Less than half the parts in Chevy and GMC trucks are made in America.

Made in American (not the camel)

The most American truck? The Toyota Tundra, made with more than 70% American parts.

I could make the obvious, cheesy joke about how a Japanese company is making the most American truck, but there’s a more important takeaway here. And it's starting to give us an idea how interconnected manufacturing and the modern global economy has become.

We hear a lot about globalization these days, mostly in terms of trade agreements like NAFTA. We also hear a lot of talk that treats globalization like it's some brand new phenomenon. Actually, globalization dates back (at least) to the Bronze Age. Yes, ancient societies were hardly isolated citadels surrounded by barbarians.

The Ancient Sumerian texts (some of the oldest in the world) fairly often referred to trade partners. We’ve managed to decipher some of these partnerships—including deals with ancient Middle Eastern states like Egypt.

We couldn’t match the name of one trade partner, Meluha, though, to a location until recent archaeological discoveries. As it turned out, Meluha is actually the Harappan civilization.

Also known as the Indus River Valley civilization, it was located in our modern-day India and Pakistan. Meluha was some 2,300 miles away from the Sumerians—a tremendous distance for this time period.

As time went on, the level of globalization only grew. We've found Roman coins in ruins from ancient India, and we know goods from as far away as China made it to Rome. Medieval Europe was chronically short on coinage, since all their silver was going to India and China.

(Europe had nothing India or China wanted, but India and China had all sorts of spices and such that Europe wanted.)

Apart from the Roman Empire, Europe was an unimportant backwater on the global scale until the Renaissance and the Age of Sail.

So, if anyone tries to convince you that globalization is something new, or that human history isn't one of perpetual interconnection, well...laugh. Laugh harder than you would have if I’d actually made some cheesy joke about a Japanese car company being more American than an American company.

J Harlen Bretz, 1949

Geologists have a tendency to get really worked up about flood-related theories. Early in the history of the science, the Biblical flood provided the foundation for most every claim, and we approached all of geology in that context.

Evidence built up over time until it forced the geological community to acknowledge that nothing of the sort had happened. In fact, they went so far as to construct a doctrine called uniformitarianism, which claimed that all past geological processes are the same as the ones operating now.

Then, in 1920, a geologist named J Harlen Bretz developed a new set of flood theory that would shake things up all over again.

Bretz's research and field work led him to propose a series of absolutely catastrophic floods in the Pacific Northwest. I won't go into all the various iterations of the idea over the years, but the floods as we understand them now are far more destructive than almost any other geological events today.

The Cordilleran

During the ice ages, the Cordilleran continental ice sheet dwarfed any glacier existing today. It and its several sibling glaciers around the world held enough ice to lower the sea levels by hundreds of feet. As the temperature gradually increased, however, a massive lake, around the size of one of the Great Lakes, began to melt into the top of the ice sheet, somewhere in Western Montana.

Over time, cracks began to grow in the massive ice dam holding the lake in, until it finally shattered, releasing all the water at once. The floodwaters would have moved between 45 and 60 miles per hour, cresting at over 400 feet tall in the Columbia River Gorge and the Willamette River Valley.

McCoy Fields, 2017

Flood waters carried enormous boulders as though they were twigs, deforming entire landscapes. The debris from the flood flowed hundreds of miles through Idaho and Oregon, and from there well into the Pacific Ocean.

Oh, and there wasn't just a single flood. The ice sheet eventually formed a new lake and the cycle repeated itself as many as forty times. This all took place well before any humans arrived in North America.

The geological establishment resisted Bretz’s ideas for years, but Bretz and his allies eventually won the day in a crushing victory. Decades later, Bretz complained that he no longer had any enemies to gloat over.

_________

Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy: Now, here’s a quotation:

“Nature gave men two ends -- one to sit on, and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most.”

— Robert Albert Bloch

It Begins...

On April 5th, 1815, Mount Tambora—in present-day Indonesia—began erupting.

The noise made by these eruptions was loud enough to be heard hundreds of miles away. Some English garrisons thought it was cannon fire and sent troops around their islands to investigate.

The eruptions continued until the whole mountain exploded from April 10th and 11th. Mount Tambora's eruption was the single largest in recorded history. So much ash was blasted into the sky that it was pitch black outside as far as four hundred miles away from the mountain.

Tsunamis ravaged the shores of countless islands, and countless more died from ashfall-related complications. (Volcanic ash is really, really nasty stuff, filled with tiny bits of volcanic glass that shred your lungs. Note to file: Don't breathe it in, and don't drink water contaminated with it.)

That was just the start of things, though. By 1816, the Mount Tambora’s airborne ash had spread through the atmosphere to the Northern Hemisphere, kicking off the Year Without a Summer.

A dry fog persisted throughout the spring and summer (what scientists call a “stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil”) that blocked much of the sunlight and kept the temperature from rising to normal levels. Frost began killing off crops in North America, and heavy rain drowned crops in Europe.

Massive famines cased severe social unrest and famine. Hundreds of thousands died in North America, Europe, and Asia. Hungary experienced brown snow, while Italy saw red snow falling throughout the year. The family of Joseph Smith was forced to leave Vermont due to famine, kicking off a chain of events that would lead to the founding of the Mormon Church.

Karl Dranis was inspired by the lack of horses in Germany (no oats to feed them) to invent the velocipede, ancestor of the bicycle.

Mary Shelley, trapped in a Villa with her husband and friends, decided to have a contest to write the scariest story. Her entry, Frankenstein, is commonly considered the original science fiction novel.

I could go on listing consequences for a while. The rapid migration into Indiana and Illinois, leading to their statehoods. Spectacular sunsets. And on and on.

Mount Tambora’s eruption changed the face of the world as we know it. Here's the thing, though: This isn't an anomalous event. It is a singular one, due to its size, but natural disasters and climatic events are major drivers of history, and are far-too seldom treated as such. The current civil war in Syria? One of the primary causes is a drought that led to crop failures.

As much as we like to pretend that we're the bosses of the planet, we need to remember how big our planet is, and how easily it can devastate civilization with a slight shrug.

_________

Quotable

Dear Yard Ramp Guy: I’ve read your quote-off challenge and take it on…only backwards, starting with “Z.” I’ll meet you at “M” in mid-April.

“Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.”

— Evan Esar