Many creatures in the natural world build structures, Bees build their hives, many birds build nests and Beavers build their lodges. Human beings however have rebuilt the world with all of our structures. It’s not surprising therefore that much of the work of archaeologists concerns human structures, how and why they were built.
Bower Bird males build some of the most incredible nests and then they decorate the entrances with basically whatever they can find. All to attract a female for mating. (Credit: Alamy)
The first structure I’ll discuss today is a very well known one, perhaps the best known of all the prehistoric structures, Stonehenge in England. Much has already been written about this most famous of stone circles so I’ll just mention a few points of importance for today’s story.
We’ve learned a lot about Stonehenge over the last century but that hasn’t taken away the sense of mystery from these ancient ruins! (Credit: HistoryExtra)
Begun about the year 2200BCE Stonehenge was initially a circular trench dug into the soil with the excavated earth forming a circular henge inside the trench. It wasn’t until some 500 years later that the first stones were brought to the site and placed inside the earthen ring. These first stones are known as ‘Bluestones’, each weighing about 5 metric tonnes that were brought from the Mynydd Preseli region of western Wales, a full 290 kilometers from Stonehenge. See my post of 27 February 2019. How stone aged men managed to transport these large stones such a great distance is still a subject of controversy.
One of the techniques proposed by modern archaeologists for how the big Sarsen stones of Stonehenge were transported. (Credit: Bradshaw Foundation)And once the ancient Britons got the stones to the site of Stonehenge they then had to erect them! (Credit: English Heritage)
The larger ‘Sarsen Stones’, some weighing as much as 55 metric Tonnes, were brought to the site around the year 1500 BCE. While these massive rocks came from a much closer location just some 25 kilometers to the north bringing them to the Stonehenge site must still have required the cooperation of hundreds if not thousands of people indicating a society with considerable organization.
The Heel stone at Stonehenge lies a distance outside the main ring of the stone circle but from inside it aligns with the rising of the sun on the summer solstice, the first day of summer. (Credit: Daily Mail)The rising of the Sun on the first day of summer as seen from the center of Stonehenge. You can understand why the ancient Britons built this wonderful place. (Credit: EarthSky)
Several of the individual stones at Stonehenge have been given special names such as the Heel stone, which sits away from the other stones near the entrance to the original, and the slaughter stone, so named because early archaeologists thought it could have been used for human sacrifice. Both of these stones are Sarsen stones.
The Altar stone at Stonehenge, so named because of its placement in the circle and its lying flat on the ground. But was it actually used as an altar, we can only guess? (Credit: The Stones of Stonehenge)
One of the Bluestones also has a special name, the Altar stone, so named because the other Bluestones seem to orient towards it as if it were the place where certain ceremonies were enacted. Now a new study by researchers at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the UK have questioned whether the Altar stone is in fact a Bluestone after all. For one thing, although the Altar stone is about the same size and shape as the Bluestones the others are primarily igneous rocks while the Altar stone is made of sandstone. Now there are sandstone deposits near the quarry in Whales were the Bluestones came from and it has long been thought that was the Altar stone’s source.
This outcropping of rocks in Wales has been chemically demonstrated to be the actual quarry where the Stonehenge Bluestones came from some 290 km from the site of Stonehenge. (Credit: The Sun)
The new study conducted several different analysis of the material of the Altar stone including Ramen Spectroscopy, XRF analysis, optical petrography and SEM-EDS analysis. What the researchers found was that the Altar stone had a significantly higher level of the element Barium than the stones from the Welsh quarry, so it definitely did not come from the same place as the other Bluestones.
The study of racks and minerals using different forms of light, optical petrography, can not only tell you a great deal about the rocks but can be very beautiful as well. (Credit: YouTube)
Where did the Altar stone come from, no one knows. So now the hunt is on to try to find the geographic source of the Altar stone. At the same time archaeologists now have to try to understand why that particular stone, from wherever it came from, was brought to Stonehenge. Now we have yet another mystery to add to all the mysteries surrounding Stonehenge.
A clan of Homo erectus, our ancestors half a million years ago. There is a great deal of evidence that H erectus used fire and hunted as shown in this artist’s drawing but the hut in the center? New evidence does indicate that H erectus may have built structures as well! (Credit: Fine Art in America)
The second structure in the news recently may not be as famous as Stonehenge but it is certainly much older, in fact at an estimated age of 475,000 years old it may be the earliest wooden structure known have to been built by humans. In fact the structure wasn’t built by our species Homo sapiens but probably by our ancestral species Homo erectus.
