Disturbance Hardening of Snow

Ever notice that the berm across the end of your driveway, or the one formed when you shovel the sidewalk, is harder than the undisturbed snow? That’s because when snow is disturbed crystals are broken, and the broken surfaces positively grab onto other ice surfaces. Two examples of this are common in nature, and I’ve used both in my fiction writing.

The first is called a wind slab or wind crust. When a turbulent wind picks up snow crystals and redeposits them, a good deal of crystal breakage takes place. When the broken crystals settle down they weld themselves to other crystals and the result can be a hard crust—even though the temperature is below freezing. Roi has to cope with this in Tourist Trap:

The trees had broken the force of the wind up to now, but once he entered the open swath the wind almost knocked him off his feet. The snow was crusted here, not quite enough to hold his weight, but enough that his thighs were bruised repeatedly by the chunks of wind-slabbed snow he was dragging Timi through. He paused twice to increase the circulation to his feet. Were they cold, hurting like hell, or just numb? he wondered absently, and then realized that Timi’s shields had dropped to the point that he was feeling Timi’s body as well as his own. The wind cut through the frozen scarf and the cold glued his eyelashes shut, and with a start of horror he realized that he had drifted away from the line back to the shelter. He could teleport himself back, maybe—but he wasn’t sure he had the energy left to do even that, and there was no way he could take Timi with him.

He struggled on: lift a leg and break the crust with his knee, then drag the leg through the slightly softer snow underneath until he could balance on that leg to break out the next step with the other leg. Timi staggered behind him, almost falling several times, and his mind ached from the effort of keeping the other boy upright. Snow had sifted into his clothing, somehow, and he knew he was cold but no longer felt it. With an abruptness that caught him by surprise, the wind died down, and he went to his knees as he tried to break through a crust that was no longer there. Back in the trees, he finally realized, and reached out for the faint impression of the shelter.

The second is probably less familiar to most, and I hope it remains so, but here in Alaska it is constantly being drummed into us. This is what happens in an avalanche. The churning snow sets up like concrete as soon as it comes to a halt. Well, not quite like concrete — it can be dug through with shovels – but far too hard to shift by moving your body. Marna is caught in an avalanche in Homecoming:

Even as she crouched and aimed herself for a belt of trees that might provide some protection, the leading edge of the avalanche overran her, tumbling her helplessly down the slope. The churning snow caught and twisted one forceweb until she thought her leg would break, but the torsion activated the safety cutoffs and the forcewebs went abruptly inert. She clawed her way upward through the fast-moving snow, and tried to remember what lay downhill. Only her perceptive sense kept her from total disorientation.

The buffeting and spinning as she was carried along reminded her of the time she had been caught in the breaking wave—but then Win had been there to rescue her. Win. She had repudiated whatever was left of Win, but as the slowing mass suddenly set rigidly about her body, she wondered at her own insanity in wanting to be alone. She struggled to move, but felt only the slight snapping of a switch, followed by the growing cold of the snow that held her prisoner. Her struggles must have turned off the thermal suit, she realized with a growing sense of despair. Exhausted and chilled, she could not even visualize a place of safety. Win, she sobbed mentally. Forgive me, my love.

This is a situation where time is absolutely essential, and buried but living victims are likely to die of suffocation or cold – often in less time than it takes to get help. Dogs are better than people at finding victims, but if search and rescue dogs have to be flown in, it is often too late to find anything but a body.

Oceanography (Great Courses) DVD Review

Oceanography: Exploring Earth’s Final Wilderness

It’s been almost 50 years since I took an oceanography course, so I ordered this course as a refresher. It was a refresher all right, and not just of what I remembered of oceanography — this course covers everything from the history of the Earth to modern-day pollution. As one of my old colleagues at the Geophysical Institute says, “It’s not Planet Earth, it’s planet Cloud-Ocean.”  And this course was a marvelous refresher of the whole of geophysics, core to tropopause, and some biology with the whole thing straightforward enough to be understandable to almost anyone.

It started out conventionally enough, with an overview of the history of oceanic exploration. But many of the observations of the ocean basins demanded explanation. Why did the mid-Atlantic ridge exist, for instance? The Challenger Deep? For that matter, why were island arcs so often paralleled by trenches and home to volcanoes and earthquakes? What were the magnetic stripes discovered during World War II? How was it that the sea floor, which should have been receiving sediments from the continents throughout geologic history, had astonishingly young bedrock when drills began to penetrate those sediments? Some of these questions were touched on 50 years ago, some were hastily swept under the rug, and some (such as the puzzlingly young age of the seafloor bedrock) had not even been discovered yet.

