The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool (19 page)
Read The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool Online
Authors: Wendy Northcutt
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #General, #Stupidity, #Essays
At Risk Survivor: Flyswatter
Confirmed True by Darwin
APRIL 2004, CALIFORNIA
One spring morning when a bug crawled across his desk, an adult education teacher gave twenty-five students an impromptu and involuntary lesson in safety—during his safety class. You see, Teach had an unusual paperweight, a 40 mm shell he had found on a hunting trip. It made a unique conversation piece. Using opaque reasoning, he assumed that the ordnance
must
be inert. But this particular ordnance was the teacher’s ticking ticket to fame.
Back to the spring morning when a bug crawled across his desk. Should he squash it with a tissue? Sweep it out the door? Leave it to pursue its happy existence and continue with his lesson? No, the teacher picked another alternative. He hefted the “inert” artillery shell and slammed it onto the short-lived insect.
“He assumed the artillery shell
must
be inert.”
The impact set off the primer, and the resulting explosion caused burns and shrapnel lacerations on his hand, forearm, and torso. No one else in the classroom was hurt. To the teacher’s further consolation his actions did succeed in one respect. That bug was eliminated.
Reference: cnn.com,
San Mateo Daily News
At Risk Survivor: Caulker Burner
Unconfirmed
SEPTEMBER 1999, SCOTLAND
The Ferguson shipyard at Port Glasgow uses a plasma cutter to cut steel for boats according to plans. For smaller holes the plasma torch just cuts out the hole. But for larger holes it is programmed to leave sections of uncut steel to make sure that no one can accidentally fall through.
Once the steelwork is positioned on the ship, a caulker burner uses an oxyacetylene blowtorch to burn through the six-inch sections, thereby creating the properly sized hole in the steel.
Enter our hero. Liam was a caulker burner, and he had been tasked with the job of going onto the ship and cutting away these sections. The piece in question had been designed to allow a large exhaust pipe to come through the deck.
“He decided to stand in the middle of the hole he was burning out.”
Liam began his task of burning away the steel. But Liam had decided to stand in the middle of the hole he was burning out, which led to a rather nasty fifteen-foot fall onto scaffolding below. He escaped with a few broken ribs and a month off work. Luckily for him, neither the blowtorch nor the large steel plate fell on top of him, therefore denying him a gloriously well-deserved Darwin Award.
Reference:
Greenock Telegraph
and the eyewitness account
of E. Buchanan, a twelve-year veteran of the shipyards
At Risk Survivor: The Turn of the Screw
Unconfirmed
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
The Kalgoorlie Nickel Smelter uses a piece of heavy machinery called a screw feeder, a large cast-iron tube with an Archimedean screw inside. As the screw turns, it transports chunks of ore along its length. One of the drawbacks to the design is that it can and does jam, if ore gets wedged between the edge of the screw and the casing.
When a jam occurs, correct procedure is…what? That’s right, shut down the machinery, open a hatch in the casing, and use a pry bar to dislodge the jam. Then start the machinery back up.
Incorrect procedure, as demonstrated by one worker, is to take a six-foot jimmy bar and bash the side of the casing in an effort to dislodge the jam. This is a bad idea because cast iron can fracture if abused. But the screw feeder is a rugged piece of equipment. It survived the bashing.
Our antihero then opened the inspection panel while the feeder was running. He spotted the jam and dislodged it with the same six-foot jimmy bar. Did I mention that the feeder was still running? Did I mention that it’s a large and rugged piece of equipment?
“He put an end to the smelter’s accident-free run in a public and highly amusing fashion.”
The screw grabbed the end of the jimmy bar and whipped it around violently. The free end of the bar intersected our man’s testicles. He landed in a crumpled, semiconscious heap ten feet away from the now free-running feeder. Fortunately for him the mangled bar missed him when it was flung free of the feeder moments later; otherwise this story would have a more somber ending.
