Natural History Events in the Methow
January 3: 'Green Fire.' 7 PM at the Twisp River Pub. A full-
January 10, 17 &24: Human Evolution: The Incredible Journey. 7 PM at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp. Two powerpoint presentations and a film on the 24th tracing the human journey, from our roots in the primates, through the emergence of symbolic thought in caves of Europe, to our ecological conundrum today. Free, donations welcome to defray room costs. Presented by Dana Visalli,/The Methow Naturalist, call 509-
February 7, 14, 21, 28: Natural History of the Methow. Four hands-
There is some curious hanky-panky going out there in the universe. To begin with, and as discussed in this winter’s Methow Naturalist in the article ‘Uncommon Sense’, the entire universe is thought to have begun as a point the size of a pinprick, or even quite a bit smaller. The universe now appears to contain up to a trillion galaxies, each with at least a hundred billion stars, so things would have been quite crowded back when everything was packed into a small dot. As Terence McKenna points out in the above-mentioned article, in describing the Big Bang to us, all science asks for is one miracle; after that it can explain everything rationally.
There are a number of other peculiarities in the universe, one of which is that extreme violence, which is quite commonplace out there, is frequently the precursor to an increase in order, complexity, and beauty. An easy example might be our sun, a mid-sized star in which the hydrogen in its core is being crushed so intensely that 4000 tons of it is smashed to pieces every second. The atoms reconstitute themselves as helium (with two protons and electrons instead of the one-each of hydrogen), but they have lost some of their original energy, which is given off as heat. One of the emergent by-products of this violence is life itself: almost all of the five to ten million species on earth depend on the sun as their ultimate energy source.
Another example of complexity and beauty emerging from violence relates to the tilt of the earth, which rotates on an axis that is 23.5° out of perpendicular with the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun. When the earth formed from accreting material early in the development of our solar system, the gravity of the sun would have ensured that the earth’s axis was perpendicular to the line of travel around the sun. So what happened? Apparently early in the history of the earth a planetesimal smashing into it at an oblique angle, pushing the earth over by 23.5°.
An impact so violent that it almost blows the earth apart occurs, and the results are…..the four seasons in the northern and southern latitudes, which owe their existence to the earth's tilt, the annual migrations of trillions of animals as a result of the changing seasons and the adaptation of trillions of others to the cycle of summer and winter, the bright colors of the leaves in the fall and the greening of the leaves in the spring: all these phenomena owe their existence to a violent collision that occurred four billion years ago.
One other small by-product of that violence is our moon. The impact of the planetesimal was so powerful that it showered earth minerals out away from the planet, which later accreted into the moon. The moon is not just a good looking addition to the night sky. As is well-known, the moon causes most of the tidal effect on the planet, so the enormous biological diversity that depends on daily tides would not exist without the moon. Less well-known is the fact that the gravitational pull of the moon has slowed down the earth’s rotation considerably over the four billion years of its existence: day length has grown from six hours a day to twenty-four hours since the moon formed. In addition, faster rotating planets have higher winds; it is estimated that at its original higher speed of rotation the earth would have experienced 100-mile-an-hour winds daily, which would have probably prevented life from growing upward very far from the earth’s surface.
To recap: the sun annihilates 4000 tons of hydrogen per second, and the result of this violence is life on earth. A massive object smashes into the earth so brutally that it tips the planet over and knocks a portion of it into space. The products of this carnage are the four seasons, the majority of the earth’s tides, the vast diversity of living species, gentle breezes and the twenty-four hour day. Our universe is a strange place. Dana Visalli
An impact so violent that it almost blows the earth apart occurs, and the results are…..the four seasons in the northern and southern latitudes, which owe their existence to the earth's tilt, the annual migrations of trillions of animals as a result of the changing seasons and the adaptation of trillions of others to the cycle of summer and winter, the bright colors of the leaves in the fall and the greening of the leaves in the spring: all these phenomena owe their existence to a violent collision that occurred four billion years ago.
One other small by-
The moon is an astonishingly beautiful addition to the night sky. This ethereal phenomenon was
created when an enormous asteroid smashed into the earth with brutally destructive force.
created when an enormous asteroid smashed into the earth with brutally destructive force.
The Methow Naturalist is a voice for nature, and a window into the intricate natural world of the Methow Valley in north-central Washington, the Cascade
Mountains, and the into the larger bio-geo-chemical web of the living Earth. The Winter 2011 edition (available at upper left) marks 16 years of publishing,
a total of 60 issues.
Violence & Beauty
