Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome this Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
Speaker 3: and we are back with the second part in our
Speaker 3: series on the Prairie, the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America.
Speaker 3: This subject was inspired Robbed by your recent family visit
Speaker 3: to Colorado, spending some time in the western Prairie. I
Speaker 3: guess this is in the region just before the landscape
Speaker 3: turns into the rocky mountains. I couldn't remember if you
Speaker 3: mentioned last time. Did you see bison on your trip?
Speaker 2: We did. Yeah, at the Arsenal, we saw some bison.
Speaker 2: Like I say that, that area has a number of
Speaker 2: bison and there's a lot of bison conservation that is
Speaker 2: focused there, and so we got to drive through that
Speaker 2: area and we got to see the bison, not super
Speaker 2: close because they're going to do exactly what they want
Speaker 2: to do, but we still got to see them at
Speaker 2: a distance, which was pretty cool.
Speaker 3: It's not a petting zoo there, right right.
Speaker 2: This is not one of those places where you hold
Speaker 2: potatoes out your window the livestock comes over. No, No, they
Speaker 2: do what they want and if you are close enough
Speaker 2: to see them, and then you're lucky.
Speaker 3: So in the previous episode of this series, we talked
Speaker 3: about the definition of our prairie and its similarity to
Speaker 3: other ecosystems like the step. Prairies are relatively flat or
Speaker 3: rolling landscapes that are dominated not by trees and shrubs
Speaker 3: but by grasses and flowering herbaceous plants called forbes, and
Speaker 3: so one of the questions that we talked about in
Speaker 3: the last episode somewhat extensively was why are prairies filled
Speaker 3: with grasses and forbes instead of trees? What historically has
Speaker 3: kept the trees out. The answer to this question turned
Speaker 3: out to be kind of complicated, involving, but possibly not
Speaker 3: being limited to factors of climate and rainfall, pressure from herbivores,
Speaker 3: and very importantly, frequent fires, fires to which native grasses
Speaker 3: and forbes are very resilient, while young trees and shrubs
Speaker 3: are typically not. Of course, human behavior in recent centuries
Speaker 3: has altered basically all of the factors that are upstream
Speaker 3: of the natural plant balance, and as a result, North
Speaker 3: America's prairies are seriously endangered. The vast majority of the
Speaker 3: original Eastern tall grass prairie is already gone, as we
Speaker 3: talked about last time. There are different ways of calculating
Speaker 3: how much of it remains, but some estimates say like
Speaker 3: four percent, others say less than one percent. It's mostly gone,
Speaker 3: and so this is a very precious, endangered type of
Speaker 3: landscape and there are ongoing conservation efforts to try to
Speaker 3: return some of this landscape more to its original plant
Speaker 3: balance and original ecosystem characteristics. After that, we went on
Speaker 3: too a fascinating sort of historical niche subject about the prairie,
Speaker 3: which was about grizzly bears, grizzly bears of the plains.
Speaker 3: Today most people think of grizzlies as animals that live
Speaker 3: exclusively in like remote mountain forests, but grizzlies used to
Speaker 3: be apex predators of the prairie as well. And we
Speaker 3: talked extensively about the journals of the Lewis and Clark
Speaker 3: expedition in the early nineteenth century, which had lots of
Speaker 3: encounters with prairie bears, and we analyzed at least one
Speaker 3: of those encounters at length. We are back today to
Speaker 3: talk some more. Now, Rob, I understand for today's episode
Speaker 3: you got somewhat obsessed with prairie madness.
Speaker 2: That's right. The other topics have had quite an effect,
Speaker 2: but this one will drive you absolutely mad.
Speaker 4: I'd never heard of this, you know.
Speaker 2: I wasn't really familiar with it either, though it certainly
Speaker 2: makes sense considering some of the things we talked about
Speaker 2: in the last episode. On one hand, you discussed your
Speaker 2: own personal response to the treeless openness of the prairie,
Speaker 2: that it had maybe a sort of uncanny or even
Speaker 2: threatening feeling to it, like, you know, too much space,
Speaker 2: not enough trees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as I said in the last episode, I don't
Speaker 3: like that I feel this way. I feel like I
Speaker 3: want to I should be able to appreciate, you know,
Speaker 3: the beauty of all different types of landscapes equally. But
Speaker 3: for some reason, maybe just the environment I grew up with,
Speaker 3: I do have a kind of bias or preference for
Speaker 3: forested landscapes. And when there is not anything taller than
Speaker 3: me vertically in an area and it's just you know,
Speaker 3: vast open space all around, that does feel kind of
Speaker 3: exposed and vulnerable and uncomfortable to me. I need tall
Speaker 3: things around me, I think, And I don't know, maybe
Speaker 3: this is something I could get over one day, spending
Speaker 3: more time in the prairie.
Speaker 4: But I do have that tree bias.
Speaker 2: I think, well, this, I think this is going to
Speaker 2: arguably play the scenario here. But another thing that I
Speaker 2: think plays into the scenario that we touched on last
Speaker 2: time is how we have a lot, a great deal
Speaker 2: of writing and poetry about the about about the planes
Speaker 2: the great American prairies. Particularly, we talked about the words
Speaker 2: of William Cullen Bryant, the poet who described this sense
Speaker 2: of awe at beholding the prairies. And yeah, I think
Speaker 2: both of these examples steer us naturally into discussion of
Speaker 2: prairie madness, sometimes called prairie sickness, and so forth. And
Speaker 2: I do want to stress at the outset here. This
Speaker 2: is not a scientific term. This is not a medical term,
Speaker 2: and it is primarily reported as a phenomenon of the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century, and specifically in cases where you had European
Speaker 2: and American homesteaders, American homesteaders from the East who ventured
Speaker 2: out onto the prairies, you know, trying to you know,
Speaker 2: creating a new life, grabbing some land, you know, trying
Speaker 2: to make a lot life out there, who then experienced
Speaker 2: an array of psychological symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, behavioral changes,
Speaker 2: and in the extremes, even violence in response to the crushing, vastness,
Speaker 2: the open landscape and the howling wind of the prairie.
Speaker 3: Now, based on what you were reading, would you say
Speaker 3: that this is something that is probably culturally contingent. You
Speaker 3: mentioned it's among like European American homesteaders, European colonizers basically
Speaker 3: in the prairie landscape. It's not something typically reported by
Speaker 3: like indigenous peoples of the prairies.
Speaker 2: Correct, And that is very important to note, Like there's
Speaker 2: been indigenous people living on the prairies for more than
Speaker 2: ten thousand years, so this is not something that they experienced.
Speaker 3: And so probably also not something that's like an objective
Speaker 3: human body response to the prairie landscape. It's probably more
Speaker 3: like a conditioned cultural type of response.
