This interview with David Suzuki is essential to see if you care about the Earth and how we interact with the natural world.
Peace,
Grant
I receive weekly science news emails from the David Suzuki Foundation. Just last week I got a great one: a scanned pdf file from a magazine in 1956 of an article by Rachel Carson. It is called, "Help your child to wonder", and its message is just as pertinent today as it was 53 years ago.
Here it is: carsonwonder2.pdf
This article got me thinking again about a blog I wanted to write for some time now... about the little things you can find in nature if you just look closely enough. Now, we tend to think of "nature" like we do for "environment", just somewhere, out there, intangible. But, we are as much a part of the natural world as is "nature", it's just that we have surrounded ourselves with so much technology and electronics that we think of ourselves as in little isolated bubbles unaffected by the natural world. Well, as you will read in this article, we are in danger of losing our sense of wonder about nature. We are still living in a Cartesian world, where we are situated as the users and usurpers of nature, not part of it and subject to its ebb and flow, as Dan aptly points out.
In Spanish, lizards are colloquially known as "dragons", so to borrow Dan's metaphor for ancient wisdom, I set out a while back to search for these elusive dragons, while rediscovering my repressed sense of wonder.
Just below our balcony there is a little enclosed area where we keep the hens and partridges.
Here, there is an old wooden door kept locked with a skeleton key. Upon this door, near the hinges there hide dragons. These dragons are small. perhaps about 4 inches long, but they dominate their world of insects and spiders.
You have to look closely and carefully to find them, else they slither away faster than you can react. In the summer months, at least. The dragons come out mostly in the summer, and are much more active and faster moving in the heat. Being cold-blooded they thrive upon the heat. They need it to survive. In the summer evenings they can be seen briskly crawling quickly up and down and side to side along the walls of buildings chasing smaller insects and finding food for their young. They stick to the walls using little minature suction cups and claws on their feet. They seem to defy gravity. From the perspective of these dragons, what, to us seems like a smooth stucco wall, is in fact filled with grooves and bumps and is easy to grip. They move stealthfully after their prey, but if you are patient and observent you can see them snatch a juicy fly out of mid-air and munch it up in a few seconds. In the winter, the dragons go into semi-hibernation, I would say. This is my observation. I'm not a biologist, so I can't say I read this in a book, but I know one thing... they are easy to catch in the winter. They are silient, but sluggish, preserving their energy until the spring when the bounty of life begins to multiply once again. This is the ebb and flow of the seasons. The ebb and flow of heat and light from the sun that provoke the ebb and flow of life.
Here in northern Spain, we are at about the latitude of New York City, the extreme southern tip of Canada (Pelee Island), Northern California, the Northern tip of Honshu, or Beijing. So, our seasons are quite pronounced. While we don't get much snow in the winter, that is more a function of the moderate Mediterranean climate, rather than the latitude. It can get quite chilly in the winter. But, the dragons survive. It's at this time, that a curious, child-like mind of wonder can reach out and gently pick up one of these beautiful creatures, being careful not to squeeze too hard. Although they are the masters of their domain, their world of insects and spiders, even a small child has the power to easily kill one without realizing it. These dragons are beautiful, but fragile, like nature itself.
Nature abounds wherever you look... you just have to look. Outside the old wooden door, I have found there are more dragons, swallow nests, bats, cats, fruits, vegetables, a microcosm of nature itself. Living. If you just open the door, there is nature, the whole world, waiting for you to explore it, waiting for you to wonder. It's more important to teach ourselves how to wonder than to learn simple, boring facts. This could very well be the problem with the whole western education system, fact after fact crammed into your brain, limited standardized testing without being taught how to learn, to wonder.
The best thing about searching for dragons is... the searching!
Peace,
Grant
Tonight, Anna and I are going to see a Catalan band called "Anna Roig i l'ombre de ton chien". Which translates to "Anna Roig and the shadow of your dog". But, here's the thing... this is actually a mix of French and Catalan. Like I mentioned in the blog "Le Soleil", Catalan and French are closely related and share some words. Chien is not one of them. The Catalan word for dog is, in fact "gos". But, anyway, like I find sometimes over here, sometimes language is spoken as a blend of two or more languages. I don't mean just randomly mixed, of course, but it may be common to speak some sentences in one and some sentences in another, depending on the persons involved and with what they are most comfortable. Here, in Barcelona, you are more likely to hear people speaking a Catalan and Spanish interchangeably. Near, the border with France, more a blend between Catalan and French, or among other languages of the region, such as Occitan. In some ways and between some peoples, the languages are mutually comprehensible. This is how languages have evolved and spread throughout antiquity, by people speaking and expressing in their own way, what they mean. Another interesting example I came across was how, between Catalan, French and Spanish, there is a consistent difference in the spelling of some words. For instance, the English word "flour" is "Farina" en Català, "Farine" en Français, and "Harina" en Español.
