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SPEAKER_00: I
SPEAKER_09: Q Josh Trumpet. You know what that means, everybody? We are going back on tour again. We are hitting the road next year in January for our annual Pacific Northwest and Northern California swing. And we will be at the Paramount Theater in Seattle on January 24th. Revolution Hall in Portland on the 25th. And our home away from home at San Francisco Sketchfest on January 26th.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, we'll be at the Sidney Goldstein Theater again, everybody. A great place. That's right. If you want tickets and information, you can go to Linktree slash S-Y-S-K and it's got all that jam. You can go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com. It's got all that jam. And we will see all of you guys in January with bells on.
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_10: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just moving slowly against one another, starting static in the slowest possible way. Yeah, perhaps one day we'll be a mountain range.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, or a deep, deep trench.
SPEAKER_10: All right, you get down there.
SPEAKER_09: I'll be up in the mountains. All right. When I'm down there, I'll be like, hello, how's the weather up there?
SPEAKER_10: Ha ha ha. Jerry will be, you know, her nickname will C-level Roland.
SPEAKER_09: C-level. Yeah, but we need to spell it with just the letter C.
SPEAKER_10: Right. That's more nicknaming. Oh, that sounds mean all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, that sounds mean all of a sudden. C-level.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, I didn't mean it like that. Yeah, like Jerry's the C-level producer.
SPEAKER_10: Right. Wow. That was just subconscious. Sorry, Jerry. That's okay.
SPEAKER_10: So, since Jerry said that was okay, I say we just go ahead and move on because we're making all these plate tectonic jokes for a good reason, Chuck. We're going to talk today in part about plate tectonics.
SPEAKER_09: That's right. But first, we're going to go back before that.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so I included this, I coupled this together from a bunch of different stuff including our old vulnerable HowStuffWorks site, Nat Geo, Live Science, I didn't go wrong there, Heritage Daily, good stuff. Great. U of Calgary. Yeah. The U stands for Upwardly Mobile. Upwardly Mobile of Calgary.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_10: And then Wondrium Daily, which I hadn't heard of before, but it's a cool little site.
SPEAKER_09: Is it a Wondrium?
SPEAKER_10: On the daily. On the daily? So, yeah, I coupled this together and I wanted to put this in there about the idea of what people used to think of. I guess I'm fascinated with that lately because you just did a whole episode on what people used to think before the scientific method. I feel like we talked about something similar in another episode and now we've got this. But this to me is like we're right on the precipice of essentially folklore and then scientific understanding. This is essentially like the dividing line, what we're looking at right here in this first little anecdote. And then the other reason I thought it was really significant is because I think Madame Blavatsky, who kind of comes up in a second, she would play really well today. Everybody would be like, what kind of BS are you selling? I want to give you some of my money. Like she would be a featured like goop contributor basically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yes, you're talking about Helena Blavatsky, aka Madame Blavatsky, the Russian occultist from the 1800s, who was a member and co-founder, in fact, of the Theosophical Society. That sounds like it would play these days for sure. For sure. And something that Blavatsky was going on about back then was something called Lemuria.
SPEAKER_09: And we'll get to how that came about in a second as well. But this is the idea that a lot of Theosophists thought that, hey, listen, religion has tried, science has tried, but nobody still here in the 19th century has fully explained how we got here and what's going on on planet Earth. But I am able to because I am the great Blavatsky and I have talented insight into the times that came before.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, through psychic gifts, right? Yeah. So just drop your rubles in a bucket and I'll tell you.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. So she had, I think, multiple books, but one in particular that came out in 1888 called The Secret Doctrine, she talked about how there were seven root races. This is another thing people were very preoccupied with, was where we came from. And the reason why is because just a couple decades before, Darwin had published On the Origin of the Species, and it's really difficult to get across the revolution and understanding that book brought, right? And that made people fascinated. Like, wait, okay, well, where did we come from? If God just didn't go, boop, 7,000 years ago, where did we come from? Let's figure that out. And again, this was at a time when science was very much mishmashed with superstition, I guess. So you could really get some play with the superstitious stuff. And that's exactly what Blavatsky was doing. She was saying, check this out, this place called Lemuria, it's a lost continent, everybody loves those. And it's where one of the three of seven root races came from. So, yeah, the third root race in which giant hermaphroditic, egg-laying humans, pre-sex
SPEAKER_09: organ humans lived along with the dinosaurs. And everyone was like, hey, sounds pretty good to me. Sounds good. Take my money. Yeah, so it made me wonder, too, if some of this obsession with where we came from, too, because we'll learn later other people talked about some of the original races. Was some of that rooted in things like horrors to come? We're the original people, so we're the ones who count.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I think it definitely finds its roots in that era, that whole fascination at this time, yes. OK, I thought so. And also, there's something that comes up in another episode we're going to talk about, scientific romanticism, which I guess this is probably kind of an example of. But that's like, yeah, not only are we uncovering this history in the deep past, we're uncovering my ethnicity's history in the deep past. And all we're going to find is the most splendorous, spectacular examples of how we're actually the survivors of a lost civilization that was even grander than anything we can understand now. That's another thing that people were pursuing. At the same time, so it's pop culture, but again, it's kind of dressed up like it's following the same lines of science, but it's not really science. Fortunately, at the same time, there were legitimate scientists working. It's just they were still following blind alleys to some way, which I just want to press the pause button right here. I am in no way suggesting that science is done. Like we've reached science is exactly perfect the way it is now. There's still plenty of problems with it. There's still lots left to discover. And so by casting dispersions or shade at this kind of situation back in the mid to late 19th century, I'm not insinuating that our current reality is vastly superior and perfect. I'm just saying at this time, there were big problems with science and pop culture meshing.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And I'm glad you said that, but you've been clear where you are on that through the years I think.
