Six Sentence Sunday

Welcome back, Sixers. I’m going to post something today that is completely different from what I’ve done before, though still in the same universe. This is from the third book of the trilogy, working title War’s End — though I hope I can come up with a better title before publication. This is roughly halfway through the book, and a moment before this scene, Coralie is on a spaceship.

She had to protect the baby.  Coralie tried to make a rigid shield of her body and arms as she rolled through wet, foul-smelling greenery, punctuated by harder masses that might have been tree trunks or rocks — she was too confused to tell.  Around her, familiar voices cried out in shock, and somewhere a dog yelped.  What had happened?  This wasn’t the ship!  The uncontrolled tumble ended with a blow that drove the breath from her lungs, and for a moment she could see nothing but colored flashes as she struggled for air.

If you like this excerpt, or want to play yourself, check out the other fine authors at Six Sentence Sunday.

Quotes from Anne McCaffrey

All of this past week’s quotes but the last were taken from Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCafffrey. This is the first of the Pern novels in terms of internal (Pernese) time, but nineth in terms of when it was written.

“Things were going far too well.” Kenjo, on the first landing approach to Pern.

“History was something one read about in books.” Sorka, then elementary age, is unimpressed by the idea that she is making Pernese history.

“Horses, always. We were promised horses.” Sean, talking with Sorka about the need of the traveling folk for draft animals.

“Alaskans had a reputation for never throwing anything away.” Sallah Telgar, commenting on the way the quartermaster (who is Alaskan) has stripped the colony ship, sending everything remotely usable down to the new colony.

“It’s one thing to see, and another to know.” Sorka, when she is taken along on an exploration trip.

“Mankind prove[s] in many ways that greed is universal.” Admiral Benden at a meeting of the colony’s leaders while they are discussing a legal framework for the new colony.

“If they drink that much beer, they wouldn’t be drinking that much water.” Tourist Trap, by Sue Ann Bowling. Roi’s observation on the Eversummer plague situation, which sends Marna looking for a water-borne source.

Note that all of these quotes were tweeted on @sueannbowling. Follow to get more Context? Quotes, and challenge yourself to identify them before these weekly roundups!

Six Sentence Sunday

Today’s snippet is from near the end of the first chapter of Rescue Operation, my current WIP. Zhaim has been arguing that he’s done the right thing in imposing slaving on Horizon, a recently colonized planet, as they refuse to pay their dues and are breeding people faster than their economy is growing.

Right if he wanted to make the Confederation into a military dictatorship rather than something that allowed over a hundred human-occupied planets to live in peace, if not harmony, Roi thought as he returned home. Not that there weren’t times he would have liked more power over individual planets, especially those that abused their own people. For that matter, he’d like more power over Central, to eliminate slavery there, but not at the cost of turning the Confederation into something people feared, instead of a protection.

Mark and Ginger, the latest of the slaves he’d rescued, adopted and educated for freedom, found him sitting in his office with his face in his hands. “Audi told me,” the young man said awkwardly. “Were you able to do anything?”

Be sure to visit the other Six Sentence Sunday authors.

Skywatching: DVD Course Review

Every now and then I order a course on DVDs from The Great Courses. Most recently, I’ve been viewing Skywatching, a course by Alex Fippenkio on the sky, day and night: what can be seen in it and the physics of why it looks the way it does.

Roughly the first third of the course deals with what we can see in the daytime sky. Dr. Filippenko discusses sky color in midday and when the sun is rising or setting, clouds, lightning, and the interaction of sunlight with water and ice (giving rainbows and halos.) This is closely related to what I researched and taught, so I didn’t really lean anything new. The presentation, however, was generally good. I did catch an error in one diagram, but I suspect that was the graphic designer. (The diagram is the one used to explain polarization in reflected light, and the error is that the angle of reflection and the angle of incidence are not shown as equal.) I was also rather disappointed that Dr Filippenko did not point out that frozen droplets are initially near-spherical, and develop their hexagonal prism shape (and the optical effects this produces) only later, by vapor-phase growth. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect everyone to be familiar with ice fog.

This section of the course should be of particular interest to writers needing information on sky and cloud cover, storms, and less common phenomena such as rainbows or sundogs. If you are going to describe an evening sky, you’d better have some idea of what’s happening.

Roughly half the course deals with the constellations and observing the bodies of the solar system. Most of this I was familiar with as an amateur, and I’ve used some of it — lunar phases and seasons, for instance — in my writing. Every writer who wants to put a moon in the sky should watch the section on lunar phases. Rising crescent moon in the evening? Nope. Just doesn’t happen. Neither does a narrow crescent high in the sky.