It just two pieces of wood lying together but those pieces have been worked with stone tools so as to fit together making them the oldest known wooden construction made by human beings. (Credit: The Guardian)
The wood was discovered in the sands at the bottom of the river beneath the Kalambo falls in Zambia not far from the border with Tanzania by archaeologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Aberystwyth. The location had been studied by archaeologists ever since the 1950s and pieces of wood that shows signs of having been worked by humans have been found there before. Those artifacts included sticks used for digging, the hafts of spears and wood used to build fires. The wooden pieces from the riverbed were preserved because they had been essentially ‘pickled’ by the acidic water of the river.
The Kalambo Falls in Kenya are not only very beautiful but the area around them are an archaeological treasure for the study of our ancient ancestors. (Credit: Tanzania Tourism)
The new find however consists of two much larger wooden logs, each about 2m long, which had been worked by stone tools in such a way as to fit together in a ‘T’ shape. The archaeologists who found the logs think that the wooden T probably served either as a foundation for either a dwelling of some kind or more likely an earthen platform from which to fish in the river.
Tom Sawyer knew that fishing was better off of a wooden platform. So apparently did Homo erectus. (Credit: Amazon.com)
Unlike earlier pieces of wood from beneath the falls the team was able to get a more precise date on the logs by using a new dating technique known as luminescence dating. This technique depends on the fact that grains of sand will pick up natural radioactivity from the environment over time. By heating up those grains and analyzing the light they emit their age can be determined. Luminescence dating is quickly becoming an important tool in archaeology and paleontology because it is able to measure the age of objects that are too old to be determined by Carbon14 but too young to use Potassium-Argon dating.
Luminescence dating can be used to determine how long grains of soil have been buried away from the light of the Sun. (Credit: Geographisches Institut)
The find in Zambia pushes back in time the date of the first known use of wood to build structures showing that even our remote ancestor were capable of innovation and invention.
Quit a lot happened in space this past month for both manned and robotic missions. While I usually start with the manned missions this month the Lucy space probe made an interesting and surprising discovery so I’ll begin there.
The Lucy probe, launched back on the 16th of October in 2021, is on a mission to study the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter beginning in 2027. For a description of the Trojan asteroids see my post of 6 January 2017. Before reaching the Trojans however Lucy was scheduled to pass by a small main belt asteroid named Dinkinesh, which means, “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It was during the planning for the mission that the engineers at Goddard Space Center decided that Dinkinesh would represent a good opportunity to test Lucy’s cameras and other sensors so the small asteroid was added to the list of asteroids Lucy would study making a total of eight planned flybys at launch.
The Lucy probe compared to a human being. Those are some really big solar arrays. They’re needed because the sunlight out at the orbit of Jupiter is much weaker than here near Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Turns out that studying Dinkinesh was a great idea because as Lucy passed by on the first of November the images sent back by the probe showed that the small asteroid, about 790m in diameter, had an even smaller moon orbiting around it. While pleased with the surprising discovery the technicians controlling Lucy at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab were equally satisfied at the performance of Lucy’s Terminal Tracking System and it’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. Having successfully encountered Dinkinesh Lucy is now ready to begin its prime mission of studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
A flyby of the Near Earth Object (NEO) Dinkinesh was intended to be just a test of the probe’s equipment but it turned out to be a nice discovery as a tiny satellite asteroid was orbiting the rather small itself, main asteroid. (Credit: Space.com)
Closer to Earth China has successfully carried out a crew exchange at their Tiangong space station. The station, which is smaller than the International Space Station (ISS), is normally crewed by three taikonauts (as China calls its astronauts). For the past six months it had been the crew of China’s Shenzhou-16 manned mission who had occupied Tiangong but on 26 October China launched the Shenzhou-17 mission from its space port on the isle of Xinhau. A day later Shenzhou-17 docked at Tiangong allowing the Shenzhou-16 crew to return home to Earth, which they did successfully on the 31st of October.
Image of the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft docking with the Tiangong space station. (Credit: Kalkine Media)
Keep in mind the fact that both NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have carried out dozens of such crew exchanges at the ISS over the last two decades. The fact that China is now keeping its space station manned so smoothly and professionally however is a testament to how far China’s manned space program has come.