SPEAKER_10: Hey, we get new listeners every episode, man. That's a good point.
SPEAKER_09: And that's a lot easier to say that than to say go back and listen to 16 years worth of stuff.
SPEAKER_10: Right. Or field a bunch of angry emails too.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. We will never get those after you said that. So Lemuria was not something that Blavatsky created. Lemuria has, well, this will all tie into tectonic plates, believe it or not. Yeah, just wait. Just wait. It really does in a very neat way. It's spectacular. I love how you did this. But there was a British zoologist named Philip. I'm sorry, Philip. Philip is not a name that I know of.
SPEAKER_10: Phalic is in there, but who would name their kid Phalic? Not Phyllis.
SPEAKER_09: Gary Goldman, the great comedian, has a great bit on Phyllis and that name being retired in 1933 by the government. Gary Goldman, the rock and roll part two guy?
SPEAKER_09: Gary Goldman, G-U-L-M-A-N, the great stand-up comedian. I got you. Anyway, Philip, not Phyllis, nor Phyllis, Sklatter or Sklatter wrote an essay in 1864 called The Mammals of Madagascar. And this one is sort of kind of funny when you think about how Madagascar so clearly fits off of where it broke off from Africa. But Sklatter didn't see that at the time. He really wondered like, hey, I'm looking at Madagascar. It's right off the, just right off the coast of Africa there. And they have all these dozens of species of lemurs. Yet Africa and India don't only have a few species of lemur. He was wrong about that even, which isn't the point. They didn't have any true lemurs. But he was like, why is Madagascar just loaded with all these lemurs and Africa so close has none? And he says, here's what happened. There was a land bridge there and it was once, you know, all connected. And I'm going to call that big, you know, great continent Lemuria after the lemur.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he really liked lemurs a lot. So this is a lost continent. It includes a land bridge. And what Sklatter's doing here is what was kind of all the scientific rage. It was like, okay, again, like we came from apes, animals evolved from other animals. Let's take that new worldview and figure out how that works. And he couldn't figure out like how like similar species got it out there eventually. Mm-hmm. Could be separated by hundreds of miles of water. The best explanation that he thought was a land bridge that's just currently inundated with water. And so like you said, he came up with Lemuria and that got very quickly deposited into the pop culture and people like Blavatsky and others were like, yep, Lemuria, and then let's add to it so we can get that goop money.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And land bridges were just land bridges were the thing. And here's the thing, and we'll get to some more of this in a minute, but like they weren't totally off in all of this stuff. Like they were on the right track for some of it, some a little bit more than others. There was I think a German biologist that you tracked down named Ernst Haeckel, or Haeckel, and he was like, hey, listen, Lemuria was not only a thing, but that's where we all came from. That was a cradle of humanity. There were 12 varieties of men. Here we go with that stuff again. Yeah. We evolved from these ancient primates right there at this place that is now partially underwater.
SPEAKER_10: Right. What's nuts about the whole thing, though, is that that actually has happened before. There actually is at least one, and I'm sure there's plenty. It's not a lost continent, but a lost pretty decent sized bit of land that is now covered by water that once held people who lived there, and it's called Doggerland. And it's just so nuts that like these guys were off in their interpretation of what they were seeing to explain species divergence. And as we'll see, like fossil beds separated by an ocean, but they still kind of match up on one coast of Africa and one coast of South America. All these things are trying to put together. They were on the right track trying to explain it, but they were just off a little bit. And yet at the same time, they were explaining stuff that they didn't actually know really existed, but did. Does that make sense in a really roundabout way? Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_09: And when something like Doggerland happens where this is the land that was around basically what we now know as the UK, and it connected to Europe. And in 1931, a fisherman pulled up a barbed antler point, part of a weapon basically, part of a harpoon that they were using 12,000 years ago, buried in peat. And they're like, well, wait a minute. Peat isn't in the ocean. Peat's in the forest. Why would it be 25 miles out into the ocean? And then they started poking around more and more in the decades since. And they're like, oh, well, this used to all be land. And beneath the North Sea are canoes and burial sites and all kinds of other things that we can point to as pretty good proof that, yeah, this happens. There is land that used to be here that is now beneath the sea at different places on planet Earth.