Speaker 2: Right, if you fly into Denver, people will warn you
Speaker 2: about the altitude difference, but nobody's going to warn you
Speaker 2: about prairie madness because it's not really a thing in
Speaker 2: terms of it's not something that is going to just
Speaker 2: objectively be a factor in anyone's life. And again, it's
Speaker 2: really mostly talked about within this particular historic context and
Speaker 2: among particular people who were venturing out into this landscape.
Speaker 2: And there are a number of other factors that are
Speaker 2: involved here. So the explanation for what's going on or
Speaker 2: allegedly went on here have more on that in a minute,
Speaker 2: and is that you could basically underline by two examples
Speaker 2: that we've already touched on. First, the poetic awe of
Speaker 2: the prairie, of which there are many examples, and this
Speaker 2: awe kind of finds its dark reflection in the fiction
Speaker 2: and nonfiction of the time that cast the prairie is
Speaker 2: something ominous and unnatural. Part of that is just sort
Speaker 2: of the power of poetry and literature. If you're going
Speaker 2: to describe a landscape, you know you're going to lean
Speaker 2: into one direction or the other. Is it awesome and
Speaker 2: does it make you feel like a god? Or is
Speaker 2: there something creepy about it? It makes you feel less than
Speaker 2: you know? Both There are you know, potentially rewarding directions
Speaker 2: to go in in definite choices in any given work
Speaker 2: of fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 3: Well, I think every landscape on earth has this this
Speaker 3: dual quality. I mean, is the forest a soothing, calming,
Speaker 3: shady landscape, where you are, you know, covered nicely in
Speaker 3: these calming greens, or is it a spooky place where
Speaker 3: you hear sounds that echo between the trees and maybe
Speaker 3: spirits are trying to lead you off the path.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and kind of going into something we talked about
Speaker 2: last time. I feel like, and this is highly subjective,
Speaker 2: but I feel like the desert environments they tend to
Speaker 2: speak more clearly on this way, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a land of death, but it's alive, you know.
Speaker 2: It seems like the back and forth there's a lot
Speaker 2: more balanced. Prairies can maybe I'm just making them the
Speaker 2: personal argument here that they can maybe be a bit
Speaker 2: harder to wrap your head around because they're not barren.
Speaker 2: They are full of life. But then there is the
Speaker 2: more or less flat topography and some other factors environmentally
Speaker 2: that we're going to get into here. And then the
Speaker 2: other factor is there was this frequent observation that these
Speaker 2: lands were fundamentally different compared to the lands that homesteaders
Speaker 2: called home, either in the eastern United States or elsewhere
Speaker 2: in Europe and on the literary front, some of the
Speaker 2: some really famous examples of this, and some of the
Speaker 2: most famous examples stem from Oliovog's nineteen twenty seven novel
Speaker 2: Giants in the Earth. This is a book that concerns
Speaker 2: pioneer Norwegian immigrants in the Dakota territory, with the character
Speaker 2: Barrett Hansa particularly experiencing literary, very prairie madness. Joe, have
Speaker 2: you ever read this book?
Speaker 4: No, I haven't.
Speaker 2: I had to read it in junior high or high school,
Speaker 2: and this is one of those books that was assigned
Speaker 2: to me, and I do not think I give it
Speaker 2: a very dedicated reading. I remember virtually nothing of it
Speaker 2: except for the you know, the the obvious that it
Speaker 2: concerned no actual giants in the earth or no actual
Speaker 2: FLM crawling out and attacking anyone.
Speaker 4: So I really false advertising.
Speaker 2: One star false advertising, I guess if you're in you know,
Speaker 2: junior high or high school, well whatever age I was.
Speaker 2: But looking back on it, and you can find the
Speaker 2: full text online and you can, you know, find it
Speaker 2: in print very easily to get a copy of this book.
Speaker 2: But there are some beautiful passages that deal with this, again,
Speaker 2: particularly concerning the character Barrett, and it's it is telling
Speaker 2: that she's the one that experiences it because a lot
Speaker 2: of the alleged cases of prairie madness are very gendered
Speaker 2: in their general focusing on the housewife in a given scenario.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to read a few passages from giants
Speaker 2: in the earth. After they had bustled about for a
Speaker 2: little while, the others left her. The moment they had gone,
Speaker 2: she jumped up and crossed the tent to look out
Speaker 2: the door. How will human beings be able to endure
Speaker 2: this place? She thought? Why? There isn't even a thing
Speaker 2: that one can hide behind. Her sensitive, rather beautiful face
Speaker 2: was full of blank dismay. She turned away from the
Speaker 2: door and began to loosen her dress. Then her eyes
Speaker 2: fell on the center pole, with its cross piece hung
Speaker 2: with clothes, and she stood a moment irresolute, gazing at
Speaker 2: it in startled fright. It looked like the giants she
Speaker 2: had read about as a child. For a long while
Speaker 2: she was unable to banish the picture from her mind.
Speaker 2: And then here's some more that gets I think, gets
Speaker 2: back to the landscape. The broad expanse, stretching away endlessly
Speaker 2: in every direction, seemed almost like the ocean, especially now
Speaker 2: when darkness was It reminded her strongly of the sea.
Speaker 2: And yet it was very different. The formless prairie had
Speaker 2: no heart that beat, no waves that's sang, no soul
Speaker 2: that could be touched or cared. And then one more here,
Speaker 2: but more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the
Speaker 2: strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon
Speaker 2: the minds of some. Many took their own lives asylum.
Speaker 2: After asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once
Speaker 2: been human. It is hard for the eye to wander
Speaker 2: from skyline to skyline year in and year out without
Speaker 2: finding a resting place.
Speaker 3: Well, that sounds pretty extreme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this, but
Speaker 2: I think everyone can. Certainly, if you have any familiarity
Speaker 2: with the literature, you can definitely pick up on Gothic
Speaker 2: tendencies in this writing. Really latching onto this idea. I
Speaker 2: referenced our recent Weird House cinema selection in the Mouth
Speaker 2: of Madness earlier, and these passages could very easily be
Speaker 2: passages that Sutter Kane has written about. You know, the
Speaker 2: void opening up in Monsters, spilling out of it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's that level of darkness.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the author's intention here is, whether
Speaker 3: it's to actually project these characteristics onto the landscape, or
Speaker 3: to do what sometimes happens in fiction, which is to
Speaker 3: show what are really characteristics of the human character of
Speaker 3: the character, and they are reading their own psyche onto
Speaker 3: the landscape. It might not actually be something that is
Speaker 3: the landscape's fault, if that makes any sense. It's the
Speaker 3: person is having feelings and they're looking at the world
Speaker 3: around them, and they see their feelings in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, it's been too long since I read it
Speaker 2: to provide full context here, but it's my understanding that
Speaker 2: most of these ideas are centered in this particular character,
Speaker 2: and that it's not present in other characters. So I
Speaker 2: think it is very character focused here.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So there are other examples from this book. I might
Speaker 2: come back and read another line from it. But all
Speaker 2: of this effectively underlies the idea that there was something
Speaker 2: about the landscape or the contrast of landscape, combined with
Speaker 2: isolation and the severity of frontier life that could lead
Speaker 2: to mental breakdown in some and the topic seems to
Speaker 2: have entered the larger American consciousness in eighteen ninety three
Speaker 2: three via the paper or the publication The Isolation of
Speaker 2: Life on Prairie Farms by E. V. Smaali sm A L. L. E.
