Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 8

Initial Descent

I hate flying. I hate everything about it, from getting to and parking at the airport to the crowds trying to get through check-in and security. Then there is getting through the mass of humanity in the terminal and being herded and packed into the sardine can of a modern jet airliner. And the passengers, don’t get me started on my fellow passengers, a more selfish, grotesque and entitled bunch you could not dream up in your worst nightmares. The most uncomfortable part of the whole awful experience is the seating, and the gamble of getting the worst possible human being seated next to you and the jerk in the seat directly in front that has to lower his chair into your knees. The minuscule cookie or tiny bag of peanuts with a dribble of soda that passes for a snack these days is the ultimate insult, it is almost worth paying a astronomical amount for a drink of something stronger to numb the mental processes in order to survive the flight.

The only good thing about the entire process is reaching that almost imperceptible moment when you feel the slightest pause in the hiss of the atmosphere over the airframe of the jet that signals a decrease of speed and a beginning drop in altitude leading to an eventual landing and an end to your ordeal. This initial descent is the most anticipated and joyous part of the whole flight for me.

In the last couple of weeks I have experienced something very close to that moment when you realize that the initial descent has occurred. Certainly the recent national elections are a cause for hope as the more radical elements were slowed and in many cases rejected for a more moderate approach. To be sure, there is a still grave danger to our democracy, but perhaps younger voters may ultimately reject the extreme politics of our aging, white, brain-dead elected representatives. There is also, finally, a louder voice saying we need to be more proactive in defending our planet against climate change and environmental damage. Many countries are starting to become more concerned about the future consequences of further inactivity in limiting global warming. The recent crashes in crypto money and declines in the fortunes of Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and others have busted the myth of the billionaire genius techno wizards. It is, as it always was, a bunch of clueless nerds with too much money making mostly ill informed decisions for us. Another myth recently busted is the superiority of the Russian military as a threat to the rest of the world. They couldn’t even take on the Ukrainians. In another view of our climate crisis, we are actually getting worried that bad things could really be happening to us. In the next couple of years there may not be enough water in the Colorado River for the number of people living in the Western US dependent on it. But, at least we realize that now, and are beginning to doing things to help with the problem.

There is still a long way to go for a safe landing and a lot of awful people to deal with when we get there, but our initial descent has begun and it is a hopeful beginning. (Below, My son Rob sitting on a precipice above the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park years ago, when there was still plenty of water in the river.)

Dumb Life

From my first job out of college, as staff artist at the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake, to my current retirement, I have always been keenly interested in the search for extraterrestrial life. Not just looking for aliens, but life itself in the form of plants and animals. I have recently learned of the very great distinction between two basic categories of life that is being searched for: smart life and dumb life. Smart life encompasses, of course, creatures similar to us in that they build planet-wide civilizations and are possibly exploring space. Dumb life is just about everything else, from bacteria to insects to whales and fungi to grass to redwoods.

Even with the newest advanced telescopes, it is very difficult to find any signs of life out there in the tremendously vast distances that separate us from other worlds. So by indirect means, we must search the nearly impossible detectible biosignatures of other planets. A world with technological creatures would have in their atmospheres, industrial chemicals and pollutants. One with developing life might have levels of oxygen, nitrogen, methane and water vapor. By looking at sunlight passing through a distant planets atmosphere, it can be determined what kind possibilities that world may hold for life of any kind. The biosignature or the technosignature, will tell us the tale of that planets development. Biosignatures will be the most likely since life must exist before any intelligence can build their civilizations. The Earth has had biosignatures of life in our atmosphere for over 2 billion years and technosignatures of industry and development for only 6,000 years, so most positive contacts would likely be dumb life.

However, a technological civilization can produce millions of identifiable products such as satellites, solar panels, cities, spaceships and hundreds of other objects that might give it an edge in being detected. So it is very difficult to know what may be found in the universe around us. For many years the ideas of trying to find, ‘little green men’, has made the search somewhat comical in looking for smart life, why should we be wasting lots of money looking for ET. But there is a real need to ignore the distinctions and just continue the search for life, smart or dumb. Any discovery of life far beyond our own planet will be a defining factor in the discovery of our place in the universe and in understanding ourselves.

(An old painting of mine. Technological civilizations may be self contained without putting pollutants in the atmosphere, and life may certainly not be anything we might be familiar with.)

