"Greenland is the largest island in the world, but it has fewer than fifty-seven thousand residents, who are mostly scattered..."

"... among settlements and towns along its western coast. Although it belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, it lies to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is part of North America. The latest articulation of the U.S.’s National Security Strategy, published in November, frames Trump’s imperial ambitions as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the assertion by President James Monroe, in 1823, that any attempt by European powers to further colonize the Americas would be treated as 'dangerous to our peace and safety.' Under Trump’s leadership, the N.S.S. says, “we will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.'"

Writes Ben Taub, in "Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland/'We want Greenland,' Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality" (The New Yorker).

Adding tags to this post, I hesitated over whether to use "geography" or "geology" or both. The part about Denmark "owning" or "colonizing" Greenland is obviously geography and not geology, so "geography" is a good tag for this post. But I want to underscore that Greenland is part of the North American continent. To get rid of the politics and human culture and speak of it geologically, Grok pointed me to the Wikipedia article "Laurentia":

"We feel threatened by them. So it would’ve been a total disaster and a cold slap in the face if the pope had been full-on American."

Said Araceli Torres Hallal, 64, "a Catholic entrepreneur in Mexico City," quoted in "World Catholics See the First American Pope as Hardly American/Catholics around the world were skeptical at first about an American pope. But Pope Leo XIV’s multicultural and multilingual identity has put them at ease" (NYT).

We're also told:

Even calling Pope Leo “American” has bothered those Latin Americans who resent the use of the word to describe someone from the United States, because they see it as a form of imperialism. They think “American” should apply to anyone from the entire continent — that is, from North, Central or South America.

Isn't that 2 "continents" — North America and South America? Central America is not a continent. It's part of North America, though I've heard educated Americans deny it. And I mean to say Americans for United Statesians, because we don't say "United Statesians." There's the Esperanto "Usonians." There's "Yankees." These are never going to happen. We don't have another word for saying who we are. Show a little empathy for our plight. Read the Wikipedia article "Demonyms for the United States." It's been a problem all along.

But the NYT writes "the entire continent — that is, from North, Central or South America," and maybe that means it has adopted the theory that the whole landmass — south and north (and central) — is one continent. I don't think the NYT has adopted that nomenclature. And I wonder if Trump would like it. He looks at a map and insists that it's some kind of manifest destiny that Canada should be part of the U.S. And he came up with Gulf of America. And if you want to say it's one continent because we're all here on one tectonic system, remember who's on our plate: Greenland. The Trumpian dinner is served!

"There are basically only two major continents. Antarctica and everything else..."

"... since South America is connected to North America through Panama, North America is connected to Asia through the Bering Strait, and Asia is connected to Europe, Africa and Australia through the Urals, the Sinai and Indonesia, respectively."

From "How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers" (NYT)(free-access link so you can read the definitions and so forth).

I've quoted the position of one geologist, but another says that there could be a third continent, Zealandia, which might not be sufficiently connected to Australia to deserve inclusion in the everything-but-Antarctica continent. There are also geologists who say 6 or 5 or 8 or 9. Just don't say 7.

"The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish/Low-lying tropical island nations were expected to be early victims of rising seas."

"But research tells a surprising story: Many islands are stable. Some have even grown."

The NYT reports. That's a free-access link, my last of the month. There are many details and diagrams — and beautiful photographs — at the link. It's a complicated phenomenon, so please try to understand it (and don't just guess that the seas are not rising!).

"Garner" of the day.

I was going to tag this onto the first post of the day — it's the same topic — but I'm savoring the presentation, replete with "garner":

Tens of thousands of Michiganders on Tuesday cast their ballots for “uncommitted,” putting them on track to garner more than 10 percent of the vote statewide. That figure seemed likely to exceed past levels of “uncommitted” votes in Michigan Democratic primaries, though fall short of sparking a political earthquake.

Democrats were divided over how to treat the outcome, noting that Biden continued to dominate the primary in ways similar to, or even exceeding, past incumbents but also wary that significant pockets of discontent in the party could prove fatal in the general election....

From "Biden won the Michigan primary decisively — but not by enough to calm Democratic angst/The president continues to put up major wins. But the protest campaign in Michigan foreshadows potential problems for him come November" (Politico).