The lecture on solar eclipses brought back the one I saw, shortly after I moved to Alaska in 1963. I didn’t have a car yet, but two other graduate students gave me a ride down to Sourdough, Alaska to see the total solar eclipse of July 20, 1963. There were scattered high clouds, and while they added suspense –would the sky be clear during totality? – they wound up adding to the experience. Every bright spot of Bailey’s Beads had its own rainbow (technically iridescence.) I know I took a picture; I remember taking photos both before and after the eclipse, the ones after being a series with the exposure set at a constant value to capture the change in the light. I found that series, but so far the ones before and during totality are missing. They may have been separate from the others and lost during the fire twelve years ago.

Overall I’d give the course an A. Dr. Filippenko is a wonderful teacher, and with few exceptions the graphics are excellent. The course takes 3 DVDs and consists of 12 45-minute lectures.

Rain Clouds

One of our assignments at Summer Arts Festival this year was to look at several paintings from one of the water color classes and use them as inspiration for something to write. One that appealed to me had heavy clouds over a mountain valley, and inspired this.

Beyond the clouds heavy with rain,
Beyond the blue we call the sky,
What galaxies! What nebulae!
What other worlds
Where clouds may float
Heavy with rain.

Plate Tectonics: Part I

The important thing about science is that it has a built-in mechanism for corrections. It doesn’t always work as well as it should, because scientists are people and resist changing their beliefs. The fact remains that assumptions are always open to challenge.

I was reminded of this in watching a DVD on How the Earth was Made, which I’ll review soon. The point I want to make here is that the DVD presents examples as if the scientists involved were searching for pieces of a puzzle that they knew had missing pieces. More often the major breakthroughs – such as plate tectonics – are made when a gradually increasing number of people realize that the accepted theory just doesn’t explain something. Or many somethings. Essentially, that the puzzle pieces available have been put together wrongly, and the picture is in fact quite different.

This happened with plate tectonics.

I wasn’t involved directly, but I was at the Geophysical Institute when it happened, and had a chance to read many of the papers as they came out. And I was interested enough to do just that.

Even as early as grade school, I was unsatisfied with the encyclopedia’s explanation of mountain-building and geosynclines. What the encyclopedia said was that mountains were formed by the cooling and shrinking of the Earth, much as wrinkles are formed on the skin of a drying apple. Erosion wore the mountains down, depositing the sediments offshore, and the weight of those sediments pushed the ocean crust down so the mountains grew higher. It did not make sense to me, even then. These processes would have resulted in filling the oceans and leveling the mountains, not building them!

When I was a little older – high school age – I was given a book that gave some of the results of the International Geophysical Year – the IGY. The one that stuck in my mind as an unsolved mystery was the discovery of major east-west trending faults in the Pacific Ocean. Based on the offset of newly discovered magnetic stripes, these faults had large displacements – tens to hundreds of miles. But the displacements totally disappeared when the faults reached land! Not only could the east-west displacements not be found, in places such as the California coast there were well-known faults such as the San Andreas tending more nearly north-south.

At Harvard I took a basic geophysics class, hoping it would help me make sense of what seemed to be an increasingly frustrating puzzle. What I learned there – and it was the cutting-edge science of the early 60’s – left me as puzzled as ever.

Gravity measurements had proved that continents stood higher than oceans because continental rock was less dense than ocean rock. This was known as isostacy – the height of terrain essentially depended on how high it floated on the mantle.

Continental drift was nonsense – there was no way continents could plow through oceanic crust, and there were no traces of any such plowing through on the sea floor. The matching of rock formations on the opposite sides of the Atlantic was sheer coincidence.

Exchanges of plants and animals over  geological time were via land bridges.

The elephant in the room, from my point of view, was that isostacy did not allow sea floor to rise and form land bridges.

I went to the Geophysical Institute as a graduate student partly because of these mysteries, but I was sidetracked into atmospheric science and ice fog. Nevertheless, I stayed interested, and since many of the seminal papers in plate tectonics were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) I watched the plate tectonics revolution happen. Next week I’ll talk about some of the breakthroughs that eventually led to the new paradigm of plate tectonics.

Inside Planet Earth: DVD Review

This is an excellent DVD for getting across the idea that the inner workings of the earth, while at times disastrous, are essential for life.

The DVD actually has two programs, both originally shown on the Discovery channel: Inside Planet Earth and Amazing Earth. The graphics are intriguing, though some are repeated a bit too often. The actual camera work is excellent.

My only objection was that at times the narration could be misleading. True, we have been in an ice age for the last 40 million years. But most of the evolution of mammals – and certainly of humans – has taken place during that period. We are adapted to an ice age in the broad sense. My concern is that many people will take “ice age” to mean the periods like 20 thousand years ago, when ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe.

