I love geology!
So my latest existential drama derives from GEOLOGY!
I always thought geology was that dumb chapter we never got to in the back of our junior high science textbooks, but it turns out volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and shit are just as cool UNDER THE SURFACE as they are ON THE SURFACE. And cool's probably the wrong word to describe them but you get what I mean.
Okay I'm sorry I need to start this entry a little bit earlier. Like, last year.
So last year, I hear that Amazon is offering this service that sends you anything you order with two-day delivery and there was some other stuff FREE for college students AKA those who still had an active .edu e-mail address. So, duh, I signed up for it.
The service (called Amazon Prime) is usually $70/year, which is like JUST TOO BIG of a "yeesh" amount for me to write off.
But Amazon.
Lovely, lovely, customer-heavy-petting, marketing-driven, savvy and long-con Amazon.
For students coming off of the free Amazon Prime, they'd offer a discount. $40 for the year, which INCLUDES a selection of 5,000 Amazon Instant Videos.
That includes all of Star Trek, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, some other shitty TV Shows. Decent, decades-old movies. It's basically like Netflix except with none of the bullshit and a search function that you have some degree of actual control over.
And even at $70/year--if Amazon keeps beefing up its library--that's still less than Netflix, which is $8/month for the same service, aka $84 for the year.
That is Amazon, baby. Doing things other people invented and perfected for better and cheaper!
Anyhoo, because I have defined my Netflix user experience to be "find the dumbest/least offensive thing to drool in front of for the time it takes me to fall asleep," I decided to use the new platform as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf. I was going to DO SOMETHING POSITIVE for myself, DAMMIT. I was going to BETTER myself.
That started by giving an invective feminist reading of Dangerous Liaisons. But then?
I started watching nature documentaries.
I started with one about Yellowstone. Did you know Yellowstone is pretty much the scariest fucking thing on the North American continent? I mean, it was a pretty standard nature documentary in which they film a family of wolves/elk throughout the year and make you sympathize with each of them to really *understand* the brutality and moral ambiguity that is Mother Nature, but then there was this little bit about exactly what Yellowstone IS, and why it's so fucking important.
So to start, Yellowstone is where like, Old Faithful is? And this cool as shit natural spring (Grand Prismatic Spring):
All the different colors are due to the different kinds of bacterial fauna that can survive at the varying temperature levels. That spring is fucking boiling hot. Some kid fell in and like, died.
Yellowstone is FULL of these things! All of these geothermal areas that indicate something huge, awesome, and sinister lurking just beneath the surface~~~~*~
You see, when the first explorers came to Yellowstone, they noticed all of these indicators of geothermal activity. And they spent some time looking for the crater where the volcanic pressure would finally erupt when it reached its boiling point.
But they didn't find one.
You know why?
THE ENTIRE FUCKING PARK IS A VOLCANIC CRATER.
Every 600,000 years or so, the entire park of Yellowstone erupts in a volcanic explosion, sending a cloud of ash all over the western half of North America. It's enough to blot out the sun, to change climate patterns. Some people think it's what caused the last ice age.
You know when the last time it went off was?
640,000 years ago.
And not only that, the ground under Yellowstone is rising. Like, seven centimeters a year. It's all going up.
IT'S ALL GOING UP SOON.
idk why, but I'm letting myself worry about this. Like what the fuck am I going to do if Wyoming erupts in an explosion of fire and brimstone? If only I'd filled up the bathtub and built a shelter full of ramen noodles.
I guess I was most freaked out that I didn't know about it. I thought Yellowstone was just some arbitrary forest we decided to protect because Theodore Roosevelt liked hunting or something. I didn't think it was something so unique, and so utterly terrifying.
So of course this inspired a brand-new fascination with geology.
And I found another nature documentary called "Amazing Planet," narrated by Patricia Clarkson, but I didn't know that when I started. Kind of like how I didn't realize the bad guy in Conan the Barbarian was General Quaritch until the damn movie was almost over.
I have to stop watching Half in the Bag, I just want to see every movie they do so it feels like I'm in on the joke BUT THEY'RE ALL SO TERRIBLE!