The unfortunate worker sustained injuries to his genitalia that necessitated a hospital stay. And worse yet, he put an end to the smelter’s accident-free run in a public and highly amusing fashion. His pride was as crushed as his testicles. Almost.
Kalgoorlie is a mining town as famous for its hotels, hookers, and gambling as it is for being the center of Australia’s gold fields. But even by Kal’s standards this one was a ripper.
Reference: Eyewitness account of Mat Meyer, who says,
“My younger brother worked at the Kalgoorlie Nickel Smelter.
He was laughing so hard telling this story that he nearly wet himself.”
Reader Comment:
“Talk about a workplace fling!”
By Norm Sleep
SIBERIA, FEBRUARY, LATE PERMIAN PERIOD
252
MILLION YEARS AGO
I
n the Arctic night a herd of dicynodonts (mammal-like ox-sized reptiles) huddled against the polar wind. They nibbled small leaves exposed by the blowing snow in the dim light. Suddenly the ground lurched. The animals had felt numerous earthquakes. They bared their twin tusks and roared, fearfully looking up for rocks that might cascade upon them. But then quiet returned, and the herd went back to its grazing.
However, this was no ordinary quake. The shaking resumed and became more intense. On the horizon to the north a pillar of fire erupted, bringing a false dawn. Then, only a few hundred meters from the herd, the earth cracked open. The crack exploded into a chasm that soon extended to both horizons. Lava poured to the surface, followed by deafening detonations. Red-hot gas spewed from the crack, and glowing coal and rock fragments pelted through the air. A dense hot cloud of gas blew across the Siberian landscape, incinerating the trees in its path.
The dicynodonts fled, but nowhere was safe.
Local vicissitudes such as volcanoes and earthquakes are common over geological time. They remove countless individual organisms from the gene pool but usually have little effect on evolution. This time, however, the effect of the eruption was global and catastrophic. Seventy-five percent of land species and ninety-five percent of marine species would soon be extinct.
Geology of the Eruption
Beneath the grazing dicynodonts a giant pool of lava had welled up from the base of the lithosphere one hundred kilometers down. At forty kilometers the lava reached the earth’s crust and accumulated beneath the buoyant and deformable lower crustal rocks. Hours before the dicynodonts’ doom a crack opened above the lava pool. A river of lava rushed toward the surface of the planet.
Just before the lava reached the surface, it intruded on a vast coal bed that happened to lie a few hundred meters below the surface. Coal is less dense than lava. The lava took the path of least resistance right through the coal bed, spreading through it far from the initial crack.
The Siberian coals contained pore water and hydrocarbons. When lava hit the coal beds, the hydrocarbons turned to gas, just as happens today in coking plants. The heavier tar hydro-carbons “cracked” into smaller molecules, creating more gas. The red-hot coals reacted with the pore water to form coal gas, composed of methane and carbon monoxide, with smaller amounts of other hydrocarbons. All of these heated gases then started to expand.
In some places the surface of the earth collapsed into the coal bed, releasing gas. Elsewhere, the incandescent gas followed the lava up cracks. When the hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and methane came into contact with the oxygen in the air, they ignited, causing titanic explosions. As in a blast furnace, the burning coal reacted with ferrous iron (FeO) in the lava to form iron metal and carbon dioxide. Sulfur from the lava and coal added brimstone to the fire. Within days a broad area of Siberia became a monstrous landscape of collapsed pits and coal gas flares extending all the way into the stratosphere.
Overall, several trillion tons of carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere—the makings for a global disaster on land and sea. In comparison the atmosphere currently holds three trillion tons of carbon dioxide; doubling this amount would be calamitous.
The infernos continued for a decade, fed by the pool of lava at the base of the crust. Lava flows and coal fires continued for hundreds of thousands of years. Basalt flows eventually covered most of Siberia, a formation now known as the Siberian Traps.
Dreadful Aftermath
The initial effect of the Siberia coal fires on the climate was mild: a cold spring in the northern hemisphere, with a hazy sky. The smoke and dust settled, and sunlight once again reached the surface. But the heat could not escape through the new blanket of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases. By summer, temperatures were several degrees Celsius hotter than normal. Drought prevailed. Plants withered and fungi prospered on the carcasses of rotting plants and animals.