These questions eventually led to the theory of plate tectonics, and several lectures on these DVDs are devoted to explaining this theory and how it came about. But that’s a small part of the first two discs in this set of six.

The physics and chemistry of water take up several lectures. Waves, rogue waves, tsunamis, and tides are covered, along with some of the physics of water. For something so familiar (oxygen and hydrogen are two of the most common reactive elements in the universe) water has some astonishing properties. Not only does it have an extraordinarily high heat capacity and is it very nearly the universal solvent, it is one of the few compounds in which the solid phase is less dense than the liquid. In other words, ice floats! We’re so used to this we don’t even think about it, but the world would be very different if ice sank, as most solids do in their own melts.

Life in the seas is interesting in itself and also critical to feeding our global population. Food webs, plankton, jellyfish, fish, marine mammals and birds and whales all get their moments of exposure, along with fish farming.

Then the course moves on to coasts: estuaries, deltas, beaches and sea cliffs. Life is here, too, from sea grasses and mangroves to coral reefs.

The lectures then cover storms, the deep ocean circulation, and the effects of climate change and pollution.

As a meteorologist I would of course like to have seen more on the role of the oceans in influencing weather. Not only are the oceans the great flywheel of climate, and their slow response one of the problems in climate modeling, they provide much of the water vapor that transports energy around the globe. Still, 36 half hour lectures can’t cover everything. Professor Tobin certainly tried, though, and for a single course succeeded brilliantly.

Why an Index?

With 550 posts as of today, I’ve started to have problems remembering what I’ve already put on here. This is particularly a problem with posting existing content such as poems, short pieces from the Summer Arts Festival, or science explanations originally written for the Alaska Science Forum. I can’t remember which books or DVDs I’ve posted reviews on. It also is starting to be a problem when I want to link to a previous post and can’t remember when it was put up or what the title was. And there are posts on this blog that have permanent information, like the series on planet building and the one on horse color genetics, or the book and DVD reviews. I want to make it easier for my readers as well as myself to find things.

I made a start some time ago by adding an index page, which can be accessed from the menu at the top of any page. Right now, the only links are to index pages on my author site. This takes you out of the site and sometimes back in, which is rather clumsy. The index list is also incomplete.

I’m going to start posting an occasional entry which is strictly an index of past posts on a particular topic. These posts will be linked from the index page, and will link forward to the individual blog posts. As it takes a while to find all the posts that belong together, this will be a slow process—probably extending over the next few months. The first in this series, on DVD reviews, is already queued for January 3. Others will follow, most on Thursdays.

I probably won’t be indexing every post. Some, like those early posts which were simply glossary entries for my books, are on the author site and really belong there. Others, like the regular Monday updates on North Pole weather starting in November 2010, can be found easily enough just by using the calendar on the site. But I hope that by the time I have finished this, older posts of interest will be easier to find.

Jarn’s Journal, Day 371

This is a continuation from last week of Jarn’s story.  Jarn is a R’il’nian, a very human-like alien, stranded on Earth 125,000 years ago. The Jarnian Confederation, setting of my two science fiction books, was named after him. Jarn’s Journal to date is posted on my author website.

Day 371

I have been here more than a year!

I knew it was more than a Kentra year, of course—the clock and calendar are still working. And the day-length here is close enough to Kentra’s that the count of sunrises alone was enough to tell me that a year had passed on my home planet.

But today I was at my first landing place near sunset. I paused to watch the sinking sun, and it was slightly north of a notch in the hills on the horizon that framed its setting the first time I looked. First it moved north, then south, and now it is moving north again and it is farther north than when I arrived, so more than a planet year has passed. I will have to set up some means of keeping track of were it sets, and develop a local calendar.

I asked Songbird if her people would return. She said yes, they followed the gazelles, which always came back to that place with the sun.

Could they not eat fish, I asked, or any of the other wild foods she was introducing me to?

“Fish is not as sweet as gazelle meat, and besides, they will meet other groups to the north. Aardvark is old enough to mate, and his mate must come from another group.”

“Does the girl go to her mate’s group, or the boy?” I asked.