TANGENT! Anyway, this documentary was even BETTER. Because I don't know what it is! Maybe this whole college-culture perception of Geology of like, "rocks for jocks." Maybe because of the aforementioned last-chapter-in-the-textbook-we-never-got-to syndrome. I just never felt like geology must have been interesting because no one ever wanted to focus on it. And somehow, that perception of disinterest led me to believe that there's just not that much to know.
For instance, Pangea. I feel like Pangea is that term you throw out when you want to convince people you've heard of geology or plate tectonics or something. Or maybe if you're having an argument about evolution, like "PANGEA! That's why there's marsupials in North America!"
For some reason, I just thought the world was born, there was Pangea, and then it split apart into the seven continents we know and love today. Like, the entire geologic past of the Earth can be summed up with that one word. Pangea.
Pangea is NOT it.
Pangea is simply the second-most recent continental configuration we've had.
Check this out:
This is actually from the documentary I watched, except they replaced like the informative narration with Grieg? Whatever bro.
Anyway, this isn't even the full history either. Like I can't even remember, but there were like 6-7 things BEFORE Pangea. The supercontinent has broken apart and come together LOTS OF TIMES BEFORE.
And I don't know what it did, but I just had this weird, awesome, existential epiphany that made me realize how insignificant and temporary humanity is. This is just a MOMENT in history. This is not the end, the geologic movement of plates and magma and continents is not some telliological process to deliver humanity to Earth. That video is just on pause for the time it takes humanity to rise and fall. We just wound up here because things worked out a certain way, and when those conditions go away, so will we.
That was the first part, anyway. It was a three-part documentary, and the second part was kind of boring, it was about like, erosion or something. There was a whole part about the sound sand makes in the desert, idk I was falling asleep.
But the third part was about oceans.
And I kind of have to hand it to the filmmakers for presenting all of this information in a completely non-judgmental, scientific way. Because I feel like phrases like "climate change" and "greenhouse gases" have become so politicized that I just start feeling guilty for liking air conditioning and hot showers whenever I hear them.
But do you want to know what happened two billion years ago?
Two billion years ago, the first life on planet Earth appeared. They were like photosynthesizing bacteria that changed carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Carbon dioxide is a good greenhouse gas. And all that really means is not that you need to buy a hybrid car, it just means that it's a good insulator. It traps the sun's energy which allows Earth to hold onto heat.
Oxygen is a poor greenhouse gas.
When these little bacteria started multiplying in large numbers, they started converting all of the carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, that had been released with all of the churning and movement under Earth's cooling crust, into oxygen.
The entire outer surface of planet Earth froze.
They fucked over Earth THE EXACT OPPOSITE WAY WE'RE FUCKING OVER EARTH.
And it wasn't just like that kind of pussy "oh, it snowed in Mexico and there were woolly mammoths" ice age that Dreamworks cashed in on. I'm talking like, all water on the entire surface of the Earth froze half a mile down.
That should have been it. Without being able to rely on the sun for energy, life on planet Earth should have ended.
But it didn't.
Deep beneath the surface of the ice, at the very bottoms of the oceans, were these like, exhaust pipes that led to the mantle and spit up boiling hot water and ash. And crabs and other geothermal organisms thrived here, and once enough of that CO2 rose to the surface, the ice age ended.
I'm not sure that guilt is the right thing to evoke when discussing climate change and greenhouse gases and Inconvenient Truths and all of that. I always felt bad that we were going to kill kittens and puppies and pandas. And then there's James Cameron catastrophizing, this whole scorched-Earth thing, that one species is capable of fucking over an entire planet so it can't support life at all anymore, like humanity is going to completely void Earth as a life-producing entity.
Boy, we are just not that powerful.
I'm not saying climate change isn't real, or that we shouldn't try to preserve the planet the way it is. Damn straight we better. Human intervention IS changing the surface of planet Earth.
But it's nothing to feel bad about. It's nothing to feel guilty over. And there's certainly no reason to worry that we're going to end all life as we know it.
Not all life. Just human life.
The way I see it, we are really no different than those first bacteria that changed CO2 into O2. Just doin' how we do. And look, oh shit, it broke everything. And I mean, it's not like the little bacteria know any better, but it's also not like there's something inherently evil about utilizing the resources of Earth to better our lives. That's what life is. That's what life does.