SPEAKER_10: And I mean a lot of land. This land stretched out from all points. It surrounded the UK and stretched toward Europe from southern Scandinavia to Brittany and France. It was just connected. And there were riverbeds and all sorts of animals to hunt. It was just really cool. And then over time, as the sea levels rose, it became inundated. And then there was a landslide, an undersea landslide that really inundated it. And it was just lost to history because the people running around there were running around there no less than 5,000 years ago, maybe seven. So everyone forgot about it. But one of the noteworthy things that I found just completely fascinating is H.G. Wells, show off that he was, set an 1897 book called The Story of the Stone Age in exactly that place. He didn't call it daughterland, but he set his story in this land that was now covered by water between the UK and Europe. And it turned out about three or so decades later that he was confirmed. H.G. Wells was a special human.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, pretty cool. So he actually managed to combine the science and the speculation, speculativeness of the age. But he was never trying to say like, this is real. This is a real book. He was like, this is fiction. It's awesome. Yeah. I like him for that.
SPEAKER_09: Didn't he write the original Invisible Man book?
SPEAKER_10: I think so.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I watched the, I've been trying to watch some scary movies in October and now I'm in a November a bit. And I watched that Invisible Man update from a few years ago with Elisabeth Moss that I had never seen before. Have you seen it?
SPEAKER_10: No. It's good. Okay.
SPEAKER_09: And it's, you know, it's not the same story H.G. Wells put forward, but it's, you know, it's based sort of adapted from that story. And it's actually really good and quite scary and has a great ending.
SPEAKER_10: Okay. Good to know. So I recommend it. Did you ever get around to watching the Gewand Origins miniseries? No, you got to email me this stuff.
SPEAKER_09: I don't remember anything after I leave the studio. So scary.
SPEAKER_10: So, you know, the grudge that Sarah Michelle Gellar was in in the 90s? Sure. That was based on, well, I know the movie and I know it was based on an original Japanese
SPEAKER_09: film, right?
SPEAKER_10: Right, called Gewand. Yeah. And so somebody went back and made a prequel to the Japanese version that explains how everything got that way. Uh huh. Why they got the grudge. Yes, it is so scary that like I will leave the light on from, you know, the family room to the bedroom as I'm going to bed and then turn it off remotely. I just won't turn it off and walk through the dark. It's that scary. It's awesome.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I didn't watch as many this year because the movie crush isn't around. I used to like really heavily watch a lot of horror movies in October, but only caught a few this year. And I still, I enjoy being scared like that and being in another part of your house and having to navigate your way back in the dark. Even in my 50s, it's always scary and kind of funny. Like, of course, I know that the supernatural being from the movie I just watched isn't in this hallway, but do I really know that?
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. I know. All right.
SPEAKER_09: Off topic, let's take a break, eh?
SPEAKER_10: Sure, let's. And we'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_06: All right, so when we broke, actually we were talking about horror movies, but a little
SPEAKER_09: bit before that I was talking some about how it's a little frustrating, not frustrating, but maybe kind of funny that they didn't put together that Madagascar so clearly broke off from Africa and fits very nicely if you just shove it back together right there in its spot. And as I was studying today, I have my light up globe on my desk and you know, when you look at that thing, my medium-smart eight-year-old daughter can say, hey, Daddy, you know, it looks like Africa could fit into South America and it looks like all of these things sort of could be puzzled together to form a larger supercontinent. That's a medium-smart, but she knows the word supercontinent. That's pretty smart. But it seems pretty obvious to us now, but it was all about land bridges back then and sort of this idea of supercontinent came about a little slower. Yeah, because if you stand on any continent and just stand around and wait, you will not
SPEAKER_10: perceive that you're moving, even though you are moving. So they were not aware of the fact that the continents moved. And so of course that wasn't what they went with. They went with land bridges. Again, it's a very sensible explanation. How did one thing get to another when it's covered by oceans? Well, there was land that used to be above the ocean and they just migrated across. It's happened before. There's Doggerland, there's the Bering Land Bridge, all that stuff. But the idea that the continents moved, that just was not around until another guy came along who we'll talk about in a second. But there were like little inklings of this idea that just weren't. There was like a light bulb that was just about to come on, but it just burns out right before it fully comes on. That's kind of what was happening with the idea that the continents moved. And again, just to reiterate, the whole reason people are thinking about this stuff is because fossil beds suddenly take on new meaning if evolution and natural selection exists. Climatological evidence suddenly takes on new meaning. Why species are similar but separated from one continent to another, it takes on significance. And so they're looking around the world with brand new fresh eyes and trying to answer these questions and they were coming up with all these different meta-narratives. And on the way to the idea that we have now, that the continents actually move and they actually formed one large supercontinent in the past, like I was saying, there were a few people who came along and almost had it.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. The idea of continental contraction was one pretty good idea and an alternate theory, you know, pre-tectonic plate shifts. And that is that the Earth was a huge magma ball, which is true. Yeah. And that as that thing cooled down over time, the land that it formed shrunk, basically, as things might do when they cool, and the continents broke apart. So that was really headed toward the right idea until the end, basically. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_10: Another thing that they had trouble kind of explaining were things like mountains.
