Smithsonian.com

We’ve got a lot of eyes on our Sun. No, not yours and mine (you shouldn’t be looking directly at the Sun anyway). I mean the artificial eyes on cameras in spacecraft. The newest of those spacecraft is NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which began transmitting images to Earth earlier this week. The image above (Credit: NASA/Goddard/SDO AIA Team), which shows different temperatures in false colors (reds are relatively cool—about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 Fahrenheit; blues and greens are hotter—greater than 1 million K, or 1,799,540 F), was taken on March 30 by the SDO. A compilation of the new imagery, including video of a solar prominence, can be found below.

Scientists are using spacecraft like SDO to investigate how the Sun works. Though they understand how a star produces heat and light, solar dynamics are complex and still rather mysterious. That may worry some—the Sun’s activity, after all, can have a huge effect on life on Earth—but I find it pretty amazing that one of the biggest mysteries in our universe is the object around which we revolve.

Dear members of the species Homo sapiens,

Portrait of Earth (Image created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC)

Hi. I’m Earth. While I’m pleased and flattered that you have chosen to honor me on every April 22 for the last 40 years, I am seriously concerned and, frankly, very angry that most of you seem to forget me for the rest of the year. I periodically try to remind you of my power—floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are among my favorite methods—but you may have noticed that I have ratcheted up my work, or at least concentrated it in places you are most likely to notice, in the past six months or so.

I began with the Snowpocalypse in Washington, D.C. back in December, briefly shutting down the government. That was just a small taste of my power. Next was the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on January 12. I struck again with a true blizzard, Snowmageddon, on the Eastern coast of the United States in February, that time shutting down the nation’s capital for an entire week. Later that month, on February 27, was my magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile. In March, I flooded large portions of New England. But my pièce de résistance really has to be this month’s eruption of the Icelandic volcano that created a volcanic plume that shut down much of European air travel.

Now that I have your attention, I have a list of demands:

• Reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t care how, but this is really for your own benefit. I survive just fine no matter how hot I get, but you’re not going to like most of the results of climate change.
• Quit using my natural resources so quickly. Again, I make this demand to help you. At the rates you’re going, I could easily run out of things like fish, wood, oil and some metals soon. I’ll be sad to see them go, but you’re going to have bigger problems.
• It took a very long time for my mountains to grow. Stop cutting off their tops to get to the coal and minerals underneath. Mountains don’t grow back like hair does.
• I know that dams may seem an easy way to create energy, but they really mess me up. They fragment ecosystems, send species into extinction and may even trigger earthquakes. Look for other, more environmentally friendly ways to generate electricity.
• Quit dumping your stuff everywhere. Didn’t your parents teach you to keep your home clean?

As you no doubt know, I can be far more violent and destructive than I have been in the last few months, but these were just wake up calls. And you can go ahead and ignore me; I’ll survive. Really, from my point of view, what you’re doing is simply annoying. But your activities are hurting your own species in the long run. So even if you don’t care about me, you might want to think about yourselves.

Cheers,

Earth

(This post was included in Scientia Pro Publica 28, where you’ll find more great science writing.)

The main plaza of Monte Albán in Mexico (Credit: Charles S. Spencer, AMNH, used with permission)

Bureaucrat is a dirty word to some people in modern society, so how can a bureaucracy be a good thing? Charles S. Spencer, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, argues this week in PNAS that bureaucracy was essential to the growth and expansion of the first states that formed across the globe, from Mexico to Egypt to China.

The evolution of a society into a state, according to modern anthropological theory, starts with an egalitarian society in which there are no permanent inequalities among social units—families, villages, etc.—and individuals become leaders through achievement, not birth. The next step is the chiefdom, or rank society, which is led by an individual of elite descent. Authority is centralized and the leader’s best strategy for management avoids delegation of authority. In pre-industrial times, this strategy would have limited the size of territory that could be controlled to about half a day’s travel by foot from the chief’s center of power, some 15 to 19 miles. The third step is a state, defined by the existence of a bureaucracy in which functions and authorities are delegated to specialists.

Anthropologists had thought that the territorial expansion of a state, sometimes called the “imperial” phase, occurs well after the state first appears. Spencer, however, argues that the two are linked and actually form a positive feedback loop:

Although the nascent state will be more expensive to sustain than the antecedent chiefdom, the new resources gained through successful territorial expansion will do much to defray the costs of the administrative transformation. The growth and proliferation of bureaucratic governance will continue as more and more resources are harnessed, leading to further delegation of authority, more territorial expansion, and still more resource extraction–a positive-feedback process that reinforces the rise of a state government qualitatively and quantitatively more complex and powerful than the chiefdom that preceded it.

If Spencer’s theory is true, then the appearance of bureaucracy (the formation of the state) and signs of its expansion should occur at nearly the same time in the archaeological record.

In his paper, Spencer focuses on a site called Monte Albán in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. Near the site, Spencer found a royal palace—evidence of a specialized ruling class—and a multi-room temple that indicated the existence of a specialized priestly class that date to the period of 300 to 100 B.C. It was at that same time that the Monte Albán began conquering peoples who lived outside the valley and more than a two-day round-trip from the state’s center. Archaeological evidence indicates that more powerful rivals to the south and east were able to resist the Monte Albán during the early years of expansion, but after the Monte Albán state grew even bigger, they too were conquered.