And yes. Our influence changes things. But if we don't fix those things, life will go on. It will be different. And in hundreds of millions of years, when the balance starts shifting back, maybe Earth will be ready to support human life again, or something that at least resembles human life somehow. Intelligent life. Or maybe not.
It's crazy, because even if we DID stop polluting the atmosphere and somehow curbed the effects of global warming, the Earth is going to be such a radically different place in hundreds of millions of years regardless. Go up and watch that video again.
In a hundred million years, there's not going to BE a Mediterranean Sea.
That is the fucking birthplace of modern civilization and it's going to be GONE.
Not only that, but the documentary at the very end talked about how the strait of Gibraltar used to connect to Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea dried up and caused all kinds of droughts and weather problems in Africa. And when the dam was breached, and water flooded in, how grasslands grew out over Africa and allowed humans to come down out of the trees.
Just imagine how different the world is going to be without a MEDITERRANEAN SEA.
Then, keep watching. By the end of the video, all of the continents come together in a new Pangea. WHAT'S THE WEATHER GOING TO BE LIKE THEN?
idk. It's fucking crazy. Humanity has had a good run so far, couple hundred thousand years or so.
But how long can we really expect or HOPE to last? Even if we fix our own behavior, there's so much other shit going on outside of our control.
I always used to think the apocalypse was a fun fictional prompt, but not much more than that. Probably that little factoid from my econ professor that was something like, "ever since the Industrial Revolution, the world economy has gone up by 2% every year."
And that was meant to placate our anxiety about the erraticism of the market. That stupid little day-to-day spikes and drops don't have much of an impact on the big picture.
This is the first time I kind of stepped back and realized, the 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, on a much bigger, geologic, or even universal scale, is an erratic spike. To us it seems archaeological, but to the Egyptians? To the dinosaurs? To the little oxygen-farting bacteria two billion years ago?
It's a blip.
And who knows what it's going to look like in two hundred million years?
Or 150?
Or ten?
I don't know. Those are my thoughts from the last week.
I always thought geology was that dumb chapter we never got to in the back of our junior high science textbooks, but it turns out volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and shit are just as cool UNDER THE SURFACE as they are ON THE SURFACE. And cool's probably the wrong word to describe them but you get what I mean.
Okay I'm sorry I need to start this entry a little bit earlier. Like, last year.
So last year, I hear that Amazon is offering this service that sends you anything you order with two-day delivery and there was some other stuff FREE for college students AKA those who still had an active .edu e-mail address. So, duh, I signed up for it.
The service (called Amazon Prime) is usually $70/year, which is like JUST TOO BIG of a "yeesh" amount for me to write off.
But Amazon.
Lovely, lovely, customer-heavy-petting, marketing-driven, savvy and long-con Amazon.
For students coming off of the free Amazon Prime, they'd offer a discount. $40 for the year, which INCLUDES a selection of 5,000 Amazon Instant Videos.
That includes all of Star Trek, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, some other shitty TV Shows. Decent, decades-old movies. It's basically like Netflix except with none of the bullshit and a search function that you have some degree of actual control over.
And even at $70/year--if Amazon keeps beefing up its library--that's still less than Netflix, which is $8/month for the same service, aka $84 for the year.
That is Amazon, baby. Doing things other people invented and perfected for better and cheaper!
Anyhoo, because I have defined my Netflix user experience to be "find the dumbest/least offensive thing to drool in front of for the time it takes me to fall asleep," I decided to use the new platform as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf. I was going to DO SOMETHING POSITIVE for myself, DAMMIT. I was going to BETTER myself.
That started by giving an invective feminist reading of Dangerous Liaisons. But then?
I started watching nature documentaries.
I started with one about Yellowstone. Did you know Yellowstone is pretty much the scariest fucking thing on the North American continent? I mean, it was a pretty standard nature documentary in which they film a family of wolves/elk throughout the year and make you sympathize with each of them to really *understand* the brutality and moral ambiguity that is Mother Nature, but then there was this little bit about exactly what Yellowstone IS, and why it's so fucking important.
