What Disease Did To Europe

From The Economist : Plagued by dear labour

Most of the article is about a debate on whether the population crash due to the plague outbreaks in the mid 1300s Europe brought about real improvements in wages and labor rights.

and then this speculation:

A more speculative theory suggests that the Black Death encouraged Europeans to become more imperialistic. Prior to the Black Death, Europeans were rather averse to long sea voyages, given the extremely high death rates on boats. But as death rates on land soared, people became less afraid of sea travel; it was not much riskier than staying at home. As a result, colonialism was kick-started. Mr Belich links the plague to the “spread of Europe”.

Interesting-- i would think the more immediate reason that triggered widespread European exploration and imperialism was a desire in Christian Europe to break the Muslim domination of Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea merchant routes. With this disease theory one can argue that it was high death rates on land that made Europeans get over their timidity of sea voyages.  Another factor is that advances in ship building made long voyages less risky and produced ships big enough to make voyages profitable. Dom Henrique (better known as Henry the Navigator) the younger son of the King of Portugal in the early fourteen hundred's was asked to find a land route across the Sahara to break the Muslim bottleneck on the Red Sea and Persian Sea routes. He realized the foolishness of this venture and began collecting navigation charts of the African coasts and became a patron of ship builders. That subsequently led to explorers like Batholomew Diaz and Vasco De Gama to finally round the Cape of Good Hope and find a passage to India and the East Indies spice riches.  Again with this disease theory one can argue that disease and the population crash triggered innovation in general and one result was advances in ship building!.. so you can end up putting the disease theory at the root of any complex causal chain and explain all sorts of intangibles with it.. that makes me wary..

Geologist Robert Young On Rebuilding After Superstorm Sandy

The complicated decision on whether to and how much to rebuilt coastlines after destruction from a major storm lies at the intersection of geology, climate change, sea level rise, preserving communities and livelihoods, and the economics of insurance risk and the real estate market.

Geologist Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines and professor of coastal geology at Western Carolina University speaks passionately and authoritatively about these issues in a talk hosted by Tom Ashbrook on OnPointRadio.

As he says; The map of the coastal U.S. 50 years on will look very different from now and we need a national plan to get from here to there. Its good to hear a geologist at the center of this discussion.

Listen: After Big Storms: Rebuild Or No?

Map Of Potential Carbon Dioxide Storage Sites In U.S. Sedimentary Basins

via Nobel Intent:

Potential carbon dioxide sequestration sites are shown in blue.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a climate change mitigation measure. Carbon dioxide emitted by power plants is compressed into a supercritical fluid and injected in deep saline aquifers with an impermeable geological capping layer that prevents the liquid CO2 from escaping.

Does U.S. sedimentary basins have enough storage capacity to make a difference in emissions? From the abstract published in PNAS:

We show that in the United States, if CO2 production from power generation continues to rise at recent rates, then CCS can store enough CO2 to stabilize emissions at current levels for at least 100 y.  This result suggests that the large-scale implementation of CCS is a geologically viable climate-change mitigation option in the United States over the next century.

Will it be economically viable though? There seems to be no hurry in the climate change policy environment in making CO2 emissions expensive enough for companies to turn to CCS.

Remotely India # 6: Chambal River - Badlands ...And Bad Men n Women

Geology and Livelihoods - 8

In the alluvial Gangetic plains, the rivers that catch everyone's eye are the Yamuna and the Ganga with their source in the high Himalayas and their standing in Indian society as the holiest of India's many holy rivers.

But the alluvial Himalayan foreland is also fed by rivers originating in the Indian craton (continental crust formed in early earth history) on the high northern flanks of the Narmada rift zone. These cratonic rivers flow north northeastwards and join the Yamuna or Ganga.The map below shows Himalayan and Cratonic rivers flowing into the north Indian foreland basin.

Source: R.Sinha et al 2009

The Chambal is the largest of these cratonic rivers. From source to its confluence with the Yamuna it is about a 1000 km long. It flows over both the Deccan Basalts and Proterozoic Vindhyan strata and contributes significant amount of sediment to the foreland basin.

The Chambal river badlands is a late Pleistocene-Holocene degradational landscape. In the image below the badlands can be recognized by the closely spaced dendritic network of gullies. The location is just west of the town of Morena in Madhya Pradesh.

Rivers and their associated floodplains go through aggradational and degradational phases. In an aggradational phase the river is carrying a large sediment load and flooding results in deposition of this sediment in the flood affected areas. This periodic deposition builds up or aggrades the floodplain.

