Christopher Dewdney

If the author hadn't categorized his own work as "poetry" I wd've been tempted to create a new "shelf" for him. Perhaps "fossil memory" wd do for this one. I was surprised to open this & find that he'd signed it for me: "inclusive pithdong". I imagine that latter word was meant as a pun off of "dipthong" (aka "gliding vowel"). Dunno, but I like the word combinations. I think he might've written it b/c he combined the "a" & "e", dipthong style, in his writing of the name of mine that the bk was signed to. It's been so long since I've seen anything by him that I just looked him up online & was happy to find that he's still alive & has plenty of new bks for me to read.

This one is published by Toronto's The Coach House Press who, as usual, do a beautiful job. It might be Dewdney's 1st bk. The cover is subtle & almost gives the appearance of an actual geological survey. Dewdney's collages are vaguely reminiscent of Max Ernst's. They combine fossil images & technical illustrations & the like - much in the same way the language does. What I like the most about this writing is the way it's like a manual for a poetic analysis of the history of the (meta)physical environment. Take this paragraph:

"Some things are not accounted for. The transitional nature of the memory jackets allow them to become imprinted with the dreams of isolated individuals even hundreds of miles away. The concretion responds to the charge induced in the memory jacket by the dream utilizing the electro-static properties of the red oil lens. The concretion moves slowly, aligning itself, and begins arbitrarily to transmit previously recorded dreams mutated over the years by stellar and meteoric interference. One dream thusly created attained an independent consciousness and began to feed from the sleeping minds of human beings. It could telepathically transmit hallucinations and was protected by a field of deja vue."… (altro)

Another bk for the "fossil memory" shelf.

"The (pointing) sound (lake) track (night) is (cathedral
nocturne) suddenly (amazon noon) conscious (giant clams)
of (vanguard clouding) itself (turning)."

The section entitled "Remote Control" begins:

"On Fossilization (Remember; the emotions you are feeling may
not be your own.)

"Of every seven years we are entirely re-composed. That from
which we are made, what we see out of, is completely trans-
formed in a transubstantiation of actuality. The replacement of
reality with fiction is the same process. The rug is pulled in front
of your eyes off a facsimile of itself. Remote control alien re-
placement of all that which you call tangible."

At the very end of the bk he begins "The Song of Remote Control" w/:

"Give yourselevs up to Remote Control.
There is no choice, either you come known
or not knowing. You come."

Some people read science journals & then write science fiction. Dewdney seems to read science journals & to then write semi-stream-of-consciousness mappings of the mind.… (altro)

More 'fossil memory', more geology & remote control, Dewndey themes, "A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario Books I & II" from an unnatural intelligence.

"There is nothing arbitrary in the predestined universe of the past. Emerald crystal caves in hot black tar. Cloudy airport haze and warm afternoons. Basement parties & guests annihilated in gasoline pools that burst into flame. Moon passing behind fast night clouds. Hot wind and moth tunnels traced by pheromones. There are conferences to which we are interminably drawn over which forces other than human preside.

"One hears the nervous tapping of fingers.

"I am walking south on Wharncliffe Road, everything is working by remote control."… (altro)

Not without its flaws. In particular, there's little about modern atmospheric research, and everything could use more detail. Still, the book is fascinating. The prose is neither dry nor overdramatic.

> A typical weather report three billion years ago. First of all, the days were shorter. The Earth was spinning three times faster than it is now. A full day-night cycle was eight hours long, with a little more than four hours of darkness and four hours of pale sunlight because, even though UV levels were high, the young sun was fainter than today. You’d definitely have needed an oxygen mask — the atmosphere was almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide. And when the moon rose, you’d have known it. It was much closer to Earth and would have appeared 12 times larger than it does now. Today, the moon looks to be the same size as a dime held at arm’s length. Three billion years ago, it would have looked the size of a cantaloupe

> Today the atmosphere is composed of 13 gases, of which two dominate — oxygen at 21 percent and inert nitrogen at 78 percent. Those ratios are important. Take oxygen, for instance. Every single percentage point over 21 percent increases the likelihood of forest fires by 70 percent. If oxygen ever reached 25 percent, all land vegetation — from the high Arctic to the equatorial rainforests — would eventually burst into flame in a raging, planetary wildfire. Nitrogen also sits at a sweet spot. If nitrogen levels fell to 75 percent, the climate would spiral into a deep freeze from which the Earth would never recover.

> Carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily decreasing since their highest levels in the primordial atmosphere, when it was the dominant gas. Gas newbies, oxygen and nitrogen, pushed out carbon dioxide to the extent that by the Cambrian period, 500 million years ago, carbon dioxide was already a trace gas, with concentrations at about 7,000 ppm. Concentrations of carbon dioxide decreased to 3,000 ppm during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, more than 60 million years ago. Then they fell lower, 34 million years ago, to 760 ppm. You can see where this is going. Today carbon dioxide concentrations stand at approximately 400 ppm. Over the long term, in a hundred million years or so, one of the most essential gases for the continued existence of life is going to run out.

> Earth’s atmosphere is pasted in an alarmingly thin layer — 99 percent of it lies within 18 miles of the surface.

> The ozone layer occupies the lower portion of the stratosphere, generally between 12 and 19 miles above Earth, depending on the time of year. Not only does it provide protection from ultraviolet light, but it also provides a thermal lid to the troposphere … So what happens in the ozone layer? When UV light strikes oxygen molecules in the lower stratosphere, it converts some of them into ozone molecules — a kind of hybrid oxygen, with three molecules instead of two. (Lightning strikes also produce ozone, which is why you can smell it in the air after storms.) These ozone molecules then absorb even more UV radiation from the sunlight, which splits them back to plain oxygen and releases a bit of heat at the same time. This cycle, called the Chapman cycle, is continuous, with oxygen molecules reacting with UV to create ozone molecules that split into oxygen molecules. The ozone layer is therefore considerably warmer than the air below and above it, sitting at about 0°C. … It acts as a thermal barrier, an inversion layer if you like, separating the frigid stratosphere from the equally frigid troposphere. That means that the ozone layer is the highest point that atmospheric convection currents can reach, and because convection is the engine of weather, driving everything from evening zephyrs to hurricanes, there is no weather in the stratosphere. The ozone layer’s double duty is to protect life from unmitigated UV radiation and to put a vertical limit on weather.

> At about 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere gives way to the thermosphere, which stretches another 160 miles above the Earth’s surface. The thermosphere is very hot — 500 to 2,000°C, though that is almost an abstract reading. There are too few particles per square yard to transfer any of that heat to objects moving through it. It couldn’t melt a snowflake. Otherwise the space station, which circles our planet well inside the thermosphere on an orbit between 200 and 240 miles above the Earth, would burn up in a few seconds.

> auroras are more than 40 miles above the Earth’s surface. Besides, there’s not enough atmosphere up there to carry sound waves. … the auroras have a younger brother called Steve (for strong thermal emission velocity enhancement). Discovered by aurora chasers in Alberta in 2017, Steve appears as a slightly curved vertical ribbon of white light in the sky that sometimes accompanies the northern lights. The ribbon is actually a stream of wildly hot gases (3,000°C), flowing at a speed of 770 miles per hour. Of course, Steve has been there all along; it’s just that new high-resolution night photography has teased him out of the background.

> the water vapor that makes up clouds is not like the mist from a sprayer nozzle or steam from a teakettle. Each droplet of water in a cloud is much, much smaller. It is only a millionth of a millimeter in diameter. Millions would fit into the period at the end of this sentence … a typical cloud — a puffy, small fair-weather cumulus like the one William Wordsworth wrote about in his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” — measuring a few hundred yards cubed, contains only a bathtub’s worth of water.

> You can see the dew point and relative humidity in action when you watch the contrail of a high-flying jet. They are literally seeding clouds, providing the microscopic particles necessary for water vapor to cling to. Some days, if the relative humidity is low, the contrails evaporate instantly.

> Even on a hot summer day, balloonists with just a few thousand feet under their belts begin to feel the distinct chill of altitude. Ten miles up, the temperature never rises above -40°C … On average, the temperature drops 3°C for every 1,000 feet of altitude

> The tiny water droplets that form clouds are so small that their high surface tension prevents them from freezing. Cloud droplets remain liquid right down to -40°C. Only then do they freeze. (Unless they’re sprinkled with a little silver iodide … Cirrus clouds, at 18,000 feet and above, undergo their whole life cycle, from formation to evaporation, in subzero temperatures

> Drops of drizzle, which are less than 0.5 millimeters across (salt-grain size), have a terminal velocity of 4.5 miles per hour, while a large raindrop about five millimeters across (house-fly size) falls at the rate of 20 miles per hour. By comparison, a falling human being hurtles to the ground at a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour. … Raindrops are not teardrop shaped. The smallest, like those that make up drizzle or Scotch mist, are almost perfectly spherical. As they get larger, into the five millimeter range, their bottoms flatten out with air resistance and they assume a sort of bun-like profile. Raindrops larger than five millimeters get a dimple indent in the bottom of their buns and begin to look more and more like mushroom caps or fat parachutes. Nine millimeters is the upper limit for raindrop size. Any larger than that and they break up into smaller drops because, at higher terminal speeds, air resistance increases by the square of the velocity.

