January 6, 2022 • 44 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the science and history of sinkholes. How have these impressive geographic features impacted our world, and what can they reveal about the past? (originally published 1/19/2021)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today
we're bringing you an episode from the vault. This is
part two of our series on sinkholes that originally aired
in January. Let's jump right in Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome
(00:33):
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our discussion of sink holes. Now. In the
last episode, we talked about some some fabulous examples of
sinkholes that suddenly open up and reveal interesting things. Below,
we talked about how sinkholes form, the geology and hydrology
of sinkholes, and we talked about some interesting specific examples
(00:56):
in the world. But today we wanted to get into
some things about the religious significance of sinkholes and sinkholes
as a scientific tool that can help show us things
about the past UH and also maybe some sinkholes in space.
But I thought sinkholes in religion would be a good
place to start because one of the interesting ways of
(01:17):
conceptualizing UH deities is that deities are often manifestations of
natural forces and natural resources, and of course one of
the most important natural resources is water, so there are
all kinds of water deities around the world. Coastal civilizations
and cultures will have deities associated with the ocean that
(01:39):
are very important in their culture. But if you're if
you're more inland, there will often be deities associated with
where you get your fresh water. Either are a very
important river or they're even There are lots of holy
wells that are found throughout the history of Europe, both
Pagan and Christian. There are a lot of like holy
wells and water sources, and the same is true of
(02:01):
many sinkholes in ancient meso America. That's right, um, in
particular the sacred senotes of the Maya, which is what
we'd like to talk about here. I was reading a piece,
really nice piece on Mexico Lore dot co dot UK
by Maya archaeologist Andrew kenkela Um just titled Sacred Sinkholes,
(02:27):
and he discusses sum of what we've already mentioned in
regard to, you know, the large number of these sinkholes
of sinotes in Mesoamerica. The entire area is situated on
a limestone bedrock, and we end up with with these
hollows and then they collapse, and then of course then
they often fill with water. But so yeah, your world
left with something. There's not just a deep pit, which
(02:49):
alone can be pretty interesting, but pits with water often
from deep underground, so you're often talking clean water, clear
water an ideal source. Some of these contain as much
as like fifty meters of water. Uh. He points out. Yeah,
there are a lot of fascinating things about these sinkholes.
One of which, just before I forget, I wanted to
(03:11):
call attention to that they explore some of these uh
sinotes in the Yucatan Peninsula. In the documentary that we
recently interviewed Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer about there, there's
a segment where they so that documentary is called Fireball,
and it's about impacts from space and the scars they
leave on Earth and and what we can learn from them.
(03:31):
And one of the things they explore is if if
you look at a map of the senotes of the
Yucatan Peninsula, there's one part of the Yucatan where there's
this almost perfect partial ring of sinotes and it's like,
what's going on there? And that apparently corresponds to the
outer rim of the crater that was left by the
(03:51):
impact from the KPg extinction, the large space impact that
probably contributed significantly to the extinction of the non avian
dinasas wars. And so in Fireball there's a segment where
where Clive Oppenheimer goes down into one of these beautiful
ancient senotes with a local researcher and and they talk
about not just what it can tell is geologically we
(04:12):
might get a little bit more into that later, but
but also what it means religiously. Yeah, So, especially for
areas far from rivers, these sonotes became very important for
just purely practical reasons like this is where you could
get water. This enabled you to live and have you know,
have have communities that existed further away from those rivers.
(04:33):
But then they ended up taking on religious power as well.
And can Tela writes that the ancient Maya regarded senotes
as one of the three symbolic entry ways uh to Sibalba,
the Mayan underworld. So eventually this kind of he describes
it as a senote cult emerges devoted to venturing out,
like taking these pilgrimages to different senotes, collecting water from
(04:56):
them from different different ones and making what offer rings
up to the watery depths. And their role these these priests,
these pilgrims, their role would have been seen is vitally important,
especially during times of drought, you know, when when the
the resources of the son Nottes becomes uh, you know,
(05:17):
in doubt or seems threatened, like they seem to have
a role in in trying to maintain the balance, to
try and maintain the bountiful gifts of these places. I
was also looking at an article on National Geographic titled
Secrets of the Maya in the Other World, and this
was by Alma Guillermo Prieto, and this is about the sinkholes,
(05:41):
uh that we've been discussing here, and about how they
were also associated with a key deity which was chock.
I believe that it's spelled in this article is c
h A A K. I've also seen it with a
with a C ch A C. I think. Yeah, So
here's what they wrote in this article quote or this
is just a really I think telling a passage from it.
(06:02):
Quote for men like unkin the old gods are still
very much alive, and Chock, ruler of sinotes and caves,
is among the most important gods of all. For the
benefit of living things. He pours from the skies, the
water he keeps in earthenware, jars and caves. Chalk is
one in many. Each thunderclap is a separate chock in action,
(06:23):
breaking a jar open and letting the rain fall. Each
god inhabits a separate layer of reality, along with dozens
of alternatively complacent and ferocious gods that live in the
thirteen other worlds above and the nine other worlds below. Together,
they filled the Maya people's lives with dreams, visions, and nightmares,
(06:44):
a complicated calendar of agricultural times and fertility rituals, in
a firm sense of the way things must be done.
Chock had moved, Unkin said, and that meant the planting
season would soon arrive. That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, So in
this we see that a cave or sinote could be
seen as as a dwelling place of chalk, but it
(07:05):
could also, can you know, be seen as this yawning
mall of the earth, or even this gateway to deeper
realms of reality. Yeah, and and this combines the multiple version,
so you you can of course see these senotes as
a gateway to the underworld and a source of water.
But I was also reading in a different National Geographic
article um about like the the the specifics of certain senotes. Like,
(07:30):
it's not just all senotes are religiously equivalent. There would be,
for example, some senotes and specific locations that have different
religious significance for the people who live nearby. The one
I was thinking of was the a senote that, as
the ancient mind city had a wall, there was like
many senotes within the wall that could be used as
(07:50):
a water source. But there's one senote outside the city
wall that it seems was regarded primarily as a place
for the burial of the dead. And there have been
many human remains found down inside that one. Yeah, yeah there, Yeah,
they're they're a whole slew of them with different significance.
Is the most famous of the sonotes, uh, it's probably
the Sacred Sinote at the Maya site of Sanita, where
(08:12):
there was this, it's been a place of of a
fair amount of study. There was a small building by
it that was apparently used for blood sacrifices um, again
tying into traditions related to the you know, the sacredness
of the spot and the continuation of water. Variety of
sacred objects were also apparently cast into the sinote, including
precious jade artifacts, gold and copper disks, uh, foods, and
(08:37):
other organic items that that we've we actually can find
you know, evidence of. But uh, yeah, so you think
of this as like an opening up into the world
below where you might throw offerings, where you might make
sacrifices of material or sacrifices of blood. It's hard for
me not to sort of connect this to some of
the stuff we were talking about in the previous episode
(08:57):
where there is a pretty your link between pumping too
much groundwater up. You know, like there's certain places where
there's a need for for massive irrigation of fields maybe
sometime to like protect a certain crop from frost or something,
so you will pump just tons and tons of water
just to put over the fields so so so much
(09:18):
that you really lower the level of the groundwater and
suddenly cause lots of sinkholes to to open up where
the suddenly the you know, the water pressure is not
what it was below the overburden can't hold up its
own weight and then collapses. And this has happened in
the US in places like Florida. I mean, it could
be it's very easy to see how something like that
could be interpreted as as the wrath of the gods, right, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
(09:42):
you're you're messing with the domain of the the earth gods. Now.
One of the interesting things about these Mesoamerican traditions concerning
sinots is that it's also thought that that native people's
um elsewhere in the America has probably carried some of these, uh,
these ideas with and so when you encounter of some
North American sinotes, there's there's evidence of that these areas
(10:07):
that native peoples may have used them as burial places
as well given them, um, you know, places of importance
in their worldviews. And one such place is Devil Sinkhole
northwest of San San Antonio. Um it's now a state park,
but it's a hundred and forty ft deep or forty
three meters deep, and um uh yeah, apparently there's evidence
(10:29):
that ancient people's came here and probably held it in
some esteem. But one of the really crazy natural world
things about Devil Sinkhole is that it is home to
or at least part of the year, it is home
to three million Mexican freetailed bats. Wow, that's a lot
of bats. Yeah, so they migrate to Mexico for the
(10:51):
cooler months, but they roost up in the sinkhole other
parts of the year. And we've we've talked about how
amazing bats are in the show before and especially especially
insectivore uh bats you know that eat insects. Well, it's
been estimated that the bats that live in Devil Sinkhole
again something like three million Mexican freetail bats that they
(11:12):
consume un estimated thirty tons of beetles and moths each night,
each night, thirty tons, thirty tons beetles and moths. That's crazy.
