A Plea to Science Writers: Scientists Don't Believe in Their Research..

Kim at All My Faults are Stress Related thinks we need some new geologic metaphors. Her blog post resulted in a real melange of great suggestions. I like the idea, but I would add that I believe we also have a need for new words for describing to the general public the findings of science. What's my problem? The fact that many a story about a scientific discovery begins with the statement "scientists believe...."

Scientists believe that amphibians evolved from...
Scientists believe in global warming...
Scientists believe that an earthquake is overdue on the San Andreas...
Scientists believe that continents were once joined in a single giant landmass...
Scientists believe that smoking cigarettes is a major cause of cancer...
Scientists believe that the rocks of the Grand Canyon are millions of years old...

How should we describe theories and well-grounded scientific principles? What words should we be using?

Scientists have evidence that....
Scientists have found that...
Scientists now know that...
Scientists have long known that...
Scientists discovered long ago that...

Or leave "scientists" out of it. What's wrong with a straightforward declarative statement of fact?

Marsupials originally evolved in China...
Pangaea was built by the collisions of a number of continents...
The schists in the bottom of the Grand Canyon are 1.7 billion years old

Are the findings you are describing tentative? Is there actually some doubt or are there some competing ideas? That is not a problem, most cutting-edge scientific research is tentative. But not subject to belief. How about:

The researchers are of the opinion that...
The evidence is suggests that...
But other researchers have presented evidence that...
...but other alternative hypotheses are still valid

Like it or not, the word believe has many meanings, but in today's society (American, anyway), it has religious connotations, and is opinion-based in usage. We like our facts boiled down into polls that we can pick and choose from, like food from a buffet line. If a scientific finding is uncomfortable to us, or challenges our assumptions, we can choose not to believe it. Science writing should not feed into that.

I've had a beef with the misuse of theory in journalism before. Some previous thoughts along these lines can be found here...

What do you think?

The definition of believe, from Merriam Webster online:

intransitive verb

1 a : to have a firm religious faith b : to accept as true, genuine, or real

2 : to have a firm conviction as to the goodness, efficacy, or ability of something

3 : to hold an opinion : think

transitive verb

1 a : to consider to be true or honest

b : to accept the word or evidence of

2 : to hold as an opinion : suppose

Time Beyond Imagining - Where did the Ancient Enemy Go?

Bandelier National Monument on the flanks of the Jemez (Valles) Caldera is a fascinating place to observe Pleistocene geology, being the site of a massive rhyolite eruption only 1.15 million years ago (back to geologic time instead of human time; so much for yesterday's post on deep time...). Subsequent erosion carved canyons into the slopes of the volcanic edifice that later provided arable environments when humans arrived in the region within the last 10,000 years. Their construction of these dwellings in Frijoles Canyon provides a piece to an interesting puzzle.

Part of the mystique of the Colorado Plateau has to do with the disappearance of the Anasazi People ("Ancient Enemy" in the Navajo language. I know that name is out of vogue, but bear with me on this). A number of reasons have been advanced to explain why essentially the entire region was depopulated about the end of the 1200's. They point to a disastrous 25-year drought, soil and resource depletion, religious influences, invasions and warfare. For years it was standard procedure to promote this deep mystery of "where did all the people go, and why?" I haven't read the book in years, but even Louis L'Amour got in on it with Haunted Mesa, where I guess they disappeared into some different dimension or something (I didn't think it was one of his better efforts...).

Not being an anthropologist, I am perfectly satisfied with the idea of the stress of a drought as the root cause of the migrations out of the region. Making a living on the plateau has always been a dicey proposition, and it still is today. Big cities like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque and Las Vegas flank the plateau country, but few towns thrive in the midst: Flagstaff, Moab, Farmington, Cortez, and a few others, totaling a few hundred thousand people at most. Water is a limiting factor, and even today with all the technology we have for pulling water up and out of rivers and from underground, most towns on the plateau barely have enough. Water for use by the 4 million yearly tourists at Grand Canyon is captured at a spring on Bright Angel Creek deep in the canyon, and pumped up 5,000 feet to both rims.

There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of water available on the Colorado Plateau. The Colorado River offers something like 10-15 million acre-feet each year, even in the dry ones. But where is the river? Across most of the plateau, the Colorado flows through deep canyons, far from any kind of arable lands. Today, to make use of the water, we've had to construct giant monstrosities of dams and reservoirs to capture the water, and a huge network of canals and pipelines to distribute the water to where we have chosen for it to go. That technology wasn't available 700 years ago.

If you were a community of people living on the edge, depending on the yearly rains that simply weren't coming, the choice boils down to migrating elsewhere or starving. A prolonged drought would have serious consequences: crops would fail, hunger would be widespread, soil erosion would commence, and in an such an environment, one could understand that a fight for survival might mean a fight with others for limited resources. Religious beliefs would certainly play a part, since the gods would be presumed to be angry, and they would need to be placated to bring back the rain.