Humanity now has two Manned Space Stations orbiting the Earth. (Credit: YouTube)
Two other news items may tell us something about the future direction of space exploration in the decades to come. The first story concerns Sierra Space Corporation’s long awaited Dream Chaser space plane / mini shuttle. The Dream Chaser design does in fact bear a striking resemblance to the space shuttle and is intended to operate in much the same fashion. Launched into orbit on top of an Atlas rocket or perhaps even a Space X falcon 9 the Dream Chaser would dock at the ISS or another space station. Returning to Earth the Dream Chaser would fly into the atmosphere, experiencing no more than 1.5 g’s in the process and land on a runway like any ordinary plane.
Looking very much like a small shuttle the first Dream Chaser spacecraft will merely carry cargo to the International Space Station but eventually Sierra Space Corp. intends to use it to carry passengers as well. (Credit: Space.com)
Initially intended to deliver cargo to and from Earth orbit Sierra Space hopes that one day the Dream Chaser will also carry people into orbit. Right now however the Dream Chaser still has yet to fly. Indeed the first Dream Chaser space plane has just recently finished its construction at the company’s factory at Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. That first Dream Chaser, which has been named Tenacity, will now be shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Ohio to undergo a series of tests to verify that it is capable of withstanding the rigors of space.
The first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, undergoing construction at Sierra Space Corp. Tenacity has now been shipped the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to begin its testing. (Credit: YouTube)
Dream Chaser represents yet another attempt at finding ways to lower the cost of getting into space in order to expand human exploration. Sierra Space Corporation hopes that the first, unmanned flight of this interesting spaceplane could come as early as next year providing some competition to Space X’s Dragon capsule.
The first Dream Chaser will rocket into orbit aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle, perhaps as early as next year. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Finally another current limit on our exploration of our Solar System are the low exhaust velocities possible with chemical rocket fuels. I have in several posts discussed both Nuclear and Ion rocket engines which have to potential to provide much greater exhaust velocities and thereby much greater total delta velocities for space travel. See post of 29 April 2020. Recently NASA and the aerospace corporation Aerojet Rocketdyne have carried out a series of tests on the most powerful ion rocket engine ever developed. Known as the Advanced Electric Propulsion System or AEPS the engine operates at a power consumption of 12 kW.
The Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) at full thrust during a test at Aerojet Rocketdyne corp. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)
Now ion engines function in a very different way than the chemical rockets we’re used to seeing. In an ion engine the atoms of an inert gas, usually xenon, have an electron stripped from them giving them an electric charge. A high voltage potential then accelerates those ions to a velocity that is scores if not hundreds of times faster than the atoms in a chemical rocket. As the ions are fired out the engine, giving it a thrust, the electrons are reattached to the atoms because otherwise the engine, and the space ship connected to it would quickly build up a tremendous static electric charge.
Cutaway view of the AEPS. A gas is stripped of its electrons making the atoms charged ions. Those ions are then electrically accelerated and fired out the back producing thrust. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)
One major difference between a chemical and an ion rocket engine is that while a chemical rocket gives a big thrust for a few minutes, the first stage of a Space X Falcon 9 only fires for about four minutes, an ion engine gives a small thrust, but it can do so for days or weeks or even years.
The first stage engines of the Saturn V produced a huge amount of thrust. But they could only do so for about five minutes. An ion engine can fire for months or even years eventually producing an ever greater delta-V. (Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology)
NASA has used ion engines in past missions, notably the Dawn deep space probe to the minor planet Ceres and the large asteroid Vesta along with the recently launched Psyche space probe. The space agency hopes to use AEPS on the Gateway space station to be placed in Lunar Orbit sometime around 2025.
The Dawn space probe visited both the Minor Planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta using its ion engine to provide thrust for years. (Credit: Space.com)
Plans for the future even as we have successes in the present, that’s progress in our exploration of space.
In my last post I recounted some of the severe weather events that have already taken place here in the year 2023, a year that will almost certainly be recorded as the warmest in human history, or at least that is until 2024. To be honest I could have written two or three times as much as I did write in that post, extreme weather was basically everywhere this year and many locations around the world suffered for long periods of time or several times over.
