CSI EARTH

Glaciation is one of the issues science wrestles over, now more now than ever before.  Aside from the nature and existence of “trace” there may indeed be an issue of murder if global warming is due to the industrialization of civilization because if it changes growing patterns of ag crops, vector vulnerability, and animal abundance enough, people will die of famine and climate disasters.  Let’s begin way before such issues, at a time when there was no life:  “Snowball earth”, a phrase that refers to the planet being totally frozen (even the oceans) or partially glaciated, which happened repeatedly to different degrees.

Most people think of geology as the land they can see rather than the interactions of air, water, and deep earth patterns like aquifers, molten upwellings, the jet stream and whatever the hell frakking is doing as it multiplies small earthquakes.

Relying on wikipedia (is there life on wikipedia?), these approaches offer theories.

 Change in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. 

“The geological time frames under consideration come before the sudden appearance of multicellular life forms on Earth known as the Cambrian explosion, and the most recent snowball episode may have triggered the evolution of multi-cellular life on Earth. Another, much earlier and longer, snowball episode, the Huronian glaciation, which occurred 2400 to 2100 Mya may have been triggered by the first appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere, the "Great Oxygenation Event."

Great Oxygenation Event

It’s a sequence:  methane in the atmosphere created enough of a greenhouse effect for vegetation to flourish, and they made so much oxygen that animals could develop.  “The Huronian glaciation followed after the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), a time when increased atmospheric oxygen decreased atmospheric methane.  It is the oldest known ice age, occurring at a time when in biological sense, only simple, unicellular life existed on Earth.”  We appear to be reversing this process.

Moving spheres in the layered planet:  

The molten core moves according to its temperature.  It may be a factor in El Nino.  At the outer limits of thin atmosphere and gravity, the penetration of the sun energy varies.  In between are, from the inside out (so far as we know) are plate tectonics floating on the molten core.  These are huge and moving, so they collide, riding up over each other or scraping sides, and they leave spaces for major upwellings of magma.  The continents float on these tectonic plates, with momentous consequences.  We’ll come back to the Rocky Mountains, the Ring of Fire, rain shadows, and so on.

Ocean gyres

Evidence about these forces is shaky because it is so vast and ancient, but satellites have helped to get the “big picture,” even of the steady air currents and the steady water streams that affect our own transportation routes.  Some of the ocean streams are driven by temperature and salinity (melting sending in fresh water from ice) so that if the temperature changes enough it could destroy the Japanese current, which would mean that the Pacific Northwest current might stop or move, which would very much alter the mild temps in those states and in Japan.  This has happened and was marked by bitter winters and no summer growing season, thus famine.  If the Jet Stream which passes over Valier gets wobbly we have Arctic Intrusions, weeks of sub-zero weather.  If it moves vertically, we are literally blown away.  If it fails to blow across the Rockies, we will have no Chinook warming winds.  If it brings a lot of moisture, which then meets north-to-south arctic wind, we are buried in snow.  It is the dependability of these geologically controlled features that has made our lives possible.

The effect of the bi-polar magnetic forces of the planet.

We don’t know much about this, but we do know that the poles can swap positions and that the north pole has moved recently.  We are overdue for another swap, but none of the previous have been in recorded time.  It’s possible that the poles might turn out to be “trans” and to end up with four or eight poles.  Now there’s a pole at each end of the axis of the turning earth.  No one knows what would happen if they were realigned.  The axis tipping back and forth is what makes our earth seasons.  What would happen if the earth stopped tipping?  Or turning, come to that.

Bentham Erratic Boulder

Sedimentary layers left by moving air, water or land.

Little grains of whatever pile up (as in when a glacier makes deposits) are some of the best “trace”, now that we can detect orientation to magnetism, isotopes, and other atomic phenomena.  Some of it is plain, like the prairie potholes from ice boulders that melted after being buried up to their “gills” in earth, or from stone boulders moved and then stranded, called “erratics.”  (Napi was always offending them so that they chased him.)  As the glaciers picked up, ground up, and redeposited particles, they changed the land.  One of the most influential of these sequences scraped over a big rock formation constituted of a natural fertilizer and distributed it over the prairie to the south, adding to its fertility.  We’ve just about exhausted that fortuitous sedimentation.

One of the most intriguing sedimentations is “space dust” left from constant bombardment.

Technically, the really big ones would be meteorites.  And the really, REALLY big ones would be drastic game changers.

All these moving layers and forces change everything.  If they didn’t, the entire planet would “eutropify” which is the term for a body of water that is stagnant, no inlet, no outlet.  Eventually it will just go dead.  “The "Zipper rift" hypothesis proposes two pulses of continental "unzipping" — first, the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, forming the proto-Pacific ocean; then the splitting of the continent Baltica from Laurentia, forming the proto-Atlantic — coincided with the glaciated periods. The associated tectonic uplift would form high plateaus, just as the East African Rift is responsible for high topography; this high ground could then host glaciers.” 

Even the underground is always moving.  There are three alpine lakes on the planet situated over magma so that the carbon dioxide from the molten substance builds up under the water and eventually explodes.  Since humans can’t breathe carbon dioxide except by exhaling, anyone close enough will be asphxiated.  Hundreds have died this way but it’s very rare.  Still, one thinks about Yellowstone with its magma reservoir.  Hopefully, it’s blowing off in the geysers.

Geology is replacing theology.  A planet that constantly changes is more than a simple earthquake or eruption and certainly far more than any images of powerful humanoids.  How we respond will determine salvation or death for many.  It would not be exaggerating to say every living species.  How we respond will define how we are human, even on the contemporary high prairie, facing into the wind.