So to start, Yellowstone is where like, Old Faithful is? And this cool as shit natural spring (Grand Prismatic Spring):
All the different colors are due to the different kinds of bacterial fauna that can survive at the varying temperature levels. That spring is fucking boiling hot. Some kid fell in and like, died.
Yellowstone is FULL of these things! All of these geothermal areas that indicate something huge, awesome, and sinister lurking just beneath the surface~~~~*~
You see, when the first explorers came to Yellowstone, they noticed all of these indicators of geothermal activity. And they spent some time looking for the crater where the volcanic pressure would finally erupt when it reached its boiling point.
But they didn't find one.
You know why?
THE ENTIRE FUCKING PARK IS A VOLCANIC CRATER.
Every 600,000 years or so, the entire park of Yellowstone erupts in a volcanic explosion, sending a cloud of ash all over the western half of North America. It's enough to blot out the sun, to change climate patterns. Some people think it's what caused the last ice age.
You know when the last time it went off was?
640,000 years ago.
And not only that, the ground under Yellowstone is rising. Like, seven centimeters a year. It's all going up.
IT'S ALL GOING UP SOON.
idk why, but I'm letting myself worry about this. Like what the fuck am I going to do if Wyoming erupts in an explosion of fire and brimstone? If only I'd filled up the bathtub and built a shelter full of ramen noodles.
I guess I was most freaked out that I didn't know about it. I thought Yellowstone was just some arbitrary forest we decided to protect because Theodore Roosevelt liked hunting or something. I didn't think it was something so unique, and so utterly terrifying.
So of course this inspired a brand-new fascination with geology.
And I found another nature documentary called "Amazing Planet," narrated by Patricia Clarkson, but I didn't know that when I started. Kind of like how I didn't realize the bad guy in Conan the Barbarian was General Quaritch until the damn movie was almost over.
I have to stop watching Half in the Bag, I just want to see every movie they do so it feels like I'm in on the joke BUT THEY'RE ALL SO TERRIBLE!
TANGENT! Anyway, this documentary was even BETTER. Because I don't know what it is! Maybe this whole college-culture perception of Geology of like, "rocks for jocks." Maybe because of the aforementioned last-chapter-in-the-textbook-we-never-got-to syndrome. I just never felt like geology must have been interesting because no one ever wanted to focus on it. And somehow, that perception of disinterest led me to believe that there's just not that much to know.
For instance, Pangea. I feel like Pangea is that term you throw out when you want to convince people you've heard of geology or plate tectonics or something. Or maybe if you're having an argument about evolution, like "PANGEA! That's why there's marsupials in North America!"
For some reason, I just thought the world was born, there was Pangea, and then it split apart into the seven continents we know and love today. Like, the entire geologic past of the Earth can be summed up with that one word. Pangea.
Pangea is NOT it.
Pangea is simply the second-most recent continental configuration we've had.
Check this out:
Click to viewThis is actually from the documentary I watched, except they replaced like the informative narration with Grieg? Whatever bro.
Anyway, this isn't even the full history either. Like I can't even remember, but there were like 6-7 things BEFORE Pangea. The supercontinent has broken apart and come together LOTS OF TIMES BEFORE.
And I don't know what it did, but I just had this weird, awesome, existential epiphany that made me realize how insignificant and temporary humanity is. This is just a MOMENT in history. This is not the end, the geologic movement of plates and magma and continents is not some telliological process to deliver humanity to Earth. That video is just on pause for the time it takes humanity to rise and fall. We just wound up here because things worked out a certain way, and when those conditions go away, so will we.
That was the first part, anyway. It was a three-part documentary, and the second part was kind of boring, it was about like, erosion or something. There was a whole part about the sound sand makes in the desert, idk I was falling asleep.
But the third part was about oceans.
And I kind of have to hand it to the filmmakers for presenting all of this information in a completely non-judgmental, scientific way. Because I feel like phrases like "climate change" and "greenhouse gases" have become so politicized that I just start feeling guilty for liking air conditioning and hot showers whenever I hear them.
But do you want to know what happened two billion years ago?
