Last week I was away in a place that has problematic internet access. I also had to spend a lot of time at a bank and at a town hall, or waiting for a call back from the town hall, or trying to figure out how to not need a call back from the town hall, which in fact, I did finally figure out. At all events, I didn’t expect quite the amount of trouble I had, so I didn’t arrange posts for the blog ahead of time. However, while I was on this semi-vacation from the internet I read five and a half books. 

The book I haven’t finished is called Dinosaurs of Darkness by Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich, published in 2000 by the Indiana University Press. Tom and Pat are paleontologists who worked on dinosaurs in Australia, starting in the late 1970’s. The Darkness referenced in the title is the darkness of winter at or near the South Pole. The idea is that at least parts of Australia were below the Antarctic circle for a considerable amount of time one hundred million years ago. Also, while Australia was in this position, there were no gigantic ice sheets covering land areas that far south. It was cool and damp but not frozen. This is in complete contrast to the current situation where Antarctica has huge glaciers and no life cavorting around. I knew very little about the topic including that fact that even one of the earliest explorers in Antarctica, Captain Scott, had picked up fossils showing a very different climate. Scott died on this expedition, but his collections were eventually retrieved. (https://discoveringantarctica.org.uk/oceans-atmosphere-landscape/ice-land-and-sea/tectonic-history-into-the-deep-freeze/ )  

Dinosaurs of Darkness includes detailed descriptions of various expeditions over twenty years, to retrieve dinosaur fossils from southern Australia. The expeditions had to contend with incredible winds straight from the South Pole, high water flooding the dig at times, learning how to blast rock, build equipment, take care of small children, keep people fed and safe, and do it all on a shoestring budget. At one point, the organizers needed to use a helicopter to move objects from here to there. The authors note that TV crews rushed to cover the event with their own helicopters, but absolutely refused to consider using their helicopters to achieve the mission. An interesting point. I learned a lot about arranging expeditions. I also learned a lot about areas where my information is lacking in understanding of certain topics. This, actually was why I was interested in the book. It covers several topics and gives me a framework on which to hang various bits of knowledge about positions of the continents hundreds of millions of years ago. 

I don’t have a big picture of the book, perhaps because I haven’t read every word yet. I did skip to the end and read the last chapters when I realized that I didn’t know why the book was arranged in the way that it was. I don’t have a recommendation about reading it or not. Oh, well.

Next, I read a book about the man who explained the aurora borealis. The Northern Lights by Lucy Jago, an English writer, and published in the US in 2001, is a fascinating discussion of the life of Kristian Birkeland, who worked out the electromagnetic nature of the northern lights. It’s also oddly flawed. Birkeland was a Norwegian scientist working at the end of the 1800’s, when Sweden still claimed rule over Norway, and Norway really wanted out, out, OUT. Jago does cover that situation, which I had heard of as a model for areas trying to separate themselves from other areas. Ummm. It was a lot more guns and less assurance of the end than I had imagined. The Swedish king called a halt just before the shooting started.

Birkeland was specifically interested in helping Norway to set itself apart from other countries with a national identity. He wanted to showcase important Norwegians contributing to civilization and he was a truly brilliant scientist. But he had no common sense, and reading about his experiments is occasionally terrifying. Birkeland was the kind of genius who forgets to eat, and can’t keep track of his expenditures on scientific equipment and expeditions.

He got married later in life to Ida Hammer, and I really can’t tell you why he married her, and more specifically, why she married him. The marriage was not a success. The author insists that Ida’s family didn’t care whether she married or not and that she, herself, had her own career and money, so she didn’t have to marry either. Okay, but that’s not an explanation for why the marriage did in fact happen. They ended up divorced, though Birkeland made sure Ida received a generous settlement. She lived in the South of France after World War I and died there in 1926.

Birkeland experimented with electricity which was a fairly new concept, and his safety protocols were basically non-existent. He and his lab assistants were constantly getting severely shocked. His contemporaries at the University of Norway found him maddening. He persistently made noise next to their lecture halls, either continual humming of machinery or outright explosions, and the smells he could occasionally produce were … not pleasant. However, he contributed the foundation of hydro electric power in Norway and made a fortune at it. According to Jago, Birkeland wanted money so he could pursue his scientific research. He succeeded in becoming rich. Hence, he could do as he pleased, since the university did not have the power of the purse over him. I didn’t quite understand why they couldn’t tell him to go away, but maybe that would have been too shame-making since he did have an international reputation. Also, there was a lot of German involvement in the hydro-electric power situation, and that had complicated political effects. It made me wonder what modern Norwegians think about this guy. 

Birkeland’s most important scientific contribution was in the study of the northern lights. The book details an expedition he arranged early on, when he didn’t have money and simply ran over budget. Birkeland took a whole group to a mountain peak north of the Arctic circle. Actually, two mountain peaks. He wanted to collect information on magnetic fields, along with concurrent descriptions of the lights, to show that they were related. Before data collection even began, one man had to be taken back to civilization, eventually losing the tips of all his fingers to frostbite. Later, someone else died in an avalanche. Birkeland was not deterred nor were his assistants. The guy who lost his fingers had wanted to be a surgeon, but even though that dream was gone, he remained all his life a staunch supporter of Birkeland. During the months long data collection, a storm that lasted twenty-one days threatened to tear the very roof off of the observatory built for this expedition. This also did not destroy the spirits of the crew. 

Several years later Birkeland set up a new expedition, this time to four stations above the Arctic circle. All stations gathered information simultaneously, and Birkeland asked for cooperation from dozens of other stations around the world to share their magnetic data on specific days. The author lists the stations that sent information to Birkeland. Cheltanham was listed as an American station which shocked me, but there was indeed a station in Cheltanham, Maryland that opened in 1900 to collect magnetic data. It has moved several times since then and is part of the United States Geological Survey. I initially thought Jago had made a mistake in the name. She had made an odd mistake earlier in the book, discussing whether the Chinese had the first written record of the auroras vs the Greeks, so I was suspicious. Oh, well. 

One reason why Birkeland is not well-known is that English scientists discounted his meticulous explanations for many years, depriving him of his rightful scientific kudos. Jago discusses this along with the last years of Birkeland’s life, living in Egypt and overdosing on veronal. It’s a great story with a few glitches in the telling. Jago doesn’t move well between the science and the personal. A fiction writer would get dinged for this but I’m cutting Jago some slack because this story was so new to me that I was glad she wrote the book. 

Next week, the other books!