Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Local and Global Impacts of the 1783-84 Laki Eruption in Iceland


Part of the Laki fissure system in Iceland that erupted from June 1783 until February 1784 in one of the largest eruptions in recorded history. Image: Ulrich Latzenhofer / Fotopedia.




Distribution of the 1783-4 Laki haze across the northern hemisphere. Image: Thordarsson and Self (2003)

Saturday marks the 230th anniversary of the famed Laki (or Skaftár Fires) eruption in Iceland — one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. It wasn’t a enormous explosion like many people associate with giant eruptions, nothing like Tambora or Krakatau. However, it did have a profound impact on people living around the entire Northern Hemisphere for years afterwards, although the direct impact the eruption had on the Earth’s climate is still a widely debated and researched topic. In honor of this anniversary, I thought I’d try to give a brief primer on the eruption and why it is such an important eruption, both in terms of Icelandic volcanism and its global impact.

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In 1783, the Laki Volcano in Iceland exploded. Around 10,000 Icelanders were killed—almost one-fifth of the country’s population. Up to 60 percent of livestock was destroyed and entire regions of the country laid to waste—but the volcano’s effects weren’t confined to this one island. For six months the volcano pumped out more sulphur dioxide than has ever been released into the atmosphere in modern history. And that cloud of sulphur would have catastrophic consequences across the Northern Hemisphere.

That summer, Europe was plagued by disaster. A thick fog settled in the West, dense and poisonous. Crops shriveled and died, gigantic hailstones came crashing to Earth, and an intense, suffocating heat sparked apocalyptic thunderstorms. The naturalist Gilbert White described the haze as being “unlike anything known within the memory of man.” According to his account:

“The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. At the same time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic . . . the country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun.”

For people across Europe and North America, it seemed like the end times had come. When the fog finally dissipated and winter came, it brought little relief. The ground froze, temperatures plummeted to the lowest in 250 years and 8,000 people froze to death in the UK alone. In New Orleans, the Mississippi was said to have turned to solid ice. When spring came, the thaw triggered deadly flash floods, and the USA became engulfed in howling snowstorms. Back in Europe, the economy ground to a halt while famines in Egypt caused food prices to shoot up—perhaps indirectly causing the 1789 French Revolution.

Today, the Laki Haze is all but forgotten—everywhere except Iceland, where the combined effects are known as “the hardship of the fog.” In an age where minor hurricanes and unseasonal snowfall are routinely described as signs of an impending climate apocalypse, perhaps we should all spare a thought for the 30,000 Europeans who died during that harrowing summer—when it seemed like Mother Nature had finally turned.

Hel


Hel (Old Norse Hel, “Hidden”[1]) is a giantess and goddess in Norse mythology who rules over Helheim, the underworld where the dead dwell. According to the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, she’s the daughter of Loki and the giant Angrboða (“Anguish-boding”), and therefore the sister of the wolf Fenrir and the world serpent, Jormungand. She’s generally presented as being rather greedy and indifferent to the concerns of both the living and the dead.

Many scholars view Hel as a late feature of Norse heathendom, and likely an invention of the poets.[2] Either way, it’s interesting to note that the Old Norse word Hel, which is the simpler and probably much older version of the place-name Helheim, is grammatically feminine. The writers cited above use this as a piece of evidence for the argument that the goddess Hel is a literary “personification” of the underworld. However, in the animistic and pantheistic worldview of the ancient Norse and other Germanic peoples, where nothing is inert or impersonal and everything is in some way divine, the view that the underworld comprises the tangible manifestation of a goddess – or, to put it another way, the view that a goddess is the force that animates the world beneath the ground – would be considered perfectly normal. Even if Hel is a literary invention – which must remain an open question – she’s a literary invention that’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the pre-Christian Germanic outlook on life.

References:
[1] Orel, Vladimir. 2003. A Handbook of Germanic Etymology. p. 156, 168.
[2] See, for example:
Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1968. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. p. 84.
And:
Simek, Rudolf. 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall. p. 138.

The Yale




Yale
Latin name: Eale
Other names: Centicore
A beast with flexible horns that it can move at will
 
 
General Attributes
The yale has very long and flexible horns, which it move independantly in any direction. When it fights, it keeps one horn pointed backward, so that if the horn it is fighting with is damaged it can bring the other to the front. The yale is the size of a horse, but has the tail of an elephant and the jaws of a boar, and is black. The basilisk is the enemy of the yale, and if it finds the yale asleep it stings it between the eyes, causing its eyes to swell until they burst.

Sources (chronological order)
Pliny the Elder [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 8, 30): The yale is found in Ethiopia. It is a black or tawny color, and has the tail of an elephant and the jaws of a boar. Its horns are more than a cubit in length and are moveable; in a fight the horns are used alternately, pointed forward or sloped backward, as needed.

THE KATOBLEPS (or Catoblepas)



THE KATOBLEPS (or Catoblepas) was a large bull-shaped animal of Aithiopia (sub-Saharan Africa) whose downward hanging face, when lifted, could kill by gaze or through the fumes of its noxious breath.

The Katobleps may have been derived from an embellished traveller's account of the African gnu.