The Late Great Salt Lake

On a good, clear day, I can see the Great Salt Lake from my house. I live up the lower side of a mountain on what is locally called a bench. It is actually an ancient shoreline of a Ice Age glacial body of water called Lake Bonneville. There are at least four major, separate benches along the side of the Wasatch Mountains bounding the Great Salt Lake valley on the east side of the current lake. On the west side there is a considerable expanse of pure salt flats, all left over from that previous lake. The benches represent various levels of the lakes that rose and fell during periods of the ice age, shrinking when large amounts of water was locked up during cold spells and growing when the glaciers melted and retreated. The last time the lake’s water lapped at my doorstep was 14,000 years ago.

Since then, lake levels have become much lower, dependent of the whims of nature. Growing, over time, to cover an area of over 3,000 square miles and shrinking to less then 1,000 square miles in extent. In the last 20 years the west has been going through a prolonged period of drought. Population growth along the Wasatch Mountains here in Utah has greatly increased demand for water with the net result of very little reaching the lake currently. The salinity of the lake is also growing. In the north arm of the lake, it has reached 27%, reducing the number of Brine Shrimp there to near zero and stressing Brine Fly populations. (These two are the only species able to survive in the salty water.) As more of the ancient lake bed dries out and becomes exposed to the air, more dust storms can occur. Also, various toxic pollutants in the dust, like copper, sulfur and phosphorus contaminate the air quality. More worrying is that unsafe levels of arsenic have also been found in the dust. During the winter, cold spells trap pollutants in the valley for weeks, creating unhealthy air quality, the dust will only make things worse.

The dust also has a another factor of decreasing snowfall on the mountains, cutting water for growing populations and further shrinking the lake. The decreasing Brine Shrimp and Brine Flies are food for millions of local and migratory bird species that depend on them during their travels. With the lake containing a little more the one-fourth the volume that it did during the last high point in 1987, the Utah State Legislature is waking up to the dangers of the shrinking lake. Last spring there were 11 bills signed into law related to water conservation and other policies. The danger of loosing some of the more then 2 billion dollars earned in mineral extraction from the lake water is probably also a factor. Whatever happens, it is all part of the worldwide trend in global warming that is driving climate change for all of us. It is not just something that is happening to other people, but is occurring here on my doorstep, again.

(Satellite photos from the U.S. Geologic Survey comparing the lake levels in 1987 when flooding was a danger, to 2021 where drying is now the danger.)

Spiral Jetty

In 1970, an American artist, Robert Smithson built a large earthwork sculpture on the edge of the the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500 foot-long, 15 foot-wide counterclockwise coil of rock, mud and salt. The work is located at Rozel Point on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, 31 miles south of the Golden Spike National Historical site. It can be reached by an occasionally rough dirt road. In this completely isolated area, there is no camping, water or facilities. You come, you look and you leave.

In a way, the Spiral Jetty illustrates the history of the levels of the Great Salt Lake from 1970 to present day. Shortly after it was constructed, by loads of rock from dump trucks, the lake level rose and covered it for 30 years. Building it was a gamble then, but a good one at the time. The level of the lake in 1963 was the lowest ever recorded since the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Great Salt Lake valley in 1847. In 1986 and again in 1987, exceptional rain and snowfall drove the level of the lake to record highs, 12 feet above historic lows. Since the lake is very shallow, (35 feet at its deepest point), and the area around the lake is very low, any expansion can cover a large area. In 1963 the lake covered 950 square miles, in 1987 the surface area of the lake covered 3,300 square miles.

In 2002 the sculpture resurfaced, and, with the lake currently drying up, it has remained visible ever since. The pinkish colored water of the Great Salt Lake gave it a sharp contrast to the black volcanic rock that it was constructed with. When we visited the lake in 2018, the edge of the water had receded about 300 yards from the old shore line. With continuing drought and lack of water to fill the lake, the lake edge has retreated further to a mile away from the sculpture. For the foreseeable future the sculpture will remain high and dry, not so much a jetty anymore but a kind of a lopsided bull’s eye when seen from the air. Will the water return to the area around the jetty? Right now it seems doubtful, with the continuing drought and lower precipitation in the area, it may never be surrounded by water again.

(My photographs of a view from up on the shore, and a look at it from inside the loop.)

The Water Year

Utah is the second driest state in the U.S., (Oddly enough, Nevada is the first). The water year which runs from October to October is the primary measure for all things wet here. With my weather gauge, I decided to see how the water year from last October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022 was like. Utah and most of the western U.S. is in, what is termed, a drought, so how did we do? Let’s start with some official numbers: North Ogden gets 20 inches of rain, average, per year. The US average is 38 inches per year. North Ogden gets some kind of precipitation, on average, 84 days per year. The U.S. gets 106 days of average precipitation. (Precipitation is rain, snow, sleet, or hail that falls to the ground. In order for precipitation to be counted you have to get at least .01 inches on the ground to measure.)