Speaker 2: Y published in the Atlantic and still available on the
Speaker 2: Atlantic's website. You can pull it up. I think there's
Speaker 2: a paywall if you want to read it in full,
Speaker 2: but you can also click and look at a scanned
Speaker 2: version of it as it printed. And that's how I
Speaker 2: read it.
Speaker 4: Read it in full.
Speaker 2: This individual, EV Smally was an American journalist, editor, and
Speaker 2: Republican political writer, closely tied at the time to US
Speaker 2: President James A. I'm going to read a few samples
Speaker 2: from this just to give everyone the vibe. Okay. It
Speaker 2: more or less begins with the following In no civilized
Speaker 2: country have the cultivators of the soil adapted their home
Speaker 2: life so badly to the conditions of nature as have
Speaker 2: the people of our great northwestern prairies. Okay, Yeah, And
Speaker 2: from there he goes on to argue that the like
Speaker 2: there are some there's some arguments here that I don't
Speaker 2: think really stand up to close scrutiny, including the idea
Speaker 2: that the European peasant. He refers to the quote European
Speaker 2: peasant as a type of person who lived a life
Speaker 2: of joy and social interaction and that on the and
Speaker 2: that prairie dwellers essentially had none of this and were
Speaker 2: basically doomed. Here's another passage. An alarming amount of insanity
Speaker 2: occurs in the New Prairie States among farmers and their wives.
Speaker 2: In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnished the
Speaker 2: largest contingent to the The reason is not far to seek.
Speaker 2: These people came from cheery, little farm villages. Life in
Speaker 2: the Fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I don't know if there's like actual experiment
Speaker 3: to back this up, but it seems plausible to me
Speaker 3: that loneliness and isolation could be a major contributor to
Speaker 3: people having psychological problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that is certainly a possibility here. Like, one
Speaker 2: of the realities is that you did have these homesteaders
Speaker 2: going out living in very isolated circumstances and living a
Speaker 2: hard life in an environment that they were not accustomed
Speaker 2: to different environmental factors that we'll get into here. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I want to stress that, even though I'm having some
Speaker 2: fun with the way that this is written, and also
Speaker 2: certainly singling out that this is a paper that made
Speaker 2: a big impact on how people thought about prairie madness. Yeah,
Speaker 2: not everything in here should just be dismissed. Like there
Speaker 2: are some possible connections to be made here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like it even strikes me as possible
Speaker 3: to pick up on something I was saying about the
Speaker 3: characters in that novel that one could easily read psychological
Speaker 3: difficulty stemming from, say, loneliness and isolation. Could you know,
Speaker 3: take those problems and interpret them as problems related to
Speaker 3: the landscape, when really maybe the landscape doesn't have that
Speaker 3: much do with it. It's just like what you're looking
Speaker 3: at while you're feeling the fact that you don't have
Speaker 3: any friends and haven't seen anybody but your husband and years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You're a few more quotes though,
Speaker 2: from this paper quote the silence of death rests on
Speaker 2: the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds.
Speaker 2: And then here's one more. There is but one remedy
Speaker 2: for the dreariness of farm life on the prairies. The
Speaker 2: isolated farmhouse must be abandoned, and the people must drawl
Speaker 2: together in villages. The peasants of the Russian steps did
Speaker 2: this century years ago, and so did the dwellers of
Speaker 2: the Great Danubian Plane. And so he ultimately positions isolated
Speaker 2: life on the frontier plane as standing in just stark
Speaker 2: opposition to sanity, to intellectual development, and just the rational
Speaker 2: progression of society. So he's not the final word on
Speaker 2: all of this. And there have been some papers that
Speaker 2: have really gone into this and looked at it in
Speaker 2: different ways, looking at it as a literary trope, looking
Speaker 2: at it and as it may connect to sensory deprivation
Speaker 2: and so forth. I was looking at a particular paper,
Speaker 2: This is Unsettling Landscapes, Prairie Madness and Eco Gothic Themes
Speaker 2: in US Plains Literature, published in Great Planes Quarterly from
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen by Vanessa stein Rotter, And in this she
Speaker 2: points out that prairie madness is of course a recurring
Speaker 2: theme in the fiction and poetry of the US Great Plains,
Speaker 2: and the author stressed various ways that the feature of
Speaker 2: the plain's environment stabilized non native settlers sense of place
Speaker 2: and control. So she points out that this was of course,
Speaker 2: again not a medical phenomenon, This was not a scientific term,
Speaker 2: and she also citing the work of Sarah Brooks. Sundberg
Speaker 2: points out the cases of white female settler mental and
Speaker 2: or emotional decline in the prairie might not have actually
Speaker 2: been that widespread. But even though we see this all
Speaker 2: the time with things, even though there may not have
Speaker 2: been as many cases of it, it became an idea
Speaker 2: that was difficult to dispel. It became a popular way
Speaker 2: of thinking about life on the prairies because again, outside
Speaker 2: of the actual environments of people living out there, you
Speaker 2: had people, say, reading that article in the Atlantic or
Speaker 2: reading poetry and fiction that drove home this Gothic idea,
Speaker 2: and therefore it becomes very difficult to shake, and it
Speaker 2: just becomes a staple of fiction and nonfiction writings of
Speaker 2: the time about the Prairies.
Speaker 3: How prevalent we think a problem is often has little
Speaker 3: to do with the raw numbers of how often it's occurring.
Speaker 3: Often it has more to do with like how sticky
Speaker 3: the idea is? Is it like really interesting or scary
Speaker 3: or captivating to the imagination.
Speaker 4: In some way? Right?
