The Folklore of Geology

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1:29he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work. It isn't just like the oldest story about a volcano. It's the oldest known story in existence from our species. And it makes me very happy that the oldest story is probably one about a volcano.

2:00I was like, yes. If we're gonna tell stories for almost 40,000 years, let's tell them about volcanoes. If I could talk about volcanoes for 40,000 years, that's what I would be doing. You're like, this is why. This is how it goes. I'm Paige. And I'm Megan. And this is Spooky Science Sisters. Hello, you're listening to Spooky Science Sisters, a podcast where we present to you a science-based and probably very giggly discussion on all things strange and unusual. Today, we're going to be talking about a couple of really cool examples

2:37of stories about eyewitness accounts of natural disasters that were passed down through oral histories by the indigenous people who were living on the land where they happened at the time. Because I've been making some videos on that recently, and I'm super into it. So now it is all of your problem. And I guess I just wanted to do a quick update on where we are schedule-wise. We were so hopeful coming into February that we were gonna be able to keep up

3:10to the two-week schedule. It was gonna go great. And then there was a family funeral. And then Paige got COVID. Then Paige had to get her wisdom teeth out. And I don't know, various other things have happened. And no surprise, I have a stomach ulcer. I'm falling apart. Long story short, end of February, and like first two or three weeks of March have been a disaster. So we're hoping to be more or less back on the two-week schedule now.

3:43But we really got our asses handed to us the last month. Anyway, I figured I should offer some sort of explanation as to why there's a little bit bigger gap between the last episode and this episode. Yeah. Anyway, Paige, other than what I've already covered, or I guess in case you want to provide extra detail, you can. But has anything spooky happened to you recently? No. Listen, people. We recorded our last episode more than a month ago.

4:1432 days ago. No. Something like that. I have basically been in bed since that episode. Yeah. Yeah. You were losing your voice the night that we did that episode. And then I think it was like the next day. You were like, uh, I have COVID. It was. Yeah. I tested positive for COVID the next day, which kicked my ass. It's my second time having it. Kicked my ass again. And then I felt good for like three days where Megan and I were out of town.

4:49And then I came back to get my wisdom teeth out. And now I feel like ass again. So it's going well. But it's fine. Yay. Wait, was I out of town? Well, you and I were up north. Yeah, we were out of town. Oh my God. Yeah. Those were like the few days that I felt good. So I haven't like hung out with my husband in like six weeks. It's fine. It's fine. You've got so many more years.

5:21He'll live. So yeah. Yeah. And then I guess the only thing I wanted to say is that Megan said that we're going to be talking about some stuff today and like really Megan's going to be talking about some stuff today. This is a Megan info dumping episode, but I'm excited about it. I'm excited about it. I got excited about some things and I was like, you know what? We're just going to do an episode on this because I've got the momentum going on it.

5:53And yeah, we gotta, we gotta do something after our disaster of a month. So yeah, nothing else. Great. Anyway, that's it. What about you? Okay. Mine is a weird coincidence. So I think it was, it was either two or three nights ago because I can't remember if it was the day before or two days before, but I was sitting in bed with Alice and by in bed with Alice, I mean in her bed while I was trying to get her to

6:25settle down for the night. And I seriously don't remember how we got on the topic, but we started talking about tornadoes like you do. Yeah. Before your six year old's bedtime. And she asked me what the longest tornado ever was. And I didn't know. So I Googled it and lo and behold, the record holder for the longest tornado, which was the tri-state tornado, which was on the ground for about four hours and traveled 200. Yeah. And traveled 219 miles. But the weird part about it was, is she asked me about this and I

7:01Googled it and I was like, the date that it happened was March 18th, 1925. So we were like a day away from the 101st anniversary of it. So it was like, it was weird that she asked me about it. And then we were so close to the specific day of the anniversary for that tornado, which is like considered the worst one. And it's like over 100 years later, it's still the deadliest one that's ever hit the United