So how did we do?
In the water year just completed, North Ogden got 18.60 inches of precipitation, under the average of 20 inches. It got precipitation 82 days of the year, just under the average 84 days. October, 2021, was by far the wettest month of the past year with 5.39 inches. The next six months were well below average, November with .93 inches, December with 1.20 inches, February, normally a wet month, getting only .07 inches. March got .97 inches and April, normally the wettest month of the year, with only 1.06 inches of precipitation. Summer was book-ended with a good 2.89 inches in May and 3.05 inches in September. Our summer was very hot and dry with June getting .83 inches, July getting .27 inches and August getting .81 inches of precipitation. A number of temperature records were broken in July, August and especially in September here in Northern Utah.

The numbers indicate a below average amount of water. What is worrying is the low amount of precipitation from November to April, this is normally when rain falls in the mountains making for water storage in the form of snow. That melts in the spring and summer, providing the bulk of the water available to us. With less snow in storage, there is less water for agriculture, industry and culinary use. The amount of secondary water was cut back considerably this year, resulting in dry lawns, shrubs and trees. Utah is forecast to continue to have dryer and warmer weather in the next year, so these trends should continue. I will keep monitoring the precipitation and see if the coming water year is any better, or worse.

(My little weather monitoring station in the back yard.)

By the Numbers

When I was in high school, I was leaning heavily towards studying biochemistry, this was back in the early days of DNA and RNA research and I found it all quite fascinating. However, my math skills were not the greatest and they would have to vastly improve in order to help me to study for a science degree. This was readily resolved when I was offered an art scholarship to Utah State University, which was not too far away from where I lived. I chose the path of least resistance at the time and I did not regret it. But, in my spare time, I became an amateur science nerd and a large number of scientific interests became hobbies of mine.

In the last month, several scientific numbers became very important to the world, though largely ignored by almost everyone. First and foremost, Covid deaths rose to over a million in the U.S. Having suffered from Covid in December of 2020, I pay a great deal of attention to the progress of this epidemic. As of today 1,005,823 people have died and that is only the official count, the unofficial total may be as high as double that. Deaths from Covid around the world have topped 6.3 million and while the number of deaths has slowed, it has not stopped or gone completely away, nor will it ever.

By some counts, the world population has just recently grown to over 8 billion people. When I was born in 1951, the population of the world was 2.5 billion people. In the 70 years since, the number of human beings on this planet has tripled. However, the population rate is slowing and estimated growth is about 1.05%, equaling to 81 million people born per year. It is projected that there will be 9 billion people in 2037 and 10 billion people in 2057. The population of the U.S. is estimated to be 334,800,000 and is the 3rd largest country in the world behind India with 1.40 billion and China with 1.45 billion people.

In April, CO2 levels blew past 420 parts per million, (ppm). CO2 traps heat in our planet’s atmosphere and is contributing to the rise in global temperatures. 2021 and 2018 are tied for the 6th warmest years on record, the 8 warmest years on record have all occurred in the last 8 years. 2022 is expected to be only slightly warmer then 2021 but 2023 could set a new warmest record for the world. The daily seasonal level of CO2 as of June 9 is 421.33 ppm, and that is over 2.14 ppm from the same date last year. Global surface temperature for the planet is plus 1.12 degrees Centigrade, (2 degrees Fahrenheit), since 1880. It is expected to exceed 1.5C before the end of the decade.

You do not have to be a scientist to see that these numbers are frightening and ignoring any of these trending figures is dangerous to our continuing health and wellbeing. With so many other problems in the world it is hard to focus on what is important. Overall efforts are slowly making some progress, but will it be enough in the long run. (Enclosed cities are just one possible future according to one of my old painting ideas.)

Earth Day

This Friday with be Earth Day, 2022. Earth Day was started in 1970 to mark the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement. So in those 52 years, how are things going? For one thing, back then, nobody had any idea that the climate was already accelerating towards a catastrophic end. Now, with the Paris Agreement on Climate in 2015, and the disappointing progress towards meeting the goals set then, concerned scientists and people alike are trying to get preventive measures moving again at a much faster pace then before. Time is starting to become a factor as the ravages of climate change become more apparent every year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out on Monday. The biggest warning was, that under all scenarios examined, our planet is likely to reach and pass the crucial 1.5 degree Centigrade warming increase in the early 2030s, surpassing the temperature goal set out in the Paris Agreement.