Speaker 2: And of course we see a more pronounced version of
Speaker 2: that when things become actual social panics, you know, so
Speaker 2: for instance, satanic panic, the idea there's the satanic forces
Speaker 2: at work in the world today. We've we've done episodes
Speaker 2: about this before. In this case, I don't think that
Speaker 2: prairie madness ever reached a level of true social panic,
Speaker 2: but it just becomes this sort of sticky idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, the author here points out that fiction writers were
Speaker 2: especially drawn to the idea because of those terrific Gothic undertones,
Speaker 2: as well as quote its potential to engage larger, often
Speaker 2: gendered anxieties or feelings of powerlessness within restrictive social and
Speaker 2: cultural roles.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, and I think there's a case to be made
Speaker 2: that that's maybe what we see in and Giants in
Speaker 2: the Earth. You know, it's not just about spooky landscape
Speaker 2: making people feel spooky, but maybe getting into some of
Speaker 2: these deeper concepts. Steinroder focuses on the landscape's role in
Speaker 2: the scenario, but points out that other scholars have examined
Speaker 2: the importance of gender and family relationships, domestic violence, and
Speaker 2: cultural and physical isolation that are often bound up in
Speaker 2: the scenario. So again, any as we've been alluding to
Speaker 2: any given potential case of prairie madness, any individual experience
Speaker 2: that could be chalked up as being prairie madness. They're
Speaker 2: going to be, They're potentially all these other factors as well,
Speaker 2: and again just potentially a hard life as well. I
Speaker 2: was reading some of the settler accounts of how frightening
Speaker 2: prairie fires could be. You know, we touched on that already,
Speaker 2: just the idea that like a fast moving fire could
Speaker 2: just rip across the prairie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: And as we talked about in the last episode, fear
Speaker 3: of these prairie fires and what they would bring the
Speaker 3: led to attempts by European American settlers of the planes
Speaker 3: to suppress naturally occurring prairie fires to stop them from spreading,
Speaker 3: which actually ended up being very harmful to the prairie ecosystem.
Speaker 3: You know, the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains more
Speaker 3: often intentionally both used intentionally set prairie fires in some
Speaker 3: cases for like the management of bison prey and things
Speaker 3: like that, and also allowed them to occur more, which
Speaker 3: was much healthier for the prairie because, as we know,
Speaker 3: the natural plant balance depends on the fires.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Steinroder again focuses on the landscape's role, and I'm just
Speaker 2: going to boil like our key findings down here are
Speaker 2: key arguments, and that is that the features of the
Speaker 2: landscape can destabilize one sense of control. It can make
Speaker 2: it feel like you are not a complete autonomous agent
Speaker 2: in this kind of humanless wilderness. That and that also
Speaker 2: it can just be very difficult to just comprehend the
Speaker 2: landscape around you, that there's something ineffable about it, and
Speaker 2: that that can can also feel kind of crushing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Now, I think the same could probably be argued about
Speaker 2: various other landscapes, and you know, you could probably apply
Speaker 2: this to things that we might think of as the
Speaker 2: opposite of the prairie, like the mountains. But still, I
Speaker 2: think it's an interesting argument.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I think she's acknowledging all these other factors and also
Speaker 2: the idea that there may have been far fewer cases
Speaker 2: of this than we actually think. But the landscape definitely
Speaker 2: plays a role either in the cases or our idea
Speaker 2: about these cases. I want to turn to another paper
Speaker 2: I was looking at here. This one's by Alex d. Veles,
Speaker 2: titled The Wind Cries The Effect of Soundscape on the
Speaker 2: Prairie Madness Phenomenon. This is from twenty twenty two in
Speaker 2: historical archaeology, and this one basically talks about the possibility
Speaker 2: that you could have specific details of the sounds of
Speaker 2: the prairie that could have been like a catalyst for
Speaker 2: prairie madness, so something in those howling winds, for example.
Speaker 2: There's a paywall in this particular paper, but James Gaines
Speaker 2: wrote a good piece about it for Atlas Obscura the
Speaker 2: same year, and I recommend that as well. Okay, so
Speaker 2: veils examined human hearing patterns and spectral data on Great
Speaker 2: Planes soundscapes. Now, to be clear, these are like contemporary soundscapes,
Speaker 2: and one of the things that is outlined in that
Speaker 2: Alice Obscure article is that you know, it would have
Speaker 2: been different back in these days. We changed the environment
Speaker 2: quite a bit. So it's possible that, you know, what
Speaker 2: he's studying here, wouldn't you know, one hundred percent be
Speaker 2: the environment that the settlers found themselves in. But any
Speaker 2: rate examines these things, ultimately proposing that affected settlers might
Speaker 2: have suffered from misophonia or hyperacusis, thus making them more
Speaker 2: sensitive to environmental sounds and with both conditions worsened by stress. Again,
Speaker 2: stressful environment potentially in and of itself, not counting social factors,
Speaker 2: and you know in the author also links some of
Speaker 2: this to some of the symptoms described in the literature
Speaker 2: on prairie madness, such as in the extreme's depression, insomnia,
Speaker 2: irrational behavior, and so forth. So the focus here was
Speaker 2: on low frequency environmental noise, which can potentially overstimulate the
Speaker 2: nervous system in certain individuals, as well as those continuous
Speaker 2: or supposed to continuous roaring winds out across the prairie.
Speaker 2: And as points out that every landscape that humans live
Speaker 2: in has plenty of sounds for us to hear, but
Speaker 2: that in cities these sounds are more diverse and essentially
Speaker 2: become a kind of white noise. I think a lot
Speaker 2: of us that live in cities we can speak to this.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: You just get used to the sort of bustle of
Speaker 2: say a large urban environment, and a lot of it
Speaker 2: fades into the background. Yeah, I mean you still there'll
Speaker 2: be things like horns and so forth. It still can
Speaker 2: get your attention and throw you off, but for the
Speaker 2: most part, it all just kind of becomes the background noise. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: on the planes, especially in these historic settings, there's less
Speaker 2: background then, and the sounds that do exist. They coincide
Speaker 2: with a sensitive range of human hearing that the brain
Speaker 2: pays more attention to interesting, so gains in that Atlas
Speaker 2: obscure piece on This also cites Adrian K. C Lee
Speaker 2: and auditory brain scientists at the University of Washington who
Speaker 2: said that the sound environment reminded them of since redeprivation
Speaker 2: chambers as well as anechoic chambers zero echo chambers. And
Speaker 2: these are cases where we have sonic environments that have
Speaker 2: been engineered in a way that they can cause the
Speaker 2: brain to quote naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning
Speaker 2: up or down the volume to better distinguish what's going on.
Speaker 3: I don't know how well validated this is, but I
Speaker 3: at least recall reading anecdotal reports that anichoic chambers can
Speaker 3: make people feel very uncomfortable. Yeah, like going in them
Speaker 3: after a while, Like the sound environment is literally unnerving.
Speaker 3: People don't like it, and it makes them feel weird
Speaker 3: and they.
Speaker 4: Need to leave.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this level of weirdness could potentially creep in.
