If you can’t bring footie to the kiwis…

Despite living in Australia for nearly 30 years, I have only recently become aware of the Barassi Line. While I have known for years that the rugbies are east coast sports, and Aussie rules is a game of the South and West, I had no idea that there was a formal demarcation until just last week. So this blog is the natural place for me to think through the implications of this line.

First of all, the test of any scientific theory is whether it has explanatory value beyond the data used to define it. The figure below shows the Barassi line extended into the Southern Ocean. As it shows, the line clearly delineates the rugby-mad islands of NZ (both the main islands and the scattered volcanoes of the Campbell Plateau), from Tasmania-and therefore Aussie Rules- affiliated Macquarie Island. Rugby is king in modern day New Zealand, and this is exactly what the line predicts based on the present position of the islands.

 

Of course, it is unlikely that the whales of the southern ocean will play either code of football. They can neither catch nor kick. So in order to guide Australia’s soft power and cultural projection, it is useful to look at the extension of the Barassi Line on the other direction- towards Asia.

 

Once again, the Barassi Line has predictive value; It correctly assigns Japan, Oceana and the island of New Guinea to rugbylandia. Furthermore, the cricket-playing heartland of the Indian Ocean Basin is footie aligned. This is important, since Aussie Rules is played on a cricket oval. Should the Australian porting codes attempt to carve up China, the line suggests that rugby should go for East and North China, while the South is fertile ground for Aussie Rules.

Of course, while it is easy to fantasize about where the Australian football codes might spread to, cold hard science can predict what lands will travel to the football codes.  This is, of course, a geology blog. And the main explanatory theory of Earth Science for the last 60 years has been plate tectonics. And plate tectonics is such a powerful and wide-ranging theory that it explains not only earthquakes and volcanoes, and continental drift, but also code switching.

As previously mentioned, New Zealand today is a rugby haven. And I have no doubt that the Aukland area will always be. But New Zealand is not a craton; the country straddles a plate boundary.

Every year, the eastern side of the South Island, part of the Pacific Plate, slides approximately 38mm relative to the Australian plate. The direction of movement is to the southwest- towards the Barassi line.

 

Thus, we can predict that in approximately 16 million years, New Zealand’s southernmost village of Oban will cross the Barassi line as Eastern NZ slides southwards along the Alpine fault. This will not be a sudden change; it will take approximately four thousand years for a standard 165 meter pitch to completely cross from one side to the other. So by the time the north goalposts appear, the south goalposts will be as old as the Egyptian Pyramids are today. Never-the-less, I expect the rituals of football to endure as civilizations rise and fall around the pitch.

Invercargill, the southernmost substantial mainland city, will cross over 1.2 million years later. 4.3 million years after that, Dunedin will cross the line, and the Highlanders will be forced to leave Super Rugby for the AFL. The mighty Crusaders would have another 10.4 million years of super rugby dominance before they, too, cross over to Aussie Rules.

Now, to an aficionado of either major football code, this sort of change may seem outlandish, even on the geological timescales. But a lot can happen in 20 million years. For example, 20 million years ago, the Otago region of New Zealand now inhabited by rugby players hosted forests full of eucalyptus, casuarina, and hoop pines, while the wetlands were inhabited by crocodiles. The forest types were similar to those found in the Gold Coast Hinterland, very different to the dry tussock grasslands of today. So it is not so outlandish to predict that in a similar amount of time in the future, at least the football codes night re-Australianise.

It is not a question of if Aussie Rules will take over the southlands, it is written in stone. Continental drift may be slow, but it is implacable and inexorable. The only question is whether or not the 30 million seasons between now and Canterbury joining the AFL and increasing competition is enough time for St Kilda to win at least one more premiership.

How long do the wild geese fly?

 

Rockingham is a quiet beech suburb in southern Perth, Western Australia. Garden Island shields the beach from the surf of the open ocean. There is bulk cargo port a few km to the North, but the shallow water off Rockingham restricts these waters to small craft. And yet, this quiet, ordinary beach was the site of one of Australia’s most outrageous maritime escapades.

In April of 1876, six Fenians- Irish Nationalists imprisoned for resisting the British Empire- escaped the nearby Freemantle Gaol and rowed a longboat from the wharf to the whaling ship Catalpa, which was waiting off-shore in international waters. They and the whalers then sailed to New York City, and freedom. None of the six ever made it back to Ireland, where they were first arrested in the 1860’s. But James Wilson lived to a ripe old age of 85, and missed seeing the establishment of Free State by only a year. He died a free man after living in Rhode Island for almost 50 years.

 

It’s interesting that a jailbreak against the government has such a large and conspicuous memorial, dedicated by none other than the pandemic era Premier, Mark McGowan. In New Bedford, where the voyage started, there is just a simple plaque. New Bedford is a down-on-its-luck old whaling down in southern Massachusetts. It is about halfway between where I went to university and where I spent most of my childhood summer holidays. It is a very long way from Australia. So in a way, it makes me homesick in 4 dimensions. It is literally on the other side of the globe. But additionally, 1876 seems to be particularly far away in time at present. This was an age when American citizens, using ingenuity and courage, could crowdsource a plan that spanned the global ocean to embarrass the mightiest empire on the planet. And this space, standing on that quiet beach, the country of my birth becomes even more remote than the vast distance across the waves. In a sense, the land I grew up in seems as far removed as the age of brigantines and whalers.