7:31States. So that's crazy. Yeah. Spooky. Spooky. It's like she knew. Okay. So yeah, we're talking about oral histories of natural disasters that are passed down by indigenous people. And we are going to start in Australia, which is sort of the area that got me, well, recently that sort of got me turned on to this. But like, this has been a thing for me for a while. And we'll come back to why in a little bit. But Australia is where we get some of the oldest accounts of geologic events that have been passed down by

8:08indigenous peoples. And we're going to start out in Southeast Australia, in the state of Victoria, to talk about a small volcano called Budj Bim. So the Aboriginal Gunditjmara people who are native to that area, tell stories of the dreaming time or the dream time, which are a set of stories about the creation of the landscape. And they also include moral lessons that are laid out by ancestral spirits. And the creation story of the Gunditjmara tells of four giant beings that arrived on the continent many thousands of

8:41years ago. And one of these giants laid down upon the land, and their head would become the Budj Bim volcano. And the scoria and lava that erupted there represented the giant's teeth and blood basically spilling out of their heads. So it's a little bit gruesome, but pretty awesome. So as it turns out, a study that was published in 2020 shows that their dream time story may have actually been an eyewitness account of the actual eruption that created Budj Bim, which is remarkable because it puts the

9:16Gunditjmara people in the area, tens of thousands of years before the oldest accepted archaeological evidence that was available when that paper was published. That's like very cool. I know. Listen, it's one of my favorite stories now. Okay, so the study is published in the journal Geology, and it is titled Early Human Occupation of Southeastern Australia, New Insights from 40 Argonne, 39 Argonne Dating of Young Volcanoes. So what they did is they analyzed volcanic deposits from the Budj Bim volcano and the nearby Tower Hill to

9:53determine radiometric dates for them. And they determined that they both erupted around 37,000 years ago. And I will note that there were pre-existing dates for the eruptions of both of these volcanoes. But they weren't as precise as what was published in this 2020 study. And Tower Hill is especially significant because to have a date from because there is this 1947 paper from an archaeological survey, when someone digging a post hole uncovered a stone aboriginal axe that was sitting in situ beneath layers

10:29of tephra from that Tower Hill eruption. And so in situ just means in place. And in this case, it means that no one dug up the ash and rock to bury that axe there. It was already sitting on the ground in place. And it was buried by this 37,000 year old eruption of Tower Hill. And apparently the discovery of this axe wasn't widely known. So no one had made this connection before that it had to mean that the Gunditjmara people were living in

11:05the area before that eruption took place. And the authors of the study, because they found that Budj Bim erupted around the same time, 37,000 years ago, it probably means that their dreamtime story, which I mentioned before, was their way of passing down an eyewitness account of what happened during this eruption, which is super awesome that that, you know, it's a 37,000 year old story about a volcano. But it gets even cooler. Because if this story is actually 37,000 years old, it isn't just like the oldest

11:42story about a volcano. It's the oldest known story in existence from our species. And it makes me very happy that the oldest story is probably one about a volcano. I was like, yes, if we're gonna tell stories for almost 40,000 years, let's tell them about volcanoes. If I could talk about volcanoes for 40,000 years, that's what I would be doing. You're like, this is why I did this. This is how it goes.

12:14Okay, so I will also point out that it makes a lot of sense why an eruption of a volcano like Budj Bim or Tower Hill would make a big impression on people in the area. Because these are both types of monogenetic volcanoes, which just means that they grew over the course of a single eruptive period. So this wasn't like multiple eruptions building, you know, a huge stratovolcano, like what we see in the

12:46Cascades. This was like a single eruptive period that builds this smaller cone or in the case of Tower Hill, it sort of like blows out a crater from magma coming in contact with groundwater, which is equally cool. But importantly, volcanoes like these can emerge and grow quite large, I mean, small for a volcano, but also like quite large for a land form in a period of just a few days to weeks.