Speaker 2: You start hearing all sorts of things that interfere with
Speaker 2: your slumber. Really almoso kind of induced misophonia. So you know,
Speaker 2: you might be hearing the sound of like, you know, insects,
Speaker 2: or the wind you know outside, like you know, hitting
Speaker 2: parts of the external structure of the house, that sort
Speaker 2: of thing. So, you know, I think it is it's
Speaker 2: an interesting idea. I think, you know, that we do
Speaker 2: have to remind ourselves not that we shouldn't place too
Speaker 2: much emphasis on a singular type of stimuli. And I
Speaker 2: don't think that's ultimately what the author, the original author
Speaker 2: was arguing here, but they were just saying, look, here's
Speaker 2: just one potential piece of the puzzle that could have
Speaker 2: played such a factor. And the winds, you know, absolutely
Speaker 2: could have been a factor. We touched on the prairie
Speaker 2: winds already in this series. The winds can be seasonally
Speaker 2: quite intense, especially in March and April, but also anytime
Speaker 2: you have temperature contrasts driving large scale weather systems across
Speaker 2: the plains, and the natural habitat again offers virtually nothing
Speaker 2: in the way of wind breaks. So you'll find localized
Speaker 2: areas of higher wind in the United States and Canada
Speaker 2: and certainly during pronounced storms, but on a statewide level,
Speaker 2: the Great Planes represent the largest continuous windy environment due
Speaker 2: to these just vast, unobstruct did flat terrains, and that
Speaker 2: would have especially been the case historically before these landscapes
Speaker 2: were reduced. Though again we have to remind ourself of
Speaker 2: the subjective nature of such things. So turning back to poetry,
Speaker 2: I just want to present two examples of authors describing
Speaker 2: prairie wind. The first is from Giants in the Earth
Speaker 2: that I already referenced.
Speaker 3: Barrett, can I guess this passage is going to be
Speaker 3: not a fan of the prairie wind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially since it concerns the same character. That's a
Speaker 2: good bet.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: Barrett could not go to sleep for a long time
Speaker 2: that night. At last, she grew thoroughly angry with herself.
Speaker 2: Her nerves were taught as bowstrings. Her head kept rising
Speaker 2: up from the pillow to listen, but there was nothing
Speaker 2: to hear, nothing except the night wind, which now had
Speaker 2: begun to stir. It stirred with so many unknown things.
Speaker 4: Okay, so not.
Speaker 2: An endorsement of the prairie wind. But then I want
Speaker 2: to read just a couple of stanzas here from Prairie Winds,
Speaker 2: a poem by Helena Coleman, who lived eighteen sixty nine
Speaker 2: through nineteen fifty three, a Canadian poet, and you can
Speaker 2: look this up online. This poem is available in full
Speaker 2: at all poetry dot com. I love all things that
Speaker 2: God has made that show his ordered care and might,
Speaker 2: But most I think I love the wind that blows
Speaker 2: at night. It holds so much mystery, like that in
Speaker 2: mine own restless heart, brother to me and well beloved,
Speaker 2: O wind thou art, So here we is a divine
Speaker 2: wind on the prairie, inspiring wind on the prairie, as
Speaker 2: opposed to the night wind that contains unknown threats. So again,
Speaker 2: it's also very subjective and then can be tweaked. It
Speaker 2: e's a direction with the language, with the poetry.
Speaker 3: I like how both of them appeal to the mystery
Speaker 3: in the wind, except in one case the mystery seems
Speaker 3: threatening and the other case the mystery is I don't know,
Speaker 3: so the divine possibilities unknown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I do want a flag too that in
Speaker 2: these various discussions of prairie madness that you find, sometimes
Speaker 2: they're talking about the roar of the wind, the sound
Speaker 2: of the wind, and other times you're talking about the
Speaker 2: silence of the great plains. So I don't know. I
Speaker 2: guess there is kind of a maybe it's both of
Speaker 2: those working together, you know, where you're maybe having these
Speaker 2: contrasts where you're like, how can this place be so
Speaker 2: empty and so loud, and then later it feels silent
Speaker 2: as well. So I think all of this is fascinating.
Speaker 2: I don't think any of it suggests like an equation
Speaker 2: for prairie madness that you know holds one hundred percent true.
Speaker 2: But we can identify these various the various themes that
Speaker 2: become popular about it, and these infectious thoughts regarding prairie madness,
Speaker 2: and we can identify some of the factors that may
Speaker 2: have played a role in any actual historic examples where
Speaker 2: people's mental state was pushed in a negative direction, maybe
Speaker 2: in part because of the landscape or because of the
Speaker 2: other details of the environment. Yeah, I know that we
Speaker 2: have no we have We probably don't have anything like
Speaker 2: a true pioneer of the of the of the frontier
Speaker 2: prairie out out there listening that can chime in here.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure we have some listeners who moved to
Speaker 2: the Great Plains from other areas, maybe lived in more
Speaker 2: isolated locations, who can maybe speak to a little of
Speaker 2: this or certainly can apply their own experiences to these
Speaker 2: examples of prairie madness, and you can give us a
Speaker 2: little field report. Yeah, I did not experience anything like
Speaker 2: prairie madness when I in my very brief experience as
Speaker 2: a tourist checking out the prairies. I just I found
Speaker 2: it all fascinating. Maybe a little hot at times, it's
Speaker 2: very sunny out there, but yeah, I didn't feel anything
Speaker 2: like prairie madness.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm glad to hear that. Are you ready to
Speaker 3: talk about the tangent I went on for this episode?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, what have you got for us?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: So I got sucked into a little geological or you
Speaker 3: might even call it a topographical mystery related to specific
Speaker 3: prairie landscapes, and that is the mystery of the so
Speaker 3: called Mima Mounds, named after the Mima Prairie in southwest
Speaker 3: Washington State, which is now a protected area at US
Speaker 3: National Natural Landmark. So the word Mima Spelledma originally comes
Speaker 3: from the language of the Shahalis tribe, in which mima
Speaker 3: means newness, as in something that is new and is
Speaker 3: related to or at least sounds like a word in
Speaker 3: the same language that.
Speaker 4: Means to be surprised.
Speaker 3: I was reading about this in multiple sources, but I
Speaker 3: especially want to shout out. So I was looking at
Speaker 3: some like technical papers and stuff, but I want to
Speaker 3: shout out a short informational booklet I think, mostly geared
Speaker 3: towards students, put together by the Washington Geological Survey, which
Speaker 3: is great to look up if you want to see
Speaker 3: illustrations and you want easy to understand explanations of the
Speaker 3: main theories behind these formations. So what are the Mima mounds?