Obviously, it would be easy to be nostalgic for the 1990s, or even 2002, the last time I lived in my homeland. But nostalgia misses the point. And in a sense, nostalgia is unamerican. The whole point of the American Dream is to create a better future. The past is not to be idolized; it is to be surpassed. And yet, all across the English-speaking world, there seems to be a timidity about building a better world.

The Fenians had no such qualms when they agitated for a Free Ireland, against one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Our American Forefathers did much the same thing. A century earlier, casting off the colonial rule to become the greatest country ever. But recently the imagination required to seek out a better future seems to have eluded us. Where would the wild geese of today fly, and how high would they have to soar to get there?

 

The overlords of the anti-renewable invasion

 Anyone who so much as drives between Australian cities these years will notice that an infestation of anti-renewable ideas has taken hold in pockets of the Australian bush. Alien hate and extremism has infected soils throughout our wide brown land, sprouting from ruined earth on signs and banners of slogans and lies. There is no question that these are the fruits of foreign spores being beamed in from space. But is it just Sky News, or is there something more nefarious, vast, and sinister at play?

The traditional explanation is that the leaders of fossil fuel companies have been spreading misinformation. This is disingenuous. Fossil fuel executives are very smart men, and they employ some of the best geoscientists on Earth. Exxon figured our global warming before the rest of the scientific community combined, way back in the 80s, as a side project while they were saving the world economy from OPEC by applying the newly discovered theory of plate tectonics to their vast in-house quantity of geophysical data.

The point is, these people know exactly how dangerous sudden increases in carbon dioxide are to multicellular biomes. They know that if the trilobites- who had been around for 290 million years at the time- were unable to find a refuge to wait out the Siberian Flood Basalts, we would be unlikely to do the same here and now if we wrecked the climate by releasing CO2 even faster. And while their feeble-minded critics like to chant stale slogans, like, “There is no planet B,” I really doubt many of those critics have traveled the local arm of the Milky Way enough to actually know what’s out there.

The Galaxy is full of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, who regard the Earth with envious eyes. And the plans that they slowly draw up against us aren’t about to be spoiled by a bunch of ex-hippy entrepreneurs and their wind farms.

The exact relationship between the anti-renewable shills and their alien overlords is not entirely clear. But then, neither is the ownership structure of most of their influencing operations. All that really matters is the shared purpose; stick it to the greenies, bask in the endorphin rush of winning a fight, and then shrugging off any responsibility for the consequences (which will be disastrous to everyone reading this essay). And the aliens need to prevent the widespread adoption of renewable energy because renewable energy infrastructure is really, really problematic for flying saucer invasions.

Firstly, the electrical infrastructure which distributes energy around a renewable project, and then exports it to the grid, disrupts space-based geophysical mapping, making targeting difficult from the inbound invasion fleet. Alien invasions only really took off in the post-war era, when the rapid industrialization of agriculture created fields large enough for their giant intergalactic space ships to land in. Before that, Earth simply had too many trees to be invaded anywhere other than uninhabitable scorching deserts or frozen tundra. It was the industrialization of agriculture that opened our planet up to them, which is why they first started showing up in the quiet night skies over mid-century American farms.

And if our planet was protected for millions of years by forests of 25 meter trees, you can imagine the issues with 250 meter wind turbines? Trying to squeeze into a landing spot between spinning death machines while transporting millions of alien troopers is much more difficult than spreading rumours about sleep loss or pastoral outlook. As long as these energy projects are easily cancelled and delayed, this approach is a no-brainer for the invasion fleet.

This is important because there is actually quite a lot of electricity in these installations. Modern turbines produce 6 megawatts of power. Each. Industrial solar farms run at quite high voltages. The effect of the huge power surges on the nanoscale circuitry of the UFOs would be catastrophic. So it is definitely in the interests of all alien life forms that our fields be kept clear of protective energy infrastructure.

Of course, in most instances the alien overlords of the anti-renewable lobbies operate at tentacle’s length. In space, no-one can hear you lobby. They don’t want to be heard until they break the sound barrier on re-entry. They don’t want to be seen until their heat shield glow and ablate. Most of the people amplifying concerns about headaches or unhealthy living simply parrot the lines they are fed from the sketchiest corners of the internet. But there is one group who sadly may have been tempted with much more intimate contact.

I mean, look. I know that Australian dairy farmers have had it tough the last few decades. The supermarket milk wars pushed their margins to unsustainable levels. Many farmers have left the business, and even before the fuel crisis, inflation and the cost of deferred maintenance put pressure on every possible part of the budget. But still. We all know that cows have to get pregnant and give birth for their milk to come in. But we also all know that it doesn’t really matter what sort of creature they give birth to. So please, no matter how hard things get, please, please, please don’t save on studding fees by pimping your cows out to the stars. Those sorts of aliens have no business here. No legitimate business, anyway. Practice good animal husbandry. Protect your livestock. Build windmills and put up panels.