Aelian, On Animals 7. 6 (trans. Scholfield) (Greek natural history C2nd A.D.) :
"Libya [i.e. Africa] is the parent of a great number and a great variety of wild animals, and moreover it seems that the same country produces the animal called the Katobleps (Catoblepas, the Down-Looking). In appearance it is about he size of a bull, but it has a more grim expression, for its eyebrows are high and shaggy, and they eyes beneath are not large like those of oxen but narrower and bloodshot. And they do not look straight ahead but down on to the ground: that is why it is called ‘down-looking’. And a mane that begins on the crown of its head and resembles horsehair, falls over its forehead covering its face, which makes it more terrifying when one meets it. And it feeds upon poisonous roots. When it glares like a bull it immediately shudders and raises its mane, and when this has risen erect and the lips about its mouth are bared, it emits from its throat pungent and foul-smelling breath, so that the whole air overhead is infected, and any animals that approach and inhale it are grievously afflicted, lose their voice, and are seized with fatal convulsions. This beast is conscious of its power; and other animals know it too and flee from it as far away as they can."

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8. 77 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"In Western Aethiopia (Ethiopia [i.e. West Africa] there is a spring, the Nigris, which most people have supposed to be the source of the Nile . . . In its neighbourhood there is an animal called the Catoblepas, in other respects of moderate size and inactive with the rest of its limbs, only with a very heavy head which it carries with difficulty--it is always hanging down to the ground; otherwise it is deadly to the human race, as all who see its eyes expire immediately."

Sources:
  • Aelian, On Animals - Greek Natural History C2nd - C3rd A.D.
  • Pliny the Elder, Natural History - Latin Natural History C1st A,D,
Other references not currently quoted here: Athenaeus 5.221b & 9.409c

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Religions, UFO





A subculture now exists in every country, based on the idea that humanity has a higher destiny. You will find people . . . who have literally dropped out of city life . . . because they had received messages from space instructing them to do so. . . .Their lives have been changed by what they consider to be genuine extraterrestrial communication. . . .We are not here dealing with escapism-we are dealing with the next form of religion.
-Jacques Vallee 

In H. G. Wells's story "Jimmy Goggles the God" a diver stomps onto the shore of a Pacific island in his diving suit (nicknamed "Jimmy Goggles"). The natives, seeing this unearthly being coming to them from the sea, unhesitatingly assume he is a god and proceed to worship him accordingly. In our time, otherworldly beings are allegedly visiting our planet in considerable numbers. It tells us something about human nature that-almost from the first moment the flying saucers were reported-there were those who saw beyond the nuts and bolts of the surface phenomenon to its profounder and more spiritual dimensions. What seemed to most people simply a mirror of our own tentative ventures into space-manifestations of alien technology-carried for these others implications of a supernal reality.

At the basis of every religion is a story, generally focused on a particular individual: Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad. The most elaborate and arguably the least implausible of these stories is that of Jesus, whose career while incarnate on earth involves wonders of all kinds-after an immaculate conception and virgin birth, the hero is visited by three kings bearing symbolic gifts, and he grows up to perform miracles and enunciate teachings, finally giving himself up voluntarily as a sacrifice to redeem humanity's sins, then ascending back to heaven. 

The flying-saucer religions have nothing to offer to compare with this-but they do not set out to do that. If traditional texts that are the very basis of the world's leading religions are today widely relegated to the realm of folklore, it is understandable that many regard them as an inadequate foundation for the most important spiritual commitment of their lives. Still, the promoters of the established religions offer their potential customers a product so defective yet find so many takers, which tells us something about human nature; fewer and fewer are choosing to swallow the sales pitch, which tells us that a growing number of people are learning to back their own judgment rather than take on trust what they are instructed to believe.

The flying-saucer story, by contrast, is eminently suited to a space-age awareness. As we humans make our own first tentative ventures beyond the atmosphere of our planet, it is natural to imagine the reverse process-other inhabitants of the universe coming to visit us. Stories of otherworldly visitors have been told throughout history, but they have mostly come from heaven, hell, or other such fantasy places. What has enabled today's otherworldly visitors to get the edge over their predecessors is that they claim to come from worlds more or less like our own-not a pie-in-the- sky heaven, but a planet that would be acceptable to the most skeptical astronomer. That proposition that we should be visited by the inhabitants of such places is scientifically plausible, even to be expected.

What can be said, though, is why this type of religious belief attracts people today. Robert Ellwood has written: "The UFO experience has seemed for many fraught with spiritual or religious meaning. This is understandable, for the sense of wonder evoked by the thought of otherworldly visitants flows easily, for persons of a certain susceptibility, into those feelings of the presence of the numinous and the transcendent which characterizes religious experience." This has been adumbrated through this essay. To summarize, we can say that UFO sects offer a plausible story that conforms, superficially at least, with our knowledge of life in space. They do not require belief in traditional myths such as virgin birth or bread changing into flesh and wine into blood; their marvels are space-age marvels and not inconsistent with scientific possibility. At the same time, it must be said that even though the stories are scientifically credible there is as yet no evidence for them that could be considered scientifically valid. The new URGs require just as much a suspension of disbelief, just as venturesome an act of faith, as any of the old religions.