Conditions may change. For example during longer wet periods and increased rain intensity river discharge increases. Sediment is not deposited locally but is carried out of the system to the sea.  In these conditions rivers incise or cut into their own deposits. The river channel becomes situated in a deep valley detached from its floodplain. Starved of sediment, the floodplain degrades as erosion along the main channel and smaller streams cuts gully and ravines forming badlands.

Below is a pictorial representation of this process.

 Source: Gibling et al 2005

Sedimentological and stratigraphic analysis of facies and dating of sediment by Optical Stimulated Luminesence along the Ganga, Yamuna and some cratonic tributaries suggest (Ref) that in this region badland formation coincided with the intensification of the south west Indian monsoon at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum around 15 thousand years ago and likely continues today, amplified over the last couple of millenia by intense human reworking of the landscape.

Another mechanism that may initiate a phase of river incision is tectonic uplift and tilting of the region. Tectonic upwarp may steepen stream gradients increasing their erosive power. That mechanism has been invoked by some to explain phases of incision of the Yamuna and the Chambal. However many researchers have pointed out that late Pleistocene - Holocene river incision episodes in basins of varied tectonic settings from Nepal , Bangladesh and northern India all coinciding with monsoon resurgence points to a regional climatic control.

Ravined badlands border long stretches of the Chambal as seen in the image above but also occur along the Yamuna, Betwa and Sengur rivers. The incised main channel of the river and the ravines expose older sediment. In these older sediments, earlier degradational and aggradational episodes can be recognized and coincide with fluctuations in monsoon intensity interpreted from coeval Arabian sea cores containing variations in pollen abundance which records variation in terrestrial vegetation and planktonic foraminiferal abundance which records oceanic upwellings related to monsoonal circulation.

These badlands and incised channels of the Yamuna, Chambal and other smaller cratonic rivers have given geologists a priceless opportunity to study the interplay between fluvial processes and climatic changes mainly the influence of the Indian monsoon on sedimentary processes over the last hundred thousand years.

I am leading into a different topic for the rest of the post- a somewhat warped installment of my long running series Geology and livelihoods, the reason being that in the Chambal region for long centuries people have developed a parallel economy based on dacoity. Some of India's most infamous outlaws have operated from this region. Dongar-Baturi, Pana, Sultan, Man Singh, Amritlal, Lakhan, Gabbra and Putli Bai (the first documented women dacoit of the Chambal), Kallan and more recently the notorious Nirbhay Gujjar (in photo, source).. the list is long.

The reasons are many and the badlands and ravines play an important role through history. They are situated close to the power centers of ancient north India, Delhi and the kingdoms of Rajasthan. Rebels used to retreat and hide in its byzantine gullies and engage in guerrilla warfare. That metamorphosed over time to looting and making a living that way, a culture of highway banditry developed.

From ancient times to recent, people took to being outlaws for different reasons. Droughts which are common in this region drove many to desperation. A rigid caste system often ignited inter caste violence and initiated revenge cycles that lasted generations. The rugged terrain meant that farming land was scarce and land disputes escalated to murderous outbursts and often a point of no return. 

The background was always the gullied landscape in which the outlaws could escape and hide from their enemies and the law.

Annie Zaidi surveying this region has found out that dacoity has changed with the times. These days gangs earn a livelihood not by old fashioned looting and raids on villages and travelers but by kidnappings for ransom and protection rackets.

Geology influences this new economy too. At the fringes of the alluvial badlands outcrop Archean granites and gneisses, Proterozoic marbles, limestones and sandstones and the Deccan Basalts,all of which are extensively quarried, often illegally.

These quarries are in remote areas and gangs extort protection pay from owners in exchange of safety.

Chambal geology, both recent and ancient has sustained illegal livelihoods for centuries.

Interactive:


View Larger Map

See: Geology and livelihoods

Markets And Carbon Cap And Trade

Cracking good talk on NPR's Fresh Air on the carbon Cap and Trade markets.

Host Terry Gross talks with journalist Mark Schapiro who does a really excellent job of explaining what a cap and trade is, how it works and the derivative markets it has spawned.

Top Questions: ....would you explain what the market is..and what people are actually buying and selling...

... explain a little more how investors make money out of the carbon trading..

The similarity between the housing derivatives and carbon derivatives are eerily similar and unnerving....carbon offsets from different projects with different standards of reliabilty in terms of their future ability to actually reduce emissions being grouped into say one million ton bundles and sold on the derivatives markets.

I am not knowledgeable enough to explain all that too well over here...so go and listen or download here.

At least for the European markets where carbon cap and trade has been going on for some time the actual amount of emissions reductions from cap and trade schemes has been below expectations according to Mr Schapiro.