But no matter if it is power line blockades, or turbine hoaxes, or solar panel visual pollution complaints, these various tactics all lead back to the same strategy: Keeping the world’s huge agricultural fields open and available for landing giant flying saucers full of alien invasion troops. So even if these aliens aren’t lizard people better adapted to a warmer, wetter world than we are, it is in our interests to thwart their cosmic beachheads with solar and wind generation.

The confident insanity of generative AI

 

A bit over 31 years ago, in October 1993, I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. I came across an injured park ranger, and helped him get back to his truck. However, because it was so long ago, I couldn’t remember the exact trail head he was parked at. It could have been Newfound Gap, or it could have been the Clingmans Dome (now Kuwohi) parking lot. So I did what most people my age do when looking for information, and I Googled it.

As is its wont these days, the AI pushed to the top of the page, and confidently proclaimed this disaster epic:

On October 30, 1993, a search and Rescue operation took place in Great Smoky Mountains National Park after a Cessna 421 aircraft carrying five people went missing. The missing plane had transmitted an emergency locator ping, prompting the search. A helicopter assisting the search crashed about a quarter mile from the top of Clingmans Dome on the Tennessee side. The helicopter’s rotors were ripped off during the crash, according to one witness. The search effort also involved part maintenance personnel assisting with traffic and cleanup. Ultimately, the Cessna 421 was found, and a later investigation attributed the crash to a fuel system malfunction.

 

This is a confidently told, gripping tale of a day in my actual life. The only problem is that it has nothing to do with my actual lived experience in that place on that day. It is gaslighting in the purest form.

October 30, 1993 was a quiet, cloudy day on and around Clingmans Dome. There was ice early and late, and the main range was in the clouds the whole time. As a result, there were no aircraft of any description operating. There were a few hardy tourists on the lookout tower, and an injured ranger, but that’s all.

 Disaster-free Clingmans Dome on October 30, 1993

And this is why AI is so insidious. There were only a handful of people in that place on that day. The vast majority of humanity has no idea that the AI is spinning fantasies to replace ordinary life with exciting tales of death and adventure. My entire generation has grown up thinking of the Internet as a place to find information, and the speed at which is has transformed into a digital hookah dispensing hallucinated nightmare scenarios from the ordinary days of our lives.

Of course, this AI description is far more alluring than “It was cold and cloudy all day.” In the battle for attention and advertising, it makes complete sense for the search page to return the most exciting tale it could concoct. But those of us who are old-fashioned enough to actually want reality need to retrain ourselves to not trust the modern internet.

FYI, an actual list of reported incidents in the Great Smoky National Park can be found here.

Dream big, young scientists

Looking back through old journals for something entirely different, I found the following research proposal that I wrote in Oct-Nov of 1996, shortly before I got awarded my PhD scholarship. It was a pretty good scholarship I got, so I'm repeating this in case anyone else wants to aim high in the planetary science field: 

Knowing the chemical and isotopic composition of the whole Earth would help constrain the mechanics, timing, and efficiency of differentiation and core formation, as well as give valuable information on the partitioning of siderophile elements into the core. Unfortunately, directly sampling the core is impossible using current technology. Many substitutes of this have been explored, including the analysis of the undifferentiated chondrites and the study of iron-nickel meteorites thought to be pieces of a demolished differentiated planetary body. 

Sadly, oxygen and other isotopes show that these objects formed in a region of the solar nebula different to the Earth, and thus their compositions cannot be directly compared to that of the Earth-Moon system without extrapolation. Since the Moon dies not include a substantial iron core, any determination of the whole Earth, or whole Earth-Moon system composition must include the Earth. 

Our proposal is to use Whole Earth Laser Ablation (WELA) ICP-MS to determine the chemical and isotopic composition of the entire planet. Building the mass spectrometer for this will be an easy task, as the Earth is already located in an extremely good vacuum. We are merely asking for enough funding to purchase a laser powerful enough to ablate the planet, so that the resulting plasma can be sampled by our mass spectrometer. We believe that based on its excellent performance in the Alderaan System, the purchase of a Death Star would allow us to use its primary weapon as our Earth-ablating instrument. We ask that you fund the acquisition of this tool, as we believe it will fundamentally alter the way we view our planet.

Geosonnet 70

 

Geosonnet 70

Amusement parks of resurrected beasts
Traditionally lie on offshore isles.
But dinosaurs, volcanoes now extinct
Might be preserved in sediment’ry piles.
Eroding mountains shed their clastics west
Until they rest in Eromanga seas.
The sand where Muttaburrasauri rest
Has zircons from unknown localities.
Cretaceous rifting pushed the arc offshore.
This thinning crust by newborn ocean drowned.
The Norfolk Ridge and Lord Howe Rise may store
Jurassic arcs where source rocks may be found.
   The dinosaurs and arcs are gone today
   But just like life, the zircon finds a way.

Geology 49 1391 

 

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