I recently read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, and came down with a bit of Everest fever.
Hung these bad boys up in my room
Rather letting the dream of climbing the darn thing slowly start to take hold in my mind, or fantasizing about flying into Nepal and landing at one of the sketchiest airports in the world (see video below), my Everest fever manifested itself by driving me to share some tidbits and facts about mountains with all you fine people.
Landing at the Lukla airport
The first question I'll dive into is "How do we measure the tallest Mountain?" When measured as 'height above sea level,' Everest gets the #1 spot, but Everest is not the tallest mountain when measured from base to peak. That honor belongs to Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea is much taller than Everest
On top of the 'Mauna Kea,' there is a suite of telescopes. My two personal favorites are the Keck binocular telescopes and the Subaru telescope (the car company and the telescope are both named for the Pleiades, known as "Subaru" in Japan). Pretty cool.
I also think that Chimborazo is worth mentioning here. An argument could be made that Chimborazo is the 'highest' because it is the farthest point from the center of the earth. Because the Earth is not quite solid, and it's rotating, Earth is not spherical; the middle bulges out by several kilometers. Chimborazo, being a tall mountain situated near the equator means it gets an extra boost, making this peak the farthest you can get from the center of the Earth.
In thinking about mountains, I began thinking about how mountains are measured, and how peaks are defined. I have heard of are so-called twin peaks, such as Greys and Torreys, two nearby 14ers (peaks over 14,000') here in Colorado, but what is the cutoff point between two distinct peaks and say a north and south summit of the same peak?
This brings me to the idea of "prominence." Prominence is loosely "how far the mountain sticks up from it's surroundings."
Prominence is defined as "the vertical distance between the summit and the lowest contour line that does not also include a higher peak"
In the image above, we are looking at three mountains with differing heights and levels of prominence. The dashed horizontal lines in the image above are contour lines. Looking at the middle peak, we can see that any lower contour line would also have to include the peak on the right. Likewise, for the peak on the right, any lower contour line would also need to include the peak on the left. The highest peak's contour line goes right down to the coastline because no other contour line includes a higher peak, giving it the most prominence.
This creates a problem. Everest has a North and a South Summit, but would these summits qualify for the worlds first and second tallest mountains? What's to keep several rocky outcrops near the summit of Everest from being called the world's ten tallest peaks? It turns out there is no set minimum to decide on what constitutes a separate peak, but I was able to dig up something called the 'Colorado Rule,' which holds to a minimum of 300' of prominence to be called a separate peak. For reference, that makes the Maroon Bells two summits of the same peak:
Moving away from mountains in general, and on to Everest Itself, I'd like to talk next about the Khumbu Icefall. This is a section of the southern route up Everest, and it is one of the more dangerous sections of the climb. All those photos you see of climbers walking over ladders are from the Khumbu Icefall:
Situated just above base camp, the icefall is the end of the Khumbu Glacier. Pieces of ice the size of houses are moving down the icefall, and shifting at the rate of meters per day, sometimes coming loose and tumbling down the glacier. Here is a link to beautiful timelaspe showing how much the icefall moves over the course of many hours:
https://vimeo.com/33809028 Everest being at the elevation it is, has some interesting properties. Above 8,000 meters, or the so-called "Death Zone," you need supplemental oxygen (unless you're a badass), but the thin air has another interesting property: water boils at relatively low temperatures at different points along the route from the nearby cities to base camp and beyond:
Lastly, I'll talk about how Everest got its name. George Everest, (pronounced with a long 'e') was a surveyor general and was given the task of mapping the Indian subcontinent. After he was in a different job, a peak appearing on one of the maps produced ("peak 15" on the map) was found to be the world's highest. His successor, Andrew Scott Waugh, suggested the name "Everest" be applied to the mountain, given the lack of a local name for the peak. Interestingly, Everest never even saw Peak XV, later known as Everest.