Uncommitted didn't just get 10% of the vote. It garnered it. Take that, Joe Biden. The garnerers are hot on your trail. And they are significant. You've got to be wary. Those significant pockets of discontent could prove fatal! You've always got to be on the lookout for fatal pockets.

Speaking of fatal pockets, did you know that a baby sleeping on its stomach with its face against a pillow "may build up fatal pockets of Carbon Dioxide they can't escape"? And beware of the karst landscape.

This morning, it rained, so there are no photos of today's sunrise, but I have sunrise pictures from Sunday, the 13th...

... when we camped on the shore of Lake Superior. This is Horseshoe Harbor, at 6:38 EDT:

6:39:

6:44:

6:45:

About those rocks:

I was deeply puzzled by "Here’s the real reason the Vikings left Greenland/A new study found some Viking settlements experienced up to 10.8 feet of sea level rise over four centuries."

By Kasha Patel in The Washington Post.

The sea rose 10.8 feet? How could that have happened? Maybe it's already obvious to you, but I didn't have a clue — because of the way this is written — until the 10th paragraph. The first 9 paragraphs say speak in terms of the sea level rising — which I presume is intended to resonate with today's fears of climate change. To collect all the references in a compact block of elided text:

"He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread."

"'That was the one that started me thinking about this,' he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. 'That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.' A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. 'Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,' Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious."

From "Predicting the Earthquake That Could Wreck New York/A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region" (The New Yorker).

The tallest mountain in the world — most of which is underwater — has been ascended — bottom to top — for the first time.

SF Gate reports on the climbing of Maunakea, which is 33,500 feet tall, with 19,698 feet of that underwater.

Mountain climber and underwater explorer Victor Vescovo teamed up with Native Hawaiian scientist Cliff Kapono to scale Maunakea Volcano from its base at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to its peak.... The historic voyage included descending to the bottom of the ocean, kayaking to shore, then biking and hiking to the peak.

Oh, this isn't what it sounded like from the headline. They didn't go up the mountain in some underwater trek. Then went straight down to the starting point but then came straight up and kayaked over to the starting point on land:

"UW-Madison will remove a 70-ton boulder from the heart of campus Friday morning following calls over the past year from students of color who view the rock as a symbol of the university's racist past."

UPDATE: I just went over to see the set up for removing the rock. This is my photograph, taken at 6:01 p.m.

ORIGINAL POST: 

"Chamberlin Rock, located on top of Observatory Hill, is named in honor of Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a geologist and former university president. But for some students of color on campus, the rock represents a painful history of discrimination. The boulder was referred to as a 'n-----head' — a commonly used expression in the 1920s to describe any large dark rock — at least once in a 1925 Wisconsin State Journal headline. University historians have not found any other time that the term was used but said the Ku Klux Klan was active on campus at that time. UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca approved the removal of Chamberlin Rock in January but the Wisconsin Historical Society needed to sign off on the rock’s removal because it was located within 15 feet of a Native American burial site. The university announced Thursday that the rock will be removed at 6:30 a.m. Friday."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

"The next morning, I return to Viroqua for a stroll through the town’s vaunted bookstore, Driftless Books, housed in another massive tobacco warehouse."

"The walls are covered floor to ceiling in secondhand books. Framed custom portraits hang from the rafters. A moose head. A rusting sousaphone... 'So yeah, one thing led to another, and a guy gave me this building,' says owner Eddy Nix, a community fixture in Viroqua. He is wearing a loose sweater and patched denim, and he wraps used books in donated paper bags as I pepper him with questions about the store. 'Literally just gave it to you?' I ask. 'He was like some guerrilla philanthropist,' he says. They met when Nix was running the first iteration of his shop in nearby Viola. A stranger walked in one day looking for Richard Brautigan’s 'Trout Fishing in America.' Nix sold him a copy, along with a preorder for 'Wake Up,' Jack Kerouac’s posthumously published biography of the Buddha. And that was that — until a year later, when Nix grew obsessed with this empty old warehouse in Viroqua and finally contacted the owner, who asked whether the Kerouac book had arrived yet. 'It was the same dude!' he says. 'And then like five months later, after forcing me to read the complete commentaries of Gurdjieff and all this metaphysical hoodoo, he gives me the building, like out of the blue.'"

Oh, no! The Washington Post has discovered Wisconsin! 