Even before this year has set a new record, the top 10 hottest years ever recorded have all come in the last twelve years. That’s kinda scary!!!! (Credit: KCRA)
The important thing to keep in mind is that in 2023 for the first time the average global temperature could cross over the 1.5ºC above pre-industrial average that scientists have been warning will bring ever greater climate change and the natural disasters that accompany it. If, as now predicted this year’s El Niǹo continues into 2024 then the world could remain above that threshold and next year’s weather could be even worse.
The consensus is that El Nino has caused 2023 to be even hotter than predicted. With El Nino still hanging around will next year be even hotter? (Credit: YouTube)
So with the evidence of climate change all around us is the human race as a whole finally waking up to the danger we ourselves are creating? Are governments and the media paying attention, enough attention so that some real progress will finally be made?
Young people are paying attention to the dangers of global warming, are you? (Credit: Denise Pass)
The answer of course is both yes and no. There are clear signs that a large fraction of society is becoming very concerned about the world’s environmental future and are ready to do something about it. As you might guess young people are in the forefront of this movement.
It’s easy to understand why young people are concerned about climate change, it’s the future they’re going to have to live in. (Credit: Oregon Public Broadcasting)
A main focus of the efforts undertaken so far by young people worried about their future has been in courtrooms around the world. This summer a lawsuit was filed in Montana by 16 of the state’s teenagers alleging that the state government has violated the Montana constitution by failing to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment for present and future generations.” The Judge in the case agreed, ruling that the state was violating the rights of young people when it enacted policies that prohibit the state from considering the effects on the environment of fossil fuel extraction in the state. Whether or not that judgment will affect the coal and oil industry in Montana remains to be seen, indeed the state is already appealing the decision. However the simple fact that a of that kind case could be brought and won in such a deep red state as Montana is clear evidence that more and more people are becoming concerned about our changing climate. Similar lawsuits have been filed by a group of teenagers in Hawaii and by young people suing the Federal Government as well.
The Montana children who chose to act like adults while the adults in the State Legislature chose to act like children. (Credit: Vox)
Meanwhile in other countries a similar lawsuit was brought by 6 youngsters in Portugal, but these plaintiffs were a bit more ambitious, they decided to sue the entire European Union along with the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Turkey, 32 countries in all. In this case the plaintiffs allege that the increasing temperatures and drought conditions in their country are generating a Sahara desert like environment in Portugal that is again to the determent of their future lives. They blame this growing problem on the reluctance of the 32 governments to enact significant policies for fighting climate change, specifically legislation to curb CO2 emissions.
Talk ’bout David versus Goliath, six kids in Portugal are suing 32 countries over climate change. (Credit:Climate Home News)
This suit, brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg could actually have major consequences, at least for the EU countries. Again the idea is that the entire future lives of these young people are being harmed by the shortsighted policies of the present. The success for these lawsuits, even if only partial so far, will generate more and more such cases until governments are finally forced to take real action.
For half a century now the world seems to have been concerned only with the next paycheck, the next quarter’s profit, the next election. All the while the foundation of the world we live in has been crumbling beneath our feet. (Credit: Mashvisor)By a large majority now the people of the US support combating climate change. But with the special interests willing to spend so much money keep on emitting greenhouse gasses will that be enough? (Credit: CNN)
Which some governments are actually doing, if only in small steps so far. Here in the US last year the Biden administration, as a part of its Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), succeed in allocating the most money ever for subsidies to boost green energy production. This money is targeted not only for new solar and wind power projects but also to help reduce the cost of electric vehicles (EV) and to increase the number of EV charging stations throughout the nation. At the same time President Biden has announced the formation of his American Climate Corps (ACC), an organization patterned after the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and intended as a training program for young people leading to good jobs in green energy and climate mitigation. Although both the ACC and the IRA are insufficient to solve the coming climate crisis they are at least steps in the right direction, and can serve as foundations for further programs if the political will for fighting climate change increases.
While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a board piece of legislation intended to fix many problems it does provide a considerable amount of money for Green Energy and other environmental issues. (Credit: AFL-CIO)
A few individual states are also taking action. In California the state’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Exxon-Mobile, BP, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, all the big oil companies alleging that for decades they have been fully aware of the effect that fossil fuel emissions were having on the environment. The suit contends that the oil companies deliberately continued to minimize the threat of global warming while suppressing the data collected by their own scientists.