As to the "where" part of the question, that is somewhat less of a mystery. They moved to where dependable water supplies could be found. For some communities, these were the mesas that nowadays form the Hopi Reservation. Some of the towns there have been occupied continuously since the 1100's. Others headed south and east into the Rio Grande River country where two dozen different puebloan groups continue to live today. The Acoma and Taos pueblos have been continuously occupied for around 1,000 years, and the village at Bandelier was constructed about 1150 AD.

The term "Anasazi", mentioned before as meaning "ancient enemies" by the Navajo, has no precise meaning. The haunts of the people now called "Ancestral Puebloans" on the Colorado Plateau had been abandoned by the time the Navajo people arrived in the region.

Does the story of the Ancestral Pueblo people on the Colorado Plateau have any relevance to our society today? Ya think? The southwestern part of the United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented drought that is probably influenced in large part by global warming. There are serious concerns that Lake Powell and Lake Mead could conceivably go dry in a decade. The effects are being felt at Bandelier as well, although ecologists don't see the effects as all bad. Just the same, millions of people depend on the Colorado River. If the modeling is correct, we have some serious choices to make concerning water use in this arid region.

The first picture of the day shows Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier with the rim of the Valles Caldera on the horizon. The ruins in the main canyon include the unique cliff houses (second picture) carved directly out of the softer parts of the rhyolite (the linear pattern of holes is where timbers were inserted to hold up floors and roofs). Harder chunks of rhyolite were used to make the bricks that form the buildings in the village called Tyuonyi on the main nature trail at the monument (third picture).

School begins tomorrow! If blogs become a bit more irregular, you'll know why...

Time Almost Not Beyond Imagining: Recent Volcanism on the Colorado Plateau and Deep Time

1.15 million years ago, a massive explosion shook the New Mexico landscape, and some sixty cubic miles of ash shot into the atmosphere in a catastrophic rhyolite caldera eruption. The collapse of the magma chamber produced the Valles (Jemez) Caldera. Some of the ash traveled as far east as Iowa, but most of it was dumped on the flanks of the volcano in layers hundreds of feet thick. It was so hot upon landing that the material fused back together into a solid light-colored rock called welded tuff. Smaller eruptions followed, the most recent around 50,000 years ago. Erosion has been eating away at the margins of the caldera, forming a number of deep canyons (see this map of the caldera). One of these canyons is called Frijoles, the "Canyon of the Beans".

Tucked away in Frijoles Canyon one of the more interesting national monuments in the park system: Bandelier. It preserves the remains of an Ancestral Pueblo village that was built nearby and sometimes right into the welded tuff generated by the Jemez Caldera eruption. It is a fascinating place to explore. Although humans had passed through the region for portions of the previous 10,000 years, the village was built around 1150 AD and abandoned about 1600 AD.

A couple of divergent thoughts crossed my mind when I was considering a post on Bandelier National Monument. They had to do with deep time, and the wanderings of people. Wanderings takes up the next post. Here, I wanted to provide a bit of perspective about geologic time.

A thousand years seems a long time to the casual tourist wandering through these very ancient dwellings. We can feel a connection to these people sometimes as we look at the drawings they made on the rock, or the personal improvements in the living spaces in the rock rooms of the village built into the cliff. And yet they seem far removed by time. The year 1600 seems impossibly distant to our daily lives.

Still, there were (and actually still are) people in my life who were personally acquainted with Civil War veterans. And those veterans would have known people whose lives reached into the 1700's. Two or three degrees of separation...it isn't that far back is it? We can perhaps visualize that kind of time if we work at it.

But 1.15 million years? Even though we have actually covered 2 billion years in this series on the Colorado Plateau, I sometimes find even a million years difficult to comprehend. One million. One thousand thousand. The entire history of Bandelier's village, from construction to abandonment to tourist destination could be repeated 1,000 times to reach the time when the volcano exploded. And beyond that: the history would have to be repeated 65,000 times to reach the time when the dinosaurs disappeared, and more than 200,000 to reach the time when dinosaurs first appeared. And they appeared relatively late in Earth's history.

Deep time is one of the four great discoveries that mark the biggest advances of my science, that of geology: the others were the principles of uniformitarianism, evolution, and plate tectonics. The first two are largely credited to one man, James Hutton, and evolution is credited to Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin, although others were involved. Plate tectonics was the discovery of dozens, even hundreds of researchers, although Alfred Wegener is given credit for kick-starting the idea though sheer stubbornness (I guess this should give the Alfreds of the world some hope!).

Bandelier National Monument is a fascinating and scenic place to wander. The top photo is of a kiva set in a high alcove in the upper canyon. Getting to it requires an acrophobic climb up some high ladders and narrow trails. The rocks of the canyon walls are full of holes caused by cavernous weathering of the relatively soft rock. Along the canyon floor, the Puebloans scraped and scooped out the rock to make their living spaces larger and more comfortable. I will have some more photos of the ruins in my next post. Camping and other facilities (mostly built by the CCC in the 1930's) are available.

Another Rock Fall in Yosemite

Photo from The Yosemiter

Ok, this really is a coincidence. I posted a couple of pictures recalling the Happy Isles rockfall of 1996, and this happens today in Yosemite Valley. A rock fall from the Royal Arches slightly damaged some parked cars, and forced the closure of the Ahwahnee Hotel until Friday so the chances of more activity can be evaluated. Boulders were the size of "microwave ovens".