I'm reading "In southwestern Wisconsin, the bucolic Driftless Area is an overlooked gem."

My favorite comment over there is from Owen Caterwall:

Please, please don't come here. Don't bring your crappy coffee shops, your whiney tourists, your behemoth vehicles, your brassy loud voices, your unsolicited opinions, and your bored witless kids. People live here. It's not quaint, or cute, or charming, or fey. It's where we live and conduct our lives. It's not a museum or gawkers' paradise. Go to Disneyland. You'll have more fun.

"UW-Madison chancellor signs off on removing rock seen by some as symbol of racism."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports. 

The university’s Campus Planning Committee in November unanimously approved recommending the boulder be relocated off university property to a location on or near the National Park Service’s Ice Age Scenic Trail. 

UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank accepted the committee’s recommendation on Monday.... 

The rock’s removal is not yet a done deal. Because the boulder is located on or near a Native American burial site, the Wisconsin Historical Society needs to sign off and all Native Tribes of Wisconsin need to be notified and given time to provide input.... 

The 12-foot-tall Chamberlin Rock — in the news these days as racist — is featured as a climbing destination at Mountain Project.

It's one of the "the classic, most popular, highest rated climbing routes in this area" — "UW Madison Campus Bouldering":

 

The route is marked:

There's "Chamberlin Rock East Arete":

Sit start and work your way up the arete using holds on both sides of the corner. Top out. In my opinion this is the best problem on this rock.

In the comments there:

Found some more routes on this little boulder. Hang below the plaque and climb and top out at top left corner. If you avoid using your feet on the ledge you started with it is a bit tougher V2-V3. You can also start on the southwest arete of the boulder and traverse right. If you avoid the top ridge until you top out in the center of the boulder I would rate it as a V3.

The climbers are looking for what they seem to call "problems." Ah, yes... in bouldering, a "problem" is the path you take up the rock. 

We also see this word — "problem" — in critical theory. From the Wikipedia article "Problematization": 

Problematization of a term, writing, opinion, ideology, identity, or person is to consider the concrete or existential elements of those involved as challenges (problems) that invite the people involved to transform those situations. It is a method of defamiliarization of common sense....

You can also look at the rock in a political/social-justice way and figure out the best problem. Indeed, that has been done, and the rock was determined to contain racism. This problem is not a route for climbing but something that requires people to say things about the rock until the authorities feel that their best route — their path for overcoming criticism — is to get rid of the rock. 

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

The 70-ton boulder is officially known as Chamberlin Rock in honor of Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a geologist and former university president. But the rock was referred to at least once after it was dug out of the hill as a “n*****head,” a commonly used expression in the 1920s to describe any large dark rock. The Campus Planning Committee unanimously voted last week to recommend to Chancellor Rebecca Blank that the boulder be removed from Observatory Hill. Blank has previously indicated she supports the rock’s removal, though a timeline for removal has not been established. 

The Wisconsin Black Student Union called for the rock’s removal over the summer. President Nalah McWhorter said the rock is a symbol of the daily injustices that students of color face on a predominantly white campus. “This is a huge accomplishment for us,” she said on Wednesday. “We won’t have that constant reminder, that symbol that we don’t belong here.”... 

But the rock was referred to at least once... That one verified usage of the term was in The Wisconsin State Journal in 1925. Oddly enough, this new WSJ article has the word written out. I put in asterisks in the quote, above. Go to the link. They've written it out!

It’s unclear whether or for how long people on campus referred to the boulder as “N*****head Rock.”...

Whoa! They did it twice!

Kacie Butcher, the university’s public history project director, told the Campus Planning Committee... that the rock’s removal presents an opportunity to prioritize students of color and engage in complex conversations.

Complex conversations! If we can have complex conversations, why do we need to move ancient boulders?  

The rock’s next destination has yet to be decided. Options include burying the rock at its original resting place, breaking up and disposing of the rock, or moving the rock to the Ice Age Trail.... Carried by glaciers from perhaps as far north as Canada, the boulder was excavated from the side of Observatory Hill in 1925. Geochronology professor Brad Singer told the committee the department prefers it be relocated so instructors can continue using it as a teaching tool.