As the damage caused by climate change grows, 25 billion dollar environmental disasters so far this year, the number of suits against Oil Companies will also grow (Credit: Informed Comment)
Meanwhile voters in Switzerland have passed a referendum calling for their government to enact legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions by their country. The measure, which passed with 59.1% of the vote for and 40.9% against requires Switzerland to achieve ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050. More immediately it provides more than 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion US dollars) to help Swiss citizens and companies develop greener energy programs.
Switzerland is a country famous for its glaciers. But for how much longer. The Swiss people voted this year to try to keep such beauty as this. (Credit: AP News)
In parallel with the actions taken by environmental activists and groups there has been a significant increase in the coverage of climate change in many, although certainly not all, media outlets. During the heat of the Summer CNN and MSNBC devoted extensive time to the major environmental stories like Phoenix’s streak of days over 110ºF, the wildfires in Canada and the resulting smoke that drifted down into the US, and of course the great loss of life in the wildfire in Maui. So important were these stories that even Fox news was forced to cover them to some extent. The winner for news coverage of climate change however has to be the Weather Channel, which has even created a daily program, Pattrn, devoted to climate change and other environmental issues.
A major cable network devoting an entire hour every day to environmental issues, especially climate change. Who would have ever have thought it possible? (Credit: www.pattrn.com)
So there is progress, even if only in small steps so far. But as Isaac Newton pointed out, “For every action there is an equal an opposite reaction,” and the climate deniers have been busy as well. So, for every attempt at government action to fight global warming there has been an effort to deny or hide the facts, such as the decision by the Florida Department of Education, as directed by the state’s Governor Ron DeSantis, to approve climate change denying videos for use in the classroom.
Running for President as ‘Trump without the Chaos’ Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered his state’s schools to deny climate change when teaching children. (Credit: Imgur)
At the same time court cases brought by citizens concerned about the future of our planet are opposed by lawyers and officials bought and paid for by the petroleum industry who care about nothing but their next quarter’s profit. The lawsuit won in Montana is already being appealed while other cases are being delayed or obstructed.
Have you seen this ad from the Americans for Prosperity? An Ernst Hemingway lookalike telling us that Prosperity is Possible, at least it is for oil billionaire Charles Koch, he’s the one paying for the ad! (Credit: YouTube)
Finally, even as the overwhelming number of environmental stories has forced Fox news to actually cover global warming they still try with all of their might to obscure the issue by making such absurd claims as that the extreme temperatures endured by Phoenix this summer were caused by ‘the heat island effect’. ‘Heat Islands’ caused by the concrete and asphalt in a city is a real enough phenomenon but one that doesn’t explain the equally high temperatures in the desert around Phoenix, nor the high temperatures in Greece, or Portugal or Vietnam or etc, etc, etc.
During June, July and August there was hardly anywhere on Earth that wasn’t setting record high temps. Is this our Future? (Credit: NASA Climate Change)
About the only thing we can say for certain concerning the world’s reaction to 2023 being the hottest year on record is that the political war over global warming is heating up. Right now world leaders have gathered in the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 meeting on climate change. As I write these words there is considerable division over whether the phrase ‘phasing out of fossil fuels’ manages to get included in the final report that every country must agree to or will the entire conference break apart over the issue. I’ll be sure to keep you informed.
Holding a conference on Climate Change in a country grown rich from oil! Not a good idea. (Credit: State Department)
Addendum: The COP28 final accord has been agreed upon in Dubai and it’s something of a victory for the struggle to fight climate change. For the first time the conferences final document does for the first time explicitly mention fossil fuels as the leading cause of climate change. (Think about that, it took world leaders 28 years just to finally agree that coal, oil and natural gas are causing climate change.) In addition the final accord also calls for a ‘Transitioning away from’ the use of fossil fuels.
The first draft of a final agreement at COP28 caused a firestorm at the weak language about getting rid of fossil fuels. (Credit: BBC)In the end even the Oil executive who was the president of the conference was forced to accept language that at least called for the elimination of fossil fuels. (Credit: CNN)
Now don’t get too excited. The timetable for that transitioning is very non-specific, and there are no enforcement provisions of any kind. Any country that wants to can simply ignore their commitment any time they choose. Nevertheless getting 198 nations, many of them fossil fuel producers or are dependent on fossil fuels, to agree to someday getting rid of those pollutants is a major achievement.