13:17And we have a modern analog for this because in Mexico, there is a cinder cone called paracoutin, which and I'm sure I'm butchering that pronunciation, but Budj Bim is also a cinder cone. And paracoutin emerged from a farmer's cornfield one day in 1943. And within the first week of it erupting, it grew to over 150 meters tall. So like over 450 feet tall, it continued erupting over the next 10 years, and ultimately grew to a height

13:49of over 400 meters, which is like 1200 1300 feet, and completely buried to nearby towns. And the point here is that you can totally imagine that people seeing something like this happening 37,000 years ago, it would be crazy to see happen in real time. Like I said, I would also be telling everyone's stories about it. And in fact, I am telling everyone's stories about it. Yeah, I can't even imagine. Yeah, yeah. So point being, it makes sense that they were like, man, we gotta

14:25tell people about this, because this is important. This is a big thing that happened on the land that we're living in. So yes, it's super awesome. Yeah, that like, for those of you who are listening, I never as a kid, even when I was like in college, never thought to myself, like, man, I really want to learn about volcanoes. And then I met Megan and like, well, I had known Megan at this point.

14:56But like, but then I really got to know Megan. And here's the thing is, I often think to myself, like, frick, geology would have been way cooler. Listen, if I can get just one person young enough to decide they're gonna go to school, and they choose geology like that, my life will be complete. Everybody should choose geology. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, little did you know, your sister in law was gonna be like, too bad,

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15:59That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Okay, so that's Budge Bim. But it is, I also want to note that this is not the only Aboriginal story from Australia that scientists have been able to put a date on or sort of connect to a specific event that they know about from the past. So there are these 7,000 year old stories about flooding that occurred along with sea level rise

16:33that match up with geologic records. There are also Aboriginal stories that are potentially even older than Budge Bim, but I think it's kind of harder to put an exact date on it like you can with like, you know, you date the exact ash that came out of the volcano from that eruption. But they think that there are stories that they told about prehistoric megafauna that they interacted with. So listen, the Aboriginal people in Australia were just like living the dream in terms of seeing volcanic eruptions, seeing

17:10these cool events. And also, I have a real thing about being very jealous that our ancestors in the past got to hang out with megafauna from the Pleistocene, like giant sloths and stuff like that, because it is not fair that that stuff does not exist today. So anyway, but in Australia, they would tell stories of a monstrous creature called the Yamoodi that would steal little kids. And the descriptions are very similar to a giant marsupial called

17:41a diprotodon that lived in Australia over 40,000 years ago. So it would be older than the Budge Bim eruption. Importantly, diprotodon were not predators, but they were very large animals. So it is possible that, you know, they would have posed a unique danger to children, like either they mess with them and they get trampled. Or someone even mentioned like maybe the diprotodon, you know, mistook young children for young of their own. So like actually stole them away.

18:13But that's like crazy that, you know, they have these stories about monsters stealing their kids. And it's like, oh, that was a real animal that they were worried about. And then, yeah, they totally are. I know. I was like, I don't know if this is a scary animal, but you know, whatever. I wasn't living around it. So I can't, I can't speak to how it actually was. But you wish you were living around it. I just wish I was.

18:45I just want a giant slot. And I hadn't heard of the Yamudi before, but I had heard of the Bunyip before, which is another creature that's featured in aboriginal stories that people think could have been them telling stories about some megafauna animal. People have also linked that possibly to diprotodon or a giant taper. Yeah, it's just, it's really cool. And there have been, so you know, we've got these exact stories coming from 37,000 years ago. We've got evidence of, you know, them interacting with animals that weren't around since 40,000 to 50,000

19:22years ago. They've done like recent genetic work, I think, to determine that the, like the genetic lineages of aboriginal people in Australia are like at least 50,000 years old. So it's pretty cool that people have been living there that long and that they've managed to like maintain this cultural connection and these stories for, for such a long time. And it's pretty cool that, you know, people are trying to preserve them and learn more about them.