Over all, I found this a good program if a bit sensationalist – and this is my field, so I am aware of shortcomings.

Before Computers

There was a time when digital data recorders did not exist. Data was recorded on strips of paper with grids on them, generally wound around a slowly turning drum while a pen marked them. Trying to do anything with data of this sort required digitizing it.

My first job as a research assistant at the Geophysical Institute involved doing just that.

The process was called scaling, and involved a device that was moved along the paper, lined up with the ink trace at specified intervals, and a button pushed. The eventual result was a string of numbers for one component of the magnetic field. This was done for both horizontal components.

I then had to plot these numbers on an x-y graph, connecting the dots in time order for a number of stations and events. Plotting in those days used millimeter graph paper, with points entered and connected by hand.

Today, it would take five minutes on a computer — but this was 1963. It took a small army of graduate students (SAGS was actually used as an acronym) just to get the data in a form in which it could be analyzed. (SAGS are still used, but these days it is generally in collecting the data, not in doing things a computer can do better.)

All of this was carried out in the basement of what is now the Chapman Building, which looked then very much as it does today, except that it had a dome on the roof. Eventually, we found that the disturbance in the magnetic field during a sudden impulse was elliptically polarized at high latitudes, and my first paper was actually written on the results of that study.

It may sound like a silly thing to do, but that discovery provided a small boost toward our understanding of the effect of the solar wind on the magnetic field of the earth — a subject not to be ignored in the design of long-distance power lines. But I’m very glad for computers!

Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes

I’m sure you’ve heard, ad nauseum, about the plate tectonics underlying the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Indeed, it seems that plate tectonics, which produces earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis with devastating consequences is a force of destruction, pure and simple. But does it have a positive side as well?

The theory of plate tectonics, which at this point does the best job of explaining the earth’s geology, is based on the idea that the earth’s surface is made up of a number of semi-rigid plates which slide around over the earth’s surface. They interact primarily at their edges, where they may be pulling apart (as in the mid-Atlantic and the African rift valleys) sliding past each other (as in the San Andreas fault of California) or colliding.

Plates are made up of ocean crust, sometimes with relatively light continental crust on top. Ocean crust is dense enough to slide under other plates; the lighter continental rock above it resists being pulled under, and buckles or folds if it is on top of two colliding plates. Thus collisions of two plates with continents on top generally leads to mountain ranges such as the Himalayas.

Collisions between ocean plates and plates with light continental rock atop generally lead to subduction zones, such as the one off the west coast of South America, where the oceanic crust is pulled under the lighter continental crust. The sediments pulled down with the ocean crust are gradually heated and melted, reappearing as volcanic magma. Thus the volcanic spine of the Andes.

If two oceanic plates collide one is normally pulled under the other, but it is less obvious which will be subducted, and in fact this may change over time. The same melting of sediments occurs, and a line of volcanoes, such as the Aleutian Islands, normally develops next to the subduction zone.

Plates don’t slide past each other smoothly. They stick and then break loose, producing earthquakes. If they are just sliding past each other they may produce earthquakes but there is generally not much vertical movement. If one plate is being pulled under another, however, the sticking normally results in a bowing up of one plate, and when that sticking is released, there may be considerable vertical movement. If that movement is under water, a tsunami is created. This is what happened with the great Alaska earthquake, and has now happened off the coast of Japan.

But what would happen if the plates all just stopped? If there were no more plate tectonics? More, if there had never been any plate tectonics?

First, the earth would be flat and completely covered with water, if there were any water on the face of the earth. Mountains are constantly being eroded by the forces of weather. Given far less geologic time than has actually passed, any initial irregularities in the surface of the earth would have been smoothed out. Plate tectonics is and has been the main mountain builder on our planet.

Second, there is some question as to whether we would have an atmosphere. Certainly we’d have a hard time breathing the mixture of carbon dioxide, water vapor and other compounds put out by volcanoes, but then we’d have a hard time breathing the atmosphere prevailing when life evolved. Plants convert the gasses produced by volcanoes into an atmosphere we can breathe.

Third, plate tectonics is part of the way radioactive heating in the earth’s core is transferred to the surface. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have the radical resurfacing we think we see on Venus.

Plate tectonics can certainly produce devastation, but like weather, it’s something we have to live with. Japan has actually done a superb job of preparation, but there are prices we must pay for living on a dynamic planet, one which can support life. One of those prices has just come due.

Twelfth Day

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true-love gave to me:
Twelve plates colliding,
Eleven vents erupting,
Ten glaciers surging,
Nine houses sinking,
Eight cars polluting,
Seven blizzards raging,
Six aurorae swirling,
Five solar flares.
Four chickadees,
Three mammoths,
Two ptarmigan
And a spruce hen in a spruce tree.