The main parts of the agreement. The big question is whether or not the countries that signed up for this will actually do it! (Credit: CNN)He’s right, it’s really up to all of us to keep up the pressure on our governments and get the job of zero carbon emissions done. (Credit: CNN)
Perhaps the climate disasters of the past year have finally made the nations of the world take notice of the disaster looming not too far in the future. The nations of the world have made a commitment; it’s going to be up to all of us to see to it that they keep it.
Poster for the release in Japan of ‘Godzilla Minus One’. (Credit: IMDb)
O’k I’ll go into a little more detail. As a personal aside I’d like to let everyone know that Godzilla and I are the same age. I made my premier in Philadelphia just a month and a couple of days before the Toho studio film ‘Gojira’ (1954), which is the big green guy’s name in Japanese, made its premier in Tokyo.
Poster for the 1954 release in Japan of ‘Gojira’, the original Godzilla! (Credit: Wikipedia)
In that first film Godzilla was a prehistoric creature, a dinosaur released from suspended animation by, and mutated by the first atomic bombs and tests. The film was intended as an allegory on the existential threat of nuclear weapons.
Back in the 1950s the world was terrified by the threat of nuclear war. Maybe we have become a little too blase’ about it nowadays! (Credit: The New York Times)
Like all of us Godzilla has had his ups and downs. Starting with his third film ‘King Kong versus Godzilla’ (1962) Toho started teaming Godzilla with other monsters. In the film ‘Ghidorah’ (1964) Godzilla becomes a ‘good guy’ protecting the Earth, if not necessarily mankind, from the title monster.
In the movie ‘Ghidorah, the three headed Monster’ Godzilla becomes an anti-hero, protecting the Earth if not necessarily humanity. (Credit: Gojipedia)
For the next few movies Godzilla became not only more heroic but more of a child’s character, with the 1970s representing Godzilla’s low point. For the 30th anniversary of ‘Gojira’ Toho studio released the film ‘Godzilla 1984’ where the monster becomes once again, well a monster. Since that time the Toho films have kept Godzilla a fearsome monster even when he fights against other, more destructive monsters.
Throughout his long career, Godzilla has shifted back and forth between a destructive force of nature and an anti-hero. Personally I prefer the former. (Credit: Behance)
Starting in 2014 an American studio, Legendary Pictures, has begun a series of Godzilla movies in cooperation with Toho in Japan. In those movies Godzilla is portrayed as an anti-hero, protecting the Earth from any and all threats, both other monsters and even human beings.
In the American made ‘Godzilla versus Kong’ the two mighty beasts start out as enemies but in the end combine forces to defeat Mechagodzilla. (Credit: IMDb)
‘Godzilla minus One’ is all Toho however and in fact the film is being shown here in America in Japanese with English subtitles, the only way to truly experience Godzilla. The movie starts in the final days of World War II with a Japanese Kamikaze pilot named Koichi Shikishima, nicely played by Ryunosuke Kamiki, who has decided to abandon his suicide mission and stay alive rather than sacrifice himself for a lost cause. Claiming that his plane is malfunctioning he lands on Odo Island where a Japanese repair base is located. While the repair crew checks out the plane they are all attacked by a dinosaur-like creature, ‘Godzilla’. When told to use his plane’s guns to kill the beast Koichi again saves himself, while most of the technicians are killed by the creature.
Godzilla Minus One is as much about how the defeated people of Japan started to rebuild their broken country as it is a monster movie.(Credit: The Montclarion)
Rescued from the island Koichi returns to a defeated Japan whose citizens are trying to rebuild their country from the devastation of the war. This human story is probably the best plot for a Godzilla movie ever, clearly showing the trauma to the Japanese people caused by their defeat and Koichi’s shame at his cowardice. Their government’s adherence to a code of honour and victory had made defeat seem impossible so the reality of their situation is incomprehensible to them.
The Bushido code that the people of Japan lived by before WW2. It’s the code of a warrior and you’ll notice that there’s nothing here about just living a good, peaceful life. (Credit: The Comic Vault)
At the same time the creature Godzilla gets caught up in the atomic bomb test at Bikini atoll in 1946. The radiation of the bomb causes the creature to not only grow much larger but it also acquires the ability to regenerate along with a heat ray that it can fire from its mouth. If the war has brought Japan back down to zero, Godzilla will now take it to minus one, that’s the meaning of the movie’s title.