> fossils of raindrop impressions were discovered on a farm near Prieska, South Africa. A layer of fresh ash from a volcano preserved these traces as the ash transformed into rock. When the rock was dated, it turned out that this passing shower occurred 2.7 billion years ago. Scientists analyzing the tiny impact craters realized that they were more than a time capsule, they were a snapshot of the thickness of atmosphere during the Great Oxygenation Event. They estimated that the ancient raindrops measured 3.8 to 5.3 millimeters across and that, given the radius of the splashes, the atmospheric density was not that much different from today.

> during the Vietnam War: a covert offensive named Operation Popeye initiated in March 1967. For the next five years, the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron regularly seeded late-season monsoon clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, extending the rainy period by 30 to 45 days and making life miserable for Vietcong soldiers using the trail. The slogan for the operation was “make mud, not war.” Five years after Operation Popeye was shelved in 1972, during the Environmental Modification Convention in Geneva, the U.S. signed the international treaty banning weather warfare. The treaty came into effect in 1978.

> North American Weather Consultants, got its start in 1950 and has been seeding clouds over Utah ever since. Today it is a flourishing company, and weather scientists in Utah estimate its efforts add about 250,000 acre-feet to state rivers and reservoirs annually. North American Weather Consultants is just one of many rainmaking enterprises.

> Hurricane John, a Methuselah among hurricanes, lasted 31 days in August and September 1994. John crossed the international dateline twice, becoming Typhoon John and then doubling back to become Hurricane John again. If a hurricane skips from the Atlantic basin into the Pacific basin, like Earl did in August 2004, the name has to change. Earl became Frank.

> Wherever that groove occurs, whether between the polar cell and the Ferrel cell or between the Ferrel cell and the Hadley cell, a jet stream sits directly on that border. That’s why there are two of them in each hemisphere.

> [FitzRoy] began to standardize the collection of weather data from 15 inland observation stations in England, linked by telegraph to his office. In 1859, after a national maritime disaster, he seized on the opportunity to design weather charts for what he called “forecasting the weather.” … He strayed off the scientific path even more wildly when he had FitzRoy storm glasses installed at quayside in every major British port. These devices were to be consulted by sailors before they ventured out, but they were merely glass cylinders filled with a cocktail of potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, ethanol, camphor and water. This mixture occasionally produced crystals or floating particles, and these, FitzRoy insisted, foretold changes in the weather. In truth, they had no connection to the weather at all. Nonetheless, FitzRoy did have the distinction of publishing the first daily weather forecast in the Times of London

> The Coriolis effect causes a low to rotate counterclockwise and a high to rotate clockwise. In the southern hemisphere, the opposite holds true.

> the birth of a low-pressure cell in North America. Here, lows often form when a warm, southern high-pressure zone bumps into a cool, northern high-pressure zone. Due to the fact that high-pressure systems rotate clockwise, the winds at the northern edge of the southern system blow in the opposite direction to the winds at the southern edge of the northern system. They are like cogs grinding against each other. The only “solution” to this problem is a swirl rotating in the opposite direction, counterclockwise. This is the beginning of the cyclone, which becomes a low-pressure area.

> Slicing through a front vertically, in cross section, you immediately notice that it is wedge shaped. Cool air sinks, hugs the ground, so that when a cold air mass is advancing and encounters a warm air mass, it wedges under the warmer air and pushes it up and over the cold front. The rising air carries water vapor through the dew point, which then condenses, first creating clouds and then rain … Cold fronts have a steeper wedge and move faster than warm fronts, two reasons why their arrival is more abrupt. A cold front is always dramatic, creating thunderstorms in the summer and rain and snow in the winter. Warm fronts aren’t as aggressive; they are more gradual, and their approach is easy to read. Because they move slowly and have longer, more tapered wedge profiles, sometimes hundreds of miles long, it’s easier to predict a warm front’s arrival. The sequence of clouds that ride the approach of the warm front begin with high cirrus that gradually transition into altostratus, which are then replaced by nimbostratus as the clouds lower and thicken over the retreating wedge of cold air.