SPEAKER_09: Like I kind of kid it around in the beginning, one of us will be a mountain range. Yeah. They did have theories that parts of the Earth were, you know, breaking off from one another and could go underneath other parts. But they just hadn't quite arrived there until Alfred Wegener came along in 1912 and published a book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans, where he was kind of like, hey, wait a minute, everyone. This looks like a giant puzzle if you stand back and look at a map, and you're just not standing back far enough. Like, get over on the other side of the room. And then everyone did, and they're like, oh, wow. And this helped explain things like you were talking about, why the coast of Africa and the coast of Brazil might share fossils, even though they're separated by such a vast ocean.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, or share species or all sorts of different explanations. It would go on to become considered a theory of everything for geology, for Earth science, in much the same way that our understanding of the atom is like, explains, you know, quantum mechanics or vice versa. It was a really big deal that he came up with this. But it was not well received at first, as we'll see, like he was not considered a genius in his time. People ridiculed him, essentially. And his whole idea was very quickly forgotten for several decades until he was pretty much proven right. But in that book, The Origin of the Continents and Oceans, he's saying not only did the continents move apart because they used to form the supercontinent called Pangea, all the land, they're still moving around today. Yeah. All the Victorians and I'm sorry, these would be Edwardians, maybe, were like, nah, I've stood still for like an hour at a stretch and I could not tell we were moving, so we're not moving. And he's like, no, really, trust me, the continents are still moving. It explains everything. How about earthquakes? They're like, well, it's God putting his finger on Antarctica. He's like, no, it's actually these plates sliding against one another. It's wrong. And they just kind of went back and forth like this until Wegener died in 1930 in a blizzard.
SPEAKER_09: Wow. Really, really shot right to the ending there. So the other thing that was pretty brilliant was he was like, well, not only, you know, maybe we can't stand back, there's no room big enough to where we can stand back and see how exactly that puzzle might fit, but what we can do because, you know, under this theory of continental drift, we can look at the fossil record and look at different speciological phenomenon, and that is part of the puzzle as well. Like if we match up this place with that place, maybe in our mind's eye we can envision how they used to fit together even though it's not as tidy as Madagascar off the coast of Africa.
SPEAKER_10: It's so cool. He took, he was, so he was a climate or a meteorologist and a geophysicist, right? He was a sharp dude. He took paleoclimatological data. I think there was like a fern species that he was tracking. There was glacier, glacier coverage, I guess, like evidence of old glacier coverage, and then species and fossils. And he would take all this and basically say, okay, well, this fits here, and then this range now connects from, you know, India to North Africa. That explains that. That would fit. And he figured out not only that the continents fit together, exactly how they would fit together, and not by geography, but by all of this evidence, all this data he had and pairing it up. And so, I mean, he really like did some amazing work. And again, like people were just like, we don't believe what you're saying. And then in the 50s and 60s, apparently, as Nat Geo puts it, as we got more technologically advanced in warfare, we started to confirm Wegener's theories inadvertently. Like when they were trying to detect submarines using magnetometers, or when they used seismographs to detect nuclear testing elsewhere in the world. These things actually inadvertently turned up evidence that, oh my gosh, the continents actually are moving, and they're moving today, and Wegener was right. Let's go dig them up and shake his hand.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And not only that, but now we know that Pangaea wasn't even, Pangaea is just the most recent supercontinent. Right. There were supercontinents before that, because before Pangaea, there were obviously separate continents that came together to form Pangaea. And those continents had broken off from the previous supercontinent that we call Pangaea, that was about 600 million years ago. And there was one before that called Rodinia, who was that like a billion years ago. And Earth has had landmass for about three billion years. So if you're looking at this on that timeline, this is pretty quick movement. It's not to us today. What's it like half an inch a year or something? Or .6? Roughly one and a half centimeter, something like that.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It's, you know, that's cooking if you look at it on that kind of timeline.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. So what we've arrived to today, Chuck, is called plate tectonics. And it's essentially so Wegener's theory was continental drift, that the continents drift, and they were like, well, how Wegener? He's like, I don't know. Yeah. Well, finally, with plate tectonics, we've arrived at how? We still don't know exactly what the mechanism is. But what we figured out is that below the Earth's crust, below the what's called the lissosphere, it's the crust in the uppermost mantle, the really thick, hard stuff. Yeah. That's about 60 miles or 100 kilometers thick. Take your choice. There's something called the esthenosphere. And it's like molten. It's viscous. It's liquidish. And it's separated from the lithosphere so that the lithosphere can move about on it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Right? It's like the oil?
