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