WATER WARS IN PONDERA COUNTY

“That to which you are blind, will bite you in the behind.”  That’s the motto I commend to the climate change deniers.  A few people are feeling teeth marks right now.  It’s not JUST climate change but also deniers of the past in many of its aspects.

My two outbuildings, a double-garage that is half-shop and a little “hired man” bunkhouse, were trucked thirty miles to this town lot after the rebuilding of Swift Dam, so they’ve been here about thirty years, the last ten with me in residence.  They were built to be temporary and show it.  I was in Browning when this flood hit and have told the story on other posts.

“Swift Dam (National ID # MT00581) is a dam in Pondera County, Montana, on the southern end of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

“The original dam at this location was originally constructed around 1910, with a height of 157 feet. This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed and sent a 30-foot wall of water down the creekbed. The nearby dam at Lower Two Medicine Lake also failed, and at least 28 people were killed.

"The current concrete-arch structure was completed in 1967, with a height of 205 feet, and a length at its crest of 573 feet. The reservoir is also contained by a secondary earthen dike (National ID # MT00580) with a height of 53 feet and a length of 457 feet, also completed in 1967. The dams and reservoir are owned and operated by the local Pondera Canal & Reservoir Company."

This past Sunday the Great Falls Tribune (April 21, 2013) front page story was about this same Company.  ponderacanalcompany.com/  If you go there, you will find the bare outlines of the founding story.  The names are local names (Stokes, Wheeler, Christiaens, Connelly) and so is the name of the family who has brought this system to crisis, Gene and Cheryl Curry.  The originators of the company were the Conrad brothers, young survivors of the Civil War who came to this area to get rich and did, earlier with open range cattle.  I’ve posted about the flood, about the Conrads, and about some of the history of the Town of Valier.  I’ve even posted about the Foley Report, which itemizes the many ways that the US Government was supposed to be developing irrigation on the Blackfeet Reservation but didn’t.  Ivan Doig has written a novel about the building of the dam (“The Whistling Season”) and Sid Gustafson is writing about the actual flood in a novel called “Swift Dam.”  Both men have local roots.

Bob Scriver (my deceased ex) used to say “people will do whatever they can do.”  So the Conrads built Swift Dam without asking permission, didn’t bother with the rights of the Blackfeet, made their money, sold to Cargill and got out.  They are now an international, bi-coastal, sophisticated family -- not because of the money, but because the money let them find elegant and educated wives.  Think “Downton Abbey.”  

A clerk at Curry’s, the only grocery store left in Valier, is a retired ditch rider from the Canal Company.  I asked whether he started his career on horseback, but he’s not THAT old.  He said the real change came with the big “circle” irrigating systems, huge wheeled industrial-scale pumps and sprays that are far beyond a ditch that a guy goes along on a 4-wheel all-terrain vehicle with a shovel and some plastic tarp dams.  But he’s only half-right.  The real change came when enough Blackfeet had gone to college for the tribe to read its treaty rights and to pencil out the profits from circle pump irrigation.  The first reservation irrigation canals had been dug with horse teams and “scrapers” -- sometimes even by married couples with hand shovels trying to get water to their garden patches.  Since then they had slumped, been invaded by brush, and the proper paperwork was lost.  One of my own favorite sayings is “to get something done, first you have to think of it.”  They did.  Suddenly they saw that their half of the water rights in Birch Creek were literally going south.

The Curry family is known as aggressive and political.  Sometimes they just fired up the heavy machinery and took the water they wanted, and other times they went to court.  If the original Conrads had been involved, there might have been a shooting war, but now it just means nasty dynamics among people whose best chance for survival is to get along.  Of course, the lawyers are doing well.

What we’re really talking about is the remnants of the great North American glaciers of ten thousand years ago that built this land, carrying in soil and gravel from far to the north, building up unimaginable amounts of ice in the Rocky Mountains, and then melting so quickly that it dug waterways, including Birch Creek which is the boundary between the Blackfeet Reservation and Pondera County.  That’s the real canal and irrigation system.  Every year the farmers watch the snowpack levels, hoping they will provide enough renewed run-off to fill Lake Francis and water the fields.  Every year, regardless of rainfall or snowfall, the glaciers that have been the backup systems since the Blackfeet were dog people are a little smaller, a little higher, a little thinner.  The huge aquifer under Montana that holds whatever glacier melt sank underground gets a little more depleted every year.

The only way to renew it is to bring back the continental glaciers.  That will probably happen eventually, but there may not be any humans here to witness it.  We are creatures of the earth’s surface and have developed to fit it, but that means that since the crust shrugs and shrinks and splits on a scale far beyond our control, that we occasionally come to grievous harm.  Sometimes its fast, like an earthquake or volcanic eruption, but other time it’s a slow change like this one we’ve brought on ourselves with our emissions and irrigations.

We humans keep trying to find strategies:  we divvy up the territory into districts, we issue shares to companies and describe rights, we delve into history and tell stories about who did what, we try to exclude some of the parties involved -- but always the driving force is control, profit, like a consuming fire generating black-hearted smoke.  People think they can move to Valier and find a calm, safe place to live next to a pretty little lake.  Illusion.  Always the illusions.

I had the idea that my little bunkhouse would be a fun place for company to sleep.  They find it too primitive by half.  I thought I might develop a kind of studio in the big building, but the roof is caving.  Always the plans.  Always the potential.