here are their half lives: Uranium-235: 703.8 million years. Potassium-40: 1251 million years. Uranium-238: 4458 million years. And Thorium-232: 14,050 million years.

And now maybe you can see how this might be useful to geologists. Find a rock with some uranium, thorium, or potassium in it. (Potassium most likely; it’s common compared to the others.) Then determine how much “daughter” product is in the rock. It helps if the daughter product is such it wouldn’t have been in the rock when it solidified. E.g., a zircon crystal, which might pick up uranium impurities as it crystalizes, but will positively reject lead atoms. Any lead in the zircon crystal can only have come from uranium decay. Count atoms (yes, you might have to literally count atoms) to determine how much daughter product there is, versus parent isotope. Figure out how much decay has taken place and compare to the half life.

You now know the age of the crystal. Not the relative age, the absolute age, of the crystal.

But there are a lot of details with this (including the fact that dating sedimentary rock is dicey), and I will cover some of them next time. These details, when fully considered only serve to make these methods rock solid.

Notice

I have a complex project coming up IRL, and I absolutely have to reallocate my “spare” time. This will mean less laughing at online flerfs, but it also means science posts will be infrequent and/or unpredictable.

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.