Scope Creep, 2024-10-25.

First, thanks to everyone who upgraded to a paid subscription after reading, in yesterday's email, that SOW is now sponsor-free and fully funded by readers. You're awesome, I'm excited, let's go! 💞

Attentive readers will recall that I disclocated a finger a few weeks ago while mountain biking; I'm happy to say that earlier this week I was cleared to ride my road bike, and yesterday I did six gorgeous laps around Prospect Park. So as far as I'm concerned, the world is alllllright.

Let's get at the scope creep!

SCOPE CREEP.

• I’m not sure where I picked the practice up, but as autumn has progressed I’ve been keeping my eyes to the sky, watching for falling leaves as I walk around and attempting to catch them as they do. I’m currently up to four leaves caught, which feels moderately impressive, but perhaps the bigger accomplishment is that I also convinced my kids that this was something worth doing. They have so far been unsuccessful in the catching part, but seeing them scurry down the block in an attempt to intersect a fluttering yellow projectile is just wonderful.
• This week, while doing errands and puttering about the house, I listened to Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin on audiobook. Starting next week, Scope of Work’s Members’ Reading Group is reading and discussing Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Join us!
• Last week Natasha wrote here about Solvay, the chemicals giant whose founding goes back to the synthesization of sodium carbonate. Solvay's founder, Ernest Solvay, held an invitation-only conference on physics in 1911; Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Henri Poincaré were among those present. Solvay conferences have been held on both physics and chemistry dozens of times since then, usually with a similarly impressive list of household scientific names in attendance. The fifth Solvay conference, held in 1927, is described in detail in When We Cease to Understand the World; it effectively marked the beginning of the quantum age.
• Apropos of the non-metaphoric (and paywalled) portions of yesterday's newsletter, some glacial stuff:
  • The Laurentide Ice sheet, responsible for the formation of (among other things) the island on which I now live, has not fully melted: The Barnes Ice Cap, on Baffin Island in Nunavut, Canada, is a remnant of it.
  • A glacier presses down on the earth’s crust, pushing the lithosphere into the outer mantle. The mantle, being displaced and needing somewhere else to go, bulges outward in the area around the glacier. The term for this is forebulge. Forbulges can also occur in plate tectonics; before one plate is forced underneath its neighbor, it sometimes bulges up a bit.
  • As a glacier slides over rock, the rock can be abraded away into particles that are small enough to remain suspended in water. We call this rock flour, and it’s why glacial lakes often look so stunningly blue.
    
    Somewhat related, this vintage-looking PDF from the United States Botanic Garden does a good job explaining the difference between silt, clay, sand, and loam.
  • A very pretty 1976 USGS report on the geology of Cape Cod.
  • Here’s a funny idea: The earth spins, and the rate at which it spins — and the length of our day — is affected by its weight distribution. Just as an ice skater spins more slowly when they extend their arms and legs, the earth will spin more slowly as its mass moves farther away from its axis of rotation.
    
    What would cause the earth's mass to move farther away from its axis of rotation? The melting of glaciers, which are concentrated near the poles, close to the earth's axis. When glaciers melt, and their water flows off of the land and into the ocean, then sea levels rise around the world — including at the equator, which is about as far as you can get from the earth’s axis of rotation. If all of the Greenland ice sheet melted and flowed into the ocean, sea levels would rise by seven meters, and our days would become longer by about two milliseconds.
• I cannot for the life of me remember why I have this tab open, but here’s a picture of a partially silicified log cabin in Yellowstone National Park. The log cabin in question also happens to be the oldest building in Yellowstone; silification is a process by which silicon crystals (ejected, in this case, from the nearby hot springs) slowly infiltrate and petrify a piece of wood.