At 1.5 degrees of warming, dangerous effects on the world’s climate will get more critical. The limit was set as the amount of increase of the world’s average temperatures from the beginnings of the pre-industrial era in 1880. 1.5 degrees Centigrade translates to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is getting a little hotter then we think. The current increase, as of February was plus 1.19 degrees Centigrade, with the plus 1.5 degree level being reached in the next decade. Once we reach that level, do we try to set a limit to 1.6 degrees, and again at 1.7 degrees and so on? The consumption of CO2 producing coal and oil continues with little change and the amount of harmful gases being released into the atmosphere only gets bigger every year. The 10 hottest years on record have been since 2005 and 7 of the 10 have been since 2014. Mitigation of CO2 with clean energy alternatives has lagged at an ever increasing pace since the Covid pandemic and now more with the war in Ukraine. Failure to adopt available cleaner energy sources will contribute to further increases in global temperature. Higher temperatures will drive regional and seasonal temperature extremes. It will reduce snow cover and sea ice which will intensify rainfall events and change habitats for plants and animals, increasing some and shrinking others.

I’m not sure if the 1.5 degree limit was ever possible given our complete lack of regard for the consciences. To reach the goal of 1.5 degrees now, we would have to cut global CO2 by 15% a year. In the slower pandemic year of 2020, emissions fell by 5.4%, but since then, CO2 growth has rebounded to previous levels with little or no decreases. Fortunately that growth is not as steep as the first 10 years of this century, which was 3% per year on average. Emissions are now growing slower, at about 1% per year. By 2100 that growth would still top out at twice the Paris goal at 3 degrees Centigrade, not an ideal increase. Unfortunately this temperature would seriously impact the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets which contain a possible total of 40 feet of sea level rise. To get to the Paris goals we would have to use more electric cars, needing to reach 50% of all new car sales by 2030. Most industrial countries would have to shut down almost all of their fossil fuel power plants by 2035 in favor of cleaner power generation. And all remaining fossil fuel plants would have to have CO2 capture technology.

(Current national policies from around the planet will only deliver one-fifth of the emission reductions needed this decade to stay on target. We need to get busy now or the alternative will be a more drastic future that we might not like. Happy Earth Day! My photo taken in Bryce National Park, we still have a very beautiful planet, let’s keep it that way.)

Devonian Arms Race

On a recent trip, we stopped at the Herrett Center for Arts and Science on the campus of the College of Southern Idaho. There I found, on display, a replica of Therataspis Grandis, one of the larger trilobites ever discovered. I have always been fond of trilobite fossils and have a good half-dozen purchased larger specimens and a number of smaller ones that I have picked up in some of my early rockhounding days in the mountains of Utah. What impressed me most was the completely armored aspect of the huge creature, and I began to wonder why. All trilobites have similar features, the tri-lobed body, armored head, and possibly the first compound eyes in nature. They appeared at the beginning of the Paleozoic era, the first great explosion of animal species in the ocean. They lived on this planet for a total of 270 million years, much longer then the dinosaurs.

The earliest trilobites got no bigger then an inch long. In the Cambrian period, 540 million years ago they were the early dominate species. Later during the Ordovician Period 485 million years ago, there was increased competition from other species and predation. They grew larger and developed tougher exoskeletons. The first world mass extinction event at the end of the Ordovician cut into their numbers and thousands of species became hundreds. Later in the Devonian Period when fishes really began to develop, things got increasingly difficult for trilobites. Plants had colonized the world and theropods developed the ability to walk on land and breathe air. In the ocean, an arms race was developing. Fish began to rapidly diversify, developing armor, cartilaginous skeletons, jaws and teeth. The first sharks appeared at this time and rapidly evolved.

Trilobites reacted to the increased competition by growing larger, developing even thicker shells and spines. Many of the species in the early Devonian are some of the most beautiful with remarkable and exotic spines and other defensive arrays. This cumulated in the Therataspis, probably the most armored of the day. I’m sure that with teeth or not, many predators would avoid this trilobite. At the end of the Devonian a couple of events created another mass extinction and trilobites suffered greatly. Only one order of trilobites survived and lingered on until the end of the Permian Period, 250 million years ago, when the largest mass extinction event on earth killed off 95% of all ocean life and 70% of all land species. Oddly enough, this paved the way for the development of the dinosaurs, who went on the rule the earth for the next 180 million years.

(A complete fossil of the Therataspis has never been found. But enough bits and pieces have been discovered for scientists to reconstruct the creature fairly accurately.)

