The pre-Columbian California native people had a mystical and cultural relationship to the climate that did not involve measuring rainfall. The Franciscan fathers were on their own spiritual quest, and while they sometimes recorded wine production at the missions, they didn’t record the rainfall either.
The first rainfall measurements for the golden state were in 1850 when a couple of doctors who accompanied the gold rush began recording rainfall in San Francisco. One hundred and sixty-four years is a paltry database to gauge what is normal for a climate that has been around for the last ten thousand years, but it is all we have and we use San Francisco because it has the longest continuous record.
In 2011 we became concerned about drought in California and we started a graph of the driest years. Our interest waned as a reasonable amount of rain fell in February and March of the 2011-2012 season.
As you can see the 2013-2014 season is on track with the driest two previous years. It is tracking almost perfectly with 1850, much as 2011 tracked with 1897 until February. The driest year through December remains 1917.
The fact that more energy cycles between the surface of the earth and the atmosphere than the earth receives from the sun strikes me as one of the great marvels of nature.
This is the earth’s energy budget according to NASA. You can see that while only about half of incident solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere is actually absorbed by the surface due to reflection and direct absorption by the atmosphere, nearly one and a half times incident solar energy is sent from the surface back up between radiation, evaporation, and convection.
This would be a prescription for deep freeze if the atmosphere did not send the equivalent of all the sun’ s energy back down again.
So how can it be that more energy cycles between the surface and the atmosphere than the earth receives from the sun?
It boils down to water. Water just luuuves long wave radiation, commonly called infrared. It doesn’t care a fig for visible and ultraviolet light. Ice and water vapor are essentially the same, they absorb and start flinging (radiating) long wave photons every chance they get. It is just a material property of H2O.
To get things started, clouds, water vapor, and ice absorb long wave photons from the sun and start flinging them every which way, up, down, sideways. The ones flung down by the atmosphere and whatever few make it through from the sun hit the ocean and the land. Oceans cover seventy percent of the planet, and they love long wave photons so much they absorb them all within a few microns of the surface and begin flinging them as well.
The photons the ocean surface flings down (say half) are themselves absorbed within microns. This is a losing game and all the photons are essentially contained within the first few millimeters and the net effect is that the ocean flings the photons back at the atmosphere.
The photon food fight is on. It continues day and night. Simultaneously, endlessly, a sun quantum and more.
The oceans are the energy bank for the planet. They receive energy to great depth from the sun. Continents cool the planet.
Daedalus suggested in jest that if we increased the area of the continents 5%, we could reverse the supposed effect of doubling atmospheric CO2.
Quite a construction project, but one that has been ongoing since the first continents were distilled four billion years ago. My suspicion is that the first continents were “large mud provinces” from mud volcanoes.
Photo Credit Ted Cross
This is a lovely one spewing serpentinized mud. More serious continents began to form when there was enough water to hydrate granite. Granite and serpentine are too light to sink back to the mantle. Continents have been steadily growing at the rate of a bit less than a square kilometer a year since the Proterozoic.
Paving indeed. Yet temperature has not decreased steadily over the last 2.5 billion years. It has been a roller coaster ride between glacial periods and thermal maxima with no clear trend.
I sound like a Carbon wag when I say that two of the hottest periods in earth history have been in the last 250 million years. (Triassic and Eocene)
We have become so accustomed to science by public institutions of higher education, and publicly funded science at private institutions , we easily forget that a century and a half ago this practice was unheard of.
Charles Darwin was a man of some means who could quit medical school and sign on for the voyage of the Beagle. Beholden to no one, he refined his concept for a quarter of a century before publishing it. “Peer review” was written correspondence with colleagues. Darwin corresponded with Charles Lyell for decades about his thesis. “Publication” was an arrangement with a printer for some copies.
Contrast the modern arrangement where a few sanctioned journals with rigid peer review policies charge the public for the privilege of reading the results they have paid for. Where the same journals and their reviewers frame the scientific agenda and dumbed down press releases to the media. Where “publish or perish” requires young investigators to tailor their work for short time frames and conformity to the paradigm.
Before the twentieth century, science was not done at public institutions. It was done at private institutions and by private patronage. We have turned science into a government industry, and governments do not do industry well. By forcing our investigators to beg for public grants, we open the door for political control, and we beggar science.
Here at the gymnosperm/trunkmonkey research institute we have been spending a lot of time sorting rocks. It is utter drudgery and we would have quit a long time ago had the results not been so intriguing. Basically, we belatedly discovered various USGS databases with shape files for rock units with coordinates anchored in space. Unfortunately, this data is not sorted in the fourth dimension, time. So we have been sorting the units by time. This might seem easy, but we are dealing in the case of the western United States with a covey of State Geologists with different conceptions and styles. We are also dealing with rock units that are utterly unimpressed with our preconceptions. They exploit old weaknesses and extend through time and through whatever paleontological, statuary, or geological boundaries we have contrived.