That's one of those facts that makes you wonder how
many tons of beetles they're just are already? Like, is
that is that half the beetles in the area? Is
that one percent of the beetles in the area. Yeah,
(11:33):
I mean, it's just a tremendous biomass out there, and
these bats are here for it um and most of
it is insect or arthur pod in some way, or
you know, most of the animal is is arthur pod
in some way, and wow, that's just amazing. You can
measuring insects or beetles in units of like garbage truck fulls.
(11:55):
So I love this because, yeah, this is a great
example of just sort of how like we said in
the last episode, when a sinkhole occurs, it does not
you know, create this natural void. Like. Things will move
into the sinkhole, things will take advantage of this new
um aspect of the geography, and in this case, the
bats make it their home. So if you if you've
(12:16):
lived in the San Antonio area, you've visited there, and
you've been to two Devil sinkhole, I'd love to hear, uh,
hear about your experience checking it out. I know, if
you go during the right time of the year, you
can actually observe the bats like, uh, moving in and
out of the of the cavern area. So uh, it
sounds beautiful. I've read that there are also I mean,
one of the things is that belief in the sacredness
(12:38):
of of sinkholes and and their association with the world
of the gods is not just an ancient belief, it's
not necessarily extinct. I mean there are people today for
whom sinkholes hold sacred importance, and if if you, if
you are one of those people or know some, I'd
like to hear about that too. Yeah, yeah, I'd love
to hear, especially the details about any modern rights associated
(12:58):
with it, and and just of the belief system built
up around it, you know, the stories than Now, one
of the things we mentioned in the previous episode is
that the sink whole is a natural feature that can
inadvertently serve as a type of scientific instrument, much in
(13:18):
the same way that like ancient ice. You know, it's
like nobody intended it to be this way, but we
can learn things about the ancient climate from taking ice cores,
so that you know, those layers of ice really give
us a lot to read into the history of the Earth.
And apparently sinkholes can do the same thing, right, that's right.
I mean, you know, we think about how they gobble
up parts of the surface world, and yeah, they do
(13:39):
sometimes do scientists a huge favor by collecting and to
some degree preserving evidence of past life forms, even past
like storm activity and and and climates of ancient times. Uh.
And so when we ventured into the sink whole. With
the right tools or with the right methods, we're able
to uncover those secrets that have been reserved there. And
(14:01):
they've just been There've been numerous studies that have looked
at sinkholes and uh and gathered specific information from from
these sinkholes, and we're not gonna be able to give
a full overview of them here in this episode, but
I wanted to touch on some that I thought provided
a reasonable overview and in an idea of what sort
of stuff we can learn from sinkholes. So uh, there's
(14:23):
the For instance, in two thousand fourteen, a team from
the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne studied genetic information
extracted from the tooth of an adolescent girl who fell
into a sinkhole in the Yucatan some twelve thousand to
thirteen thousand years ago, and this with her remains were
found alongside the remains of ancient beasts. Because you know,
(14:46):
what what occurs is some of these really treacherous sinkholes,
is like things will fall in and then they cannot
get out, and of course they die down there. They
decay down there, and the remains are down there for
us to later discuss ever in study. Oh, I hadn't
thought about this, but I wonder if sinkholes are one
of these things, one of these terrain features that can
(15:07):
serve as a natural predator trap. Um. A predator trap is,
I guess, a concept in the interaction between the landscape
and and the animals that live nearby. But you know,
a classic example is like the Librettar pits. You know,
so a an animal becomes stranded and dies in it,
and then the smell attracts predators or scavengers who then
themselves become trapped. Another example I was reading about not
(15:30):
too long ago was there is a geologically active valley
in the cum Chotka Peninsula where often like birds are
killed by volcanic fumes, and then their decaying bodies attract
predators into the area, who then also are killed by
the fumes, and it leads to this feedback cycle. Yeah, yeah,
it's uh. I think in some cases they definitely are
(15:52):
serving as predator traps um. So in this particular study,
one of the reasons this tooth was so important is
that the researchers were studying the influx of humans into
the America's and wanted to see of a specimen such
as this with a skull shape that was that is
unusual among other Native American lineages. They wanted to see
if it fell in line genetically with those lineages or
(16:13):
represented something else, perhaps lining up with theories about migration
from Southeast Asia or even Australia that didn't come in
through the bearing straight um. And they found that their
remains did line up with with the bearing straight or
Barringian migration. So that's just one cool example. Okay, let's
(16:34):
hear another, all right, Yeah, here's one from nineteen Researchers
from the Florida Museum of Natural History looked at the
preserved bones of a Craton's carcara and an extinct carrion
eating falcon from the Caribbean that was killed off roughly
a thousand years ago when humans first entered the region.
And they were looking at these remains in a flooded
sinkhole um on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, and
(16:59):
the whole is a amill sink, a a hundred foot deep, dark,
oxygen free environment that preserved the two thousand, five hundred
year old bones of this creature enough that they could
they could conduct genetic studies of it. In fact, the
bone yielded ninety eight point seven percent of the bird's
mitochondrial genome, which is pretty impressive. Again, it's like it's
(17:21):
like a deep cooler, you know, it preserves these remains,
uh that if they were dropped, you know, in other
places on the world, would have just been long lost,
no ice required. UM. Here's another one of note. In
two thousand and eighteen, another study from the University of Illinois,
your Banno Champagne studied the remains of a giant sloth
(17:42):
that fell into a sinkhole in what is now Carriblanca
in central Belize twenty seven thousand years ago. And in
this the tooth, humorous and femur were partially fossilized, but
there was still enough unaltered tissue for stable carbon and
oxygen isotope analysis to study what the slow off eight.
And this in turn revealed details about local climate and
(18:04):
local environment there in that region at that time, which
is pretty pretty astounding. Did did it say exactly what
the sloth did eat? Um? I didn't get into the
the the nuts and berries of that. Basically, suffice to say,
I'd love to come back and discuss um. Uh, giant
ground slots more in the future though, But but basically
(18:26):
it provided them the the information they needed to, you know,
to actually gaze back in the past and consider, you know,
what it was consuming, and that means what was around it,
what was you know, how it was able to make
its home in in the world at that time. So
it's pretty amazing. We could probably do a whole episode
or series of episodes just on really interesting studies finding
(18:47):
out what ancient peoples and creatures eight using analyses and
chemical analyses of these kinds. Yeah, I mean it reveals
so much, so much. Absolutely. One I was just reading
not too long ago that was kind of funny to
me was, um, was a chemical analysis of a gigantic
copper light found I think it was around the city
(19:08):
of York in England that revealed it was left by
a human I think like a thousand years ago or so,
you know, roughly, and revealed a diet heavy and meat
and bread, but also just just riddled with intestinal worms.
So then you get the double You have the fossilized poop,
but then the fossilized creatures that were writhing inside it.
(19:31):
But I guess if it's about a thousand years ago.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that counts as fossilized.
I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.
So it was, you know, poop from hundreds of years ago,
so you know, roughly around a thousand years ago. But
is that technically a fossil or is that just very
well preserved poop. We'll have to come back and discuss
in the future. Okay. Um, here's a two thousand twenty
(19:52):
study from go Through University in Frankfort. They dove into
one of the most impressive sinkholes in the world, the
Blue Hole. I believe we mentioned this um in the
last episode, at least in Passing Uh. This is a
flooded cart sinkhole on Lighthouse Reef in Belize and they
were able to to to drill up and analyze a
(20:13):
sedimentary quote storm archive covering two thousand years of history,
built layer by layer by layer in the dark depth
of this whole, and it revealed a lot about the
frequency of tropical storms in the area. Over time. They
found quote hurricanes in the Caribbean became more frequent in
their force varied noticeably around the same time that classical
(20:36):
mind culture in Central America suffered its final demise. So
again just a chance to do gaze back in time
and see what what was going on, um, you know,
with the climate and with weather patterns by looking into
the sinkhole. So is the suggestion there. I assume it's
not totally known, but the suggestion there may be that
(20:56):
the organizational decline of the mind Civilis station was in
some ways possibly related to changes in weather patterns. That's
my understanding that it would have would have impacted UH,
that that civilization UH and would have potentially contributed. Yeah.
I also ran across a two thousand seventeen study from
(21:17):
the University of Hawaii at Manoa that looked into uh
uh Makawai Cave and Kauaii, the largest limestone cave in
y and only accessible via a sinkhole. So it's a
it's a rich fossil site providing insight into Hawaiian life.