Another example is:
English: Bean
Català: Fava
Français: Fève
Español: Haba
Ostensibly, the reason for this is due to the Arabic influence on the Spanish language, given the simila
rity of the Arabic letter "F" to the Latin letter "H". For 700 years much of modern Spain and Portugal was governed by Moorish peoples from the North west of Africa (modern Morocco, Algeria...) until the Christian Reconquest starting in 1492. So, when Latin-based characters were again used after the Reconquista, the letter had already become integrated into the Spanish lexicon. The full story may be much more complex that this, but I'll leave it to the reader to research it more. Portuguese was also heavily influenced by Arabic in many various and complex ways that I don't fully understand, but, by which I am eternally fascinated. Catalonia, much of the Northern parts of modern Spain and France, were not as influenced by the Arabic, due, at least in part to geographical and morphological features of the Earth that formed natural borders, such as the Ebro River (in the case of Catalonia) and the Pyrenees Mountains (in the case of France). On the map to the left, Catalonia and France are coloured grey. If you travel to the south of Spain, which I highly recommend, you will see this culture (eg. flamenco music and dance) still vibrant, alive and well in cities such as Granada, Sevilla and Córdoba. Granada, for example has a Moorish Quarter where you can buy different teas and items you might associate with Morocco.
So, where was I going with all this? Tonight, we are going to see Anna Roig. The following cute video clip is mostly in the Catalan language, but with French words and expressions, the title being, "Je t'aime"... Jo t'estimo... Yo te quiero... I love you. Music is truly without borders.
Peace,
Grant
Another example is:
English: Bean
Català: Fava
Français: Fève
Español: Haba
Ostensibly, the reason for this is due to the Arabic influence on the Spanish language, given the simila
rity of the Arabic letter "F" to the Latin letter "H". For 700 years much of modern Spain and Portugal was governed by Moorish peoples from the North west of Africa (modern Morocco, Algeria...) until the Christian Reconquest starting in 1492. So, when Latin-based characters were again used after the Reconquista, the letter had already become integrated into the Spanish lexicon. The full story may be much more complex that this, but I'll leave it to the reader to research it more. Portuguese was also heavily influenced by Arabic in many various and complex ways that I don't fully understand, but, by which I am eternally fascinated. Catalonia, much of the Northern parts of modern Spain and France, were not as influenced by the Arabic, due, at least in part to geographical and morphological features of the Earth that formed natural borders, such as the Ebro River (in the case of Catalonia) and the Pyrenees Mountains (in the case of France). On the map to the left, Catalonia and France are coloured grey. If you travel to the south of Spain, which I highly recommend, you will see this culture (eg. flamenco music and dance) still vibrant, alive and well in cities such as Granada, Sevilla and Córdoba. Granada, for example has a Moorish Quarter where you can buy different teas and items you might associate with Morocco.So, where was I going with all this? Tonight, we are going to see Anna Roig. The following cute video clip is mostly in the Catalan language, but with French words and expressions, the title being, "Je t'aime"... Jo t'estimo... Yo te quiero... I love you. Music is truly without borders.
Peace,
Grant
For the past few years I have been studying the Mediterranean Undercurrent. At the Strait of Gibraltar, there is an exchange of waters. Warm, salty Mediterranean Water flows out into the Atlantic Ocean, and cooler, fresher Atlantic Water flows in at the surface maintaining the volume of the Mediterranean Sea. Why is the Mediterranean so salty? While, it's not the saltiest sea in the world, it is quite saltier than the oceans because of higher evaporation due to the intense sunlight. Why is water salty at all, you might ask? That's because of the slow accumulation of different mineral salts that run into the seas or oceans from rivers, eroded off rocks over long geological times.