Previously, we explored the compiled geological evolution of the western United States. Everything has a derivative. There are several circular granite features on earth that make this interesting. What if you look at the periods individually?
Couple things worth sharing:
These are the Cretaceous rocks of the western US. What is surprising here is the band of granites extending from the “Salinian” I had previously attributed to strike slip, across Nevada and to the Idaho batholith. This represents a regression from the late Paleozoic/early Mesozoic pattern of igneous activity through the Klamath’s, Blues, And Wallowa’s.
Had to check a few times, but the Pleistocene, the reputed time of uplift of the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, shows little igneous activity south of those basalt puddles north of the Mendocino Fracture Zone? There are exceptions, the Konocti volcanics in the California Coast Ranges, the Sutter Buttes, the Long Valley Caldera. A few basalts along the Wasatch Front and along the Rio Grande Rift in New Mexico…
The triangle is formed by lines of equal age in the ocean floor derived from bands of alternating magnetism as the earth’s pole flipped. It is one of the great mysteries discussed previously. The ocean floor gets progressively older from all three sides towards a small triangle in the middle. If this were the remains a hot spot where ocean floor was emerging and spreading out, it would be progressively younger toward the center.
How could such a feature form? One possibility is that it is the signature of a sink hole, the tectonic opposite of a hot spot. Another possibility is that the tiny center triangle marks a place where three ridges arose at the same time and spread away. Interesting regarding either possibility is that the signature of the Mendocino Fracture Zone (visible extending to the right all the way to the Juan De Fuca Ridge) telegraphs back to the 170mya chron. The Murray and Molokai Fracture Zones further south seem to bottom out at 150mya.
Here is an image of a map by Christopher Scotese showing the isochrons for the whole world. The age is RGB, with red the youngest and blue the oldest. You can see that ocean floor emerges at the spreading ridges and spreads in both directions. Bilateral spreading.
Here is Scotese at the beginning of ocean floor time 180mya. There is actually some 250mya ocean floor north and east of Africa discussed previously, but it is of little importance here. Contemplate the sheer mass of ocean floor showen white here that all gets subducted one way or another to make room for what we see today.
Unfortunately the Pacific Triangle gets divided between the lower right and left in this projection, but there it is, starting out rather too large at 170mya, but infilling properly with older material at 160 and 150mya. What Scotese is saying here is that he believes it was ridges propagating from the tiny triangle. Notice that the Triangle is the only place ocean floor is formed away from a continent, and that continental rifting seems unilateral (one sided). We see no bilateral spreading before 150mya.
Interesting. If this is correct, the Juan de Fuca Ridge is a remnant of the original troika and its signature can be traced back to the 170mya isochron.
The original sin, secondary, tertiary, quaternary sins.
Hurricanes, tornadoes are upon us. Quick! Find a witch to burn.
Well, at least he saved the weed eater.
Not to minimize the tragedies, just the sensationalism. Nobody wants their house trashed and people killed. Mt. Etna is erupting too. Do you think Carbon dioxide caused that?
The Carbon in our bones spewed from volcanoes. Our DNA is a spinning vortex. Cataclysm is our heritage, not our fault.
When you look at the big picture it Mt Etna looks like this:
Our brains are layered in the same way sedimentary rocks are. In our lower brains lie the basic functions: breathe, eat and drink, thermoregulate, and reproduce. These are Archean functions we share with all living things. All beautiful, non-predictive analogies can be drawn too hard, but we suggest that the next layer might be Ediacaran functions in the mid brain: hard shell defense and fight or flight?
You can see where this is going, so we take a leap and call the upper brain a Pleistocene function whose properties are metaphor, art, and language.
There may be some rough correspondence to Sigmund Freud‘s conceptions of Id (let’s party), Ego (it’s all about me baby, I’m outta here), and Superego (what will the neighbors think?)
The human brain is way more complex than this, of course, with cross wiring between hemispheres and multiple redundancy everywhere. Yet the stratigraphic architecture sheds some light on original sin. We are constantly “conflicted” between the socially conscious communicating and cooperating forebrain and the lower layers whose impulses would wreak havoc on these niceties.
There is an Indo-European pantheon of gods embedded in the language and culture of these yeomen whose pastoral, agricultural business model was so successful they spread from central Europe east to the Indus Valley and Iran and west to England and Scandinavia and south to Egypt and north Africa.
Credit fantalov@lycos.com
The downward pointing geometry represents deities of “earth powers “, which we suggest are metaphor for lower brain and connection to the natural world. Gaia is a Greek version not mentioned above.
Humans are creatures of metaphor and representation. We are creatures of language. We painted cave ceilings, we erected stone monuments, we dug underground cities and filled them with model soldiers.
We are partly of the sky (circles above) and partly of the earth. We feel the separation. This is our original sin, and this is why we live in fear, as our predecessors; of Gaia’s revenge.
Granite is the currency in the construction of continents. Here we will time step through the existing surface expression of granites and related igneous and metamorphic rock in the Western US from the Archean to the present.
