Archive: Discursive on the Gamburtsev
To Climb These Mountains, You Need to Dive
My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: Ocean mountains? Oh, my.
The Gamburtsev Discursive
There's a mountain range on Earth that no human has ever seen.
The Gamburtsev Mountain Range is about the size of the European Alps and are as rugged as the Rocky Mountains. Why has no one ever seen the mountain range? Because it's buried underneath 10,800 feet of ice in Antarctica.
Oh, and water flows uphill there.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Gamburtsevs is the ruggedness to them. They're more than a hundred million years old. By now they should have eroded enough to resemble the Appalachians, instead of looking like the Rockies.
Scientists today think the mountain range has actually been preserved by the ice above it—a counter-intuitive result, since absolutely nothing erodes mountains faster than glacial ice in normal circumstances.
The Antarctic ice sheets are so thick, however, that the ice starts to behave in a bizarre manner. As the pressure grows stronger farther and farther down into the ice sheet, the freezing point of water starts to drop lower and lower, until liquid water eventually exists at the bottom; the freezing point of water down there is simply just too low. The pressure actually forces the water to flow uphill!
We've identified other mountain ranges that were presumably buried underneath ice sheets during the Ice Age, including the Torngat Mountains in Canada and the Scandinavian Mountains.
If the ice in Antarctica ever melts, one effect will be that the mountains (currently with an average height of 8,850 feet) would rebound upwards. Ice sheets are so heavy that they actually press the continental crust downward into the mantle.
Removing the Antarctic ice sheets would cause the Gamburtsevs to rebound back up to 10,800 feet in height.
Thankfully, we're not likely to see them any time soon. Even the worst models for global warming don't predict that rebounding scenario as extremely likely. Which is a good thing because it would raise the sea level some 200 feet.
Archive: What Happened to Everyone?
Why Cahokia Went Down
My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: What really happened in America before Columbus?
Civilization & Its Discontent
One thing that happens to me—often—as I get older:
Learning that something I was taught in school was completely wrong. As you get older, it’ll also probably happen to you more and more, as well. We have more scientists and other researchers than ever before (in fact, 90% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today). So, human knowledge is advancing faster than ever.
Still: My Cup Remains Half Full
Plate tectonics was only discovered in the 60s. There are tons of people alive today who were taught nothing about it; they often learned those older, incorrect models of geology.
The most recent thing I learned that I'd been taught wrongly? America before Columbus.
When I was a kid, we were taught that America was a wild, largely empty place, with just a few Native Americans wandering around—like a small group of people alone in a stadium. As it turns out, though, that stadium was pretty packed.
Charles C. Mann's excellent book 1491 is an exploration of recent historical and archaeological study into the pre-Columbian Americas. It turns out that massive, densely populated civilizations abounded in the Americas. The city of Cahokia was the size of London around the time Columbus showed up, and it was located near modern-day St. Louis.
The Aztec and Incan Empires both had populations comparable to many European nations at the time. Countless souls lived in massive cities in the Amazon rainforest. These last are the most mysterious of the lot, since it's such poor territory to preserve archaeological remnants. As we find more and more information on them, it becomes more and more apparent how impressive they must have been.
So, what happened to everyone? Well, in a single word: disease. Apocalyptic outbreaks of smallpox, syphilis, malaria, and more, all brought by Europeans, raced across the Americas, wiping out an absolutely terrifying 90% of the population of the Americas. The Native American populations Europeans encountered? In a very real sense, they were survivors of an apocalypse.
1491 is far from the most cheerful book I've ever read, but it's an incredibly informative one. It should be required reading for anyone interested in American history.
Archives: Roman Concrete
Learning from the School of Hard Rocks
My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: Roman concrete.
It's Written in the Concrete
Though the Romans have a pretty impressive reputation, in many regards they weren't nearly so clever as people tend to think they were.
For example, their fabled legions, while effective early in Roman history, became rather useless toward the end: the knight was basically invented by barbarians looking to defeat Roman legions. Even after it became apparent that the legions were a tool of the past, the Romans foolishly just kept sticking with it.
However, one area in which they were unquestionably brilliant was in architecture and construction.
Much has been made of Roman aqueducts and other construction techniques, but one technology that doesn't get discussed nearly as much as it should is their concrete. Roman concrete—known as opus caementicium—is, interestingly, much more durable than modern day concrete.
We have many examples of Roman concrete that have survived all the way to today. The Pantheon in Rome (not to be confused with the Parthenon), for instance, is a concrete dome that has survived intact since 126 AD.
Even more impressive is Roman concrete's resistance to seawater. Seawater is incredibly corrosive to modern buildings, corroding and destroying them in mere decades. We're lucky to get 50 years out of modern concrete. Roman concrete, however, can survive immersion in seawater for centuries or even millennia; plenty of docks and pilings from Roman times can still be found off European shorelines.
What was their secret? Well, we don't know the exact composition of Roman concrete, but we do know one of the major secrets: they used volcanic ash instead of the fly ash we use today. When submerged in seawater, the seawater reacts with the mineral phillipsite, found in volcanic ash. Over time, a new mineral known as tobermorite forms in the cracks of the concrete. As it forms, the concrete actually gets stronger and stronger.
Roman concrete today is stronger than when it was first laid down.
Many people are trying to mimic Roman concrete today. Not only is it more durable and long lasting, but it's also cheaper and more environmentally friendly. The problem, of course, is the extremely long setting time: most builders don't want to wait long enough for Roman concrete to set.
Haste makes waste. Some people are okay with that. Roman concrete endures.
Archive: Forklift-Pallet Supremacy
Or: Hit the Road, Jack
My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: not as numerous as cardboard cuts but much, much worse...
Ground Your Lift
Forklifts weigh massively more than cars do. They are not toys. If you play with one, you're going to get hurt or die. Not that those people apt to play with them in the first place are going to listen, but at least I tried.
In all seriousness, they're one of the leading cause of serious workplace injuries in warehouses. (The leading cause of minor injuries—er, hands down—are cardboard cuts.)
An early ancestor of the forklift was a manually powered hoist that we employed to lift a load. Simple in design and easy to manipulate, it generated lift through basic mechanical advantage. Those stuck around for a while without changing much.
In 1906, though, the Pennsylvania railroad introduced battery powered trucks to move luggage at stations. These two developments quickly began converging in the years leading up to the first world war, when a labor shortage—brought on by the war and the Spanish Flu—spurred the development of early hauling tractors and trucks.
We continued to develop these over the years, and the introduction of hydraulics set the pace for modern usefulness.
The most important piece of the puzzle, though, is one that no one blinks twice at today: the standardized wooden pallet. Skids (essentially pallets with no boards on the bottom) had existed since Ancient Egypt.
I'm Inclined to Inspect
Up until the 1930s, barrels and crates remained the preferred shipping options. Pallets, however, came together with forklifts in a perfect storm, and we rapidly standardized them, along with forklift sizes. Though there are many different pallet standards today, they largely remain homogenous in any given region.
We also standardized pallet jacks. (Interestingly enough, the pallet jack dates back to 1918, making the forklift actually older than the pallet jack.) The second world war only served to cement forklifts and pallets as preeminent in shipping.
This might all seem like idle trivia, but it's actually incredibly important. We design pretty much everything in that world—from truck widths and road widths to warehouse layouts and cardboard box sizes—with the different sizes of pallets in mind.
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Quotable
Cheers to you, Yard Ramp Guy. May 2023 bring greater reach to your business. In the meantime…
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
— Bill Vaughn