Spencer found similar evidence timing the rise of bureaucracies and the expansion of states when examining the archaeological record of the Moche state in Peru (c. 200 to 400 A.D.), the Hierakonpolis chiefdom of Egypt (3400 to 3200 B.C.), the Uruk state of Mesopotamia (3500 B.C.), Harappa in the Indus Valley of Pakistan (2600 to 2500 B.C.) and the Erlitou state of China (1800 to 1500 B.C.). In each case Spencer found that the development of bureaucracy was necessary for the development of the empire (even on a small, preindustrial scale).

We’ll have to leave the question of whether the empire is a good thing for another day.

A heavy plume of ash drifts southeast from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano on April 19 (credit: ESA)

Volcanoes erupt every week around the world (just check out the weekly reports from Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program and you’ll see what I mean), but most of them don’t cause problems. Those that do, including the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull that shut down European airspace for days, are really nothing more than an inconvenience on a historical scale. They don’t kill people (Eyjafjallajökull displaced about 800 Icelanders but has had no deaths associated with it so far) and quietly erupt in a way that makes us often forget they’re even there. Sure, they’ll occasionally send out a plume that will disrupt air traffic—the Alaska Volcano Observatory, for instance, sends out warnings whenever volcanoes in its vicinity start acting up and spewing ash that airplanes should avoid—or ooze lava that will destroy a handful of homes, but the really destructive eruptions are, thankfully, few and far between. Here are the six worst since 1700:

Lakagígar (Laki), Iceland, 1783: This volcano spewed 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide and other toxic gases, killing 20 to 25 percent of Iceland’s 50,000 people and thousands more in England and Europe, along with livestock and vegetation. Models of the eruption suggest it may have been responsible for a weak Asian monsoon season and a famine in Egypt.

Unzen, Japan, 1792: In Japan’s worst volcanic disaster, a month after the volcano stopped spewing lava, the collapse of a lava dome triggered a landslide and tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people.

Tambora, Indonesia, 1815: The most explosive eruption in recorded history, Tambora killed thousands on Sumbawa Island and triggered a tsunami that killed around 4,600. Tens of thousands more died of starvation and disease in the following months. Global temperatures dropped by 7 degrees Fahrenheit and 1816 became the “year without a summer” in Europe and North America, which may have inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Krakatau, Indonesia, 1883: A series of four explosions—so violent they could be heard 2,200 miles away in Perth, Australia—caused the collapse of the volcano and triggered a tsunami that was responsible for at least 36,000 deaths (though some estimate that more than 120,000 may have died). Global temperatures fell in the following year, and weather patterns did not return to normal until 1885 (though the red sunsets may have inspired Edvard Munch’s Scream).

Mont Pelée, Martinique, 1902: Hot gas and rock moving as fast as 100 miles per hour or more descended on the town of St. Pierre, killing 30,000 in minutes.

Nevado del Ruiz, Columbia, 1985: When this volcano exploded, the hot gas and ash rapidly melted the glacier that had covered the summit. The resulting lahars—volcanic mudflows—were as much as 130 feet thick and traveled as fast as 30 miles per hour. The town of Armero, 45 miles away, was swept away by a lahar two and a half hours after the eruption began, killing 23,000.

If you’ve been inconvenienced by the Icelandic volcano’s ash plume and had to cancel a trip or been stuck far from home, I do feel sorry. However, just think, it could have been a lot worse.

Wisconsin legislators last week voted on a new state symbol; the official state microbe is now Lactococcus lactis, the bacterium used to make cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack cheeses. As far as I can tell, Wisconsin will be the first state to declare an official state microbe. Plenty of states have official trees, flowers, gems, birds, fish, vegetables, insects, reptiles, mammals and/or butterflies. I had no idea, though, that so many had official soils, dinosaurs and shells. But I am even more amused by the states, like Wisconsin, that have gotten even more creative in their designations of natural-world symbols. Here are eight examples:

Alabama's state fossil (via wikimedia commons)

Alabama state fossil: Basilosaurs cetoides, a prehistoric whale that lived around 35 million years ago. Also the state fossil of Mississippi.

Delaware's state macroinvertebrate (via wikimedia commons)

Delaware state macroinvertebrate: The stonefly, an indicator of water quality. It’s one of three state insects designated by Delaware.

Idaho's state raptor (courtesy of flickr user Beth Sargent)

Idaho state raptor: The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus). That’s separate from the state bird, which is the mountain bluebird (Sialia arctcia).

Mississippi's state waterfowl (courtesy of flickr user Larry Meade)

Mississippi state waterfowl: The wood duck, which lives year-round in the state’s swamps.

North Carolina's state carnivorous plant (courtesy of flickr user petrichor)

North Carolina state carnivorous plant: The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), native to the Carolinas and listed as a “Species of Special Concern” in North Carolina due to its dwindling numbers in the wild.

Oklahoma's state furbearer animal (courtesy of flickr user Alan Vernon)

Oklahoma state furbearer animal: The common raccoon (Procynn lotor) was designated in 1990 due to the popularity of “coon hunting,” which the state declared “an exciting sport for many outdoorsmen who enjoy following the sound of baying hounds through the fields.”

Texas's state molecule (courtesy ALS/LBL)

Texas state molecule: The buckyball, a spherical fullerene shaped like a soccer ball, discovered by two Texas chemists who won a Nobel Prize for their work.

Utah's state astronomical symbol (via wikimedia commons)

Utah state astronomical symbol: The Beehive Cluster, which is located in the constellation Cancer, was chosen because “this symbol, composed of a hive of stars, transposes our beehive symbol to a new and grand level as we enter our second century as a group of people living in a place where we can still see, with our own eyes, the beautiful and dim features of the starry universe.”

What’s your favorite state symbol? Or if you could designate one for your state, what would it be?