Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 1

Like many of you, I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug last weekend. Like many of you, I've read "The Hobbit" several times (and had it read to me many times before that). But how many of you have wondered what kind of mountain the Lonely Mountain really was?

Tolkein's description and drawings of the lonely mountain bring to mind an inactive volcano. With its narrow peak and symmetrical slopes. But here's my thought - the Lonely Mountain works much better as a part of a much older and much larger tectonic history of Middle Earth. Let me explain with a little background information, first.

We're told that the Lonely Mountain was a solitary peak perhaps 2,500 - 3,000 meters or so above sea level (since there was some snow on the peak year-round). Assuming the latitude/climate was similar to that of the northern Alps. We also get some backstory on the great Dwarven kingdom of Erebor, which was famous for its deposits of gold and precious gems. Mithril, Tolkien's "unobtanium," was found only in Moria - several hundred miles to the Southwest. To the east lay the Iron Hills. To get to the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo and the Dwarves had to cross the Misty Mountains - a long north-south trending line of imposing peaks.




The photo above is Mt. Baker - A Composite Volcano that I photographed from the (relative) comfort of my economy airplane seat, about 30,000 feet above sea level. The summit reaches a height of about 10,780 feet above sea level. Note the relatively low-lying topography around the summit and the lovely symmetry of the mountain itself.



Here's another grand mountain peak, Grand Teton (summit is 13,775 feet above sea level) from the Garnet Trail, Grand Teton National Park Wyoming.


And here is a wider view of the Teton Range, Wyoming. Relatively young, these mountains are the direct result of extensional tectonic stresses, causing the block of crust I'm standing on (along with the barn) to drop downwards relative to the uplifted mountains in the background. But this tectonic stress is spread out along a north-south trending fault line - made of not one, but many mountain peaks worn sharp by glacial ice and not yet brought down by millions of years of erosion.



This is what gold mining in the western United States used to look like - a long narrow shaft to dig into the gold-rich ore (north-central Nevada). You can see how the mine follows the "vein" of high quality ore along a linear path into the hillside. But there aren't any big mountains nearby...



Longs Peak at sunrise on the Chasm Lake Trail, Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado). Another lovely mountain peak. By comparison to other areas in Colorado, the rocks in Rocky Mountain National Park are relatively poor in economically valuable minerals like gold and silver. Fortunate for us, because it was easier to set the area aside as a National Park.


Abandoned Iron Mine in Ely, Minnesota. One doesn't need giant mountains to produce economically viable deposits. The iron found in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan comes from ancient sea-floor deposits over one billion years old.

So we're faced with a few questions. First, if the Lonely Mountain was once a volcano, why is it extinct? What kinds of patterns left by geologic processes here on Earth similar to those described by Tolkien? How do we get gold deposits in such abundance (aside from the "because, magic" clause)? Why did I include a picture of an iron mine?

For this first part, I'm going to leave you with a quick sketch map (drafted in "ArtRage" on my iPad). Look over the topography - where are there areas of likely active tectonics?

Next, I'll go over some of the features and discuss what might lie below the surface as a product of things that happen over what we geologists like to call "deep time."

For a complete overview of this series:
Part 1: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain.html
Part 2: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_16.html
Part 3: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_9632.html
Part 4: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_1042.html
Part 5: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_5911.html

Part 6: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_8985.html

If it ain't Scottish, it's crap!*

Our cats like my wife's lap. It would appear that they are either not bound by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, or Pippin has a different integer spin than Birke.

*Title of this post comes from my high school physics class where my friends and I decided that phrase as an alternate explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. And yes, Wolfgang Pauli was Austrian, but SNL was one of our primary meme generators back in the day...

You see some pretty strange things sometimes

Every now and then I get a bit of a creative "itch" that needs scratching. I was strolling through the hardware store last month and they had plastic lawn flamingos on sale. I already had some other items like black and glow-in-the-dark spray paint, and a few plastic skulls. The nucleus of a project began to form in my head.







Together with my pal Kelly, we just installed them and are currently waiting for them to be noticed.

Cool, there are some photos of me at TED Youth

There are some pretty awesome pictures of me giving my talk about sand to the kids attending TED Youth in New Orleans a few weeks ago. I'm hoping a separate video of my talk will go up in a few weeks.





I hope all of you in the US had a grand Turkey day yesterday. I'm thankful for the opportunities to share how amazing the world is through this blog.

Some dancing water droplet slo-mo

Inertia. I has it. You has it. A drop of water has it. If, say the floor were to suddenly drop out from under you, it would take time for you to start falling downward. Once the floor disappeared, the force of gravity would start accelerating you, but you would start moving slowly, then continue to move faster. Inertia is the tendency of an object to keep doing what they were doing (motion, rest, etc.) unless acted upon by another force. The water drops in this video are sitting on a hydrophobic material, so when the fabric is pushed down, the water drops stay where they were until gravity starts accelerating them downwards.

The effect is pretty cool, because normally water's surface tension tends to allow water to adhere to the surface it's on and the force of the surface tension keeps the water drops moving along with the material. This is why those cool "shaking wet dog" videos show the water flinging out in every direction - the water adhered to the animal's hair is moving with the animal - and gets flung out in whatever direction it's headed when the shear stress exceeds the water's surface tension.

Water Drop Dance from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
Nano-coated fabric stretched over the mouth of a bucket provides a flexible surface on which drops of water are able to bounce around easily.

TED Youth 2013: Talk Archive

If you're interested in seeing what I had to say - or what any of the other speakers talked about, go on over to the TED Youth streaming video page. My talk is at about 48:07 of Session 1. But there are enough awesome talks that it might be cool to let them just play through.