The Huntington Mammoth

The old mammoth walked slowly and painfully through the high mountain meadow, mindful of those following him at a safe distance. He could sense water ahead and continued wearily on, stopping to eat a bite or two, which had become more difficult as the last of his teeth were quite worn down. Moving forward, he wandered into a bog and sank into the soft mud, his struggles only made his plight worse, trapping him completely. The Paleoindian hunters following him, sat down to wait until his struggles ceased.

Discovered quite by accident in 1988 when a bulldozer operator was preparing ground for a reservoir in the mountains above Huntington, Utah. This hairless Columbian Mammoth, more commonly associated with living on the plains, was found at an elevation of about 9,000 feet. It is estimated that he lived some 10,500 years ago and may have been one of the last of his kind in Utah. He probably migrated to higher and cooler elevations because at this time, the earth was warming up from the last ice age. The area may have been a ecological refuge as lower elevations became less habitable. His remains indicated that he was about 60 – 65 years old. His teeth were quite worn and he had arthritis and was undernourished. 98% of the Mammoth was recovered along with bones of an extinct short-faced bear and several human projectile points.

The Columbian Mammoth is one of several species of elephant that inhibited North America during the ice ages and was a close relative to the Woolly Mammoth. Their remains have been found as far south in the U.S. as New Mexico and Texas, others have been found in Mexico. The Columbian Mammoth were one of the largest of the species and one of the largest elephants to have ever lived, measuring 12 to 14 feet high and weighing up to 10 tons. It had a head that was 12 to 25% percent of its body weight and had impressive spiraled tusks with often extended from 6 to 10 feet long. One pair of Columbian Mammoth tusks discovered in Texas was 16 feet long. The elephant was a herbivore and ate as much as 300 to 500 pounds of plants a day. The elephants may have lived until about 7,800 years ago as a specimen was reliably dated to that time in Tennessee. Warming temperatures and hunting by ancient people, sadly, brought an end to these amazing creatures in the U.S.

(On a recent trip to Southern Idaho, I was delighted to find this beautiful reproduction of the Huntington Mammoth at the Herrett Center for Arts and Science on the campus of the College of Southern Idaho. I am standing in front for size comparison, I am 5’ 11”, he is much bigger.)

Waking Up to the Future

I have to admit, I have been sleepwalking for the last two years. All I have done over this period is to just hunker down and wait for things to get better. I knew in advance at the start of 2020, that the decade would be one of immense change, I wrote about it in some of my blogs. But the reality is, of course, very much different from what I imagined then. Many of the new trends and changes came about from the Covid-19 pandemic, certainly our political parties have done little else then argue over vaccinations, mask mandates, closures, restrictions and ways to avoid doing anything to help people. To say that there are other problems out there in the real world other then transgender people and race history is an understatement, as has been shown from the sudden impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I have grown extremely tired from all the messaging that says everything is just great, and only our, (choose one or the other), political party can save us and our way of life. When in fact absolutely no one is thinking about the near or distant future and the real extreme challenges we need to start facing right now.

Covid and the Ukraine War has only accelerated continuing supply chain issues and has now set off dangerous inflationary trends. It has also impacted energy issues with rising gasoline prices, even though the U.S. has some of lowest worldwide costs amid the largest car dependency of any country. Needed clean energy advances are blocked with much higher commodity prices of things such as steel, rare earth minerals, lithium and nickel necessary for the new world of electrical vehicles, mass transportation and providing large amounts of nonpolluting energy to combat increasing CO2 levels. Gas prices also impact farming and food production. Imports of wheat and fertilizer from Russia and Ukraine will be greatly slowed and farming in third world countries may be unable to pick up the slack from much reduced imports leading to shortages and famines.

Other very near future problems we need to face are advances in quantum computing that have the ability to break modern encryption that safeguard our finances, tech and military secrets. Artificial intelligence and robotics will accelerate the loss of service-based workforce jobs in a mind-numbing way over the next several years. Medical advances will continue to offer life extending therapies and other moral questions of living and dying. There is the real need to recognize that Russia and especially China will continue to work against our economy by stealing intellectual property, buying up large amounts of real estate and actively fighting against the dollar. Russian efforts to delegitimize our government and create even more divisions among Americans will continue unabated. And if that is not enough, other kinds of viruses and future pandemics are also a very distinct possibility. As Pope John Paul II said, “The future starts today, not tomorrow.”

(We need to stop sleepwalking, it is eyes wide open time to start preparing for a large number of issues to tackle. For too long I have expected and painted a rosy Star Trek future that, alas, can never be.)