She looked puzzled. “The shamans of the two clans decide,” she finally said, “but I hope Aardvark stays. We have more girls than boys.”

The shamans again. Was keeping the sex ratio balanced one of their jobs? What else influenced them? I do not know how long these people had been in their camping spot before Patches found them. But this year I will start watching when the clouds begin massing on the northern horizon.

Jarn’s Journal, Day 350

This is part of the background history of the Jarnian Confederation, the universe in which both of my science fiction books are set. Think Africa 125,000 years ago, with the narrator being a stranded R’il’nian and the “aliens” being early humans.

Day 350

I think she will live.

I had some real worries as to whether the antibiotics I brought, which work well on my own species, would work on this alien child, but already her fever is reduced. Anesthetics were not among my supplies, but I managed to straighten and set the bone while she was still unconscious, and I believe the swelling and inflammation is down a little today.

I stayed with her last night, in the hut where her fellow tribesmen left her. I think the warnoff did more than the thorns to keep us safe, and I was reluctant to teleport back to my own shelter and trust to the thorns alone to protect her.

I could treat her much more easily back at my own shelter. Certainly I would be far more comfortable! I actually had to sleep – or rather try to sleep –on the ground last night! And the insects! Luckily I had the warnoff set to repel insects from actually biting, but with the clearer light this morning, I found that it did not stop them from laying eggs – the child’s leg was crawling with maggots before I cleaned it out yesterday, and I found flies trying to lay their eggs in the wound when I rechecked it this morning!

And the smells! There is no way to clean the hut at this point, and the miasma of rotting flesh, sickness and bodily waste almost overcomes me. She would be much better off at my shelter, where I could keep her clean.

I wish I could teleport her there, but one of the first things I learned is that teleporting another sentient being, without that being’s full understanding and cooperation, can produce permanent mental trauma in the teleportee.

Wait.

She is still unconscious.

Could I teleport her in that state?

Jarn’s Journal to date is on my Author website.

Brigadoon (DVD)

My taste in movies tends to run to the fluffy.

My parents used to load us all in the old woody station wagon and take us out to the drive-in. Often as not the movie was a musical, and I still love the old MGM song and dance films.

Drive-ins have never been practical in Alaska. If it’s dark enough to see the screen, it’s too cold to sit in a parked car, and most of my movie watching nowadays is DVDs while pedaling away on my stationary bicycle. I still love the MGM musicals, though, from The Wizard of Oz on. Especially Gene Kelley.

I watched Brigadoon the other night, and marveled again at the musical numbers with Gene Kelley and Cyd Charisse. Oh, the sets are rather obviously painted, and the plot is pretty weak, but the dancing is wonderful. Still, I found myself wondering about a few things.

Not the willing suspension of disbelief that always is necessary to enjoy a fantasy. I’m a science fiction author, and that comes naturally. This was more the world building. Where were the children? Brigadoon was supposed to date to a time before the Revolutionary War. At that time, the death rate, especially among children, was high. One result was large families – more than two children per family, because some would not survive to have children of their own. As a result the age distribution should have been skewed toward the young, as it is today in developing countries — lots of children, numerous adolescents, a moderate number of adults, and a very few old people.

Oh, there were a handful of children shown. But for the village to survive, there should have been at least three children – probably more – for each adult woman.

That’s not true today. Most children born today survive to have children of their own – we consider it a real tragedy when they do not. But that wasn’t true in pre-Revolutionary times.

I’ve done a certain amount of genealogy on my own background, and I have ancestors who gave three children the same name, because the first two died. And women died in childbirth all too often – again hinted at by the fact that many of my male ancestors were widowed when the wife died in childbirth, and then remarried.

No, the society shown in Brigadoon is unlikely, to say the least. But that doesn’t make the singing and dancing any less enjoyable.

Tourist Trap: What’s it About?

This isn’t really a book review, or if it is it is a very biased one — I wrote the book. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a much longer version of the synopsis on the back of Tourist Trap. A synopsis has to be very limited in length; this gives me room to introduce the characters and the conflicts.

Tourist Trap: the second novel about the Confederation that grew from Jarn. The white lead dog is Snowflake.