Speaker 3: A mundane way of putting it is that they are
Speaker 3: little hills, lots of little hills crowded together. Now, initially
Speaker 3: that probably doesn't sound very intriguing or mysterious, but I
Speaker 3: think you will immediately grasp what is interesting if you
Speaker 3: look at a picture of them. So, Rob, I've got
Speaker 3: some pictures for you to look at in the outline.
Speaker 3: Here this first one. In the outline, you can see
Speaker 3: the nice green landscape, but all of these hills. This
Speaker 3: is a photo from one of the sites in Washington State,
Speaker 3: and what we see is a vast field of several
Speaker 3: square miles full of little hills, each between two and
Speaker 3: seven feet tall and between eight and forty feet wide,
Speaker 3: covered in prairie grass and flowering herbs, and occasionally with
Speaker 3: little trees or shrubs growing on them, but mostly not
Speaker 3: mostly just this grassy landscape with these basically evenly spaced
Speaker 3: little hills. These hills sometimes get called soil pimples or
Speaker 3: even goose bumps on the earth, and that comparison makes
Speaker 3: even more sense if you look at them from above
Speaker 3: from imagery that's created using aerial photography or other top
Speaker 3: down imaging methods like lidar from above and rob I've
Speaker 3: got a couple of images of this that you can
Speaker 3: look at in the outline as well. We'll describe these
Speaker 3: for people listening at home. So the first one is
Speaker 3: a photograph taken from above, and then the second one
Speaker 3: is a lidar image.
Speaker 4: And looking from above when.
Speaker 3: You're not distracted by other surface features like plants or buildings,
Speaker 3: you know what it looks like To me? It looks
Speaker 3: like the skin of a beaded lizard. It really does, yes,
Speaker 3: So the mima mounds are squeezed together into the landscape
Speaker 3: in a way that feels both regular and irregular. Irregular
Speaker 3: in the sense that they are not in rows that
Speaker 3: line up or anything like that. It's not a repeating pattern,
Speaker 3: but they feel regular in the sense that they are
Speaker 3: crowded together without significant gaps, and the spaces between them
Speaker 3: feel like they are confined to a regular, very small size.
Speaker 3: It looks kind I was trying to think of an
Speaker 3: analogy to picture. It looks kind of like what would
Speaker 3: happen if you got a bunch of different but similarly
Speaker 3: sized coins and you put them all down on a
Speaker 3: table lying flat, and then you push the mass of
Speaker 3: coins together from the outside of the of the mass,
Speaker 3: so that this pile of coins has like or no
Speaker 3: space in between the coins, but they're not overlapping.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I get what you're laying down here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: something about just you know, how tightly compact everything is,
Speaker 2: like the bumps or mounds or not uniform in their
Speaker 2: size exactly, but yeah, they seem to there is this
Speaker 2: feeling that they are bunched together.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now another thing is if you're thinking hills, you might
Speaker 3: be getting the wrong idea because these do not have
Speaker 3: the long, rolling, natural feeling of hills in the traditional
Speaker 3: sense like you would see in the you know, the
Speaker 3: foothills of a mountain range or you know, most naturally
Speaker 3: occurring hills. Something about them, maybe the way that they're
Speaker 3: relatively small and.
Speaker 4: Tightly packed together.
Speaker 3: It feels unique, unique from most hills. And yet they
Speaker 3: are not totally unique as features or geological formations. If
Speaker 3: you dig them up and look inside them, they are
Speaker 3: these small piles of silt, sand, and pebbles, and similar
Speaker 3: patterns of small hills and mounds, sometimes with similar constituents
Speaker 3: inside them, also called Mima mounds. Even when they're not
Speaker 3: inside the Mama Prairie region, or called Mima like mounds,
Speaker 3: these similar mounds can be found in other places in
Speaker 3: North America and even on other continents. So there are
Speaker 3: a bunch of different places beyond the Mama Prairie where
Speaker 3: you will find Mima like mounds. And there's still debate
Speaker 3: about some of these formations. We actually don't know if
Speaker 3: they are all truly the same type of feature with
Speaker 3: the same underlying cause, or if they're only superficially similar
Speaker 3: goosebumps in the earth with different causes. Now that brings
Speaker 3: us to the question of what is the cause? How
Speaker 3: were these hundreds of little mounds formed? And we still
Speaker 3: don't know. This is an open scientific question. And I
Speaker 3: thought it might be interesting to do a brief look
Speaker 3: at few of the competing hypotheses. I can't promise I've
Speaker 3: captured all of the hypotheses in circulation today, but I
Speaker 3: think I've got the main ones that are out there
Speaker 3: now and have been out there in the past.
Speaker 2: But to be clear, UFOs write out non ufis.
Speaker 3: Obviously, some people are going to say that anything that
Speaker 3: looks weird or interesting, and these do look weird and interesting.
Speaker 3: Somebody's going to say, yeah, that's the that's crop circle type.
Speaker 4: Thing, landing zone. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is where the Aliens they were going to
Speaker 3: build some pyramids, but they gave up early.
Speaker 4: I don't know that.
Speaker 3: But yes, the ufologists are going to be on this,
Speaker 3: But no, that is not That is not a good
Speaker 3: theory in my opinion.
Speaker 2: And then at the same time, we shouldn't, like surface level,
Speaker 2: confuse these with nouns and like the mound builders and
Speaker 2: mounds elsewhere in the America, is that it seemed to
Speaker 2: have definitely had an origin in human construction by indigenous peoples.
Speaker 3: No, from what I was reading that they do not
Speaker 3: seem to have major characteristics of mounds built by human
Speaker 3: and so human construction is not one of the leading theories,
Speaker 3: at least in any of the sources I was finding.
Speaker 3: People may have thought that a long time ago, but
Speaker 3: not in modern science. So let's go through some of
Speaker 3: these hypotheses about how they were formed. One is the
Speaker 3: so called sun cup hypothesis. This was originally proposed by
Speaker 3: a geologist named J. Harlan Bretts in the year nineteen thirteen.
Speaker 3: Bretts specialized in the geological history of the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 3: and he studied how the landscape had been shaped by
Speaker 3: glaciers and by glacial outburst floods. A glacial outburst flood
Speaker 3: is a flood caused when a glacier lake suddenly breaks
Speaker 3: free of its containing structure. Essentially, there's a natural dam
Speaker 3: of some kind, maybe made of ice or of earth,
Speaker 3: that gives way, and then this huge lake of glacial
Speaker 3: meltwater is released onto the lands below. And so the
Speaker 3: sun cup hypothesis goes like this. Thousands of years ago,
Speaker 3: the surrounding area, especially this big vast landscape just north
Speaker 3: of the Mima Prairie, was covered in a glacier, and
Speaker 3: the Mima Prairie itself became blanketed in a thin sheet
Speaker 3: of ice and snow, and the sun shined down on
Speaker 3: these thin sheets of ice and snow in the relevant
Speaker 3: areas and melted them in irregular patterns called sun cups.
