Our two-night stay in Florence is ending all too soon. I can't figure out how to upload photos on this rent-a-computer (it's hard enough to find the correct keys for typing because the Euro-keyboard is loaded with accent marks where other keys usually are), but if you were looking at a photo I'd posted, it might be of a statue of da Vinci or Galileo, or one of the three million (!!!) animal specimens at Europe's oldest and largest natural history museum, or our funky art hotel, or the two of us sketching at the Uffizi art museum, or the dramatic third-floor apartment fire we stumbled upon, or maybe two glasses of Chianti next to two plates of steaming homemade pasta. We will post photos eventually. We have found some treasures to bring back to The Naturalist's Notebook...and wish we had room in a suitcase for others. I made it to a more than 200-year-old astronomical observatory and tried to figure out the principles behind a solar calendar inlaid in the floor (I had inadvertently joined a tour group, but the guide was speaking Italian). Time to head off to the bus station and a trip to Siena. On Tuesday we will move on to the Spannocchia foundation retreat and organic farm outside Siena for a drawing workshop and even more great food and history. And some really interesting animals. Bye until then!
Happy Earth Day
As we head off for a two-week adventure on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, here are some Earthly sights to enjoy. Today is a good day--no, every day is a good day--to appreciate what an extraordinary planet we get to live on. Though computer access could be a problem, I will attempt to post some blog entries from Italy, perhaps telling of the nearly extinct farm animals we'll be seeing, or the art we'll be creating, or the skies that Galileo once gazed up at (an old observatory is on the itinerary). We will be gathering more surprises for The Naturalist's Notebook, which in June will open for the season. In the meantime, I'd love it if any of you started e-mailing us your own photos and observations from your corner of our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.
Hmmmm...too thin to be a mushroom; jail stripes too far apart for it to be a convict cleaning the roadside.
Utter Horsetail!
What do you usually find on the roadside? Sand, bottle shards, broken-up pavement, maybe the flattened remains of a porcupine or a Big Mac. Life is hard on the margin, which is why I've admired these striped tan stalks that sprout up every spring on the Oak Point Road here in Maine. Yesterday I decided these sturdy stems deserved more respect. I decided to figure out what they were.
I first tried a Google search, but I didn't know what key words to use. I typed in TAN STALK THIN and, bizarrely enough, got as one of the first results, "Left-hand-assisted laparoscopic resection of hepatocellular carcinoma in an accessory liver." Whoa! Welcome to the wired age! Now I had to do a separate search to find out what an accessory liver was. (An unnecessary lobe that grows off the liver in very rare cases, as far as I can tell. Apparently, if you want to impress the medical crowd at a cocktail party, just boast, "I can resect one of those babies lefthanded!")
I tried more searching. I typed in TAN STALK ROADSIDE and the first result, inexplicably, was the website for the Wellsboro (Pa.) Area Chamber of Commerce. (Turns out Wellsboro—who knew?—is home to the so-called "Pennsylvania Grand Canyon," otherwise known as Pine Creek Gorge.) I tried again. TAN PLANT ROADSIDE took me to a Chinese research paper entitled, "Bioaccumulation and physiological effects of excess lead in a roadside pioneer species Sonchus oleraceus L." (When I looked up Sonchus oleraceus L., it was a yellow-flowered herb called common sowthistle. )
Then I remembered Tom Vining, a plant expert who lives on Mount Desert Island. I e-mailed him a photo of the tan stalk and he quickly got back to me with the news that it was field horsetail. Because its stem contains silica—essentially, sand; no wonder it thrives on roadsides!—field horsetail used to be used to scour pans. It also was made into a diuretic tea, a cough medicine for horses and a clothing dye. Perhaps most amazing, a subsequent Google search revealed that it "can accumulate gold in its tissues, up to 4.5 ounces of gold per ton of fresh plant material." At the current price of more than $1,140 an ounce, that's five grand per ton. Proof again that money doesn't grow on trees—it grows in little tan horsetail stalks.
Bet you look more closely at the plant life the next time you're walking down the road.
Elephant Meets Dog
Thanks to Amy Damboise for bringing this wonderful story to my attention!
The world gets a shakeup in Roland Emmerich's now-rentable catastro-flick.
Maine Movie Night: Earth Disaster!
The President's chief of staff looked alarmed as he studied the computer-projection map. “You're telling me the North Pole is now in Wisconsin?" he asked.
“Actually, that's the South Pole,” corrected the scientist standing beside him.
Those memorable lines—uttered, of course, in an underground bunker—scarcely hint at the mad, mad world created by a blast of solar neutrinos that disastrously overheat the Earth's core in the movie 2012. Pamelia and I saw that mind-bending, science-defying box-office blockbuster (worldwide gross: nearly $800 million) on pay-per-view the other night. Watching the planet shake, quake, volcanically erupt, launch thousand-foot tidal waves and rain Hummer-sized fireballs onto unsuspecting citizens brought back memories of the evening news, which had immediately preceded it.
This movie ought to be shown in Earth-science class in high schools. First, because no kid would tune out—the action and special effects are nonstop—but, more important, because it raises good, brain-teasing questions about physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, oceanography, seismology and—my field of interest—popcornology.