The sinkhole Paleo Lake contains ten thousand years of sedimentary information,
(21:38):
revealing a rich diversity of natural information as well as
Polynesian artifacts. So in this study they were able to
find supporting evidence in the coral fragments there to discover
the source of the mega earthquake UH in the Aleutian
Islands that spawned the devastating fifteen eighties six tsunami that
hit uh sen Riku, Japan. And so uh, you know again,
(22:02):
it's it goes beyond merely being able to go in
and find the remains of creatures, you know, which is
I think the first place your mind goes when you
think about sinkholes. But able to to be able to
go in there and find some some shattered bits of
coral and then compare that to um two other bits
of information and sort of piece together like seismic activities
(22:23):
that occurred centuries ago. And I have I have one
more here. This one's really fun too. Back in v
a twenty five thousand year old sinkhole in Wyoming Natural
Trap Cave and Big Horn Canyon was found. It measured
fifteen feet across about eighty five ft deep, and when
they went into it, they discovered fossils of mammoths, short
(22:44):
faced bears, camels, and um collared limmings. But they ended
up boarding it up after that for thirty years to
prevent accidental falls. Because the Natural Park Service I was
reading describes that Uh, this particular sinkhole is quote virtually
impossible to see until it is directly underfoot, and if
you look at pictures of it, yeah, it looks because
(23:05):
if you fell, like it widens out underneath, so you
wouldn't like skid along the side of this or even
like it would just you would just plummet down to
the bottom. Yeah. It's not a cone. It's not even
a cylinder. It's like a jug with the with the
you know, bottle opening. Yeah, so it's it's very impressive.
You should look it up. They have some wonderful pictures
(23:26):
of it in the National Park Service does. But so, yeah,
they ended up bordering it up, boarding it up for
thirty years. But when scientists finally got a chance to
dig in again, they discovered numerous large prehistoric mammal bones
and even complete skeletons of smaller mammals, and they said
that it ultimately functioned like a refrigerator, even preserving collagen
and some of the bones. It wound up containing a
(23:47):
whopping thirty thousand specimens, they say, And on top of this,
scientists are still studying what the cave can reveal about
ancient human migration, ancient climate. So again, just another cash
of information shan about about the past that we find
in one of these sinkholes. Now, I'm sorry if I
missed this. Do they know if this this huge cache
(24:07):
of different animal specimens, is that a result of some
kind of natural deposition process, or is that the result
of humans like humans putting animal remains into the sinkhole? Um?
My understanding is that this would have been animals accidentally
falling in over over the ages. Um. But it could
be wrong on that. Um. There's I guess it's possible
(24:28):
that that some of these bodies would have been thrown in.
But uh, my impression was that we were dealing with
with things that had had made the very mistake that
the Natural National Park Service was was warning about, you know,
that it being virtually impossible to see it until it's
directly underfoot. Like you've got to do a real dexterity
saving throw to avoid fall into the bottom of this baby, Yeah,
(24:50):
at disadvantage? Yes? Thank? Okay, Well I've got another one
for you. Obviously, it would be bad to suddenly plunge
down into a sinkhole unwittingly on Earth, But what if
you were to do it in space? Oh? Wow? Well,
(25:11):
that would be even worse. Well, actually you might think so,
but I just I just now thought of a condition
that would make it maybe not nearly as bad. I
don't know what we'll get into that. I mean, I
would hate to fall into a sinkhole like the one
we just described in general. But what if then you
I mean, because if you get to the bottom, what
you're injured, maybe you maybe you're gonna starve to death,
or you know, dive your wounds or dive exposure down there.
(25:32):
Maybe there's a recently uh fall an animal down there
you can you can eat, or maybe there's something down
there that is going to eat you. There's so many
horrible ways it could go. But space is a lonely
place to die. So I don't know how true that is.
So I want to talk about a space object, an
object called comment six P Trumov Garasimenko. Now, this comment
(25:55):
is called sixty seven P because it is the sixty
seven periodic comment discovered in our solar system. It was
found in nineteen sixty nine at an observatory in Russia
by an astronomer named Klim Ivanovich Churyumov from a photographic
plate that was taken by some fed Lana Ivanova Garasimenko
(26:15):
and like I said, as a periodic comment, meaning that
it's a comment with a relatively short orbit that we've
documented repeatedly returning to the inner Solar system. Some comments,
you know, they're just way way out there and they're
never going to get close to the Sun, so we
don't really have any chance to get a good look
at them. This is one of the ones that comes
in at one angle of its of its orbit, pretty
(26:38):
close to the Sun, and astronomers have of course cited
it a bunch of times since it was first discovered,
since it comes around every six and a half years
or so, if you've seen pictures of a comet up close,
there's a good chance it was this one. Uh. It's
it's kind of l shaped, or sort of like a
bent barbell with a very short handle. It has these
(26:58):
two lobes of frust or rocky icy material and its nucleus.
It also kind of looks like a bent double mushroom.
It probably originally came from the Kuiper Belt, which is
a large loose collection of icy objects that extends far
out past the orbit of Neptune. So if you go
out past all of the planets, you know, you go
(27:19):
past the gas giants, past Neptune, into the realm of Pluto,
and then from there on out there's just sort of
this big shell around the Solar System of of space,
and these icy objects that if they're perturbed in just
the right way, if they get flung off of their
their deep orbital path and thrown down into the inner
Solar System, they can become these familiar periodic comets. And
(27:42):
that appears to be what happened to Six. It was
probably flung on this path that occasionally brings it close
to the Sun when long ago it was subject to
a collision or gravitational disturbance by some other object. At
its biggest dimensions, it's a little over four pometers or
about two point five miles long and wide, so it
(28:03):
would be big enough to walk on, but not nearly
as big as a planet or even a moon. Now
we know a lot about six and have great pictures
of it because it was the target of the e
s A, the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, which actually
landed a probe on the surface of this comment and
took a bunch of amazing photos. Among other things, Uh,
(28:25):
and there's a lot that's really interesting about this comment.
There's likely one amazing short video or gift that you've
seen from its surface, and this was made out of
a series of still images taken by the lander. That's
that we're sequenced together into an animation where it looks
kind of like there's a snowstorm or a blizzard raining
down onto the surface. Rob have you seen this animation before, Yes,
(28:50):
it's really amazing. Now it does need some qualification that
this is not actually a snowstorm like we would experience
here on Earth. Uh. And the animation that we see
is a sped up animation. It takes something I think
like twenty five minutes of original uh you know, time
lapse between the different photos, and compresses it into a
few seconds of of panning camera shot. So it's not
(29:12):
actually a snowstorm, but probably more like the movements of
dust particles and the star field as the comet travels.
But it's still just one of the most strange and
beautiful images I've seen made out of photos taken by
space probe. Yeah, I mean, it's it's absolutely other worldly. Now,
there are a lot of things that were interesting about
the Rosetta mission, including the ways that the Rosetta mission
(29:33):
kind of went wrong. Do you do you remember this
when it was trying to put the phile a lander
down on the surface of the comet, and how it
kind of bounced in a way it wasn't supposed to.
I I remember, I remember this being a point in
the news around the time it happened. Yeah. Yeah, So
the so the Rosetta mission had it had a lander
that separated from the orbiter craft, and then the lander
(29:53):
was supposed to touch down on the surface of the comet,
and I believe it was supposed to fire these harpoons
that would lock get into the surface so it didn't
float away again, because again, thinking about the gravity of
a comet, uh, it's mass is so small compared to
the kind of gravity we're used to on planets or
moons that you can quite easily drift away from it
(30:14):
if you've really got any momentum at all. I believe
I read that the escape velocity from this commet was
one meter per second. So if you're you know, moving
away from its center of mass at one meter per
second or more, you're not going to fall back down.
You're just gonna keep drifting away. But anyway, what I
think happened with the lander was that it was supposed
to fire these harpoons to lock it into the surface,
(30:36):
but that didn't work correctly, so instead it kind of
bounced after it touched the surface, and then bounced a
couple of times and eventually came to rest under a cliff.
Because remember this is not like a spherical commet, but
it's kind of bent l shaped with these round edges.
It came to rest under some kind of cliff or overhang,
the shadow of which mostly blocked the solar panels that
(30:57):
were supposed to power the lander. So then that led
to you know, uh laed to it not having enough
power to do all the things it wanted to do.
But despite that, there was still a huge amount of
um really great science that came out of the rosett
emission and these wonderful photographs. And one of the interesting
findings about this comet sixty s P that I wanted
(31:17):
to mention this was from a NASA press release from
September of called comet discovered to have its own northern lights.
Uh this was actually revealed with the help of NASA
instruments that were part of the essay Rosette emission. What
they found was that the comet has this invisible glow.
It has an aurora of far ultra violet radiation. Uh.
(31:39):
These findings were published in Nature Astronomy of last year,
and this electromagnetic glow was an aurora much like we
see in the polar regions of Earth. So on Earth,
the northern and southern lights are created when charged particles
from the Sun collide with gas particles in our upper atmosphere,
and this results in reactions that create patterns of green, red,
(32:01):
and white across across the sky. Other planets in the
Solar System also have a rural phenomenon. Jupiter does, I
think even Mars does. Mini planets, but this is the
first time we've ever observed it surrounding a comet. And
quote from the press release here quote electrons streaming out
in the solar wind. The stream of charged particles flowing
(32:22):
out from the Sun interact with the gas in the
comets coma, breaking apart water and other molecules. The resulting
atoms give off a distinctive far ultraviolet light, invisible to
the naked eye. Far ultra violet light has the shortest
wavelengths of radiation in the ultra violet spectrum, which makes
me wonder if this comet could give you a sunburn.
(32:45):
But anyway, I want to get around to the main study.
I wanted to talk about tying into our our overall
theme today. So this is a study published in Nature
by Jean Baptiste Vincent at All called large heterogeneityse and
commets et seven p as revealed by active pits from
sinkhole collapse. So the authors here talk about how a
(33:06):
lot of times when we get a look at the
surface of a cometary nucleus, that's the hard icy core
of the comment. Remember comment has so it's got a
hard core that's made of like ice and dust, the
part you could walk on, and then it's surrounded often
by sort of cloud or tail. The coma is made
of water, vapor, dust and gas. And when they get
(33:27):
a look at this hard nucleus of a comet, we
often observe pits. Now, there's one way that that might
not be surprising, because if you think about other objects
in the Solar System, like the Moon or asteroids the
dwarf planet like series, they have a lot of pits also,
and these are quite clearly impact craters. As these objects
are bombarded by space junk over millions of years, these
(33:51):
pits accumulate, and if the planets or moons don't have
active geology like volcanoes and plate tectonics to repeatedly pave
and smooth over the surface, the pits from ancient impacts
just sit there and they stay there, and we can
see them easily. But there is a problem with explaining
the pits on commets as impact creators. First of all,
(34:12):
our best guests about how often commets encounter large impacts
does not seem to correlate with the number of pits
that we see. And then second, when we try to
create physical models of what would happen when a comet
suffered a high speed impact, these models just don't create
pits like the ones we actually observe. So what's making
the pits? Uh? Some researchers have hypothesized that the pits
(34:36):
are a result of internal explosions of some kind, But
in the words of the author's quote, the driving process
remains unknown. Uh So do we have any better guesses? Well,
according to this study, yes we do. Zarab. I want
you to look at this next picture picture I've got
for you here. This is a picture of Commet six
(34:56):
seven shared by the E s A. And if you
look at this comment from a close orbit under the
right conditions, you can see what look kind of like
shafts of light, almost like those Spielberg lights, you know,
from Steven Spielberg movies. He loves these God lights, the
shafts of light piercing through a dusty patch of air
(35:16):
or you know, cutting through different obstacles in the foreground.
You see these shafts of light blasting out of the
surface of the comet, like it makes me think of
Indiana Jones saying, you know, lightning, fire power of God
or something. Yeah, yeah, it does bring to mind the
you know, the fires of the art or or the
lights of you know, the UFOs, the very spaceships that
(35:38):
are that they are encountered in Spielberg films. So I
was reading an article about this study by phil Plate
the Bad Astronomer, at his blog on sci Fi, and
he highlighted this image in particular, the one you're looking
at now, rob in connection with the subject matter the study.
This photo is taken from a distance of about a
hundred and seventy seven kilometers. And the point of it
(36:00):
is that what's being shown in these shafts of light
in the image is not actually lightning or fire a
power of God. They're not actually shafts of light. It
is actually jets of water vapor that are gassing out
from the surface of the comet and being illuminated by
the sunlight. And I've got another photo for you to
look at this up close of these jets. It truly
(36:22):
does look amazing. Yeah, it creates this feeling that it
is glowing or emitting energy. Um what whicheness since it
is emitting energy here. Uh, but yeah, it creates these
are very these are beautiful images like these would not
look out of place, like framed on the wall of
some sort of you know, trendy uh you know in
(36:46):
New York eatery or something. Yeah, I agree. I mean
they have an almost artistic quality with their their real photos.
So scientists believe these jets are caused in the following way.
A large part of the nucleus of a comet is
made of water ice. As a comet with an irregular
orbit gets to that part of its orbit closest to
(37:07):
the Sun, of course, the ice in its crust heats
up and it melts or its sublimates, it vaporizes, turns
into a gas, and these jets we see in the photos,
this is the water vapor that is being exhaled into
space by the crusty lobes. But here's where all of
the different subjects we've been talking about come together. What
(37:27):
we have recently observed in these images is that many
of these jets seem to be shooting directly from the
mysterious pits in the surface of the comet. Now what
does that mean. Well, the authors of this study in
Nature conclude that the pits are probably sinkholes, sinkholes in space. Well,
(37:48):
that makes sense given what we've just discussed about the
water vapor jetting out of them. Right, it is leaving
a hollow and uh, and that's the very kind of
situation that on on Earth can lead to a sinkhole
exactly right Now, These wouldn't be caused by the exact
same process as natural sinkholes on Earth, just because it
(38:08):
wouldn't involve things like rain, drainage and such. But it's
pretty close. It's it's almost exactly the same thing. And
what you're what you're saying rob is exactly correct. So
the hypothesized mechanism works like this. The comet travels into
the inner parts of its orbit so it gets close
to the sun. Heat from the sun warms the comet,
turning the ice into water vapor, and apparently sometimes this
(38:29):
heat penetrates the surface, sublimating large pockets of ice underneath
the top layer of the comet, and then the water
vapor gets blasted off into space, leaving these voids or
caves underneath the surface where the ice used to be. Eventually,
the overburden lying above these evaporated comet caves can't support
(38:50):
itself and it collapses, leaving a pit. And this can
create an interesting feedback cycle because now that there's a pit,
radiation from the Sun can pin to trade deeper into
the surface of the comet, warming even more ice below,
which is why we see jets of water vapor shooting
out of the pits themselves. These are sort of hot
spots where the solar radiation can access pockets of ancient
(39:14):
ice and heat them up very fast. The author's right
quote here. We report that pits on Comet six Triuma
of Garrisimenko are active and probably created by a synk
whole process, possibly accompanied by outbursts. We argue that after formation,
pits expand slowly in diameter owing to sublimation driven retreat
(39:37):
of the walls. Therefore, pits characterize how eroded the surface is.
A fresh commentary surface will have a ragged structure with
many pits, while an evolved surface will look smoother. The
size and spatial distribution of pits imply that large heterogeneitys
exist in the physical, structural, and compositional properties of the
(39:58):
first few hundred meter is below the current nucleus surface.
So what they're saying there is that there's also probably
a way to tell how old the pits are and
how old the surface of the comet is by looking
at these pits. Over time, the vaporization of ice eroads
and smooths over the walls of the pit. So if
you're looking at a comet, uh, the older a comet
(40:20):
sinkhole is, the smoother its walls and the shallower its
pits become. And very new pits in in less evolved
comets are the ones with very steep, straight walls. It's
kind of the exact opposite of like how human faces age, right,
So a very old piece of comet terrain that's been
exposed to the sun many times. I guess would probably
(40:41):
have a smoother surface with shallower pits, and one where
the pits are fresh. It's gonna be craggier. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's interesting. But but but, like you said, this
is essentially a sinkhole in space, and not even in
the most likely place you might think to find it,
not on a planet, but on the surface of a comet. Now,
(41:03):
the one reason I said maybe, actually it wouldn't be
quite as bad to fall into a sinkhole in space,
at least in this example, is that the gravity of
the comet is so low that when you fell into
the sink whole, you wouldn't fall very fast, so you'll
probably be fine when you hit the bottom. Yeah, or
maybe you can catch an upward boost on one of
those jets right right. It sounds like a great place
(41:24):
for an action scene to take place. Yeah, Ice pirates
to sinkhole City. I think all city sounds great. That
sounds like exactly like the kind of place you'd want
to wind up in and um like a space noar
kind of a um you know fiction. Yeah, sinkhole City,
I like it. Well, we've I feel like we've really
(41:45):
expanded even more on the idea of the sinkhole and
hopefully worked a little more to to rescue the sinkhole
from the what you call it, the the the the
section at the bottom of blogs. The chum box. Chum box.
That's not a word of Mike Pointage. That's like a
well known term. I think it was a term innovated
by somebody who wrote, like a I don't know, like
(42:06):
a Gawker article or something about them a long time ago,
about like how they're put together and what's in them.
But yeah, that that that is not a term original
to me, but I think it is a very good term.
It's an apt description. Yeah, returning, I guess it's referring
to the kind of like a slurry of meat that
you throw out of a boat to attract sharks. Yes, exactly,
(42:26):
that is exactly what those boxes are. They're just like
kind of throwing rotten garbage out there to see what
comes up. Yeah, and the sinkhole deserves better. The sinkhole
is far more interesting. Yet. Yeah, certainly they do, uh,
they do have this this visceral impact on us. Just
this again, this idea of the earth opening them up,
(42:46):
opening up and swallowing his whole, or exposing dark realms
beneath the earth. But but there's much more beyond that,
much more than just sheer terror titilation. So hopefully we've
we've you know, urged everyone out there too to uh,
you know, respect the sinkhole a little bit more. And obviously, yeah,
we'd love to hear from anybody out there, you know,
(43:06):
if you've traveled any of these sinkholes we've mentioned, if
you've been to impressive sinkholes that we didn't get into
in these episodes, um, or you just have general thoughts
about them, we would love to hear from me. In
the meantime, if you would like to listen to other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you
get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We
(43:27):
just asked the you rate, review, and subscribe if the
platform allows you to do so. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello. You can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind
dot CARM. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
(43:54):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio
because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or were
ever you listening to your favorite shows? U
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today
we're bringing you an episode from the vault. This is
part two of our series on sinkholes that originally aired
in January. Let's jump right in Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome
(00:33):
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our discussion of sink holes. Now. In the
last episode, we talked about some some fabulous examples of
sinkholes that suddenly open up and reveal interesting things. Below,
we talked about how sinkholes form, the geology and hydrology
of sinkholes, and we talked about some interesting specific examples
(00:56):
in the world. But today we wanted to get into
some things about the religious significance of sinkholes and sinkholes
as a scientific tool that can help show us things
about the past UH and also maybe some sinkholes in space.
But I thought sinkholes in religion would be a good
place to start because one of the interesting ways of
(01:17):
conceptualizing UH deities is that deities are often manifestations of
natural forces and natural resources, and of course one of
the most important natural resources is water, so there are
all kinds of water deities around the world. Coastal civilizations
and cultures will have deities associated with the ocean that
(01:39):
are very important in their culture. But if you're if
you're more inland, there will often be deities associated with
where you get your fresh water. Either are a very
important river or they're even There are lots of holy
wells that are found throughout the history of Europe, both
Pagan and Christian. There are a lot of like holy
wells and water sources, and the same is true of
(02:01):
many sinkholes in ancient meso America. That's right, um, in
particular the sacred senotes of the Maya, which is what
we'd like to talk about here. I was reading a piece,
really nice piece on Mexico Lore dot co dot UK
by Maya archaeologist Andrew kenkela Um just titled Sacred Sinkholes,
(02:27):
and he discusses sum of what we've already mentioned in
regard to, you know, the large number of these sinkholes
of sinotes in Mesoamerica. The entire area is situated on
a limestone bedrock, and we end up with with these
hollows and then they collapse, and then of course then
they often fill with water. But so yeah, your world
left with something. There's not just a deep pit, which
(02:49):
alone can be pretty interesting, but pits with water often
from deep underground, so you're often talking clean water, clear
water an ideal source. Some of these contain as much
as like fifty meters of water. Uh. He points out. Yeah,
there are a lot of fascinating things about these sinkholes.
One of which, just before I forget, I wanted to
(03:11):
call attention to that they explore some of these uh
sinotes in the Yucatan Peninsula. In the documentary that we
recently interviewed Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer about there, there's
a segment where they so that documentary is called Fireball,
and it's about impacts from space and the scars they
leave on Earth and and what we can learn from them.
(03:31):
And one of the things they explore is if if
you look at a map of the senotes of the
Yucatan Peninsula, there's one part of the Yucatan where there's
this almost perfect partial ring of sinotes and it's like,
what's going on there? And that apparently corresponds to the
outer rim of the crater that was left by the
(03:51):
impact from the KPg extinction, the large space impact that
probably contributed significantly to the extinction of the non avian
dinasas wars. And so in Fireball there's a segment where
where Clive Oppenheimer goes down into one of these beautiful
ancient senotes with a local researcher and and they talk
about not just what it can tell is geologically we
(04:12):
might get a little bit more into that later, but
but also what it means religiously. Yeah, So, especially for
areas far from rivers, these sonotes became very important for
just purely practical reasons like this is where you could
get water. This enabled you to live and have you know,
have have communities that existed further away from those rivers.
(04:33):
But then they ended up taking on religious power as well.
And can Tela writes that the ancient Maya regarded senotes
as one of the three symbolic entry ways uh to Sibalba,
the Mayan underworld. So eventually this kind of he describes
it as a senote cult emerges devoted to venturing out,
like taking these pilgrimages to different senotes, collecting water from
(04:56):
them from different different ones and making what offer rings
up to the watery depths. And their role these these priests,
these pilgrims, their role would have been seen is vitally important,
especially during times of drought, you know, when when the
the resources of the son Nottes becomes uh, you know,
(05:17):
in doubt or seems threatened, like they seem to have
a role in in trying to maintain the balance, to
try and maintain the bountiful gifts of these places. I
was also looking at an article on National Geographic titled
Secrets of the Maya in the Other World, and this
was by Alma Guillermo Prieto, and this is about the sinkholes,
(05:41):
uh that we've been discussing here, and about how they
were also associated with a key deity which was chock.
I believe that it's spelled in this article is c
h A A K. I've also seen it with a
with a C ch A C. I think. Yeah, So
here's what they wrote in this article quote or this
is just a really I think telling a passage from it.
(06:02):
Quote for men like unkin the old gods are still
very much alive, and Chock, ruler of sinotes and caves,
is among the most important gods of all. For the
benefit of living things. He pours from the skies, the
water he keeps in earthenware, jars and caves. Chalk is
one in many. Each thunderclap is a separate chock in action,
(06:23):
breaking a jar open and letting the rain fall. Each
god inhabits a separate layer of reality, along with dozens
of alternatively complacent and ferocious gods that live in the
thirteen other worlds above and the nine other worlds below. Together,
they filled the Maya people's lives with dreams, visions, and nightmares,
(06:44):
a complicated calendar of agricultural times and fertility rituals, in
a firm sense of the way things must be done.
Chock had moved, Unkin said, and that meant the planting
season would soon arrive. That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, So in
this we see that a cave or sinote could be
seen as as a dwelling place of chalk, but it
(07:05):
could also, can you know, be seen as this yawning
mall of the earth, or even this gateway to deeper
realms of reality. Yeah, and and this combines the multiple version,
so you you can of course see these senotes as
a gateway to the underworld and a source of water.
But I was also reading in a different National Geographic
article um about like the the the specifics of certain senotes. Like,
(07:30):
it's not just all senotes are religiously equivalent. There would be,
for example, some senotes and specific locations that have different
religious significance for the people who live nearby. The one
I was thinking of was the a senote that, as
the ancient mind city had a wall, there was like
many senotes within the wall that could be used as
(07:50):
a water source. But there's one senote outside the city
wall that it seems was regarded primarily as a place
for the burial of the dead. And there have been
many human remains found down inside that one. Yeah, yeah there, Yeah,
they're they're a whole slew of them with different significance.
Is the most famous of the sonotes, uh, it's probably
the Sacred Sinote at the Maya site of Sanita, where
(08:12):
there was this, it's been a place of of a
fair amount of study. There was a small building by
it that was apparently used for blood sacrifices um, again
tying into traditions related to the you know, the sacredness
of the spot and the continuation of water. Variety of
sacred objects were also apparently cast into the sinote, including
precious jade artifacts, gold and copper disks, uh, foods, and
(08:37):
other organic items that that we've we actually can find
you know, evidence of. But uh, yeah, so you think
of this as like an opening up into the world
below where you might throw offerings, where you might make
sacrifices of material or sacrifices of blood. It's hard for
me not to sort of connect this to some of
the stuff we were talking about in the previous episode
(08:57):
where there is a pretty your link between pumping too
much groundwater up. You know, like there's certain places where
there's a need for for massive irrigation of fields maybe
sometime to like protect a certain crop from frost or something,
so you will pump just tons and tons of water
just to put over the fields so so so much
(09:18):
that you really lower the level of the groundwater and
suddenly cause lots of sinkholes to to open up where
the suddenly the you know, the water pressure is not
what it was below the overburden can't hold up its
own weight and then collapses. And this has happened in
the US in places like Florida. I mean, it could
be it's very easy to see how something like that
could be interpreted as as the wrath of the gods, right, yeah, absolutely, yeah,
(09:42):
you're you're messing with the domain of the the earth gods. Now.
One of the interesting things about these Mesoamerican traditions concerning
sinots is that it's also thought that that native people's
um elsewhere in the America has probably carried some of these, uh,
these ideas with and so when you encounter of some
North American sinotes, there's there's evidence of that these areas
(10:07):
that native peoples may have used them as burial places
as well given them, um, you know, places of importance
in their worldviews. And one such place is Devil Sinkhole
northwest of San San Antonio. Um it's now a state park,
but it's a hundred and forty ft deep or forty
three meters deep, and um uh yeah, apparently there's evidence
(10:29):
that ancient people's came here and probably held it in
some esteem. But one of the really crazy natural world
things about Devil Sinkhole is that it is home to
or at least part of the year, it is home
to three million Mexican freetailed bats. Wow, that's a lot
of bats. Yeah, so they migrate to Mexico for the
(10:51):
cooler months, but they roost up in the sinkhole other
parts of the year. And we've we've talked about how
amazing bats are in the show before and especially especially
insectivore uh bats you know that eat insects. Well, it's
been estimated that the bats that live in Devil Sinkhole
again something like three million Mexican freetail bats that they
(11:12):
consume un estimated thirty tons of beetles and moths each night,
each night, thirty tons, thirty tons beetles and moths. That's crazy.
That's one of those facts that makes you wonder how
many tons of beetles they're just are already? Like, is
that is that half the beetles in the area? Is
that one percent of the beetles in the area. Yeah,
(11:33):
I mean, it's just a tremendous biomass out there, and
these bats are here for it um and most of
it is insect or arthur pod in some way, or
you know, most of the animal is is arthur pod
in some way, and wow, that's just amazing. You can
measuring insects or beetles in units of like garbage truck fulls.
(11:55):
So I love this because, yeah, this is a great
example of just sort of how like we said in
the last episode, when a sinkhole occurs, it does not
you know, create this natural void. Like. Things will move
into the sinkhole, things will take advantage of this new
um aspect of the geography, and in this case, the
bats make it their home. So if you if you've
(12:16):
lived in the San Antonio area, you've visited there, and
you've been to two Devil sinkhole, I'd love to hear, uh,
hear about your experience checking it out. I know, if
you go during the right time of the year, you
can actually observe the bats like, uh, moving in and
out of the of the cavern area. So uh, it
sounds beautiful. I've read that there are also I mean,
one of the things is that belief in the sacredness
(12:38):
of of sinkholes and and their association with the world
of the gods is not just an ancient belief, it's
not necessarily extinct. I mean there are people today for
whom sinkholes hold sacred importance, and if if you, if
you are one of those people or know some, I'd
like to hear about that too. Yeah, yeah, I'd love
to hear, especially the details about any modern rights associated
(12:58):
with it, and and just of the belief system built
up around it, you know, the stories than Now, one
of the things we mentioned in the previous episode is
that the sink whole is a natural feature that can
inadvertently serve as a type of scientific instrument, much in
(13:18):
the same way that like ancient ice. You know, it's
like nobody intended it to be this way, but we
can learn things about the ancient climate from taking ice cores,
so that you know, those layers of ice really give
us a lot to read into the history of the Earth.
And apparently sinkholes can do the same thing, right, that's right.
I mean, you know, we think about how they gobble
up parts of the surface world, and yeah, they do
(13:39):
sometimes do scientists a huge favor by collecting and to
some degree preserving evidence of past life forms, even past
like storm activity and and and climates of ancient times. Uh.
And so when we ventured into the sink whole. With
the right tools or with the right methods, we're able
to uncover those secrets that have been reserved there. And
(14:01):
they've just been There've been numerous studies that have looked
at sinkholes and uh and gathered specific information from from
these sinkholes, and we're not gonna be able to give
a full overview of them here in this episode, but
I wanted to touch on some that I thought provided
a reasonable overview and in an idea of what sort
of stuff we can learn from sinkholes. So uh, there's
(14:23):
the For instance, in two thousand fourteen, a team from
the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne studied genetic information
extracted from the tooth of an adolescent girl who fell
into a sinkhole in the Yucatan some twelve thousand to
thirteen thousand years ago, and this with her remains were
found alongside the remains of ancient beasts. Because you know,
(14:46):
what what occurs is some of these really treacherous sinkholes,
is like things will fall in and then they cannot
get out, and of course they die down there. They
decay down there, and the remains are down there for
us to later discuss ever in study. Oh, I hadn't
thought about this, but I wonder if sinkholes are one
of these things, one of these terrain features that can
(15:07):
serve as a natural predator trap. Um. A predator trap is,
I guess, a concept in the interaction between the landscape
and and the animals that live nearby. But you know,
a classic example is like the Librettar pits. You know,
so a an animal becomes stranded and dies in it,
and then the smell attracts predators or scavengers who then
themselves become trapped. Another example I was reading about not
(15:30):
too long ago was there is a geologically active valley
in the cum Chotka Peninsula where often like birds are
killed by volcanic fumes, and then their decaying bodies attract
predators into the area, who then also are killed by
the fumes, and it leads to this feedback cycle. Yeah, yeah,
it's uh. I think in some cases they definitely are
(15:52):
serving as predator traps um. So in this particular study,
one of the reasons this tooth was so important is
that the researchers were studying the influx of humans into
the America's and wanted to see of a specimen such
as this with a skull shape that was that is
unusual among other Native American lineages. They wanted to see
if it fell in line genetically with those lineages or
(16:13):
represented something else, perhaps lining up with theories about migration
from Southeast Asia or even Australia that didn't come in
through the bearing straight um. And they found that their
remains did line up with with the bearing straight or
Barringian migration. So that's just one cool example. Okay, let's
(16:34):
hear another, all right, Yeah, here's one from nineteen Researchers
from the Florida Museum of Natural History looked at the
preserved bones of a Craton's carcara and an extinct carrion
eating falcon from the Caribbean that was killed off roughly
a thousand years ago when humans first entered the region.
And they were looking at these remains in a flooded
sinkhole um on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, and
(16:59):
the whole is a amill sink, a a hundred foot deep, dark,
oxygen free environment that preserved the two thousand, five hundred
year old bones of this creature enough that they could
they could conduct genetic studies of it. In fact, the
bone yielded ninety eight point seven percent of the bird's
mitochondrial genome, which is pretty impressive. Again, it's like it's
(17:21):
like a deep cooler, you know, it preserves these remains,
uh that if they were dropped, you know, in other
places on the world, would have just been long lost,
no ice required. UM. Here's another one of note. In
two thousand and eighteen, another study from the University of Illinois,
your Banno Champagne studied the remains of a giant sloth
(17:42):
that fell into a sinkhole in what is now Carriblanca
in central Belize twenty seven thousand years ago. And in
this the tooth, humorous and femur were partially fossilized, but
there was still enough unaltered tissue for stable carbon and
oxygen isotope analysis to study what the slow off eight.
And this in turn revealed details about local climate and
(18:04):
local environment there in that region at that time, which
is pretty pretty astounding. Did did it say exactly what
the sloth did eat? Um? I didn't get into the
the the nuts and berries of that. Basically, suffice to say,
I'd love to come back and discuss um. Uh, giant
ground slots more in the future though, But but basically
(18:26):
it provided them the the information they needed to, you know,
to actually gaze back in the past and consider, you know,
what it was consuming, and that means what was around it,
what was you know, how it was able to make
its home in in the world at that time. So
it's pretty amazing. We could probably do a whole episode
or series of episodes just on really interesting studies finding
(18:47):
out what ancient peoples and creatures eight using analyses and
chemical analyses of these kinds. Yeah, I mean it reveals
so much, so much. Absolutely. One I was just reading
not too long ago that was kind of funny to
me was, um, was a chemical analysis of a gigantic
copper light found I think it was around the city
(19:08):
of York in England that revealed it was left by
a human I think like a thousand years ago or so,
you know, roughly, and revealed a diet heavy and meat
and bread, but also just just riddled with intestinal worms.
So then you get the double You have the fossilized poop,
but then the fossilized creatures that were writhing inside it.
(19:31):
But I guess if it's about a thousand years ago.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that counts as fossilized.
I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.
So it was, you know, poop from hundreds of years ago,
so you know, roughly around a thousand years ago. But
is that technically a fossil or is that just very
well preserved poop. We'll have to come back and discuss
in the future. Okay. Um, here's a two thousand twenty
(19:52):
study from go Through University in Frankfort. They dove into
one of the most impressive sinkholes in the world, the
Blue Hole. I believe we mentioned this um in the
last episode, at least in Passing Uh. This is a
flooded cart sinkhole on Lighthouse Reef in Belize and they
were able to to to drill up and analyze a
(20:13):
sedimentary quote storm archive covering two thousand years of history,
built layer by layer by layer in the dark depth
of this whole, and it revealed a lot about the
frequency of tropical storms in the area. Over time. They
found quote hurricanes in the Caribbean became more frequent in
their force varied noticeably around the same time that classical
(20:36):
mind culture in Central America suffered its final demise. So
again just a chance to do gaze back in time
and see what what was going on, um, you know,
with the climate and with weather patterns by looking into
the sinkhole. So is the suggestion there. I assume it's
not totally known, but the suggestion there may be that
(20:56):
the organizational decline of the mind Civilis station was in
some ways possibly related to changes in weather patterns. That's
my understanding that it would have would have impacted UH,
that that civilization UH and would have potentially contributed. Yeah.
I also ran across a two thousand seventeen study from
(21:17):
the University of Hawaii at Manoa that looked into uh
uh Makawai Cave and Kauaii, the largest limestone cave in
y and only accessible via a sinkhole. So it's a
it's a rich fossil site providing insight into Hawaiian life.
The sinkhole Paleo Lake contains ten thousand years of sedimentary information,
(21:38):
revealing a rich diversity of natural information as well as
Polynesian artifacts. So in this study they were able to
find supporting evidence in the coral fragments there to discover
the source of the mega earthquake UH in the Aleutian
Islands that spawned the devastating fifteen eighties six tsunami that
hit uh sen Riku, Japan. And so uh, you know again,
(22:02):
it's it goes beyond merely being able to go in
and find the remains of creatures, you know, which is
I think the first place your mind goes when you
think about sinkholes. But able to to be able to
go in there and find some some shattered bits of
coral and then compare that to um two other bits
of information and sort of piece together like seismic activities
(22:23):
that occurred centuries ago. And I have I have one
more here. This one's really fun too. Back in v
a twenty five thousand year old sinkhole in Wyoming Natural
Trap Cave and Big Horn Canyon was found. It measured
fifteen feet across about eighty five ft deep, and when
they went into it, they discovered fossils of mammoths, short
(22:44):
faced bears, camels, and um collared limmings. But they ended
up boarding it up after that for thirty years to
prevent accidental falls. Because the Natural Park Service I was
reading describes that Uh, this particular sinkhole is quote virtually
impossible to see until it is directly underfoot, and if
you look at pictures of it, yeah, it looks because
(23:05):
if you fell, like it widens out underneath, so you
wouldn't like skid along the side of this or even
like it would just you would just plummet down to
the bottom. Yeah. It's not a cone. It's not even
a cylinder. It's like a jug with the with the
you know, bottle opening. Yeah, so it's it's very impressive.
You should look it up. They have some wonderful pictures
(23:26):
of it in the National Park Service does. But so, yeah,
they ended up bordering it up, boarding it up for
thirty years. But when scientists finally got a chance to
dig in again, they discovered numerous large prehistoric mammal bones
and even complete skeletons of smaller mammals, and they said
that it ultimately functioned like a refrigerator, even preserving collagen
and some of the bones. It wound up containing a
(23:47):
whopping thirty thousand specimens, they say, And on top of this,
scientists are still studying what the cave can reveal about
ancient human migration, ancient climate. So again, just another cash
of information shan about about the past that we find
in one of these sinkholes. Now, I'm sorry if I
missed this. Do they know if this this huge cache
(24:07):
of different animal specimens, is that a result of some
kind of natural deposition process, or is that the result
of humans like humans putting animal remains into the sinkhole? Um?
My understanding is that this would have been animals accidentally
falling in over over the ages. Um. But it could
be wrong on that. Um. There's I guess it's possible
(24:28):
that that some of these bodies would have been thrown in.
But uh, my impression was that we were dealing with
with things that had had made the very mistake that
the Natural National Park Service was was warning about, you know,
that it being virtually impossible to see it until it's
directly underfoot. Like you've got to do a real dexterity
saving throw to avoid fall into the bottom of this baby, Yeah,
(24:50):
at disadvantage? Yes? Thank? Okay, Well I've got another one
for you. Obviously, it would be bad to suddenly plunge
down into a sinkhole unwittingly on Earth, But what if
you were to do it in space? Oh? Wow? Well,
(25:11):
that would be even worse. Well, actually you might think so,
but I just I just now thought of a condition
that would make it maybe not nearly as bad. I
don't know what we'll get into that. I mean, I
would hate to fall into a sinkhole like the one
we just described in general. But what if then you
I mean, because if you get to the bottom, what
you're injured, maybe you maybe you're gonna starve to death,
or you know, dive your wounds or dive exposure down there.
(25:32):
Maybe there's a recently uh fall an animal down there
you can you can eat, or maybe there's something down
there that is going to eat you. There's so many
horrible ways it could go. But space is a lonely
place to die. So I don't know how true that is.
So I want to talk about a space object, an
object called comment six P Trumov Garasimenko. Now, this comment
(25:55):
is called sixty seven P because it is the sixty
seven periodic comment discovered in our solar system. It was
found in nineteen sixty nine at an observatory in Russia
by an astronomer named Klim Ivanovich Churyumov from a photographic
plate that was taken by some fed Lana Ivanova Garasimenko
(26:15):
and like I said, as a periodic comment, meaning that
it's a comment with a relatively short orbit that we've
documented repeatedly returning to the inner Solar system. Some comments,
you know, they're just way way out there and they're
never going to get close to the Sun, so we
don't really have any chance to get a good look
at them. This is one of the ones that comes
in at one angle of its of its orbit, pretty
(26:38):
close to the Sun, and astronomers have of course cited
it a bunch of times since it was first discovered,
since it comes around every six and a half years
or so, if you've seen pictures of a comet up close,
there's a good chance it was this one. Uh. It's
it's kind of l shaped, or sort of like a
bent barbell with a very short handle. It has these
(26:58):
two lobes of frust or rocky icy material and its nucleus.
It also kind of looks like a bent double mushroom.
It probably originally came from the Kuiper Belt, which is
a large loose collection of icy objects that extends far
out past the orbit of Neptune. So if you go
out past all of the planets, you know, you go
(27:19):
past the gas giants, past Neptune, into the realm of Pluto,
and then from there on out there's just sort of
this big shell around the Solar System of of space,
and these icy objects that if they're perturbed in just
the right way, if they get flung off of their
their deep orbital path and thrown down into the inner
Solar System, they can become these familiar periodic comets. And
(27:42):
that appears to be what happened to Six. It was
probably flung on this path that occasionally brings it close
to the Sun when long ago it was subject to
a collision or gravitational disturbance by some other object. At
its biggest dimensions, it's a little over four pometers or
about two point five miles long and wide, so it
(28:03):
would be big enough to walk on, but not nearly
as big as a planet or even a moon. Now
we know a lot about six and have great pictures
of it because it was the target of the e
s A, the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, which actually
landed a probe on the surface of this comment and
took a bunch of amazing photos. Among other things, Uh,
(28:25):
and there's a lot that's really interesting about this comment.
There's likely one amazing short video or gift that you've
seen from its surface, and this was made out of
a series of still images taken by the lander. That's
that we're sequenced together into an animation where it looks
kind of like there's a snowstorm or a blizzard raining
down onto the surface. Rob have you seen this animation before, Yes,
(28:50):
it's really amazing. Now it does need some qualification that
this is not actually a snowstorm like we would experience
here on Earth. Uh. And the animation that we see
is a sped up animation. It takes something I think
like twenty five minutes of original uh you know, time
lapse between the different photos, and compresses it into a
few seconds of of panning camera shot. So it's not
(29:12):
actually a snowstorm, but probably more like the movements of
dust particles and the star field as the comet travels.
But it's still just one of the most strange and
beautiful images I've seen made out of photos taken by
space probe. Yeah, I mean, it's it's absolutely other worldly. Now,
there are a lot of things that were interesting about
the Rosetta mission, including the ways that the Rosetta mission
(29:33):
kind of went wrong. Do you do you remember this
when it was trying to put the phile a lander
down on the surface of the comet, and how it
kind of bounced in a way it wasn't supposed to.
I I remember, I remember this being a point in
the news around the time it happened. Yeah. Yeah, So
the so the Rosetta mission had it had a lander
that separated from the orbiter craft, and then the lander
(29:53):
was supposed to touch down on the surface of the comet,
and I believe it was supposed to fire these harpoons
that would lock get into the surface so it didn't
float away again, because again, thinking about the gravity of
a comet, uh, it's mass is so small compared to
the kind of gravity we're used to on planets or
moons that you can quite easily drift away from it
(30:14):
if you've really got any momentum at all. I believe
I read that the escape velocity from this commet was
one meter per second. So if you're you know, moving
away from its center of mass at one meter per
second or more, you're not going to fall back down.
You're just gonna keep drifting away. But anyway, what I
think happened with the lander was that it was supposed
to fire these harpoons to lock it into the surface,
(30:36):
but that didn't work correctly, so instead it kind of
bounced after it touched the surface, and then bounced a
couple of times and eventually came to rest under a cliff.
Because remember this is not like a spherical commet, but
it's kind of bent l shaped with these round edges.
It came to rest under some kind of cliff or overhang,
the shadow of which mostly blocked the solar panels that
(30:57):
were supposed to power the lander. So then that led
to you know, uh laed to it not having enough
power to do all the things it wanted to do.
But despite that, there was still a huge amount of
um really great science that came out of the rosett
emission and these wonderful photographs. And one of the interesting
findings about this comet sixty s P that I wanted
(31:17):
to mention this was from a NASA press release from
September of called comet discovered to have its own northern lights.
Uh this was actually revealed with the help of NASA
instruments that were part of the essay Rosette emission. What
they found was that the comet has this invisible glow.
It has an aurora of far ultra violet radiation. Uh.
(31:39):
These findings were published in Nature Astronomy of last year,
and this electromagnetic glow was an aurora much like we
see in the polar regions of Earth. So on Earth,
the northern and southern lights are created when charged particles
from the Sun collide with gas particles in our upper atmosphere,
and this results in reactions that create patterns of green, red,
(32:01):
and white across across the sky. Other planets in the
Solar System also have a rural phenomenon. Jupiter does, I
think even Mars does. Mini planets, but this is the
first time we've ever observed it surrounding a comet. And
quote from the press release here quote electrons streaming out
in the solar wind. The stream of charged particles flowing
(32:22):
out from the Sun interact with the gas in the
comets coma, breaking apart water and other molecules. The resulting
atoms give off a distinctive far ultraviolet light, invisible to
the naked eye. Far ultra violet light has the shortest
wavelengths of radiation in the ultra violet spectrum, which makes
me wonder if this comet could give you a sunburn.
(32:45):
But anyway, I want to get around to the main study.
I wanted to talk about tying into our our overall
theme today. So this is a study published in Nature
by Jean Baptiste Vincent at All called large heterogeneityse and
commets et seven p as revealed by active pits from
sinkhole collapse. So the authors here talk about how a
(33:06):
lot of times when we get a look at the
surface of a cometary nucleus, that's the hard icy core
of the comment. Remember comment has so it's got a
hard core that's made of like ice and dust, the
part you could walk on, and then it's surrounded often
by sort of cloud or tail. The coma is made
of water, vapor, dust and gas. And when they get
(33:27):
a look at this hard nucleus of a comet, we
often observe pits. Now, there's one way that that might
not be surprising, because if you think about other objects
in the Solar System, like the Moon or asteroids the
dwarf planet like series, they have a lot of pits also,
and these are quite clearly impact craters. As these objects
are bombarded by space junk over millions of years, these
(33:51):
pits accumulate, and if the planets or moons don't have
active geology like volcanoes and plate tectonics to repeatedly pave
and smooth over the surface, the pits from ancient impacts
just sit there and they stay there, and we can
see them easily. But there is a problem with explaining
the pits on commets as impact creators. First of all,
(34:12):
our best guests about how often commets encounter large impacts
does not seem to correlate with the number of pits
that we see. And then second, when we try to
create physical models of what would happen when a comet
suffered a high speed impact, these models just don't create
pits like the ones we actually observe. So what's making
the pits? Uh? Some researchers have hypothesized that the pits
(34:36):
are a result of internal explosions of some kind, But
in the words of the author's quote, the driving process
remains unknown. Uh So do we have any better guesses? Well,
according to this study, yes we do. Zarab. I want
you to look at this next picture picture I've got
for you here. This is a picture of Commet six
(34:56):
seven shared by the E s A. And if you
look at this comment from a close orbit under the
right conditions, you can see what look kind of like
shafts of light, almost like those Spielberg lights, you know,
from Steven Spielberg movies. He loves these God lights, the
shafts of light piercing through a dusty patch of air
(35:16):
or you know, cutting through different obstacles in the foreground.
You see these shafts of light blasting out of the
surface of the comet, like it makes me think of
Indiana Jones saying, you know, lightning, fire power of God
or something. Yeah, yeah, it does bring to mind the
you know, the fires of the art or or the
lights of you know, the UFOs, the very spaceships that
(35:38):
are that they are encountered in Spielberg films. So I
was reading an article about this study by phil Plate
the Bad Astronomer, at his blog on sci Fi, and
he highlighted this image in particular, the one you're looking
at now, rob in connection with the subject matter the study.
This photo is taken from a distance of about a
hundred and seventy seven kilometers. And the point of it
(36:00):
is that what's being shown in these shafts of light
in the image is not actually lightning or fire a
power of God. They're not actually shafts of light. It
is actually jets of water vapor that are gassing out
from the surface of the comet and being illuminated by
the sunlight. And I've got another photo for you to
look at this up close of these jets. It truly
(36:22):
does look amazing. Yeah, it creates this feeling that it
is glowing or emitting energy. Um what whicheness since it
is emitting energy here. Uh, but yeah, it creates these
are very these are beautiful images like these would not
look out of place, like framed on the wall of
some sort of you know, trendy uh you know in
(36:46):
New York eatery or something. Yeah, I agree. I mean
they have an almost artistic quality with their their real photos.
So scientists believe these jets are caused in the following way.
A large part of the nucleus of a comet is
made of water ice. As a comet with an irregular
orbit gets to that part of its orbit closest to
(37:07):
the Sun, of course, the ice in its crust heats
up and it melts or its sublimates, it vaporizes, turns
into a gas, and these jets we see in the photos,
this is the water vapor that is being exhaled into
space by the crusty lobes. But here's where all of
the different subjects we've been talking about come together. What
(37:27):
we have recently observed in these images is that many
of these jets seem to be shooting directly from the
mysterious pits in the surface of the comet. Now what
does that mean. Well, the authors of this study in
Nature conclude that the pits are probably sinkholes, sinkholes in space. Well,
(37:48):
that makes sense given what we've just discussed about the
water vapor jetting out of them. Right, it is leaving
a hollow and uh, and that's the very kind of
situation that on on Earth can lead to a sinkhole
exactly right Now, These wouldn't be caused by the exact
same process as natural sinkholes on Earth, just because it
(38:08):
wouldn't involve things like rain, drainage and such. But it's
pretty close. It's it's almost exactly the same thing. And
what you're what you're saying rob is exactly correct. So
the hypothesized mechanism works like this. The comet travels into
the inner parts of its orbit so it gets close
to the sun. Heat from the sun warms the comet,
turning the ice into water vapor, and apparently sometimes this
(38:29):
heat penetrates the surface, sublimating large pockets of ice underneath
the top layer of the comet, and then the water
vapor gets blasted off into space, leaving these voids or
caves underneath the surface where the ice used to be. Eventually,
the overburden lying above these evaporated comet caves can't support
(38:50):
itself and it collapses, leaving a pit. And this can
create an interesting feedback cycle because now that there's a pit,
radiation from the Sun can pin to trade deeper into
the surface of the comet, warming even more ice below,
which is why we see jets of water vapor shooting
out of the pits themselves. These are sort of hot
spots where the solar radiation can access pockets of ancient
(39:14):
ice and heat them up very fast. The author's right
quote here. We report that pits on Comet six Triuma
of Garrisimenko are active and probably created by a synk
whole process, possibly accompanied by outbursts. We argue that after formation,
pits expand slowly in diameter owing to sublimation driven retreat
(39:37):
of the walls. Therefore, pits characterize how eroded the surface is.
A fresh commentary surface will have a ragged structure with
many pits, while an evolved surface will look smoother. The
size and spatial distribution of pits imply that large heterogeneitys
exist in the physical, structural, and compositional properties of the
(39:58):
first few hundred meter is below the current nucleus surface.
So what they're saying there is that there's also probably
a way to tell how old the pits are and
how old the surface of the comet is by looking
at these pits. Over time, the vaporization of ice eroads
and smooths over the walls of the pit. So if
you're looking at a comet, uh, the older a comet
(40:20):
sinkhole is, the smoother its walls and the shallower its
pits become. And very new pits in in less evolved
comets are the ones with very steep, straight walls. It's
kind of the exact opposite of like how human faces age, right,
So a very old piece of comet terrain that's been
exposed to the sun many times. I guess would probably
(40:41):
have a smoother surface with shallower pits, and one where
the pits are fresh. It's gonna be craggier. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's interesting. But but but, like you said, this
is essentially a sinkhole in space, and not even in
the most likely place you might think to find it,
not on a planet, but on the surface of a comet. Now,
(41:03):
the one reason I said maybe, actually it wouldn't be
quite as bad to fall into a sinkhole in space,
at least in this example, is that the gravity of
the comet is so low that when you fell into
the sink whole, you wouldn't fall very fast, so you'll
probably be fine when you hit the bottom. Yeah, or
maybe you can catch an upward boost on one of
those jets right right. It sounds like a great place
(41:24):
for an action scene to take place. Yeah, Ice pirates
to sinkhole City. I think all city sounds great. That
sounds like exactly like the kind of place you'd want
to wind up in and um like a space noar
kind of a um you know fiction. Yeah, sinkhole City,
I like it. Well, we've I feel like we've really
(41:45):
expanded even more on the idea of the sinkhole and
hopefully worked a little more to to rescue the sinkhole
from the what you call it, the the the the
section at the bottom of blogs. The chum box. Chum box.
That's not a word of Mike Pointage. That's like a
well known term. I think it was a term innovated
by somebody who wrote, like a I don't know, like
(42:06):
a Gawker article or something about them a long time ago,
about like how they're put together and what's in them.
But yeah, that that that is not a term original
to me, but I think it is a very good term.
It's an apt description. Yeah, returning, I guess it's referring
to the kind of like a slurry of meat that
you throw out of a boat to attract sharks. Yes, exactly,
(42:26):
that is exactly what those boxes are. They're just like
kind of throwing rotten garbage out there to see what
comes up. Yeah, and the sinkhole deserves better. The sinkhole
is far more interesting. Yet. Yeah, certainly they do, uh,
they do have this this visceral impact on us. Just
this again, this idea of the earth opening them up,
(42:46):
opening up and swallowing his whole, or exposing dark realms
beneath the earth. But but there's much more beyond that,
much more than just sheer terror titilation. So hopefully we've
we've you know, urged everyone out there too to uh,
you know, respect the sinkhole a little bit more. And obviously, yeah,
we'd love to hear from anybody out there, you know,
(43:06):
if you've traveled any of these sinkholes we've mentioned, if
you've been to impressive sinkholes that we didn't get into
in these episodes, um, or you just have general thoughts
about them, we would love to hear from me. In
the meantime, if you would like to listen to other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you
get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We
(43:27):
just asked the you rate, review, and subscribe if the
platform allows you to do so. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello. You can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind
dot CARM. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
(43:54):
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