Sediments are boring. You don’t want no downstream beer. Geologists love them because they stack nicely and behave in predictable ways, but they clutter up geologic maps so as to obscure the exciting stuff. Here we invoke Vulcan, and Vulcan only.
Before 2.5 billion years ago we have no idea where the continents were located. The Archean is expressed in the western US as currently NW trending granite batholiths in Wyoming and Montana.
Between 2.5 and 1.6 billion years ago we see an extension of granitoids in a current north-south trend into Colorado and the Rio Grande Rift that we now think of as the Rocky Mountains. What is very strange is that we also see development on a different trend in Arizona south-west of the Colorado Plateau. Perhaps the Colorado Plateau was a separate craton then and differential rotation created the discordant trends.
From 1.6 to a billion years ago we see further development along the discordant trends with new plutons in Colorado and extension to very near the current coast in the San Gabriel Mountains. There is also activity in Montana and Idaho roughly parallel to the Arizona/California trend.
The neoproterozoic between a billion years and the Cambrian adds the finishing touches to the Proterozoic mountain building era and ushers in the extremely boring Paleozoic where pretty much nothing happens. We begin to get some idea where the continents may have been.
Christopher Scotese thinks they looked like this, but the magnetic alignments used to create the reconstruction are very uncertain before the Paleozoic. The western US would be Laurentia down there under the ice. Scotese even suggests my Colorado Plateau craton if you look closely.
The Cambrian above ushered in the Paleozoic era where not much happened in the western US for a half a billion years.
Mr. Scotese would have us floating idyllically as an island paradise at the equator in a drastic turn of events from 650 mya.
Ron Blakey has it like this. Anyway, for whatever reason, is spite of beginning the role of a castaway sailing into the Panthalassic Ocean it would maintain for most of the Phanerozoic, North America as evidenced by the western US shows very little tectonic activity in the Paleozoic.
Here, jumping ahead a couple hundred million years to the Carboniferous we resort to showing some lowly sediments in the Roberts Mountain Thrust in Nevada out of sheer boredom. The trend of the thrust is unclear it seems to suggest the beginning of the current lineation in Nevada and to follow from activity in the Klamath mountains.
This is about when the collision forming the Appalachians occurred.
We close out the dull Paleozoic with the Permian about 250 mya as the great extinction occurred.
Ron Blakey’s Triassic at 245 mya above. Important changes were brewing. North America was separating to sail off into Panthalassa once again, a voyage that will bring continuous mountain building to the western US from the Mesozoic to the present.
The great extinction at the Permian/Triassic transition was followed by wild fluctuations in Carbon isotopes as life on the planet alternately rebounded and regressed. Volcanos were spewing in a grand arc evident in vegetation today from the southern end of the Sierra Nevada batholith, to the Klamath, and through the Blue and Wallowa Mountains and into Idaho.
By the end of the Cretaceous 65 mya as the dinosaurs passed, a circle was completed as the Idaho batholith joined the Archean granites. An important volcanic center was forming in northern Washington.
During the Eocene andesitic volcanics began extending northward from the Klamaths and southward from Washington in the line we think of as the Cascades. The Absoroka volcanics formed at Yellowstone.
In the Oligocene felsic volcanics swept across the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah and important volcanic activity began in the San Juans of Colorado and in western New Mexico.
The Miocene saw the impressive spreading of flood basalts. Those things are almost as bad as sediments. There was also an interesting arm of felsic volcanics extending into southern Utah. Note the felsic volcanics beginning to extend up the edges of the Snake River Plain.
We jump to the present as flood basalts basically cover the Pacific Northwest.
When we follow the granite we see a great concave arc formed during the Proterozoic, an interlude during the Paleozoic, and the completion of a ring of granite with a great convex arc in the Mesozoic. The Cenozoic basically extended the circle to include the Cascades and filled it in with a “bimodal suite” of flood basalt and felsic tuffs.
In the beginning there was a great flash of light, and soon there was the primal proton, Hydrogen, which fused to produce Helium , and so on, within supernovae, to create our pantheon of elements.
Honestly, we need to muster the honesty to acknowledge that our modern “scientific ” cosmology is no less bizarre and improbable than any that has come before. “In the midst of Nun, Atum released his divine energy to create Shu, who begets the other gods of the pantheon.” So went the cosmology of Heliopolis, inscribed 4500 years ago in Egypt.
Pantheons come and go, and here we are interested in Vulcan, many generations removed. He is the Roman god of fire and volcanoes.
Vulcan speaks to deep seated human awe of fire and the mysterious workings of the underworld. The power of fire is manifest in the Indo-European/Hittite/Celtic forge, where metal can be smelted from rocks to create instruments of power and hegemony.
Yet from the toxic mud and caustic sulfurous fumes, our modern cosmology would have the elements Hydrogen and Oxygen emerge from the deep to create our oceans, the element Carbon to enable life, and Nitrogen to fill the atmosphere.
We would have these elements coalesced from cosmic dust to form our planet until their sheer weight and intrinsic energy cause them to boil through the crust.