Thanks to Loyd Schutte and the Yosemite Blog and the Yosemiter for up-to-date info. Thanks to Loyd for the morning photo link!
Update (8/27): links to pictures of the new rockslide on the Yosemite Blog here and here, and on Yosemite Trekker here (thanks, Loyd)

Hoodoos Redux: What I'm Reading

With my last post on hoodoos at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks and the distinctive landforms to be found there, it is mere coincidence that I am reading a book right now called "Hoodoo" by Susan Cummins Miller. It is a murder mystery set in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The hook? The protagonist is Frankie MacFarlane, a community college geology professor who gets involved in a series of murders while dragging a group of students around on a field trip. Given my personal bio, I'm not really sure why I find such a plot interesting....

I've enjoyed Miller's stories (this is the fourth in a series) for a number of reasons. For one, it's nice to have an author that gets the setting right. I loved Tony Hillerman's mysteries, and his understanding of Native American culture was extensive, but I would get tripped up when all of a sudden his detective was stumbling around in limestone caverns at Lake Powell, which is not likely. I spend a fair amount of time in some of the places Miller writes about: Riverside, the Mojave Desert, eastern Nevada, and others. She captures the sense of these places well. And, much of the plotting is plausible. I love reading Thomas Perry novels but no real human being could survive the assaults his protagonists suffer without going absolutely nuts from PTSD. Or being dead about 30 pages into the story. Miller's mysteries are more character-driven, and less action-driven. Finally, being not a literary reviewer, I will simply say I enjoyed having enough clues to be able to have an inkling, if nothing more, of who the murderer or murderers were.

It's nice that we geologists get to have a few literary heroes (check out the Sarah Andrews series of mysteries with the Em Hansen character for another example). For some other mysteries with a great sense of place, be sure to check out the Nevada Barr and Tony Hillerman novels (my criticisms above are trivial, really). One more series you may have missed are the Jessica Speart novels with a Fish and Wildlife Service agent as the protagonist.

Did I forget anyone?

Today's photo is some of the most famous hoodoos of all, those at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.

Geologic Change in Yosemite: Remembering the Happy Isles Slide of 1996

I was looking for something else in the massive pile of old slides and photographs at the department today, and ran across a pair of photographs of taken a few weeks after the Happy Isles Rockfall of 1996, one of the more damaging historical mass wasting events in Yosemite Valley. The pictures recall a flurry of posts last spring about the Ahwiyah Rock slide near Half Dome. The 1996 event killed one person and severely injured another, destroyed a food stand, and damaged the Happy Isles Nature Center.

The rock involved in the event was a slab of exfoliated granitic rock roughly the size of a football field that broke off from the top of the cliff near Glacier Point, slid for several hundred feet and then fell 1,800 feet, hitting the floor of the valley at a speed of something over 200 mph. The rocks exploded on impact generating an airblast that toppled 1000+ trees. U.C. Berkeley has an excellent analysis of the slide here, and formal article from the GSA Bulletin can be found here.

Regrowth of trees and shrubs has obscured much of the damage, but the Happy Isles Nature Center has a nice exhibit and viewpoint; walk out the back door of the museum to find it. The slide was not the first in the area. Huge talus piles cling to slopes below the breakaway point, and a much larger prehistoric slide has been mapped beneath the thick forest. It forced the Merced River into a new channel, and contributed to the formation of the marshy area west of the campground.

Time Almost Beyond Imagining: Who Do the Magic that Hoodoo?

Sorry for the title. Sometimes such things are irresistable, and geology terms sometimes seem to lend themselves to parody: subduction, orogeny, bedrock, schist and gneiss. Just the same, today's post is about one of the stranger places in the Colorado Plateau country: Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument on the flanks of the Valles Caldera, site of the previous post on the latest part of the geological story of the Colorado Plateau. It's got a lot of unique scenery packed in a small area.

The Valles Caldera is one of the nation's active supervolcanoes, and over a period of more than six million years, the eruptions of the center have blanketed the region with rhyolite tuff and ash. If you look at a physiographic map of the caldera you can see that erosion has sliced into the flanks of the volcanic complex, exposing evidence of older eruptions. The scenery at Kasha-Katuwe is the result of this geologically recent erosion of the soft volcanic rocks.

Some of the layers on the flanks of the caldera contain river and mudflow deposits with boulders and cobbles of all sizes. The larger boulders protect the softer underlying rocks from erosion until the boulders stand at the top of tall pillars (see the third picture). These are hoodoos. Eventually the boulders topple, and erosion attacks the underlying rock, producing the strange conical spires that give the monument it's name (the English part anyway; Kasha-Katuwe refers to "white cliffs" in the Keresan tongue). The erosion of the soft rock by flash floods in this arid environment have also led to the formation narrow steep-walled slot canyons (the fourth photo).

The monument is a bit tricky to find; the park brochure and location map can be found here. The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources has a nice review of the geology of the region. If you ever pass through the Sante Fe-Albuquerque region on a field trip, check it out!