Two billion years ago, the first life on planet Earth appeared. They were like photosynthesizing bacteria that changed carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Carbon dioxide is a good greenhouse gas. And all that really means is not that you need to buy a hybrid car, it just means that it's a good insulator. It traps the sun's energy which allows Earth to hold onto heat.
Oxygen is a poor greenhouse gas.
When these little bacteria started multiplying in large numbers, they started converting all of the carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, that had been released with all of the churning and movement under Earth's cooling crust, into oxygen.
The entire outer surface of planet Earth froze.
They fucked over Earth THE EXACT OPPOSITE WAY WE'RE FUCKING OVER EARTH.
And it wasn't just like that kind of pussy "oh, it snowed in Mexico and there were woolly mammoths" ice age that Dreamworks cashed in on. I'm talking like, all water on the entire surface of the Earth froze half a mile down.
That should have been it. Without being able to rely on the sun for energy, life on planet Earth should have ended.
But it didn't.
Deep beneath the surface of the ice, at the very bottoms of the oceans, were these like, exhaust pipes that led to the mantle and spit up boiling hot water and ash. And crabs and other geothermal organisms thrived here, and once enough of that CO2 rose to the surface, the ice age ended.
I'm not sure that guilt is the right thing to evoke when discussing climate change and greenhouse gases and Inconvenient Truths and all of that. I always felt bad that we were going to kill kittens and puppies and pandas. And then there's James Cameron catastrophizing, this whole scorched-Earth thing, that one species is capable of fucking over an entire planet so it can't support life at all anymore, like humanity is going to completely void Earth as a life-producing entity.
Boy, we are just not that powerful.
I'm not saying climate change isn't real, or that we shouldn't try to preserve the planet the way it is. Damn straight we better. Human intervention IS changing the surface of planet Earth.
But it's nothing to feel bad about. It's nothing to feel guilty over. And there's certainly no reason to worry that we're going to end all life as we know it.
Not all life. Just human life.
The way I see it, we are really no different than those first bacteria that changed CO2 into O2. Just doin' how we do. And look, oh shit, it broke everything. And I mean, it's not like the little bacteria know any better, but it's also not like there's something inherently evil about utilizing the resources of Earth to better our lives. That's what life is. That's what life does.
And yes. Our influence changes things. But if we don't fix those things, life will go on. It will be different. And in hundreds of millions of years, when the balance starts shifting back, maybe Earth will be ready to support human life again, or something that at least resembles human life somehow. Intelligent life. Or maybe not.
It's crazy, because even if we DID stop polluting the atmosphere and somehow curbed the effects of global warming, the Earth is going to be such a radically different place in hundreds of millions of years regardless. Go up and watch that video again.
In a hundred million years, there's not going to BE a Mediterranean Sea.
That is the fucking birthplace of modern civilization and it's going to be GONE.
Not only that, but the documentary at the very end talked about how the strait of Gibraltar used to connect to Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea dried up and caused all kinds of droughts and weather problems in Africa. And when the dam was breached, and water flooded in, how grasslands grew out over Africa and allowed humans to come down out of the trees.
Just imagine how different the world is going to be without a MEDITERRANEAN SEA.
Then, keep watching. By the end of the video, all of the continents come together in a new Pangea. WHAT'S THE WEATHER GOING TO BE LIKE THEN?
idk. It's fucking crazy. Humanity has had a good run so far, couple hundred thousand years or so.
But how long can we really expect or HOPE to last? Even if we fix our own behavior, there's so much other shit going on outside of our control.
I always used to think the apocalypse was a fun fictional prompt, but not much more than that. Probably that little factoid from my econ professor that was something like, "ever since the Industrial Revolution, the world economy has gone up by 2% every year."
And that was meant to placate our anxiety about the erraticism of the market. That stupid little day-to-day spikes and drops don't have much of an impact on the big picture.
This is the first time I kind of stepped back and realized, the 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, on a much bigger, geologic, or even universal scale, is an erratic spike. To us it seems archaeological, but to the Egyptians? To the dinosaurs? To the little oxygen-farting bacteria two billion years ago?
It's a blip.
And who knows what it's going to look like in two hundred million years?
Or 150?
Or ten?
I don't know. Those are my thoughts from the last week.