19:53So yeah, that's Australia. Yay. Okay. So now, uh, we are going to travel, I don't know, to the other side of the world, I guess, uh, to closer to home for us, uh, because there are also a lot of examples of ancient stories, um, or not so ancient stories in some cases, um, stories about natural events being passed down in the Pacific Northwest and along the West coast of North America. And I know for a fact that we've talked before about the origin story for the caldera at Crater Lake

20:30that has been passed down by the Klamath people for almost 8,000 years. So that sort of, you know, that was my first, like in grad school, I learned about that because I was obviously doing a lot of reading about Crater Lake because that was my thesis topic. And I just remember all that time. I don't know how long ago, that was 15 years ago. Now that hurts my feelings, but I remember even at the time being really struck by just how cool it

21:04was that there were people around to witness this like cataclysmic eruption and to be able to pass down the stories all these years later. We have also talked about the Clallam legend that describes the formation of Lake Crescent and Lake Sutherland in the Olympic Peninsula. And for a brief refresher on that, that's where the spirit of Mount Storm King, which is a mountain that's up above Lake Crescent, throws down a giant boulder upon Clallam and Quileute

21:34warriors because the mountain spirit was upset that they were fighting. And later geologists have been able to match that story with physical records of the landslide that occurred to split the lakes in two, which was like eight to 10,000 years ago, I think. So that's a really old story as well. So today, though, we're going to talk about another more recent example, which are these very widespread legends about Thunderbird and Whale. So scientists and historians and folklorists noticed that indigenous groups along the west coast of North America from Northern California,

22:10all the way up to Vancouver Island, were telling some version of a story or stories about battles between Thunderbird and Whale or similar mythical figures and, you know, got to wondering how these stories are related and what they're referring to. And this is my point or my time to butt in and make a side note that I can't really butt into my own story, but I can tell a side note or go on a tangent. The bookstore that Bella goes to in the Twilight movie is called Thunderbird and Whale.

22:45So I was like, man, this is the crossover that we didn't know we needed. But did you just like, did you remember that? Yeah, man. Listen, I have seen those movies an embarrassing amount of times. It is what it is. Anyway, so I will take any opportunity for a Twilight crossover because I'm not going to be ashamed. You shouldn't be just I there's I there's no way if you had asked me that question. I would have been like, I don't fucking know. Yeah, I should have quizzed you.

23:20I should have been like, what is the Twilight connection here? And yeah, but you wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have. Okay. So anyway, back to these stories. So they vary. Sometimes you've got Thunderbird as the hero. Other times Thunderbird is the villain in the story. But in all of them, you've got fighting between Thunderbird and Whale, which causes great shaking of the earth followed by the ocean rolling over the coastal lands. And this often happens when whale is lifted up out of the

23:52water and then dropped on the land from a great height. There are other versions where like Thunderbird gets dragged under the water. So it brings the level of the water up. But yeah, as you might have guessed, this sounds an awful lot like an earthquake and a tsunami that happens after. And we know that there have been at least seven major earthquakes along the Cascadia subduction zone in the last 3500 years. And I'm sure you've seen very sensationalist news articles about when's the next big one going to be.

24:27But you know, it will happen eventually. But anyway, scientists have found Thunderbird and whale artifacts at archaeological sites of various ages along the Pacific coastline, suggesting that native peoples were using these motifs to pass down information and warnings about these earthquakes for many centuries. And in 2005, researchers from the University of Washington were able to use a specific set of stories they compiled in combination with physical evidence to help determine the events and timing of a

24:57megathrust earthquake that occurred on January 26th, 1700. And this earthquake had an estimated magnitude of 8.7 to 9.2. So, you know, it's like the mythical magnitude nine earthquake. It's like as big as earthquakes get. It's the size that we worry about hitting the Cascadia subduction zone. That's going to have huge implications for Seattle and various places down the coast. But this earthquake also sent a tsunami all the way across the ocean to Japan, where it caused major coastal