Speaker 3: You can actually watch sun cups form on patches of
Speaker 3: snow melting in the sun today. There are these irregular
Speaker 3: patterns of differential melting that look kind of like inverse goosebumps,
Speaker 3: little depressions or cups crowded together like a random honeycomb pattern.
Speaker 3: So Rob, I've got a picture for you to look
Speaker 3: at in the outline here. But folks at home, you
Speaker 3: can google sun cups in snow if you want to
Speaker 3: see it. You've probably seen something like this yourself before.
Speaker 3: Maybe a little of shaded patch of snow or something
Speaker 3: thing lingers for a while, it gets beamed on by
Speaker 3: the sun over and over, partially melts and then refreezes,
Speaker 3: that kind of thing, and you get these these little
Speaker 3: these patterns of cups and depressions in the ice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you live in areas that gets received snowfall,
Speaker 2: then you've probably seen this before. You just didn't know
Speaker 2: what it was called.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Brett's argued you had something like this happening.
Speaker 3: This big layer of snow and ice over the top
Speaker 3: of this prairie. And then water flowed over the top
Speaker 3: of this ice that had had these sun cups forming
Speaker 3: in it. So maybe this is from a you know,
Speaker 3: maybe a glacial outburst, flood or something. You know, water
Speaker 3: flows over the top, and as it flows over the
Speaker 3: top of this ice, it deposits sediment such as silt, sand,
Speaker 3: and pebbles or gravel in the cups, and this keeps happening.
Speaker 3: Over time, the deposits in the sun cups build up
Speaker 3: and become quite large. Then the landscape the ice melts away,
Speaker 3: so the cups are now gone, leaving only the deposits behind.
Speaker 3: So what had once been piles of sediment accumulating in
Speaker 3: the bottom of these ice cups now become little hills
Speaker 3: with no ice cups. One that I want to mention
Speaker 3: that from what I can tell, is not really still
Speaker 3: in the mix anymore, but it was historically important was
Speaker 3: the frost polygon hypothesis. Apparently in the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 3: it was a popular explanation to say that frost polygons
Speaker 3: had formed the mounds, and the idea goes like this,
Speaker 3: you have frozen soil that cracks in a polygon pattern.
Speaker 3: You've again you've probably seen something like this yourself. Actually,
Speaker 3: you may have seen images of polygonal cracking in dry
Speaker 3: or frozen soil. You think about like soil that gets
Speaker 3: wet and then gets parched and dries out, it cracks
Speaker 3: in these kind of weird again, kind of honeycomb like pattern.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this reminds me their actual There are these texture
Speaker 2: paints you can get. These are used in the miniature
Speaker 2: painting and all, where you lay this sort of thick
Speaker 2: paint with like little grains in it. You lay this
Speaker 2: out over like the base that a miniature like human
Speaker 2: soldier is going to be standing on, and then as
Speaker 2: it dries, it actually like breaks up like this. And
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily like completely you know, you're not just
Speaker 2: saying polygons necessarily, but the way it breaks up, you
Speaker 2: get these little gaps and it creates this wonderful effect
Speaker 2: where it looks like dried earth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, cool, cracked landscape.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you can actually have a similar thing to that
Speaker 3: happening with icy soil ice that you know, it freezes
Speaker 3: and then it cracks and inside these cracks. The idea
Speaker 3: wind with the frost polygon hypothesis. Inside these cracks they
Speaker 3: would fill with rain water or maybe floodwater. They'd fill
Speaker 3: up with water and then freeze again, and so the
Speaker 3: freezing would cause the water track in the cracks to
Speaker 3: expand each time, because water expands when it freezes, and
Speaker 3: this would widen the cracks. So it freezes pushes the
Speaker 3: soil away to the sides, and as a result of
Speaker 3: this process you get like freezing and then warming, and
Speaker 3: then the warming conditions would melt away the ice and
Speaker 3: when it flowed away, it would leave these large spaces
Speaker 3: in between rounded mounds that had been pushed up by
Speaker 3: the expanding frost. Apparently, there was a big geological conference
Speaker 3: in the eighties which examined this hypothesis and concluded that
Speaker 3: it could not adequately explain at least some of the mounds.
Speaker 3: So I think this is not a major contender for
Speaker 3: the explanation anymore. Another idea is the vegetation anchoring hypothesis.
Speaker 3: The Washington Geological Survey booklet calls this the runoff erosion
Speaker 3: roof anchor hypothesis. But the common feature of these explanations
Speaker 3: is that there are plants growing on the prairie and
Speaker 3: the roots of these plants grip the soil and help
Speaker 3: protect it from erosion, and the mounds in this hypothesis
Speaker 3: would represent places where plant roots once held the soil together,
Speaker 3: while channels were carved around the mounds by surrounding soil erosion. Okay,
Speaker 3: then we get another hypothesis. This one's interesting gophers. So
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty two, a couple of biologists named Walter
Speaker 3: Dohlquest and Victor Scheffer proposed that it could have been
Speaker 3: bioturbation by gophers. So how would gophers have built these mounds?
Speaker 3: Don't they dig tunnels underground? How would that result in mounds? Well,
Speaker 3: the idea goes like this. When gophers dig tunnels, they
Speaker 3: displace soil. That soil has to go somewhere, so they
Speaker 3: dig out cavities in the earth, and then they throw
Speaker 3: the displaced soil into a pile behind them, and this
Speaker 3: excavated soil gets packed into a big mound. And these
Speaker 3: piles can actually they're not just waste. They can be
Speaker 3: useful to the gophers because then when a rainstorm comes,
Speaker 3: the gophers now have high ground they can retreat to
Speaker 3: to get away from the flood. And if you study
Speaker 3: gopher behavior. This hypothesis says gophers actually tend to space
Speaker 3: their burrows a fairly reliable distance apart from one another,
Speaker 3: though not in exactly like regular patterns or rows. And
Speaker 3: this spacing could match up roughly with the spacing and
Speaker 3: irregular arrangement of the Mima Mounds.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the idea here being yeah, that the Mima
Speaker 2: mount spacing is a visual representation of gopher territories.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I believe this hypothesis is still in the
Speaker 3: mix as well, could be gopher related. Another hypothesis is
Speaker 3: glacial outburst flooding. So it's worth mentioning. I think I
Speaker 3: said this a little while ago, but the Myma Prairie
Speaker 3: is right at the southern edge of where a giant
Speaker 3: glacier reached down to about sixteen thousand years ago, and
Speaker 3: some researchers think that the Mima Mounds could have been
Speaker 3: formed by here. This concept is coming back a glacial
Speaker 3: outburst flood from the glacially damned lake known as Lake Carbon.