SPEAKER_10: Yes. Sort of? Exactly. Oil, ball bearings, WD-40, all mixed together. That's what the lithosphere is moving around on. So now we know how it could happen. We still don't know exactly what creates the motion in the ocean. But we do know that this is what it's based on. One way or another, this is what it's based on. And it's possibly because of the convective currents coming from the center of Earth toward the outer crust and mantle.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And Johns Hopkins University a few years ago in 2019 said this has been going on for about two and a half billion years, which tracks with the other supercontinents we were talking about. And I guess this is a professor from the University of Florida named Ray Russo, an associate professor, that talked about the Earth being what you call the quote large-scale heat engine. And like we talked about that just big hot ball of magma. And so all this heat coming from all these different things throughout these hundreds of thousands and millions of years, heat's going to try to go from warm to cold. It's going to flow from a warm area to a cold area. Right. And if the heat is on the interior of the Earth, it's going to try to move outward and in fact does towards the cold surface of the Earth.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. What's neat is the Earth still hasn't cooled off from when it was formed almost five billion years ago. It may have by now. I don't know if it would have or not. But the thing that keeps it going, that keeps it hot is well, leftover heat, radioactive decay of all these amazing atoms and elements that are in the core that are under such intense pressure that they just create more heat and that creates more pressure and so on and so forth and you've got more and more radioactive decay. And then also just the compression, the gravitational compression is so great it actually produces temperatures. That's some pressure right there, right? And so all this heat is emanating, like you said, outward toward the colder surface. And as it does, it carries the heat energy with it. As it gets toward the top, it starts to cool off. And it goes, oh, here I go back down because the cooler stuff sinks. It's less dense, it's less buoyant than heat, than the warm stuff that's coming up from the core. And then that stuff gets heated up and comes back up. And what I've just described is a convective current. It's the same thing that you get when you look at one of those awesome see-through glass cookware pots from the early 80s when the water's bubbling. That's a convective current. It's the same thing. Yes. The water, the bubbles of water trying to get away from the heat source, they're rising. As they get toward the top, they cool and they come back down. And that's exactly what they're saying is happening. They, being today's scientists, is coming from the core, moving, like that moves like all the molten junk that's in that 400 miles of a stenosphere. And as that's moving, they think that that is acting like some sort of maybe conveyor belt or something that moves the plates around. So we know they move on the stenosphere and they think the convective currents are possibly the mechanism that actually moves them.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And there's this other theory called slab pull. You were talking about those oceanic plates sinking to the less dense plates below them. And just think about when you're pulling a tablecloth off of a table. It's basically saying, hey, the tablecloth's coming, but so is that dinner plate that's sitting on the tablecloth. You're coming with me. Right. And that's what slab pull is basically at point, I think, no, I said 0.5, 0.6 inches per year is the average speed. Although science isn't fully in agreement on if things are going faster now or if they're going slower. But they have figured out that things are still moving. And as these plates are close to each other, there's going to be three different ways which they're going to interact. And that's going to help cause planet Earth, basically. Divergent boundaries obviously are when they are diverging, when they're moving away from each other. And you're going to find earthquakes a lot along these areas.
SPEAKER_09: We've talked about this in earthquakes and volcanoes and supervolcanoes, so it's a bit of a refresher. Sure. But that's a divergent boundary. The other two are convergent. That's obviously when things are going toward one another. And that's where you're going to get those mountain ranges when two continents are going to hit one another. They're going to buckle up and either go up or down. So you're either going to get a mountain range or something like the Mariana Trench on the ocean floor. And then you have transformed plate boundaries. And that's when things are not moving away or toward each other. They're just sort of generally happily side by side going by one another very slowly saying, hey, how you doing? We might be cracking apart here and there as we touch one another. But we're not smashing against one another very slowly. And you're also going to find earthquakes here along these fault lines.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I say we take a break because, I mean, you mentioned volcanoes and earthquakes and all that happening. There's a lot of action that happens thanks to plate tectonics. And in fact, it turns out that life actually may not be able to exist on Earth were it not for plate tectonics. They're that important. Let's do it.
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SPEAKER_07: Word up, Jerry.
SPEAKER_10: OK, Chuck. So one thing I wanted to mention is tectonic is a strange word and it sounds super futuristic and technological. It's actually a very old medieval word that was used as what you would call a builder or a carpenter. So plate tectonics is the actual process of building earth. And that's a really apt name for it, because that's what's going on with plate tectonics, because when all that magma starts to come up, it doesn't just move the plates at places where there's a gap between the plates. That magma comes up and comes out. And as it does and cools, it forms new rock, essentially new earth. And over the course of millions and millions and millions of years, that moves up and out and over and does all sorts of other cool things until it's eventually recycled back into magma, where it will be heated and eventually brought back up as new magma to form new continental crusts. So tectonic is a really great word for this whole process.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, totally. And you were talking about, or I guess I was talking about the fact that we spoke about volcanoes and how they form in volcanoes and super volcanoes. But as a refresher, these plates are causing, you know, they're moving around. And when there's a break in the crust, that's basically like a vent for all that hotness underneath and that lava to come out or to erupt. This is what I'm going to recommend my second movie of the day. May have talked about it before, but the documentary Fire of Love is amazing. It's about volcanoes. It's about this couple, these volcano hunters. Okay. And it is one of the most amazing, some of the most amazing footage I've ever seen in my life is this 16 millimeter film footage that this couple shot years and years ago that this current documentarian has put together in the form of Fire of Love. Okay. You would love it.
SPEAKER_10: All right, I'll check it out. Yeah. Is it even better footage than Joe getting spit out of the volcano that he just jumped in in Joe versus the volcano? Cause that was a pretty amazing sight. It's pretty amazing that no wuponi woo in this one.
SPEAKER_10: Okay. So I haven't seen that movie in a while. I hope it holds up. It does. Okay. So as I was saying, there's a lot of stuff that the plate tectonics do in addition to volcanoes, you're like volcanoes, big wup. Again, this is how new crust is formed. Like all that magma comes up out of these vents or even on land and forms new land or new undersea crust, right? Yeah. That also does all sorts of other things too. Like when that magma comes up, it's bringing all sorts of minerals and elements and all sorts of crazy superheated stuff that's really reactive and ready to just party essentially when it comes at shooting out of these magma vents. And it actually, I did not realize this. One of the things that undersea volcanoes are responsible for is the balancing the ocean salinity. I never thought like, where did the salt come from? It comes from the magma that's spitting out at the bottom of the ocean.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And we came from there. And so it's no coincidence that our blood has about the same salinity as seawater.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, pretty cool. And then on land, those same openings down to the magma chambers below, what we typically think of as volcanoes, when they erupt, they create new land too. They replenish land. They replenish soil over time. So yes, there was a direct connection between the volcanoes that are formed by plate boundaries and life on Earth. But it gets even more arcane than that.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure. We mentioned earthquakes. It's also no coincidence that we're going to find earthquakes don't happen everywhere. They are clustered around these tectonic plate boundaries. And when they press together, when those plates move, and for them it's a sudden movement, that energy's got to go somewhere, and that is what an earthquake is. We should do one on the fault lines, like the San Andreas Fault, maybe, the most famous fault line.
SPEAKER_10: I feel like the rock did that. It's done.
SPEAKER_09: That's funny. What else? What about those, what about the rocks, the undersea rocks?
SPEAKER_10: So remember when I said that they used to, and probably still do, have magnetometers like undersea to detect submarines? Well, this is actually one reason they figured out that Wegner is right, and that it's plate tectonics doing it. They inadvertently detected that if you go along the seafloor on either side of a ridge, you're going to find that your compass goes haywire. Yeah, yeah. And the reason why is because as that magma comes up from the vent in the middle of the undersea ridge and spills out over, there's some minerals in there that actually kind of clock the North Pole, right? Like the minerals that are, a magnet episode is really, really interesting. I went back and listened to it again. And it's even more difficult than I remember trying to explain it. But just suffice to say that there's minerals that align themselves with the North Pole. And in effect, when they become rock, they record where the North Pole was. Well, Earth's magnetic North Pole sometimes switches with the South Pole. It can wander throughout Earth and end up at the opposite side. And depending on when those rocks were formed from that undersea vent, it will record where that North Pole was. And so over the course of millions and millions of years, I think the poles flip every one to 300,000 years, something like that. Those new ridges that are created are going to get pushed further and further out from the vent so that if you went over them with a compass, you will see that they just keep flipping back and forth, marking each time that the North Pole changed direction. Amazing.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_10: I think so too. And they're like, well, the only thing that explains this is that the continents are actually pushing apart. They're forming new continents that's coming out of the vent. And as it cools, it's getting pushed apart by new stuff. Hence, the plate tectonics theory seems pretty accurate.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And it has an effect on the overall climate too, because we tend to think when we think about plate tectonics, we think about the land masses that are moving. But that's also going to affect the shape of the ocean and very much did inform the shape of the ocean 2.5 billion years ago whenever all this stuff started. Because it used to be, what did they call it? Not a super ocean.
SPEAKER_10: Panthasia?
SPEAKER_09: I can't remember. But basically it's a super ocean. Like all the ocean. Yeah, all the ocean. But the current shape, like what I'm about to say might sound silly. Like the current shape of the ocean prevents the equator and the poles from having like wildly different temperatures. They have pretty wildly different temperatures according to us, like humans walking around on the planet. But if it wasn't for the fact that it was, that the oceans ended up shaped in such a way where they are supplying, like always supplying this warm equatorial water toward those polar regions, the difference in temperature between the poles and the equator would be, I don't even know. It would be crazy how big that disparity would be. It'd be a mess.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It wouldn't be like, oh, it's like hot at the equator and boy, it's super cold there. It would be, you know, I wish somebody knew. What, hundreds of degrees?
SPEAKER_10: I don't know. But I do know that really weird stuff happens along temperature gradients. So you would not want something like that. It would not be hospitable for us. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: But all of the ocean currents, and because of the way the oceans are shaped, because of the way the continents broke apart, influences climate all over the place.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. It carries water from here to there. And yeah, it's pretty interesting. And again, you can trace it all the way back to the movement of the plates. There's also carbon dioxide. The amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere at any given point in time also serves as a global thermostat, right? In that if there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, it warms up, kind of like what's going on right now. And when there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, the water, sea levels rise. And as the sea levels rise, rocks are weathered, and a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere gets sucked out of it into water to form limestone. It essentially gets locked away from the atmosphere. And as this happens over enough time, the atmosphere cools. As the atmosphere cools, sea levels lower again, and the opposite process starts to happen. Those rocks that are exposed now get weathered, and that CO2 enters the atmosphere again. And then another way that the plate tectonics influence this is the stuff that gets formed into limestone settles to the bottom of the ocean. And it's just trapped. It's trapped CO2. But as it forms part of a plate that ends up back down into the core, into the asthenosphere, and gets heated up and turned into magma again, when it comes out of the volcano, it brings all that CO2 with it, releasing it in the atmosphere. It's a really long, it's the carbon cycle. And over really long geological time scales, it keeps the Earth from getting too warm or too cold. It's a thermostat. And again, without plate tectonics, this would not be possible, and we probably would not be here today talking about this. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_09: If you're wondering where, you know, if things are moving even that slowly, where might we be in a million years from now or something like that? That's a good question. And there are people that are studying exactly that. There are computer simulations, obviously, that scientists can run to see which way we're going and how fast we're going and what might bump into what at what point. And they have estimated some things. They're good enough now to know and say out loud, like, hey, listen, this is a guess still. We have no idea what's going to happen, really. Steve McLaughlin Tell all this to us in a million years.
SPEAKER_10: Steve McLaughlin In a million years, or a hundred million years.
SPEAKER_09: But they're saying, what we think might happen is one day, just as there were previous supercontinents before Pangea, we will all be reunited again. And maybe that's when humanity really comes together. As one supercontinent in about 250 million years, and they've already pre-named it Pangea Proxima, which I guess is just, you know, what they're approximating it will be like. There'll be new mountain ranges. And in fact, they think once Africa eventually finishes going north and hits Europe, then that may be like, if you think the Himalayas or something, wait till you get a load of, like, the mountain range that's coming in a hundred million years.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. The rock needs to do a movie about that.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, that's probably in development already. Steve McLaughlin Probably. Steve McLaughlin Waiting on the SAG strike to finish. Steve McLaughlin Pangea Proxima. Steve McLaughlin But the rock's going to get in the middle and hold both the continents apart. Steve McLaughlin Keep it from happening. Yeah. Steve McLaughlin Yeah. Steve McLaughlin You just sold the movie.
SPEAKER_10: Steve McLaughlin Yep. Steve McLaughlin So, you got anything else? Steve McLaughlin I got nothing else.
SPEAKER_09: This is really fascinating. I mean, 0.6 inches a year doesn't sound like a lot. But when you're talking about plate tectonics, it's moving. Steve McLaughlin Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: A lot happens. Well, if you were jazzed by this, you can go search plate tectonics on the website howstuffworks.com or anywhere on the internet, and it will bring up all sorts of neat little earth science lessons. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Steve McLaughlin All right.
SPEAKER_09: I'm going to call this Don't Listen to Us Because We're Not Vets. Steve McLaughlin Because on the white dog poop short stuff, we talked about cooking your own dog food, which a lot of vets wrote in and said, don't do that unless you really have it dialed in with a pet nutritionist. Steve McLaughlin Mm-hmm. Steve McLaughlin And we talked about grain-free. I mentioned grain-free because one of our dogs required it because of an autoimmune issue, sweet Buckley. And I was under the misinterpretation that, or the misunderstanding rather, that that was just sort of good for all dogs. And they were like, no, grain-free can lead to cardiac abnormalities. Steve McLaughlin Duh.