Tourist Trap is the second novel I’ve written about the Jarnian Confederation. This is a loose confederation of human-occupied planets, with a remnant population of R’il’nians, who hybridized with proto-humans to produce modern humans around 125,000 years ago. Some of the hybrid descendants followed their R’il’nian progenitor back to space; others remained on Earth and became our own ancestors. Most of the pure R’il’nians are extinct, but the remnant and their descendants from recent cross-breeding have the responsibility of protecting the human-occupied planets from other intelligent races and (more often) of preventing them from warring with each other.

In Homecoming (set around the time of George Washington’s birth) the last R’il’nian surviving in the Confederation, Lai, discovers that the human lover who left him years ago fled because she was pregnant with his child, in defiance of the Genetics Board. The child, raised a slave, is rescued at thirteen and given the name Roi — but he is found because he is struck down by a paralyzing disease. Homecoming deals with Lai’s discovery of a woman of his own species, Marna, on a distant world and their acceptance, Healing and education of Roi – himself an untrained Healer — who must finally accept that he, as having the most R’il’nian characteristics of Lai’s children, will replace his sociopathic half-brother, Zhaim, as Lai’s heir.

Tourist Trap starts a year and a half after the end of Homecoming. Roi, now eighteen, has been given a trip on Falaron, a planet terraformed from ice age Earth, as a graduation present. His three closest friends from slavery have been given to him as slaves, though as far as Roi is concerned the slavery is simply a legal fiction that allows him to act as their protector while they gain the education they will need to survive on their own.

The markings on this horse are a good match for Amber's horse, Splash.

Roi is well aware that his father and the other adults around him consider that he is lacking in independence because of his slave upbringing, and partly because of that is determined to handle the journey on Falaron without aid. Underneath, however, he is both afraid of Zhaim and fearful of becoming like his older brother.

Flame, slave-born and the one who has known Roi the longest, has every intention of staying with him and doesn’t much care whether she is his slave or free.

Amber, kidnapped into slavery as a child, also loves Roi. But she is very aware that she will grow old and Roi will not, so she has decided to stay with Timi. She trusts Roi to release her when she has the education she recognizes she needs.

Tim, also kidnapped into slavery, wants his freedom now, and has begun to resent the fact that Roi owns him. In partial response to this, he is pursuing a friendship with Zhaim.

This foal is obviously much younger than Roi's horse, Raindrop, but the color and markings are right. Photo courtesy of Gail Lord.

The Falaron guide, Penny, makes the fifth of the group. Dog sledding, hang gliding, a trip across a landscape much like Pleistocene North America by horseback, sailing across a large lake, river rafting and rock climbing are all part of the fun.

Penny starts out treating Roi and his friends as clients. But she finds herself caring more for all of them –especially Roi – than she really intended.

But Zhaim is using Timi, and intends that none of the five will survive their trip. He is not stupid, and realizes that either Lai or Marna would protect Roi if they had any idea of what he was up to. So he plots to get them far away from Falaron – Marna to combat a plague he engineers, and Lai to stop a holy war he has goaded on. Even before the two R’il’nians leave he uses Timi and the weather against the travelers.

The geophysics and weather patterns of Faleron were carefully thought out, as was the seasonality. Yes, I modeled it on the rain-shadow effect of the Rocky Mountains, but the weather patterns and climate are reasonable for mid-latitudes on an Earthlike planet.

I had fun writing this. I’ve had considerable experience with dogs and horses, and they, as much as the people, are individuals. Amber and Timi’s lead dog, Snowflake, is an older dog, arthritic, and a bit of a telepath – so was the first dog I owned. Snowflake might well be the leader on the cover of Tourist Trap. And the five horses they ride are individuals too. Roi’s Raindrop is a spirited animal that responds well to Roi but is far too much horse for Timi, who does fine with the rather lazy Dusty.

It’s science fiction, but the surroundings are primitive and the focus is on the people: R’il’nians, crossbreds and Humans alike. Try it. You might be surprised to like it, especially if you think you don’t care for science fiction.

The Geophysical Institute

“From the center of the Earth to the center of the sun.” The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks covers a lot of territory, and a lot of subjects. It started out with space physics and aeronomy, but has expanded its interests to include atmospheric sciences, seismology, remote sensing, snow, ice and permafrost, tectonics and sedimentation, and volcanology.

The building to the right is actually the International Arctic Research Center, but this is the building that now houses the GI's climate and atmospheric science program.