25:29flooding. And Japan at the time had written records. So it was also significant that the Thunderbird and whale stories about the earthquake allowed scientists to determine an exact origin for that tsunami and confirm the timing for the earthquake that caused it. Yeah. So earthquakes, volcanoes, giant animals dragging your kids away. We've got a little bit of everything. What was the, do you remember the magnitude of the Fukushima? Ah, man, that was up there. So yeah. So the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, the big one that yeah, yeah, had

26:03those huge tsunamis, which, you know, we could do a whole other episode about that was a magnitude nine. So yeah, that was I thought it was up there. Yeah, that was a massive event. And like, obviously had very disastrous consequences for the coastline there. And yeah, like, that's one of those ones. I've sat there and watched YouTube videos of the just like the the tsunami swells, you know, rolling over the seawalls and into the cities.

26:33It is just it's unreal. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. So it's it's crazy. Anyway, yeah, that's a good modern analog, though, for a super big one that happened in Japan. So yeah, listen, geology is the best. Have you ever actually been like, have you really seen an erupting volcano like in real life? Uh, I have seen like the glow of lava from Kilauea in Hawaii. Okay, I figured if you had it would have been there. Yeah, but not anything like what's going on right now where it's, you know, got these like massive fountains going

27:11on. So that's the dream I want to see. But you would want to though, right? Oh, for sure. Listen, I am I will always say like, obviously, I do not want people's lives to be in danger. And I don't want people's livelihoods and homes to get destroyed. But I would not be sad about seeing one of the cascade volcanoes go in my life. I feel like it will be like pretty cool. Right? Yeah. Like it would be terrible, obviously. And, you know, it would be scary.

27:45But it would be pretty awesome. Yeah, to see. So anyway, that's my thoughts about that. But I'm also not sure like I've lived several places, you know, where earthquakes are common, like I've lived in in Oregon, I've lived in Alaska. And then we've had a couple small ones hit the Midwest because of the Madrid fault zone. And I like have been around for small earthquakes in the past, but I never actually can like say that I actually felt one, which is also a bummer.

28:19No, we had one that a lot of people felt when I was at Albion. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I don't remember feeling anything at all. Yeah. So but also, I'm like, maybe not the most observant person. So I probably thought someone like ran into my desk or something. Right. And I, yeah, like some people are like, Oh, like a magnitude four or whatever woke me up out of bed. It's like, No, I don't even wake up for fire alarms in my own house.

28:52So I'm not waking up for a little bit of jiggling for sure. Anyway. Yeah. So just to wrap up this episode, this is obviously something that I really love just this overlap of folklore and science. And you know, it's sort of a lot of the show of the podcast is centered around that premise. But I think it's super cool that we can use science to help teach people just how important these stories are. I think it's also cool that recently, we keep sort of learning this lesson over and

29:28over again, that modern science, a lot of times is just catching up to indigenous science to like the eyewitness accounts and the observations that they made. And they just happen to find these creative and memorable ways to pass that information down. Because if you want to make sure that people get the warning about a volcanic eruption or an earthquake or tsunami, why not build it into this very memorable story that people are going to be able

29:58to keep in mind and tell others about. So anyway, this has been Megan's science corner. Well, I think you nailed it. This was the best. All right. Well, I guess that wraps up our 102nd episode. If you liked this episode, hit subscribe and share with a friend. Check the show notes for all links to all. Whoa. Check the show notes for links to all of our social media accounts, our discord server and Patreon. If you have any questions about previous topics or ideas for future episodes, email us at the sisters at SpookyScienceSisters.com.

30:35As always, thank you for listening and stay spooky. Spooky Science Sisters is a proud member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. For more information or to check out other shows, please visit EvergreenPodcasts.com. How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. Legacy How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit USAA.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply.