Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know. Super Bowl, okay, supervolcano? Was that?
Speaker 1: What was that? Do you know what that was? Oh? Geez,
Speaker 1: you and that song. I can't help it. For nine
Speaker 1: years you've been Holman the Final Countdown by Europe. Not
Speaker 1: every oh, I don't know, every three months or so,
Speaker 1: it's the world years. It's the world's most effective earworm.
Speaker 1: Do you do that to you? Me? With the final Countdown?
Speaker 1: She's like, it doesn't get to her. It bounces right off.
Speaker 1: She's like, try your worst. Um, super volcanoes. If you
Speaker 1: listen to volcanoes, well we did that one, yeah, or
Speaker 1: our Yellowstone or I guess it was Geyser's Nature's Innuendo.
Speaker 1: That was a great title. Um. Then some of this
Speaker 1: might seem a little bit familiar, but why not to
Speaker 1: cover it as its own thing? Well, it is its
Speaker 1: own thing. They're starting to figure out. Yeah, Like this
Speaker 1: article even says don't even think of it as a
Speaker 1: amped up volcano. It says stop stop. They should call
Speaker 1: it something else, then they really should. I mean that
Speaker 1: you can make a case that, yes, it's calling it
Speaker 1: a super volcano. It does make sense in a way, um,
Speaker 1: because it is obviously magma pushing up through the earth. Uh.
Speaker 1: But that's pretty much where the comparisons end, and that
Speaker 1: that's that's a pretty deep comparison between a volcano and
Speaker 1: a super volcano. But there's a lot of different stuff
Speaker 1: going on. And the more we look into these things that, frankly,
Speaker 1: the scarier they become. Yeah, I mean, right out of
Speaker 1: the gate. One of the big things that is different
Speaker 1: from a volcano is a volcano is usually like a
Speaker 1: mountain that you can look at with smoke coming out
Speaker 1: of it and point to you can keep an eye
Speaker 1: on it. In other words, yeah, and whereas a super
Speaker 1: volcano is usually categorized by a big depression in the
Speaker 1: earth from a past explosion, like a crater or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or it might be like nothing, that crater might be
Speaker 1: fully filled in by this point, might be a forest,
Speaker 1: It could be Um, it could be a hot spot
Speaker 1: like a yellow Stone as we'll see, where there are
Speaker 1: is a lot of geysers and hot springs. But the
Speaker 1: point is is it's a A super volcano is a
Speaker 1: massive amount of magma, a chamber, a magma chamber, possibly
Speaker 1: a magma reservoir feeding the magma chamber, something even bigger
Speaker 1: um and it's it's connected or near a thin spot
Speaker 1: in the mantle that it may or may not have
Speaker 1: created itself in the Earth's sor this and that. Eventually
Speaker 1: something's going like the pressure inside is going to build up,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be enough magma and then kaboom. Things are
Speaker 1: gonna go south pretty quick. Because these things are so
Speaker 1: big and so explosive that they could they can change
Speaker 1: the global climate, possibly irreversibly on a human time scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whenever I read about stuff like this or even your
Speaker 1: garden variety natural disaster, it just feels like the Earth
Speaker 1: is like, you know, one day, I'm going to kill
Speaker 1: all the people. You realize this slowly, like all humans
Speaker 1: will be gone. I want to just explode you all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so gaya guy. A hypothesis is it kind of
Speaker 1: all right? But it's not gonna be anytime soon. In
Speaker 1: the case of a super volcano, Well, we hope, I saw,
Speaker 1: I saw. It's been calculated that they go off every
Speaker 1: Oh no, a hundred thousand or so years. The most
Speaker 1: recent one was something like um four thousand, twenty six
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. It's not too bad. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: got a little time from New Zealand. Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: should say this is spelled t a u p o.
Speaker 1: Here in the States, we would typically pronounce that like
Speaker 1: taupo maybe, but based on our Maori episode, I would
Speaker 1: guess that it's actually pronounced Could you repeat that again?
Speaker 1: So let's talk about how big these things can be. Uh,
Speaker 1: Sumatra seventy four thousand years ago. That was a super
Speaker 1: eruption that some say, and of course we don't know
Speaker 1: because it was seventy four thousand years ago. That's all
Speaker 1: we can do is kind of make our best guess.
Speaker 1: But some people think that that this almost was an
Speaker 1: extinction level event in full. It all most wiped out
Speaker 1: the entire human race. It could have jumped started a
Speaker 1: ten thousand year ice age, leaving behind a crater or
Speaker 1: a CAULDERA that was about nineteen by sixty two miles.
Speaker 1: That is huge. That's a yeah, that was Mount Toba,
Speaker 1: the Toba super eruption, right, Yes, six seventy cubic miles
Speaker 1: yea of ejecta. Yeah, and that ten thousand year ice
Speaker 1: age thing, that's noteworthy. They think that this whole thing
Speaker 1: was bad enough that it reduced humans down to several
Speaker 1: thousand people, and that there were plenty more humans before then,
Speaker 1: but that the the effects from shooting um gases the ejecta,
Speaker 1: but gases that flowed up into the atmosphere and actually
Speaker 1: reflect sunlight cooling the earth below it. UM really disrupted
Speaker 1: a lot of normal processes here on Earth, cooled it
Speaker 1: and made it really tough to survive. Five. That's the
Speaker 1: hallmark of super volcanoes. Is there their global effect? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a nuclear winter, basically changing the temperature of the Earth,
Speaker 1: maybe not permanently, but long enough to where your s
Speaker 1: O l right ten thousand year. I said, you're you're
Speaker 1: not gonna be happy during those years. Uh, these days, UM,
Speaker 1: North America, South American Asia are the greatest risks and
Speaker 1: there's one. Um. Actually it says we're those three places
Speaker 1: of the greatest risk. But there's one in Europe in Italy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that supposedly, and this was from Geez. Just like four
Speaker 1: months ago, I read an article that said that the
Speaker 1: one in Italy, it's in Naples, what's it called the
Speaker 1: Compy Flagray or, as we say in the United States,
Speaker 1: the Flagrian Fields area, the burning Fields. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: should give you an indication of what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Didn't get that name for nothing, No, but it's right
Speaker 1: beneath Naples. Yeah. But apparently that one is based on
Speaker 1: computer modeling and physical measurements. Uh. One of the scientists said,
Speaker 1: we proposed that magma could be approaching the critical degassing
Speaker 1: pressure level at Camp Flegria. Uh. And basically what that
Speaker 1: means is it's not gonna happen like next year, but
Speaker 1: they have raised the volcano threat level from green to yellow,
Speaker 1: which means we need to kind of really start monitoring
Speaker 1: and study. Is studying this thing a lot more. The
Speaker 1: thing is that they don't know like how to predict
Speaker 1: like it could happen next year. They're saying it's probably
Speaker 1: not going to but it could because we know so
Speaker 1: little about volcanoes and supervolcanoes in particular, that like it
Speaker 1: could just happen. Yeah, Like we don't even know for
Speaker 1: sure how many there are underneath us, but they say
Speaker 1: like six to ten maybe potentially active ones around the
Speaker 1: globe right now, and then a total of maybe thirty
Speaker 1: to forty that have ever been right. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: that one. I don't understand why this article overlooked that
Speaker 1: one Europe, but it's it's like Europe's toast, basically, it's inevitable.
Speaker 1: Probably the next month or two, there was one I
Speaker 1: think the biggest ever UM happened here in the States
Speaker 1: in Colorado, long before anybody called it Colorado. It was
Speaker 1: twenty million years ago, and the Fish Canyon Tough Event.
Speaker 1: So here's where super volcanoes really kind of come into
Speaker 1: um their own, just the massive amount of damage and
Speaker 1: stuff they spew out. Right, the Fish Canyon Tough event
Speaker 1: shot out twelve d cubic miles. So you know what
Speaker 1: a cube is, right, It's like a three dimensional square.
Speaker 1: And by Mr Rubick, you can write exactly you can
Speaker 1: take a little like an inch by an inch by
Speaker 1: an inch and create a little cubic kitch. You can
Speaker 1: do that with feet, you can do that with a meter,
Speaker 1: and you just keep going bigger and bigger and bigger,
Speaker 1: and eventually you're going to get to a cubic mile
Speaker 1: or a cubic kilometer. And this Fish Canyon Tough event
Speaker 1: spewed out twelve hundred cubic miles or five thousand cubic
Speaker 1: kilometers of rock, of dust, of ash, of molten lava
Speaker 1: shot it out and that nuts. That's so much stuff
Speaker 1: that literally changes the geography of an entire region when
Speaker 1: something like that happens, that's crazy. Um all right, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna contemplate the Cube and uh, we'll be back right
Speaker 1: after this to talk a little bit more about Yellowstone.
Speaker 1: Did you ever watch Jim Henson's The Cube? Remember when
Speaker 1: we talked about did you ever watch it? Bizarre? Yes,
Speaker 1: very weird. We love our friends with the handsome company. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, well we're gonna talk about Yellowstone a little bit.
Speaker 1: But defining these and when we talked about volcanoes, Defining
Speaker 1: volcanoes and what makes a volcano or super volcano is
Speaker 1: not an exact science. They don't have strict definitions, but um,
Speaker 1: they do try to look at a couple of different
Speaker 1: things when they're categorizing these these bad Mama jamas um
Speaker 1: Magne said, did I just say that magnitude which is
Speaker 1: the volume of the magma or the mass of magma
Speaker 1: that's erupted, and then intensity, which is the rate that
Speaker 1: that happens. Um, so if you're looking at magnitude intensity um,
Speaker 1: Like I said, they don't have it like a number.
Speaker 1: They say once it gets over this number. But um,
Speaker 1: so I wonder how they do categorize it. They don't.
Speaker 1: It's just up in the air, like they just do
Speaker 1: not have it set out so that you can say, well,
Speaker 1: once it hits this and this, it's it's officially a
Speaker 1: super volcano. That's just not laid out like that. As
Speaker 1: bad as writers of articles want it to be like that,
Speaker 1: it's just not at that point. There's just but there
Speaker 1: are factors where it's like, yeah, I would qualify that
Speaker 1: as a supervolcano. I'm Joe volcanologist or Jane volcanologists or
Speaker 1: versus a volcano um. And they usually do it by comparison, right,
Speaker 1: So like as far as intensity goes, that's how fast
Speaker 1: magma erupts. Right. Yeah. And Mount Vesuvius back in seventy nine,
Speaker 1: see with that very famous eruption that covers Pompeii and Herculaneum. Um.
Speaker 1: If you believe that kind of thing, right, I've seen
Speaker 1: it with my own eyes. Yeah, Um, Mountain Vesuvius shot
Speaker 1: out magma uh and ojecta at a rate of a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand cubic meters a second. Wow, that's a lot, right,
Speaker 1: that's some fast magma. So super volcanoes erupted it's something
Speaker 1: like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of cubic
Speaker 1: meters per second. That's a lot too. Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: want to be standing on that road. No, you don't
Speaker 1: want to be anywhere near it. So that's typically how
Speaker 1: they're figuring out what constitutes a super volcano. They look
Speaker 1: at this volcano and they say that's bad, and then
Speaker 1: they go, but what about this, and they go, that's
Speaker 1: a super volcano. There is another categorization they use, which
Speaker 1: is also a great band name, Volcano explosivity index. Yeah.
Speaker 1: See the index just kind of throws it off, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe an album title, okay, ejecta not bad, not bad
Speaker 1: at all. So this is when they measure ash column
Speaker 1: height and the quantity of that ash promise and lava ejected.
Speaker 1: So not the volume, but how high it goes. I
Speaker 1: don't know why they just can't combine all that into
Speaker 1: one big formula Claven scale, but supervolcanoes there, it is
Speaker 1: a scale, and the highest of the EI category is
Speaker 1: a magnitude eight, which means more than two fifty cubic
Speaker 1: miles and a plume more than sixteen miles high. Sixteen miles, dude,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. It is it's super It is um. So
Speaker 1: you kind of put all this stuff together. They don't
Speaker 1: have it in a single index, but if you combine
Speaker 1: all the stuff, you start to get an idea of
Speaker 1: just how much damage a supervolcano can do. Just how
Speaker 1: massive in huge it is so um And again going
Speaker 1: back to comparisons, Krakatoa was a very famous volcano that
Speaker 1: erupted in eight three, and it created what's regarded as
Speaker 1: the loudest sound ever recorded here on Earth. It traveled
Speaker 1: around the world four times over five days. And we
Speaker 1: know that it did because by three there were um
Speaker 1: weather stations that had barometers all over the world and
Speaker 1: they would record the shock wave from the sound every
Speaker 1: thirty four hours like clockwork. For five days. It just
Speaker 1: kept traveling around the world from this explosion, this volcanic explosion.
Speaker 1: It was heard by human ears three thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most as sounding events that's
Speaker 1: ever happened in recorded history. And there's a really cool
Speaker 1: article just about the sound it made, called the sound
Speaker 1: so loud that it circled the Earth four times on Nautilus.
Speaker 1: So go check it out. I think everybody should read
Speaker 1: this article. It's really cool article. And didn't it killed
Speaker 1: like thirty six thousand people? Yeah, and it just and
Speaker 1: that wasn't a very populated area. No, huh, No, Krakato
Speaker 1: was um in uh Java, Indonesia. Yeah, I guess Krakato
Speaker 1: in the eighties was probably not you know, New York City. No, No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. So yeah, the idea that it killed thirty
Speaker 1: six thousand people, Yeah, it wasn't a densely populated area
Speaker 1: right around the mountain. It killed a lot of people
Speaker 1: spread out like Naples. Yeah, they're talking about I think
Speaker 1: like five thousand people live in just that immediate area.
Speaker 1: It would be just devastating. That would not be good man.
Speaker 1: Um Alright, So we talked about it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: tough two predicting these things, kind of tough to pin
Speaker 1: down where they are and to study them. And Yellowstone,
Speaker 1: which we've kind of danced around a little bit, not literally, Uh,
Speaker 1: Yellowstone and particular is a big deal because um of
Speaker 1: just how big this thing could be Uh, they're talking
Speaker 1: thirty by forty five miles underground, stretching from northern Nevada
Speaker 1: through southern Idaho to northwest Wyoming. Um, it's basically a
Speaker 1: system three fifty miles long and about eighteen million years old.
Speaker 1: That's just man, it's just bubbling underground. That's the trail
Speaker 1: of volcanic activity that's taken place, which ends at Yellowstone, right.
Speaker 1: And the one that's actually the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone is
Speaker 1: like thirty miles by forty five miles, which is huge.
Speaker 1: The one in in Europe at the Burning Fields is
Speaker 1: about seven seven miles wide, which is enormous in and
Speaker 1: of itself, but you know, thirty to forty five that's
Speaker 1: way bigger. I'm afraid to stay. Um. And it's made
Speaker 1: up of a magma chamber beneath the surface, few miles
Speaker 1: beneath the surface. And they thought that that was the
Speaker 1: extent of super volcano. Apparently they did a survey in
Speaker 1: two thousand and fifteen they figured out that this chamber
Speaker 1: has about cubic miles worth of magma in it. There's
Speaker 1: also a reservoir beneath that magma chamber, and that that
Speaker 1: reservoir has eleven thousand, two hundred cubic miles all this
Speaker 1: magma poised right beneath yellow Stone, and the pressure is
Speaker 1: just building and building and building. And that's the other
Speaker 1: thing about super volcanoes. They seem to erupt, not slowly
Speaker 1: where lava just spills out like and say like Hawaii
Speaker 1: at Kilauea, where it's very famously just this pretty steady flow.
Speaker 1: But it's not explosive. These things blow up, and when
Speaker 1: they do, they can bury areas around them in hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of meters of of ash that solidifies and
Speaker 1: turns into the new crust of the earth, that turns
Speaker 1: us all into statues. It does. So that was my
Speaker 1: own eyes too. All right, well, let's take our final
Speaker 1: break and we'll talk a little bit more about what
Speaker 1: lies beneath Yellowstone Park right after this. Alright, So Yellowstone
Speaker 1: has had um, I mean, it's had events in the past.
Speaker 1: That's why they know there's going to be one in
Speaker 1: the future. About two point one million years ago, the
Speaker 1: Huckleberry Ridge event um name, I don't think they called
Speaker 1: it that two point one million years ago, but that
Speaker 1: I had a five cubic mile blast and it created
Speaker 1: a crater about the size of four um Manhattan's and
Speaker 1: I assume they mean everybody knows exactly what manhattans. Sure,
Speaker 1: just put four New York City's side by side on
Speaker 1: top of each other. However you want to arrange them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe in a little spin spinning pin wheel, mush them
Speaker 1: together in a ball like use soap bars remnants, you know. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: one point three million years ago they had one at
Speaker 1: Masa Falls and that was only about sixty seven cubic
Speaker 1: miles of ejecta. That was tiny, but they still consider
Speaker 1: that a super volcano because no one seems to care
Speaker 1: that it has no definition. Right. What else? Uh, six
Speaker 1: hundred forty thousand years ago at Lava Creek, that one
Speaker 1: spit out two hundred and forty cubic miles about a
Speaker 1: thousand cubic kilometers and apparently it's ash pillar hit a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand feet. That's pretty awesome, right, Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they're looking at these things and they're saying, um, this
Speaker 1: is probably a pretty decent map of what's going to
Speaker 1: happen at Yellows Owned eventually. Yeah. We have an article
Speaker 1: on our site too called what if the Yellowstone supervolcano
Speaker 1: were erupted, and they said it could kill as many
Speaker 1: as ninety thousand people immediately and put a ten foot
Speaker 1: layer of molten ash as far as a thousand miles
Speaker 1: around the park. Ten Yeah, that would cover your one
Speaker 1: story house. Yeah, for a thousand miles. And um they
Speaker 1: said that nuclear winter would probably almost be a certainty,
Speaker 1: probably be a certainty almost probably. Uh. It would basically
Speaker 1: blot out the sun and cool the earth, um, which
Speaker 1: would kill our crops. It would be really really bad.
Speaker 1: But they said, do you remember do you remember um
Speaker 1: in two thousand and fourteen fifteen when that Icelandic volcano
Speaker 1: went off, to the effect that it had, was it two?
Speaker 1: The effect that it had on air travel in Europe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was just air travel and everybody he kept
Speaker 1: waiting for it to clear up in it for weeks,
Speaker 1: like flights were getting delayed, canceled, rerouted, like Europe was
Speaker 1: just off the map as far as plane travel was going.
Speaker 1: There's just plane travel. And that was a pretty small volcano.
Speaker 1: It was in no way, shape or form a super volcano.
Speaker 1: So just just that one aspect of transportation being affected,
Speaker 1: let alone the fact that this could like kick off
Speaker 1: an ice age. There's just so many, so many factors
Speaker 1: that could come into play that could get us in
Speaker 1: this way, get us in that way, get us. It
Speaker 1: could affect our crops through sunlight and through temperature. It
Speaker 1: could make as super cold, make our toes fall off.
Speaker 1: There's just so many different ways it could. It could
Speaker 1: affect us. Um that we just the average person is
Speaker 1: not walking around thinking about this, and they should be
Speaker 1: well true, but um not to be alarmist. They the
Speaker 1: U S Geological Survey said that the probability that UM
Speaker 1: that Yellowstone will blow its top is point zero ro
Speaker 1: zero zero each year. Yeah, so one in seven hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: which is on par of any given individual UM being
Speaker 1: struck by lightning. So that makes me feel better. There's
Speaker 1: still plenty of lightning out there. Yeah, and you never
Speaker 1: know what's gonna happen. So apparently this the hot spot
Speaker 1: causes the earth above it to dome once in a while,
Speaker 1: and it feels like it showing off right. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: bet the park rangers of the LA Zone when they
Speaker 1: see that are like, man, is this it. There was
Speaker 1: a two thousand three temperature increase just a few inches
Speaker 1: below the soil and some spots that was hitting like
Speaker 1: two hundred degrees fahrenheit, boiling the sap in trees nearby.
Speaker 1: It was getting hot and then apparently it's already cool
Speaker 1: down again. And what's probably going on in these processes
Speaker 1: there's a process called incubation right where they're just sitting there.
Speaker 1: Because the reservoir and the chamber are they have finite space.
Speaker 1: So the more magma that builds up in it, the
Speaker 1: higher the pressure builds. And if that pressure starts to
Speaker 1: build and all of a sudden escapes a little bit,
Speaker 1: that magma is gonna shoot up. And as that magma
Speaker 1: shoots up, it starts to form air bubbles. Because the
Speaker 1: change in elevation we're talking is traveling miles very quickly upward,
Speaker 1: so bubbles start to form. As those bubbles breakup, they explode.
Speaker 1: It's very much like champagne, and it shoots out and
Speaker 1: it allows more magnet to follow behind it and follows
Speaker 1: the same process. So there's huge explosion and it can
Speaker 1: actually be hastened by earthquakes, or it can also be
Speaker 1: um delayed by earthquakes. Yeah, um, so there's a lot
Speaker 1: of different factors involved. But during this period where the
Speaker 1: pressure is building and building and building. It's the incubation period.
Speaker 1: And the reason it changes from say one year to
Speaker 1: the next is if it's not getting as much magma,
Speaker 1: then some of that magma higher up has the chance
Speaker 1: to kind of cool and solidify and fall back down
Speaker 1: and pressures relieved. But we have no way of tracking that.
Speaker 1: We can just be like, oh my god, the ground
Speaker 1: is bowing up. That's that's about where we're at right now.
Speaker 1: But don't they generally think that dormancy is like the
Speaker 1: longer it sits, the worst it's going to be when
Speaker 1: it eventually does go off. That's what I read. Interesting.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything else? Yeah, apparently one other thing.
Speaker 1: Um if you were around a volcano then went off,
Speaker 1: and I would guess any volcano, it would be like
Speaker 1: breathing tiny glass needles thanks to all of the um
Speaker 1: silicates that were ejected into the air. And I have
Speaker 1: even one more other thing. There was a an volcano
Speaker 1: that went off in eighteen fifteen, Tambora. I believe, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly where that was, but the Tambora earth
Speaker 1: or volcano is credited with the creation of Frankenstein. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the the year without a summer, and in
Speaker 1: the northern and Northern Europe the summer was super super cool.
Speaker 1: Elsewhere there was basically no summer. It was no the
Speaker 1: whole the whole time. Um. But because of that, Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley and uh Byron Right and her husband Percy by
Speaker 1: Shelly Um all were stuck inside for during a summer vacation.
Speaker 1: And that was when she came up with Frankenstein because
Speaker 1: they had a scary story contest. There was a movie
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, but that that contest may never have happened,
Speaker 1: and Frankenstein may never have been created had it not
Speaker 1: been for that volcano going off. Yeah, that was a
Speaker 1: freaky movie. I can't remember the name of it, The
Speaker 1: Lost Summer. It wasn't that, man have been more than one.
Speaker 1: I just remember the whole time. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of drugs and Mary Shelley was like, Percy, why can't
Speaker 1: you be more like Lord Byron And he's it because
Speaker 1: I'm Percy. Who is in it? I'm just kidding? No, man,
Speaker 1: was it called Gothic? I don't know. I seem to
Speaker 1: remember that it was kind of a Why do I
Speaker 1: think Julian Sands was in it? This sounds like a
Speaker 1: Julian Sands. Movie's all very much in the very nineteenth
Speaker 1: century drugs. It's in the back of my head. We'll
Speaker 1: find out buried deep. Uh. If you want to know
Speaker 1: more about volcanoes and Frankenstein and all that stuff, type
Speaker 1: those words in the search bar how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this uh cool uncle from Katie. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: is about free speech. In ninety ninety, my uncle, Dennis
Speaker 1: Barry was a director of Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnata, Ohio.
Speaker 1: The museum brought in the Robert Maplethorpe UH Robert and
Speaker 1: Maplethorp art exhibit titled The Perfect Moment, which resulted in
Speaker 1: an uproar as seven of the photographs for seeing as
Speaker 1: pornographic from some conservative folks. My uncle defended the artwork
Speaker 1: this freedom of speech, and was subsequently arrested, charged with obscenity,
Speaker 1: and went to trial, the first time in history that
Speaker 1: a museum was actually taking the trial with criminal charges
Speaker 1: over the contents of an exhibition. UH. He spent a
Speaker 1: few nights in jail, received death threats, and was harassed
Speaker 1: all over town, but he stuck to his firm beliefs
Speaker 1: that artists had the right to express themselves freely in
Speaker 1: American furthermore, deserved to have their work exhibited. During the trial,
Speaker 1: art experts were brought in to help the jury decide
Speaker 1: if they were pornographic in nature. They can you see
Speaker 1: Matt like being, like I say, is a bull whip
Speaker 1: in a man's rectum art? I never saw that show
Speaker 1: as he Southern? No, that was falk Horn Leghorn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was definitely Southern. Ultimately, the jury concluded that Maplethorpe's
Speaker 1: work was in fact art and that my uncle, um
Speaker 1: Northern Museum was not guilty of obscenity charges. Very cool.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that? I remember that case? Oh really? Yeah? Man,
Speaker 1: when maple Thorpe like, oh yeah, it was a huge deal.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because I was Toledo at the time, so
Speaker 1: they made a big deal out of it. But it
Speaker 1: was pretty big, she said. To this day, it's still
Speaker 1: the most famous trial of freedom of speech in the
Speaker 1: art world. Uh. And as an artist myself, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: darn proud of my uncle's actions. Way back when he
Speaker 1: admits himself that the events and effects of that trial
Speaker 1: never really go away. He's still recognized for his actions.
Speaker 1: The museums and galleries across the country have been able
Speaker 1: to show challenging artwork that perhaps would have been cast
Speaker 1: aside had my uncle and as awesome First Amendment lawyer H.
Speaker 1: Lewis Serkin uh And not won that trial. Ultimately, the
Speaker 1: result of the trial left the positive legacy for Contemporary
Speaker 1: Arts Center, and my uncle went on to become the
Speaker 1: founding director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
Speaker 1: where he had to defend offensive song lyrics as art
Speaker 1: in order to get them displayed in the museum. That
Speaker 1: is such a great email. I love that email. He's
Speaker 1: a pretty interesting guy to say the least. And that
Speaker 1: is from Katie Barry and Katie Boy. Tell your uncle
Speaker 1: Dennis that we have a lot of respect for him
Speaker 1: for real, like not fake respect like but usually don't laugh, no,
Speaker 1: like seriously, it's a it's a great story. Heads off
Speaker 1: to your uncle. You know one thing, um, I'm sad
Speaker 1: about that we didn't mention in the First Amendment episode
Speaker 1: was that whole two Live Crew episode. You remember that
Speaker 1: they all went to like I think they was a
Speaker 1: Supreme Court over their lyrics. Didn't they Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a big deal. Everybody expected him to just lay down
Speaker 1: and roll over. Nope, too, Life Crew, don't roll over
Speaker 1: for nobody. Uh. You know we're going to do one
Speaker 1: on the PMRC at some point, so we'll probably cover
Speaker 1: it in that. Okay, good. Uh. If you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us, you can tweet to us.
Speaker 1: We're at s Y s K Podcast where at josh
Speaker 1: um Clark. You can hang out on Facebook dot com
Speaker 1: slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Facebook dot com slash
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know. Send us an email to Stuff
Speaker 1: Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
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