To my mind Godzilla is at his best when he’s just a force of nature, like an Earthquake or Tsunami. A creature beyond Good and Evil. (Credit: Deadline)
I do consider ‘Godzilla minus One’ to be the best Godzilla movie ever, even better than the original ‘Gojira’ from 1954, for two reasons. For one thing the special effects are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Several times in these posts I know I’ve complained about CGI looking rather cartoonish but the CGI in ‘Godzilla minus One’ is really good. Now I know it’s not fair to compare the special effects of a movie from 70 years ago to those of a movie today but still the fact is that the effects in ‘Godzilla minus One’ are really good. The battle scenes in particular.
In ‘Godzilla Minus One’ the mixture of live action with CGI is about the best I’ve seen. (Credit: Pajiba)
The other reason I think ‘Godzilla minus One’ is the best is the allegory. As I said above in ‘Gojira’ the monster is an allegory for nuclear weapons and warfare in general. Even so the original movie still displays a belief in self sacrifice and ‘a noble death’ when the scientist Serizawa uses his discovery of an ‘oxygen destroyer’ to kill Gojira but then sacrifices himself to prevent his discovery from causing further destruction.
Ideas like this have caused much of the suffering in the world. The only true defeat is death and we all die eventually so the best thing to do is to live and only fight to preserve life. (Credit: A-Z Quotes)
In ‘Godzilla minus One’ the monster is still the same allegory but the people of Japan only fight it to save themselves. There’s no sense of glory or honour, nothing remains of the ‘Bushido code’ that Imperial Japan once sacrificed itself to. To me that change of attitude is a good thing, a philosophy the world needs to hear right now.
The only legitimate reason to fight is to end fighting and persecution. (Credit: The Seattle Times)
I do have one little complaint however. In order to keep the fight against Godzilla a Japanese only thing the movie states that ‘tensions’ between the US and the USSR prevent the US from taking action against Godzilla. That’s a bit of a lame excuse, especially since at that time Japan was occupied by about four divisions of US Army troops and Japan was actually ruled by General Douglas MacArthur. The Japanese people at that time actually referred to MacArthur as their Shogun and at least the General is mentioned in the film.
After the defeat of Japan US general Douglas MacArthur ruled the country for several years pretty much as a dictator backed by American occupation troops. Here he is with the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. (Credit: PBS)
So all in all I give ‘Godzilla minus One’ my highest approval. Yes it’s true I’ve always loved monster movies but ‘Godzilla minus One’ is also a serious movie taking on important ideas even while the title character is stomping on cities.
COP28, the annual international conference on Climate Change has started in Dubai, 30November, and so I’ll be posting about global warming the next several weeks.
Meeting in the United Arab Emirates the COP28 conference on Climate Change has already been criticized for being hosted by an oil kingdom while allowing petroleum lobbyists free reign. (Credit: Campaign Middle East)
Barring a miracle now the year 2023 is going to wind up as the hottest year ever recorded for the entire planet and that by a wide margin. The declared culprits of this temperature rise are usually stated in the media as being the steady increase in temperature caused by global warming coupled with the return of the phenomenon El Niǹo in the Pacific Ocean. El Niǹo was last observed back in 2016, the previous hottest year on record before 2023. Together they have caused the Earth’s average temperature to rise very close to the 1.5ºC increase over pre-industrial averages that scientists have been saying for decades now will bring about far worse climate conditions.
While still not fully understood the El Nino ocean current in the Pacific Ocean does lead to warmer conditions around the world. (Credit: NOAASciJinks)
And that prediction has certainly appeared to come true. Phoenix Arizona, already one of the hottest cities on Earth, smashed its previous record of consecutive days above 110ºF (43.3ºC), going from 18 to 31. At the same time the city also set a record for most consecutive days where the low temperature at night never got below 90ºF (36.25ºC). (I’ve been to Phoenix and I know it’s a dry heat there but nevertheless I can’t even imagine what a month of temperatures that hot is like.)
Just one day of 110 degree heat would be too much for most people so just imagine 30 days in a row! (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
Phoenix of course is just one example of record shattering heat; many other parts of the world also saw record high temperatures. Places as far apart as Vietnam, France and China each experienced all time record temperatures. For a few days in August the entire nation of Iran was forced to shut down all but emergency services because it was simply too hot for anyone to remain outdoors for any length of time. And just to put a cap on the record setting temperatures on the 17th of November the average temperature for the entire planet passed the 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level mark for the first time, a very dangerous sign of things to come.
