Take a deep breath and repeat after me: AAAAAAAAAA!!!!

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Photo #626: Screaming MountainLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

Bah. I don’t feel like writing anything overly poignant OR educational today. Nor do I feel like pulling out the elk photos again.

So here, a screaming mountain!

Seriously, it’s screaming.

Or maybe singing, or talking, or however you want to describe it. It’s pretty noisy. We pulled off on the side of the road and rolled down the windows to see if we could hear it from that far away, and sure enough, we could.

It’s underground gas escaping through narrow passages. Sorta like a whistling noise, but lower pitched and more rumbly.

Acts kinda like a pipe organ, with air being forced through small tubes.

Or maybe it’s a seriously haunted mountain, one of the two.

  

Contextual Terraces

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Photo #625: Forest TerraceLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

There’s one key difference between seeing a photo of some place and actually visiting it: context.

I mean, it’s clear in this photo how impressive and unusual these terraces are. It’s not exactly your everyday forest hill, you know. Except, well, it would be if it wasn’t for the hot spring here.

This particular terrace, Mammoth Springs, is actually pretty far from all the other geothermal features of Yellowstone. It’s even outside the volcanic caldera, by something like 20 miles. It’s surrounded by your everyday mountain forest on all sides. Well, it would be if we humans hadn’t built roads and a town next to it. And I suppose the hill this is on is at the edge of the forest anyway. It was largely bare hills behind me when I took this photo. Still, you get the idea.

I suppose that’s more context. This set of terraces has a road going all around it, and boardwalks and parking lots all neatly laid out for the tourists. It’s the main road, too. Not that there are really any non-main roads inside Yellowstone Park. This isn’t exactly inaccessible marvels here.

It must have been quite startling for whomever found this the first time. Just wandering through the mountains, trying to find a way through, alternating between bare mountains and forest, more mountains, more forest, and then, terraces! Unlike anything most people have ever seen!

It’s no wonder people started visiting the place just for the novelty of all the phenomena, and that’s back in the days when there weren’t really anything we would consider roads in the area. Just trekking through the forest into the heart of a mountain range, to visit a small hot springs resort town named after this Mammoth Springs. It’s not a particularly good hot spring, either. The resort has been converted into National Park facilities and what not. Though I can’t be more specific because the entire town had closed down for the season when I visited in late October. I’m not exaggerating, the entire town.

That, I suppose, is another piece of context.

  

Just stare and listen and – darn it, my monitor screen’s dirty!

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Photo #624: Epic SunsetLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

Ok, if at all possible, listen to Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemaya while staring at this photo. They go together surprisingly well, to put it mildly.

Though that might just be because this is a photo that pairs well with epic music. It goes fairly well with Night on Bald Mountain as well, if not quite as well as with Sensemaya.

I’m not sure quite how to describe what I think of as epic music, even though it’s one of my favorite musical types. Easiest way is that it’s the type of music you’d put behind an epic scene in a game or movie, but that doesn’t get to the heart of what “epic” is. Something to do with adventures and high levels of danger, with a spice of mystery and intrigue.

It was in a game that I discovered Sensemaya, though. But not in any sort of epic context, alas. Civilization 5 has you lead a civilization through history, from the settling of the first city to modern days and beyond. It’s all Earth civilizations, and it follows the technological path we humans took, so there’s some heavy historical elements just in the gameplay. They add to that by including Great Persons, special units with special powers named after great figures in history, like Alexander Graham Bell, Spartacus, and Steve Jobs. The Great Artists, Musicians, and Writers all have an ability that gives you a boost to your Tourism stat – and shows or plays an example of their work. Sensemaya’s clip, even at just 10 seconds long, was enough to catch my interest and lead me to looking up the full thing.

Which I was listening to when I was starting to look through photos. I love it when blog topics just present themselves to me.

  

Clouds don’t have dust mites, right?

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Photo #623: Pillow CloudsLocation Taken: Eastern Washington
Time Taken: October 2012

I should write a longer post, but I just bought a new pillow and I really want to test it out.

Look at these clouds. They’re so soft and, well, pillowesque.

Well, not that you can sleep on them. They’re kinda really low on the density scale. And really high on the “made of ice and water” scale, for that matter. Nowhere near as nice as my new pillow.