> The six seasons in the temperate zone are hibernal (winter), prevernal (late winter, early spring), vernal (spring), aestival (summer), serotinal (late summer) and autumn. I like these nuanced divisions, particularly prevernal and serotinal, because they capture something of the magic of seasonal transitions.

> According to paleoanthropologist Curtis W. Marean, a professor at Arizona State University, central Africa became virtually uninhabitable, and the only safe haven for our ancient ancestors was the sea coast of South Africa. Ocean levels had dropped more than 330 feet, but here, on the coast, plentiful marine life and edible shore plants tempered the hard, cold millennia. Even then, it was tough going. During a particularly severe period, as the glaciers advanced to their maximum extent, Marean postulates that our species dropped from more than 10,000 individuals to a just few hundred souls. This population choke point left a telltale genetic imprint in our genes.

> By the time the Wisconsin glaciation entered its most severe period, or last glacial maximum (LGM) about 26,000 years ago, our restless, nomadic species had spread to the far corners of the planet — from northern Europe and throughout Asia to Australia, as well as North and South America. Our colonization of the world took place during the worst ice age since the Andean-Saharan ice age, 460 million years before that. Over the cold, dark millenia of the Wisconsin ice age, we developed complex languages and culture and religion. The Lascaux cave paintings were executed 17,300 years ago at the height of the LGM. Rendered by flickering torchlight on limestone walls, these exquisite paintings of ice-age mammals are snapshots of a lost era when Europe was either covered by Arctic tundra or buried under glaciers. Two-mile-high cliffs of continental glaciers were parked just north of present-day London, England, a mere 435 miles north of Lascaux, and world sea levels were 330 feet lower than today.

> When the global melt was really underway, about 15,000 years ago, Greenland’s average temperature shot up by 16°C in a period of 50 years, perhaps fewer. And around 12,000 years ago, the definitive end of the Wisconsin, Greenland’s mean temperature skyrocketed by 15°C in one decade. As a result, the reset global temperature, the new “normal,” was probably 6°C warmer. Climatologists now refer to this as “abrupt climate change.”

> Paulus decided to give his war-weary troops a weeklong furlough to enjoy the sunny, warm weather. They had to wait for supplies anyway, and they had easily bested the Russian troops they’d encountered on the way. Surely they could afford a rest, especially as other German divisions were already engaging the Russians on the outskirts of Stalingrad. Almost certainly, the furlough cost the Germans Stalingrad. It gave the Russians just enough time to reinforce the city before Paulus joined the battle on September 7. By early October, the Germans controlled 80 percent of Stalingrad, but again the weather came to Russia’s rescue. Heavy October rains bogged down the German supply convoys and then, in a second stroke of meteorological fortune, the rain turned to snow … German soldiers who hadn’t been shot, captured or starved simply froze to death in their redoubts. If the summer weather hadn’t been so fine and if winter hadn’t arrived so early, it is likely the Germans would have gone on to take the rest of the country. Despite the terrible toll of the siege of Stalingrad, the Russians held on for 900 days, and Hitler’s occupation plans were ultimately thwarted.

> This “heat island” effect means that at night, a large city is usually 2.9°C warmer than the surrounding countryside. On calm nights, the temperature differential is often augmented over urban areas by a thermal inversion that traps pollution and heat in a dome … So the Summer of Love was not quite as pastoral for the citizens of impoverished urban neighborhoods with little access to air conditioning. Their ghettoes became claustrophobic ovens that eventually reached the ignition point in a series of riots that became known as the “long, hot summer.” Decades of inequity and oppression had reached the boiling point. Throughout June, riots broke out in Cincinnati, Buffalo, New York and Tampa. In July, there were even bigger riots in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Newark. Yet none of them compared to the insurrection that took place from July 23 to 28 in Detroit: the largest urban riot in American history, the 12th Street Riot. … Michigan Governor George Romney ordered in 8,000 National Guardsmen, and a few hours later President Lyndon Johnson mobilized 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. Even then, it would take another two days to restore order, by which time 43 people had died and 1,400 buildings were burned. In the two years following the riot, 193,000 citizens left the city. Detroit, once the headquarters of a prosperous automotive industry, became an economic disaster zone. The long, hot summer of 1967 had underwritten an entirely different scenario for the citizens of Detroit than it had for those in San Francisco.

> Earth’s magnetic field has decreased by 15 percent over the past 200 years, and the process appears to be accelerating at a rate of 5 percent per decade. This isn’t good. Earth’s magnetic field creates the Van Allen belt, a field of charged particles captured from the solar wind that wraps around the planet just beyond the exosphere… (altro)