While tying the record temperature set in Death Valley just last year the heat in Ahvaz Iran was actually much worse because unlike California it’s very humid in the Persian Gulf so the heat index was the highest ever recorded.
Then there were the massive wildfires around the planet in places like Greece, China and even Hawaii where 99 people died as a wildfire surged across the island of Maui. But by far the worst fires were the hundreds that spread throughout Canada. Think about it, Canada is the largest nation on Earth by area and most of that is sparsely populated forest so when Canada suffers its worst ever wildfire season that’s a lot of trees being burned. The smoke from those Canadian fires even drifted south into the United States giving cities like New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis their worst ever measured air quality conditions.
On June 5th Philadelphia experienced a nice late spring day (l). Two days later the city experienced its worst air quality day ever (r) all because of wildfires thousands of kilometers away in Canada! (Credit: WHYY)
The increase in heat also brought with it drought conditions across southern Europe, the southern US, China and worst of all large parts of northern Africa, where millions of people live on the edge of survival during the best of times. Drought conditions have caused many of the world’s great rivers to see unprecedented drops in their water levels. For example sections of the Amazon are experiencing their lowest water levels in over 120 years. Meanwhile the drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed has caused the flow of that great river to become so anemic that salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has pushed its way upriver almost to the city of New Orleans, threatening the city’s water supply.
Drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed have caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to back up into the lower Mississippi threatening the water supply of New Orleans. (Credit: CNN)
At the same time other areas of world like Libya, Scotland and even usually dry southern California were stricken with periods of severe flooding. Providing further evidence that global warming doesn’t cause one particular kind of weather disaster but simply causes all types of weather to become more extreme.
They don’t have Hurricanes in the Mediterranean but Storm Daniel was as destructive as any tropical storm, devastating several cities along the Libyan coast. (Credit: Floodlist)
The world’s oceans did not escape from the extreme heat either. The hottest ocean temperature ever recorded was measured in the Caribbean not far from the Florida Keys at over 32.4ºC (90ºF) while the average ocean temperature in early August reached 20.96ºC (69.71ºF), the warmest global average ever recorded. One result of this record heat is that vast stretches of coral reefs around the world are being bleached and could die if temperatures continue to rise.
While all of the world’s oceans are warming in July the temperature measured in the Florida Keys surpassed 100 degrees F for the first time ever. (Credit: Washington Post)
In the Polar Regions the extreme heat did exactly what you would expect as the sea ice around both the North Pole and Antarctica fell below the lowest levels ever previously observed. Glaciers from the Alps to the Himalayas to the Andes and Rockies all saw a continuation of the melting that has been seen for decades now. A recent survey in Switzerland has concluded that the glaciers in that country famed for its glaciers have lost 10% of their volume in just the last two years, that’s the same amount as was lost over the thirty years between 1960 and 1990. By the by it was the retreat of the world’s glaciers that was actually the first real evidence for global warming.
The Trient glacier in Switzerland pictured in 1891 (l) and 2023 (r). Much of southern Europe gets its waters from rivers that flow from glaciers like Trient, if they disappear large parts of southern Europe could become a desert. (Credit: NBC News)
All in all this has simply been a record shattering year for global warming starting with the month of June being measured as the hottest June ever recorded. Then the month of July was recorded as being simply the hottest month ever recorded. July didn’t keep that record for long however as August surged past July’s average temperature to become the new hottest month of all time. September was not quite so hot, just the hottest September ever recorded, as was October. So unless November and December are really below average in temperature, very unlikely with El Niǹo still warming the eastern Pacific, then 2023 will become the hottest year on record, possibly breaking that crucial 1.5ºC above pre-industrial averages that climatologists are convinced will generate even worst climatic conditions.
The effect on the Planet of 1.5 degree warming versus 2 degrees. We still have hopes of staying below 1.5 degrees but for at least one day we’ve gone over 2 degrees and we’re still not even trying to do enough to stop the relentless climb. (Credit: Panda.org)
So if all of the foregoing just seems like a long litany of climate disasters, well it is, and things are just going to get much worse if we don’t really start taking climate change seriously. Next week I’ll discuss some of the ways that people in government and in the media are starting to take global warming seriously, and some of the ways that the petroleum industry and its apologists are still trying to cause confusion in order to continue to deceive the average person.