Speaker 3: So around this time this Lake Carbon somehow spilled out
Speaker 3: of its containment, it flooded the landscape, and as it
Speaker 3: did so, it picked up tons of volcanic rocks and
Speaker 3: sediment from the Cascade Mountains and washed them downstream, leaving
Speaker 3: them in piles along the path of the flood. Now,
Speaker 3: what would be the evidence that the mounds could come
Speaker 3: from this event? One thing cited by that Washington Geological
Speaker 3: Survey booklet is that you've got mounds in a place
Speaker 3: called Rocky Prairie upstream from the area of the Mima
Speaker 3: Prairie upstream in the what this flood zone would have been.
Speaker 3: And these mounds have more volcanic rocks and bigger rocks,
Speaker 3: and then the Mama Prairie mounds downstream have smaller rocks
Speaker 3: and smaller, finer sediment. And that pattern, you know, the
Speaker 3: bigger rocks upstream, more volcanic rocks, and the smaller sediment downstream,
Speaker 3: that would fit with a flood formation mechanism. Also, the
Speaker 3: mounds tend to be stretched or elongated parallel to the
Speaker 3: direction that this water from the flood would have been flowing.
Speaker 3: Though from what I'm reading, I think it's possible that
Speaker 3: a glacial flood like this could have shaped mounds, even
Speaker 3: if it wasn't the thing that originally formed them.
Speaker 2: Okay, one more.
Speaker 3: Idea, this is the earthquake hypothesis. This one appeared more recently.
Speaker 3: It was put forward by a geologist named Andrew Berg
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety and to illustrate the idea behind it,
Speaker 3: you can start with an experiment. If you take a
Speaker 3: flat surface like a table or a drumhead or anything
Speaker 3: like that, and you spread out an even layer of
Speaker 3: fine silt or sand on top of that surface, then
Speaker 3: you make the surface vibrate. So maybe you hit the
Speaker 3: table or the drumhead repeatedly with a mallet. Causing the
Speaker 3: surface to vibrate, will tend to make loose sediment lying
Speaker 3: on top of it arrange itself into interesting geometrical patterns.
Speaker 3: You might have seen something like this if you've ever
Speaker 3: watched these demonstrations of like a sound from a speaker
Speaker 3: acting on sand on a flat surface, Like you can
Speaker 3: play different frequency tones through a loudspeaker over a drumhead
Speaker 3: like surface, and it will make the sand sort itself
Speaker 3: into these fascinating geometrical patterns driven by the sound waves.
Speaker 3: These arrangements tend to be caused by the interactions the
Speaker 3: kind of resonance of different waves going back and forth,
Speaker 3: and you get these places where the waves, you know,
Speaker 3: they sort of line up and they form these standing peaks,
Speaker 3: and then also place is where they cancel each other
Speaker 3: out and create these valleys. Anyway, Berg proposed that earthquakes
Speaker 3: in the past had caused a similar thing to happen
Speaker 3: with loose soil on top of the Mima Prairie. So
Speaker 3: interesting idea there too, And ultimately, from what I can tell,
Speaker 3: this really is still genuinely a mystery.
Speaker 4: It is not solved.
Speaker 3: Each hypothesis I think has its own defenders and advocates,
Speaker 3: but there is not agreement within the scientific community or
Speaker 3: the communities involved that like which one is the best explanation.
Speaker 3: So this made me curious, like, if you're out there
Speaker 3: listening right now, you're a geologist or somebody with some
Speaker 3: other relevant expertise, and you want to write in about
Speaker 3: which hypothesis seems strongest to you and why, please do
Speaker 3: get in touch. Our email is contact at stuff to
Speaker 3: Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: You know, I was looking at this booklet you referenced earlier,
Speaker 2: the one for students, and I really enjoyed that the
Speaker 2: different hypotheses are presented by a talking gopher name Goodwin,
Speaker 2: and good one is very very clear that these are
Speaker 2: presented in no particular order of likelihood, so that you
Speaker 2: can decide this is a very balanced gopher. And I
Speaker 2: appreciate even though one of the ideas concerns gophers, and
Speaker 2: you know, you would otherwise be led to think, well, good,
Speaker 2: one's going to want to really push the the one
Speaker 2: that champions his own species abilities. But no, he's calling
Speaker 2: it right down the middle.
Speaker 4: I was thinking that exact thing.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, we want to have a talking gopher,
Speaker 3: but that's going to make it seem like the gopher
Speaker 3: hypothesis is the real winner, and we.
Speaker 4: Don't want to imply that. So we've got to say,
Speaker 4: you know, we're not favoring any one of these.
Speaker 2: But which one illustrates the easiest, which one potentially speaks
Speaker 2: to children better? You know this is this is the
Speaker 2: one to go in. So yeah, totally the right direction
Speaker 2: for the booklet. Well, that's fascinating. Yet I was not
Speaker 2: familiar with these these particular mounds. I've not traveled to
Speaker 2: this part of the country before. But if I if
Speaker 2: I make it out that way, I'll have to check
Speaker 2: these out.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: As I said, they're not only in southwestern Washington. There
Speaker 3: are Mama like mounds actually in many places throughout North America,
Speaker 3: and there are similar formations on other continents as well.
Speaker 3: So you can look up maps of Mama like mounds,
Speaker 3: you know. There there are places you can see them
Speaker 3: all over different regions of the prairie. There's some like
Speaker 3: in Texas and other places farther in the Northwest Prairie.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there you can look for things like this
Speaker 3: in lots of places.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I just pulled up a map of where one finds
Speaker 2: Mima mounds throughout North America, and there are there. They
Speaker 2: are in place that you can find them in California.
Speaker 2: You can find them in Arizona, various other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they're they're out there. I just need a
Speaker 2: I need a I need to put them on the itinerary.
Speaker 4: I guess. Yeah. I'd like to see some too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I think that's all for this episode
Speaker 2: on Prayer. We're going to gohea and close out this
Speaker 2: this episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out
Speaker 2: there again. Anything you have to contribute regarding these topics,
Speaker 2: any field reports, be it mound based or prairie vibe based.
Speaker 2: You know, certainly write in and we would love to
Speaker 2: hear from you, and you know, we'd like to use
Speaker 2: at least some of our listener mails in future listener
Speaker 2: mail episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You generally
Speaker 2: do about one of those a month, maybe sometimes two,
Speaker 2: depending on how much, how much is coming in and
Speaker 2: what sort of buffers they need to put into the schedule.
Speaker 2: Let's see. As always, we would just remind everyone out there,
Speaker 2: the Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
Speaker 2: and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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