SPEAKER_10: Steve McLaughlin So we heard from lots of vets.
SPEAKER_09: This is from a very frustrated vet and stuff you should know, fam. Steve McLaughlin Geez. Steve McLaughlin This is all it says. Hey, guys, your white dog poop episode drove me bonkers. Pet nutrition is a hot topic, unfortunately. Not only should people not be getting advice from you, but there are a lot of people on the internet, a lot of quacks even, that within their own industry, they're saying that you shouldn't listen to. Steve McLaughlin Sure. Steve McLaughlin Home-cooked diets are difficult to do. We see all sorts of medical abnormalities from unbalanced diets. It should be only done under the guidance of the veterinary nutritionist. Please do not even look for random recipes online, even if they're written by a vet, because of the quacks in our industry. Steve McLaughlin I want to just stick up for my wife here and be like, yes, she's got
SPEAKER_10: that covered. She's not some dummy who just looks up random recipes on the internet. Steve McLaughlin Oh, are you guys making your own food?
SPEAKER_10: Steve McLaughlin Yeah, she cooks for Momo quite a bit. Steve McLaughlin Oh, okay. Steve McLaughlin I think that's what they're responding to, is I've mentioned that. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I think you mentioned it, but one of my friends is doing it, and
SPEAKER_09: I texted him right away, and I was like, hey, dude, stop cooking for your dog until you get it down. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I mean, and the vet's right.
SPEAKER_10: You should talk to a nutritionist. There's also, like, nutrition info sites, like legitimate sites, that kind of help you balance what you're cooking for your dog. But yes, random recipes on the internet are not a good idea unless you're cooking, like, chicken dianne or something. Steve McLaughlin I think he was under the impression, like,
SPEAKER_09: hey, give him some fruits and veggies and protein, and, like, you're done. Steve McLaughlin Right. Steve McLaughlin And that's just not the case. Steve McLaughlin No. Steve McLaughlin And in fact, we're not one to buzz mark it too much, but this vet said balance.it is a great option if you're looking for legitimate recipes and formulations and supplements.
SPEAKER_10: I think that's the one that Yumi went and found initially. Steve McLaughlin Oh, sure it is.
SPEAKER_09: Steve McLaughlin Right. Steve McLaughlin Grain-free is also dangerous. It's been linked to dilated cardiomyopathy, still a developing area of research, but grain sensitivity is super rare in dogs, and grain is fine for the vast majority of dogs. Steve McLaughlin So, when you recommend a food, look for a food that is compliant with WSAVA guidelines. I think we can all agree these are pretty reasonable things to want in a pet food company. Most of the food on the shelf does not meet these standards, though, so people should talk to their vets. I'm thankful you didn't touch on raw food, which is trash, or the idea that vets are paid by big pet food because we're not. Steve McLaughlin Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And that is from a frustrated vet. I'm not even going to say stuff you should not fan anymore. Steve McLaughlin I have to say, yeah, Yumi went online and
SPEAKER_10: got her WSVA certification over the course of many years. Steve McLaughlin Heck yeah. Steve McLaughlin So, yeah, she got it all covered, everybody. Steve McLaughlin Of course you do in your house. Steve McLaughlin Do I sound defensive? Who was that for? They didn't even sign their name after all that? Steve McLaughlin They signed it. Steve McLaughlin They dragged us like that and then didn't even sign their name? Steve McLaughlin They signed it as a frustrated vet, so I
SPEAKER_09: took that to mean that's how they wanted to be addressed. Steve McLaughlin I see.
SPEAKER_10: Well, what was their email address? Steve McLaughlin DrQuack at vet.com.
SPEAKER_09: Steve McLaughlin Okay.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you, Dr. Quack. I mean, frustrated vet. We appreciate that. We know that you are looking out for all the animal babies out there. Hats off to you for that. And we would never accuse you of being owned by big pet food. Steve McLaughlin No. Steve McLaughlin That's just crazy talk. If you want to get in touch with us anonymously or otherwise and say, you guys stink. You stink to high heaven. We'd love to hear that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Announcer Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
SPEAKER_03: For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Steve McLaughlin Congratulations to Boston Children's Hospital,
SPEAKER_04: first place award winner for Innovation in Industry at the 2023 Unconventional Awards presented by T-Mobile for Business. Boston Children's is dedicated to improving and advancing the health and well-being of children around the world through its life-changing work in clinical care. And it is home to the world's largest pediatric research enterprise. Boston Children's is revolutionizing healthcare with T-Mobile's 5G solutions. Through secure, private, and reliable networks, practitioners can access internal systems and applications securely from virtually anywhere. T-Mobile for Business congratulates Boston Children's Hospital for their innovation and unconventional thinking.
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