And here's a big complication: 

UW-Madison needs to secure approval from the Wisconsin Historical Society before removal begins because the rock is located near an effigy mound. The first step requires UW-Madison to submit a request to disturb a catalogued burial site. All Native Tribes of Wisconsin are notified during the process, which can take 60 to 90 days and includes a 30-day comment period.

A complex conversation topic: Do the Native American Tribes of Wisconsin have more moral authority on this question than the Black Student Union?

Officials estimate the cost of removal ranges from $30,000 to $75,000.

Another complex conversation topic: Is this the best use of the next $30,000 to $75,000 the University spends on racial harmony?

After the rock is removed, the Black Student Union’s focus will shift to generating ideas for how students of color can reclaim the space, such as installing a piece of art, McWhorter said. “So it becomes a way to celebrate instead of having it as an empty space reminding us of what it once was,” she said.

Oh, no! Public art! If only we could see the artwork before the rock is removed and vote on whether the rock is better than the art. It's unlikely that the artwork will be better than an empty unobstructed view, and the rock is highly aesthetically pleasing... except for the plaque. Here's my suggestion — maybe we can have a complex conversation about this — how about just changing the plaque on the rock? Of course, the plaque never said "n*****head." It was always just honoring Professor Chamberlin. Write something new. Use words. Don't destroy the rock. And don't disrupt the Indian burial ground. 

The main reason to stick to the demand that the rock be destroyed or carted away is that you have a demonstrable, physical result — you demanded, they acceded to your demand — and that sets you up perfectly for your next demand... presumably, to take down the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

"In collaboration with the Black Student Union at the school, University of Wisconsin-Madison leaders are discussing plans to remove a 70-ton boulder from campus grounds due to it once being called a racist name nearly a century ago."

"The boulder had traveled to the region over 10,000 years ago, deposited by ancient pre-Cambrian bedrock drift from Canada, according to its plaque. In 1925, workers pulled the rock out of the side of a hill on campus and named it 'Chamberlin Rock' after Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, a 19th century glaciologist and University of Wisconsin president. The rock was adorned with a plaque commemorating Chamberlin and placed at the university’s Washburn Observatory, where it remains today. While Chamberlin Rock has been a campus fixture for 95 years, it recently came under fire due to once being described as a 'n****rhead' in 1925 as was common geological practice at the time to describe large dark rocks.... The Black Student Union at UW is now calling on the university to find an alternate way to represent Chamberlin on campus without the legacy implied by the rock. 'You clearly see what the rock was called and you can’t deny the history. Additionally you can’t deny the way it makes some people feel,' Black Student Union president Nalah McWhorter told Madison.com. 'If you’re not going to move the things that are disrespectful to us because other students love it, put something up that us Black and brown students can celebrate.'"

The College Fix reports.

What is the cost of moving a 70-ton boulder? What is the value of the beauty of the rock itself, which has nothing to do with racism? The only reason for attacking the rock is that there is no way to do anything to the use of a word 95 years ago. That's an incident in the past. Gone. But the rock is there. You're getting mad at a rock? No, you're asking for something to be done that can be done. A 70-ton rock can be moved, and so the demand is to move the rock. It's theater, and the university should have the sense to say no.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

We live a stone’s throw from the Chancellor’s mansion. Last Friday morning around 7AM, I heard chanting outside. Turns out it was coming from a group of 20-30 protesters at her front door chanting, “Wake up, Becky and move the rock! Wake up, Becky and move the rock!”

It is despicable of the protesters to harass Chancellor Rebecca Blank anywhere but especially at her personal residence.

Trump's Mount Rushmore speech came on too late for me, but...

... I've got the transcript, and I'm going to live-blog my reading of it. I'm fixing punctuation as I go and adding boldface:

There could be no better place to celebrate America’s independence than beneath this magnificent, incredible, majestic mountain and monument to the greatest Americans who have ever lived.

Somebody went heavy on the alliteration, but "incredible" sneaked in there. He's on the side of the monuments, not the destroyers of monuments.

The superlative — "the greatest Americans who have ever lived" — is a provocation. Not only is he defending these 4 men against the recent attacks, he's saying they are greater than every other American in history — greater than Frederick Douglass, greater than Harriet Tubman, greater than all of them. He didn't have to say the greatest. He could have said "among the greatest."

It would mean something just to call them "great" at all and not to qualify it with something like, though they did not escape the moral failings characteristic of their time. But he went big. He put the 4 above everyone else, which is the message of the mountain.

Today we pay tribute to the exceptional lives and extraordinary legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

He's got the great men on his side, not like those people who want to tear down statues of all of them.

I am here as your president to proclaim before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defamed, their legacy will never ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.

That's big! Very grand. Very much a stand against the protesters and rioters... without mentioning them.  This is hyperbole, because Trump cannot protect the monument forever, and indeed, an understanding of geology would tell you that it's impossible for the monument to stand forever as an eternal tribute.

But he's not promising. He's proclaiming. I think of the proclamation on the plinth of Ozymandias. You can proclaim it is eternal, but that doesn't make it eternal. I'm going to live forever! I'm going to learn how to fly! Sing it joyously, but you're still going to die some day.

"The remote Siberian town of Verkhoyans... six miles north of the Arctic Circle, has long held the record... for the coldest inhabited place in the world."

"The record was set in 1892, when the temperature dropped to ninety below zero Fahrenheit, although these days winter temperatures are noticeably milder, hovering around fifty below. Last Saturday, Verkhoyansk claimed a new record: the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, with an observation of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit—the same temperature was recorded that day in Las Vegas.... On May 29th, outside Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, the thawing ground buckled, causing an oil-storage tank to collapse and spew more than a hundred and fifty thousand barrels, or twenty-one thousand tons, of diesel fuel into the Ambarnaya River.... The permafrost found in the area surrounding Verkhoyansk is some of the deepest and oldest in the world, descending as much as five thousand feet. Closer to the surface, a type of ice-rich permafrost known as yedoma is particularly vulnerable to rapid thaws. The result is thermokarst, the strange and sometimes shocking topography that forms as the land slides, sags, and sinks. Mysterious sinkholes suddenly appear, drunken forests fall, and hillocks destroy farmland. One of Russia’s most extreme examples of thermokarst, known as the Batagay megaslump, is a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot-deep, half-mile-wide depression, situated just outside Verkhoyansk. It first began forming as a small gully in the nineteen-sixties, because of deforestation, but has grown significantly in recent years, exposing the remains of ancient creatures, including musk ox, a cave lion, a Pleistocene wolf, a woolly mammoth, and an almost perfectly preserved, forty-thousand-year-old foal."

From "A Disastrous Summer in the Arctic" (The New Yorker).

"A lot of people study the last 2.5 billion years, but we will emphasize the first 2 billion. This is the earliest, most exciting era, mainly because there are no known rocks."

From "Professor’s study of ancient crystals sheds light on earth’s early years" (at news.wisc.edu)(about studying zircons with "melt inclusions").

"Crystallization is the only place in nature where you see straight lines. Everything else is wobbly, round and wiggly."

"I think that we are innately drawn to order and organization in the midst of all this cosmic chaos."

Says a gem dealer, quoted in "What Draws Hundreds to This Lake Bed? Spellbinding Crystals/Welcome to Gem-O-Rama, California’s new gold rush" (NYT)(lots of cool photos at the link).

"First, we thought it was whale poop, but... there was way more of it than any normal sized pod of whales could come up with."

93 square miles of floating rock — pumice (from an underwater volcano).

From the NYT, "A Raft of Floating Rock Stuns Sailors. But Can It Save the Reef?"

Pumice tutorial:

1. The pumice raft is 1/2,000th the size of the #GreatBarrierReef
2. Corals only rarely settle on pumice. When they do, they can't get off.
3. About 25 billion corals still alive on the #GreatBarrierReef produce quite a few larvae. https://t.co/eNvVAq84tR https://t.co/KQq7DiwMPv pic.twitter.com/VJRHnrk6j3

— Terry Hughes (@ProfTerryHughes) August 26, 2019

"It is difficult not to get choked up and passionate about this topic. We look at moment-by-moment records of one of the most notable impact events in Earth’s history."

"No other site has a record quite like that. And this particular event is tied directly to all of us — to every mammal on Earth, in fact. Because this is essentially where we inherited the planet. Nothing was the same after the impact. It became a planet of mammals instead of a planet of dinosaurs."

Said University of Kansas doctoral student Robert A. DePalma, quoted in "KU student’s major find: Scene of devastation from dinosaur-killing asteroid" (Kansas City Star).