It’s organic cotton. I didn’t even know they MADE organic pillows!

And hopefully now I’ll get some decent sleep. My dust mite allergy has made my old pillow give me a headache any time I tried to sleep on it, which didn’t exactly work out so well for me. So I’m kinda tired right now. My pillows usually only last a year before the dust mites build up too much. And that’s with washing them every so often to drown all the mites.

So I keep trying out new types of pillows to see if any will last longer. Hence the organic pillow. It claims to have anti-allergen properties.

Not that I’ll be able to tell if it lives up to the hype for a year or so. Minor allergens are less deadly than major ones, but they can be highly frustrating to figure out.

At least the pillow is soft and comfy.

And calling out my name, begging me to just rest my head down on it…

  

On Forgotten Genius and Deadly Invasions

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Photo #622c: Random IslandLocation Taken: Southern coast of Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

I bumped into a mention of Alfred Wallace in the book I’m reading. That got me thinking about him and made me recall the Wallace Line, which is nifty enough on its own that I knew I had a blog topic.

If you don’t know, Wallace was one of the inventors of the theory of evolution. While Darwin gets all the fame and infamy, he wasn’t working alone to come up with the complete theory. Wallace was what you’d now call a biogeographer, someone who maps out where different species live (in fact, he’s known as the Father of Biogeography). He found lots of evidence of closely related species that were each on one side of some type of barrier, such as the Amazon River (where Wallace did a lot of his work). This lead him to come up with the concept of natural selection, a major process involved in the evolutionary process. He then sent this idea to Darwin to pass on to a mutual acquaintance, and well, Darwin recognized many of the same ideas that he had been working on himself. It was one of many instances of revolutionary ideas occurring independently to multiple people at around the same time, and in this case lead Wallace and Darwin to collaborate.

…You know, that would be an easy test to see how well someone who is stating a rather strong opinion about evolution (on either side of the topic) actually knows what they’re talking about. Just see if they know who Wallace is. If you’ve studied up, he’s quite important, and if you haven’t, you’ve never heard of the guy.

Anyway, back off that tangent and on to the Wallace Line!

The Wallace Line is a nifty relic of plate tectonics and changing sea levels found in amongst the Indonesian Islands just north of Australia. On one side of the line, you have only Asian animals, and on the other side, only Australian.

Ok, that’s a major oversimplification. Basically, Australia is on a separate tectonic plate than Asia and has been slowly creeping northward for quite some time. There was a very long stretch of time when the Australian continent was completely separated from any other land mass and all the animals that floated along with it took a very different evolutionary path than those found elsewhere. Mainly a highly venomous path, but hey…

Still, there’s a pretty big difference between the monkeys, deer, and elephants on the Asian side and the koalas, kangaroos, and echidnas on the Australian side.

At the height of the Ice Age, the ocean level was much lower, and the large Indonesian islands happened to become part of their closest continents. Sumatra, Java, and Borneo joined with Asia, while New Guinea was part of Australia. However, the ocean is actually rather deep in the area full of tiny, oddly shaped islands between those regions, so that stayed quite wet. This meant that the large islands got fully settled by the continental wildlife while the small ones in the middle didn’t.

One thing to understand about islands. It’s tough to reach them. Most large animals don’t want to swim that far, small creatures can’t manage the swim, and even a lot of birds are hesitant to go over too much flat water. So the islands get populated by whatever’s around that likes to swim or fly that far, or just floated over randomly.

This, of course, means that any area that has a large water gap that’s stuck around for a very long time will have a different mix of animals on each side. And that’s the case with the Wallace Line. It’s really quite simple.

Though technically, the Wallace Line is just one of three biogeographical lines through the Indonesian islands. The Wallace one is furthest west, marking out the zone where all of a sudden the large Asian animals are no longer found on the islands. Then, as you go east, you find the Weber Line and the Lydekker Line, which mark a halfway point between the two fauna types and then the limit of large Australian creatures. In the area between these lines, there’s a mix of the types of animals that can cross the water gaps, a hybrid zone known as the Wallacea Ecozone.  I’ll give you one guess where they got that name.

And just think, as the Australian plate keeps moving north, it’ll eventually slam into southeast Asia! Then that whole area will be invaded by kangaroos and fifty varieties of highly deadly creatures! That’ll be fun!