The Mediterranean U
ndercurrent flows out under the surface in pulses. It then cascades down over the continental shelf between the Iberian peninsula (Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar and Andorra) and settles out between 500 and 1500 m depth, moving westward guided by sea floor topography and it's own buoyancy. The Earth's rotation produces an effect known as the Coriolis force, that coerces the current northward along the continental shelf of the Iberian peninsula as far north as Ireland and even Iceland, where it is all the time mixing with the Atlantic waters while cooling off and being diluted. We set out to image this current using seismic waves.
This technique is a rather new tool to oceanography, but it has proved to be incredibly adept at imaging layers within the ocean. For decades, seismic techniques have been used to image layers within the solid earth by observing how sound reflects differently from different layers (different rock types). Basically what they are, are boundaries of different physical properties (different densities and elastic properties) such that sound travels differently through them and reflects to the surface at different angles and with different intensities. By measuring these varying intensities, seismologists are able to "map" the subsurface by "listening" to how long sound takes to travel from the surface, to an interface and back.
As our ship steamed along at about 6 nauts, we fired off an air gun at the back, which produces a bubble of air as the source of the sound. Further behind the ship we towed a long cable filled with hydrophones, basically highly sensitive microphones, which record the reflected sound. On-board there is a marine biologist. He is continuously on the lookout for whales and other marine mammals that may venture near the ship. Indeed they do on a regular basis, and we often see dolphins surfing on the bow wave. The air gun produces a pretty significant sound that no doubt is heard by the dolphins and whales. It doesn't seem to bother them however, but we take precautions anyway. In fact, given the long distances that sound can travel through water (since it is a lower-loss medium than air), whales can communicate with one another over thousands of kilometres. With the increasing ship transport due to globalization, the amount of noise in the ocean from ship engines has increased tremendously over the years such that some people believe it is affecting whale migration routes because they are not able to communicate as well over the background hum of diesel engines.
Anyway, we are out there to study the Mediterranean Undercurrent and to calibrate the new seismic oceanography method against conventional oceanographic techniques that explore the ocean using dropped probes which measure temperature, conductivity (thus, salinity) and pressure. While these provide a great measure of the vertical variability of ocean property contrasts, they are usually only dropped about every 1 km or so. So, the seismic method really helps out here because we can provide horizontal resolution on the order of about 10 m.
In the end, the image looks like this:
First of all, I should explain... number 1, these colours are artificial. The ocean, of course doesn't really look like this. Well, not visually, if you could see it at such dark depths. What you are looking at here is a vertical slice of the ocean, as seen by reflected seismic waves. The grey at the bottom is the sea floor, the yellow is what's known as the North Atlantic Deep Water, water of the North Atlantic in the Bathypelagic and Abyssal Zones. The red represents the Mediterranean Water and the green, above is the North Atlantic Central Water. The colours are totally arbitrary and have no meaning except to show the boundaries between the different water masses (these are seen as the darker patchy colours throughout, that define the ocean structure). While, these water masses have been known for some time by probing the ocean with instruments, we see that the seismic wave amplitude also changes from shallow to deep. This is due to the property contrasts between the different waters. Because the Mediterranean Water is warmer and saltier than the others, sound reflects to a higher or lower degree. The amplitude of the seismic wave is a measure of the amount of reflection (as opposed to transmission through the water). If you had an uniform water of the same density and temperature, none of the sound that we generate at the surface would reflect and we wouldn't see anything at all! But, because of the differences of the properties of the water masses, we can create an image of the physical structure of the water. Notice, how in the Mediterranean Water (red zone), there is a large lens type structure. This is what is know as a "Meddy", or an eddy (whirlpool) composed of Mediterranean Water, hence the name. They are formed as the Mediterranean Undercurrent turns north at Cape St. Vincent, the extreme southwest edge of Portugal. Here, part of the Mediterranean Water starts to spin and translate roughly westward. This structure is about 80 km wide and 1.5 km thick (so, this image is not to scale, it's actually much thinner, vertically). It spins slowly in a sort of solid body rotation.
We are developing this new method of Seismic Oceanography to try to introduce seismics into the well-established field of physical oceanography. There are a number of hurdles to overcome, but we think it adds a new tool to physical oceanography that may tell us something about the large scale structure of the ocean and in comparison with historical data, maybe something about the temporal variability of ocean currents, which may influence opinion on climate change. You can find my paper on the Mediterranean Undercurrent, here.