For example, on a really, really bad day, could the South Pole actually end up in Wisconsin?
The North and South poles have in fact swapped positions (or reversed polarities, so that a compass would point to the South Pole) tens of thousands of times over the last few billion years. These reversals can be "read" by scientists based on the direction in which certain volcanic rock has been magnetized. The orientation can even help them determine the age of the rock. However, it is safe to say that polar bears and penguins have never, and will never, set foot on the famous "frozen tundra" of Green Bay. And despite the allure of Schlitz beer and between-innings sausage races at Brewers games, there is no evidence that either pole has ever stopped in Milwaukee.
So what about sea level rising to the top of the Himalayas, as it does in the movie?
Let's see, that would be a rise of about 29,000 feet. To allay the fears of doomsayers (and disappoint all those sherpas who hoped to be surfers), disasterologists already did the math: If all the ice melted at both poles and in every glacier and, I guess, in every ice machine at every chain motel in every two-bit town around the globe, sea level would rise only between 200 and 250 feet. Given that oceans have, in past millennia, covered much, if not most, of what is now the United States (at The Naturalist's Notebook we have a slab of sea fossils from inland Maine, and similar evidence has been found in places like Kansas and Ohio), a 200-foot rise seems entirely plausible. But it doesn't make for a 2012-scale movie spectacle or splashy advertising copy ("A film that's ...very plausible!"—Chicago Tribune).
All right then: Yellowstone National Park. Is it really sitting atop a supervolcano?
That one is true. It explains the geysers, the hot springs and the other features that are also found all over—cue the ominous music—Iceland. The Yellowstone volcanic caldera (a cauldron of hot stuff) covers 1,316 square miles. It has been estimated that a major eruption at Yellowstone could bury half the United States under three feet of ash, darken the sky and plunge the world into what the BBC has described as "the equivalent of a nuclear winter." Enjoy your vacation!
What's the deal with the year 2012 and the Mayan prophecies of the world ending on December 21 of that year?
They didn't prophesy that. But if we started seriously analyzing all the things that certain cultures and religions did or did not predict—and how ludicrous most of those predictions are in the first place—we'd lose a lot of good movie plot lines. And keep in mind that the Mayans couldn't even predict their own collapse as a civilization.
One last question: What exactly are neutrinos, anyway?
They're tiny particles produced by the Sun, and more than 50 trillion of them travel through your body every second. They do no harm to you. They do not cause the Earth's core to overheat. Still, as a popcornologist, I wondered whether 2012 director Roland Emmerich might have made even better use of the roasting power of his Hollywoodized solar particles. Maybe this would have been too Spielberg, but why not a foretelling scene early on in which the awkward teenage boy working the concessions stand at a movie theater suddenly sees his popcorn popping itself? Here come the neutrinos! We're all cooked!
By the way, for all his cataclysmic movies (he also made the alien-invasion film Independence Day and the global-warming-themed The Day After Tomorrow), Emmerich professes strong support for environmental causes and says he'd really like to save the planet. Though he did say jokingly in an online Q-and-A that because Maine voters (narrowly) repealed the state's gay-marriage law last year (Emmerich is openly gay), he might have to wipe the state out with a tidal wave in a future film.
These pandas were rescued from the recent devastating earthquake in China.
Panda-monium (and Maine in Blue)
We have a friend who has spent most of the last half-dozen years living in Siberia. She is a fun and funny observer of Russian culture who also has an eye for unusual stories and photos from around the world. She sent us several post-earthquake images from China, where powerful earthquakes have struck this week. These come from a panda-breeding center located near the earthquake zone.
I think pandas usually prefer the shoots, leaves and stems of bamboo, but milk seems O.K. with these young ones.
Pamelia and I have been to a part of China not far from where the highly endangered giant pandas live (Sichuan province). Having seen the severe environmental problems of that country first-hand on three visits (you can see an environmentally-themed magazine story we did at http://www.viamagazine.com/top_stories/articles/yangtze01.asp), I'm relieved that the Chinese have set up panda preserves and increased their efforts to protect the animals. Not without pressure, mind you: A lot of credit needs to be given to organizations like the World Wildlife Fund. Sad to say—as we will examine further at The Naturalist's Notebook this summer in our extinction room—so many species are in trouble because of habitat loss, pollution, climate change and human appetites that the pandas might have a better chance of survival than most. Pandas, after all, are adorable, and people don't like bad things to happen to cute creatures. Lots of luck to less cuddly endangered animals like the slimy purple burrowing frog.
But let me close with a few shots from this morning. Oddly, though this is the season of green, I kept encountering purples and blues—and not just in the cerulean sky and the deep, almost navy tones of Western Bay.
This tree fungus reminded me a little of the shells on our shore.
We encountered four stunning light blue moths--teeny guys--but they were too elusive to photograph as they flew. When they landed to pose, I realized that the blue side of their wings was hidden from view. They looked brown.
Our sprouting hostas
Thanks to the gulls, our lawn is decorated with mussel shells--perhaps the world's loveliest form of litter.
Don't Forget...
...that Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is on again Friday night from 9 to 10. We aren't big TV watchers but the importance of what Oliver is doing—trying to get Americans to eat food that's fresher, less fattening and free of preservatives and pesticides—makes this a significant piece of television.