Seventy to seventy-five percent of the land species became extinct.
“Trilobites wandered blindly to their extinction.”
Marine life suffered even more. Carbon dioxide dissolved into the top sixty meters of ocean water. The carbon dioxide and water created carbonic acid, as happens in carbonated drinks (chemically: CO
2
+ H
2
O → H
2
CO
3
, carbonic acid.) Seawater became acidic. Calcium carbonate shells dissolved into a bicarbonate solution (chemically: CaCO
3
+ H
2
CO
3
→ Ca
++
+ 2HCO
3
-). Shell-making organisms perished. Reefs died. The food chain collapsed. Trilobites wandered blindly to their extinction. The acid had dissolved the carbonate lenses of their eyes.
Ninety-five percent of the marine species became extinct.
Mantle Plumes
What caused so much lava to erupt?
Modern geologists commonly ascribe the Siberia event to a mantle plume starting near Earth’s core. Tens of millions of years before the eruption Earth’s core heated the overlying mantle, and a massive chunk of solid magma (yes, solid) slowly ascended through the cooler mantle rock toward the surface. Scientific models of mantle plumes resemble the flow of fluid in a lava lamp: The plume has a long tail and a bulbous top, because the mantle flows more quickly through the hot tail than the top can push its way up through denser mantle.
Most but not all earth scientists accept mantle plumes. Seismologists have resolved their tail conduits in the uppermost few hundred kilometers. Images of the lower mantle (below seven hundred kilometers depth) show fuzzy features that may be tail conduits.
This huge bulb of mantle rose slowly, a few centimeters per year, and eventually reached the base of the lithosphere, the cool layer of rock near Earth’s surface. Now under less pressure, it partially melted and spread out like a bubble beneath aquarium glass. Hot basalt lava began to flow upward through the crust to meet its fate with the coal.
Magma plumes are common in the geological record. The Palisades basalt near New York City is the result of an event two hundred million years ago. Giant’s Causeway of the Spanish Armada’s bane formed sixty million years ago. More than a dozen basalt plains are known, each caused by a hot mantle plume that originated near the core of the planet.
Philosophy
“Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
—
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville (1819–1891)
We can do nothing to prevent mantle plumes. Starbuck rebukes Ahab, a prime fictional candidate for a Darwin Award, with the pragmatic Yankee view of natural phenomena as purposeless and uncaring. Charles Darwin quoted Aristotle, who said that rain falls not (with the intention) to ruin crops during harvest. If a mantle plume has a ticket to a coal or oil field, no prayers can swerve its course. But there is one consolation. Be assured that seismologists would have already detected the approach of such a mantle plume.
Science does not draw moral lessons from natural events, but one can make a practical analogy, and the analogy is stark. The herds of dicynodonts had no hand in the Great Dying, but we burn fossil fuels of our own volition. We know that burning fossil fuel puts heat and carbon dioxide into the air. About a third of the carbon dioxide now in our atmosphere was generated from this source. We have the power to avoid a man-made repeat of the great Permian extinctions by using other energy sources, or by sequestering the carbon dioxide we generate.
Our educational system has brought us to the realizations of Aristotle and Starbuck. Weather is regarded as a natural phenomenon beyond our control. Ironically, we must now teach the public that weather is no longer an immutable natural phenomenon. We are the masters of our climate.
We can learn from the distant past—or repeat it.
Norm Sleep
teaches geophysics at Stanford University. His interests include conditions on Earth and the habitability of other planets. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in the paper mill town of Parchment. He graduated from Michigan State University and arrived at MIT during the plate-tectonic scientific revolution. His thesis was on subducting slabs. He taught at Northwestern University before moving to Stanford. His interest in habitability stems from his work on hydrothermal circulation at midoceanic ridges and his work on the feeble tectonic activity on Mars.