Peace,
Grant
The Mediterranean U
ndercurrent flows out under the surface in pulses. It then cascades down over the continental shelf between the Iberian peninsula (Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar and Andorra) and settles out between 500 and 1500 m depth, moving westward guided by sea floor topography and it's own buoyancy. The Earth's rotation produces an effect known as the Coriolis force, that coerces the current northward along the continental shelf of the Iberian peninsula as far north as Ireland and even Iceland, where it is all the time mixing with the Atlantic waters while cooling off and being diluted. We set out to image this current using seismic waves.This technique is a rather new tool to oceanography, but it has proved to be incredibly adept at imaging layers within the ocean. For decades, seismic techniques have been used to image layers within the solid earth by observing how sound reflects differently from different layers (different rock types). Basically what they are, are boundaries of different physical properties (different densities and elastic properties) such that sound travels differently through them and reflects to the surface at different angles and with different intensities. By measuring these varying intensities, seismologists are able to "map" the subsurface by "listening" to how long sound takes to travel from the surface, to an interface and back.
As our ship steamed along at about 6 nauts, we fired off an air gun at the back, which produces a bubble of air as the source of the sound. Further behind the ship we towed a long cable filled with hydrophones, basically highly sensitive microphones, which record the reflected sound. On-board there is a marine biologist. He is continuously on the lookout for whales and other marine mammals that may venture near the ship. Indeed they do on a regular basis, and we often see dolphins surfing on the bow wave. The air gun produces a pretty significant sound that no doubt is heard by the dolphins and whales. It doesn't seem to bother them however, but we take precautions anyway. In fact, given the long distances that sound can travel through water (since it is a lower-loss medium than air), whales can communicate with one another over thousands of kilometres. With the increasing ship transport due to globalization, the amount of noise in the ocean from ship engines has increased tremendously over the years such that some people believe it is affecting whale migration routes because they are not able to communicate as well over the background hum of diesel engines.
Anyway, we are out there to study the Mediterranean Undercurrent and to calibrate the new seismic oceanography method against conventional oceanographic techniques that explore the ocean using dropped probes which measure temperature, conductivity (thus, salinity) and pressure. While these provide a great measure of the vertical variability of ocean property contrasts, they are usually only dropped about every 1 km or so. So, the seismic method really helps out here because we can provide horizontal resolution on the order of about 10 m.
In the end, the image looks like this:
First of all, I should explain... number 1, these colours are artificial. The ocean, of course doesn't really look like this. Well, not visually, if you could see it at such dark depths. What you are looking at here is a vertical slice of the ocean, as seen by reflected seismic waves. The grey at the bottom is the sea floor, the yellow is what's known as the North Atlantic Deep Water, water of the North Atlantic in the Bathypelagic and Abyssal Zones. The red represents the Mediterranean Water and the green, above is the North Atlantic Central Water. The colours are totally arbitrary and have no meaning except to show the boundaries between the different water masses (these are seen as the darker patchy colours throughout, that define the ocean structure). While, these water masses have been known for some time by probing the ocean with instruments, we see that the seismic wave amplitude also changes from shallow to deep. This is due to the property contrasts between the different waters. Because the Mediterranean Water is warmer and saltier than the others, sound reflects to a higher or lower degree. The amplitude of the seismic wave is a measure of the amount of reflection (as opposed to transmission through the water). If you had an uniform water of the same density and temperature, none of the sound that we generate at the surface would reflect and we wouldn't see anything at all! But, because of the differences of the properties of the water masses, we can create an image of the physical structure of the water. Notice, how in the Mediterranean Water (red zone), there is a large lens type structure. This is what is know as a "Meddy", or an eddy (whirlpool) composed of Mediterranean Water, hence the name. They are formed as the Mediterranean Undercurrent turns north at Cape St. Vincent, the extreme southwest edge of Portugal. Here, part of the Mediterranean Water starts to spin and translate roughly westward. This structure is about 80 km wide and 1.5 km thick (so, this image is not to scale, it's actually much thinner, vertically). It spins slowly in a sort of solid body rotation.
We are developing this new method of Seismic Oceanography to try to introduce seismics into the well-established field of physical oceanography. There are a number of hurdles to overcome, but we think it adds a new tool to physical oceanography that may tell us something about the large scale structure of the ocean and in comparison with historical data, maybe something about the temporal variability of ocean currents, which may influence opinion on climate change. You can find my paper on the Mediterranean Undercurrent, here.
Peace,
Grant
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