Month: October 2020
Stoned: The Exact Right Book for all Gemstone and Geology Lovers
Right from the title, you know you’re in for a good time.
Aja Raden’s Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World is written in the irreverant but informative tone that turns otherwise dry, academic facts fun. And yet it doesn’t treat its subject lightly: this book is dense with geology, gemology, history, politics, economics, sociology, and human drama. Few people could pull off writing a book like this. Aja makes it look easy breezy lemon squeezy.
So, yes, you’re going to enjoy yourself, but you’re also going to come out with your knowledge raised to critical nerdicality levels, so be prepared. (more…)
A Must-Have Book for Lava Loving Kids: What’s So Hot About Volcanoes?
Having enjoyed Wendell A. Duffield’s Chasing Lava immensely, I was beyond delighted to discover that Wendell had written a book for younger people. I couldn’t order it fast enough.
What’s So Hot About Volcanoes is a fantastic choice for anyone looking for a book about volcanoes for older kids and tweens, or even adults who want an authoritative but not too technical introduction to how volcanoes work. Younger readers should be able to handle it, too, with assistance from older kids and adults. And it’s got a hook absolutely no one can resist: what happened to Wendell when he was standing on a fresh Kilauea lava field and the seismologist at Hawaiian Volcano Observatory told him the pattern of seismicity right underneath him suggested he should probably run away immediately!
Mount St. Helens Montage I
Before other projects intervened, I did a long series of posts on the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. I’d made it all the way to the blast deposits before my magma chamber collapsed. Part of the problem was not having good photos of said deposits ready to hand. Part of it was plain cowardice. And then a lot of other fascinating stuff happened. So the series, like a Cascades volcano, went dormant.
But dormant volcanoes roar to life again, and so shall The Cataclysm.
Right now, I’m spelunking the USGS ScienceBase Catalog, pulling every single Mount St. Helens photo I can find.
A 16th Century Volcano Adventure: “The Marvelous Hills of Sulphur”
It’s early 1550, and a young Sir Thomas Hoby is traveling through a volcanic wonderland. Britain hasn’t had anything comparable to the Campanian coast of Italy for tens of millions of years. There are places where geothermally-heated water rises through fractures and faults, used by humans to treat various ailments for milennia, but nothing as raw and exciting as what he sees here.
Taking the highway to the town of Pozzuoli, he marvels at the medical baths (Sudatorii) on the shores of Lago di Agnano: “…they cause good digestion and resolve raw humors, they lighten the body and heal the inward parts, they dry up fistles and wounds, and are very good against gout.”* In an age when medicine is still far more of an art than a science, these medicinal baths fed by volcanic springs are often the best chance at relief for people suffering from poor health.
He is probably unaware that these wonderful Sudatorii are a mere remnant of a medical spa industry that had been booming less than twelve years before.