A large part of its work is cutting-edge research, but it also provides aurora forecasts, earthquake information, the Alaska Science Forum (a popular science feature distributed to media outlets throughout Alaska, which I once wrote) and volcano alerts. It maintains the world’s only scientific rocket launching facility owned by a university.

If you’ve read the bio on my website, you know that I spent more that 30 years  at the Geophysical Institute as a student, researcher and teacher. But what’s the Geophysical institute all about? What problems does it address? And what on earth does it have to do with writing science fiction?

I certainly can’t cover everything the Geophysical Institute does in a single article, but why not use this as my new article series for Sundays? As to what it has to do with writing science fiction, not much with the plots, but a tremendous amount with the planet building.

Next week I’ll try to give a little of the early history of the GI (as it is mostly called by those who work there.)

Psi and Morality

What happens when loyalties and responsibilities conflict? What is the moral thing to do?

I’ve been exploring morality to some extent in my writing. I won’t say I have the answers—there really aren’t any. But here’s an excerpt from a story set years after Homecoming was over:

“My folks hadn’t been able to teach me the morality of using my esper talents–rules don’t arise about things that are assumed not to exist.  But they had ingrained some general principles into the fiber of my being, and those general principles worked quite well with what Roi had taught me and, more recently, with what I had found in the files my mother had left behind.  Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.  Remember that ‘human’ is not just you and your relatives, or those who look like you, or who share common beliefs.  Ask yourself, ‘what would life be like if everyone behaved this way?’

“It wasn’t as easy as rules-based, black and white morality, because it required thinking.  And there had been times, both home on Earth and here on Central, when the accepted morality was immoral by the principles I believed in.  Slavery as it was practiced here on Central, for instance.  Did I even have the moral right to walk away, if I could really stop it?”

What widely accepted moral rules might be immoral in a different society or environment? Or even in our own, if looked at closely?

Momentum and Teleportation

Teleportation in Homecoming requires that energy, momentum, angular momentum and mass be conserved—all basic laws of physics. We’ll skip mass and angular momentum for right now, and just look at the situation where something is moving in a straight line.

Anything that is moving has both kinetic energy (energy of motion) and momentum, but the two are not the same. The difference is usually expressed mathematically: energy is half the mass times the square of the velocity and momentum is the mass times the vector velocity, but for many that just makes if more confusing. Let’s try this, instead. (If you don’t understand mass, think weight.)

Consider a car. Let it be a big, heavy car, say an SUV. Suppose it is coasting at a steady speed, say, 30 miles an hour to the west. Can a mosquito stop it by hitting the windshield? Not likely! The car’s resistance to having its steady motion changed is due to its momentum. This momentum has a direction—the direction the car is moving. Friction will slow it down, eventually, by transferring its momentum to the earth, but for the moment we’ll ignore that.

It also has kinetic energy. If the speed is doubled, the momentum will also double—but the kinetic energy will increase by a factor of four.

Remember momentum has a direction. Suppose we have another SUV moving 30 miles an hour to the east. Speed to the east and speed to the west cancel, so the momentum of the two-car system is zero. Their kinetic energy does not cancel, as can be seen if the two cars meet head-on—when the dust settles, they will be stationary at the point where they met. But the energy will have gone into crumpling metal (and whatever else makes up the cars) and ultimately into heat.

It is possible for two objects to bounce off of each other in such a way that energy, as well as momentum, is conserved. But if the momentum adds up to zero before the impact, it must also add up to zero after the impact. This is a common problem in billiards, though in this case the balls are most often moving at angles to each other so the vector sum of the momentum is not zero—but it will still be the same after the collision as it was before.

The conservation of momentum, in fact, nicely encapsulates Newton’s laws of motion.

Now consider Roi’s problem in teleporting to a very different location. He is moving with the planet under his feet. For illustration, let’s assume he is on the equator, at sea level, at sunrise, and wants to go to the opposite hemisphere, also on the equator at sea level, but at sunset.

Assuming he is on a planet like the Earth, he is moving toward the sun at around a thousand miles an hour, and the area he wants to teleport to is moving away from the sun at the same speed. No change in kinetic energy, but if he doesn’t do something about momentum, he’ll arrive moving about two thousand miles an hour relative to his surroundings—not a very survivable teleport!

My solution is strictly science fiction—I assume it is possible for a person (or a machine) to transfer or “swap” momentum from one mass to another. But they’d better remember to do it!