The show Game of Thrones is not for everyone. It can be gruesome, crass, lewd, rude and otherwise skewed. That being said, I love it, as do many others. Like all fantasy stories it takes place in a fictional, created world. One of the few rules in a created world is that it needs to be internally consistent. In this post I will compare the science and physics of George R.R. Martin's created world against our own real world. George R.R. Martin's world is internally consistent, and shares much in common with ours, but not everything (notably: dragons). Due to this difference, making a comparison between the two worlds is inherently pointless. The only purpose will be to learn some neat things about our own world along the way. Two quick points: One, I've separated this post into two sections, non-spoilers and spoilers. The latter section will be denoted thusly:
<SPOILERS>
Second, you needn't be a Game of Thrones fan to read this, as I'll be briefly explaining each topic at hand, and the bulk of the post will be about real-world science and physics.
Variable Seasons
In the Game of Thrones universe, seasons are variable, and as far as I can tell only include summer and winter skipping fall and spring altogether. Seasons tend to last about 5-7 years each. The most recent summer, unusually long, has lasted about a decade when the show starts. So what gives? How can seasons be variable? On Earth, some years are harsher than others, but we can be certain that we'll see one summer and one winter on each trip around the sun. Perhaps on the planet on which Westeros (the island on which the series mostly takes place) lies, traces out an unstable orbit around its central star or stars. Scientists have discovered some very strange star systems that have 2, 3, or even up to five stars.
Image:www.ras.org.uk
If the Game of Thrones planet was in orbit around one of the stars in this five star system, we might get the very odd seasons we're looking for, but here's the rub - these stars are pretty far apart. Looking at the scale, we can see that you could easily nestle every one of our own planets in the middle of this system, meaning that the light from the distant stars probably wouldn't have much of an effect on the seasons. On the other hand, if our planet was in the triple-star part of this system, I imagine it would be a bit brighter during the nights than in depicted in the show. Alright - what about a really elongated orbit? That would change seasons pretty dramatically. Unfortunately, this doesn't work either, as this system is still predictable, and you'd end up with extremely long winters and short, intense summers.
Image: www.uwgb.edu
Comets spend well over half their time in the most distant parts of their orbit. Haley's Comet spends half its time past Neptune alone.
So that's not it either... Maybe the planet is haphazardly tumbling through space after being hit by several large objects heading in different directions in the planet's distant past. I like this idea; it accounts for a fair bit of unpredictability, and could be a perfectly good reason why the seasons are so askew. Here's the interesting bit though - This sort of orbit doesn't arise in the normal way, that is, a planet condensing and aggregating as part of a huge cloud of interstellar gas around a central star or stars. This planet would almost certainly be a so-called 'rogue planet,' a planet that was floating through empty space, eventually being captured by the central star and entering orbit. That would account for the lack of a somewhat stable orbit, and would mean by definition that our familiar cast of characters on Westreros are indeed aliens in their own solar system (as if we needed yet another show about aliens). If variable seasons are of interest to you, you can read more HERE.
Valyrian Steel
Valyrian steel in Game of Thrones is an ancient product of metallurgy whose secret has been lost to the ages. Renowned for their sharpness and ability to hold an edge, Valyrian steel weapons have become rare, and as such, are either reserved for royalty or are treasured family heirlooms whose history can be traced back hundreds of years. Here is a description of Widow's Wail, a sword from the books:
"Most Valyrian steel was a grey so dark it looked almost black, as was true here as well. But blended into the folds was a red so deep as the grey. The two colors lapped over one another without ever touching, each ripple distinct, like waves of night and blood upon some steely shore."
And here is a picture of real-life Damascus Steel:
Image: Frank Schulenburg
Damascus steel is made by folding many layers of different types of steel (high carbon and low carbon, for instance) together over and over, then drawing the layers out into a blade. If you start with 7 sheets, and fold it over once, you have 14-layer steel, fold it again and you have 28-layer, and so on and so forth. Once the blade is formed, the blacksmith dips the steel into ferric chloride, and this distinctive ripple pattern emerges because ferric chloride etches different types of steel to different shades. This produces the lovely ripple pattern seen in Damascus and Valyrian steel weapons. Interested in Damascus steel and how it's made? Check out this video:
Geology of Westeros
This is a pretty interesting topic, and I can't do it anymore justice than the wonderful people at the Generation Antropocene podcast. Click around their website HERE and enjoy. They've certainly done their research.
The Wall
A while ago (thousands of years) a massive wall of ice was built in the far north of Westeros. It is 300 miles long, 700 feet high, and perhaps 100 feet deep. This is a total volume of ~ 3.14 (huh, pi) kilometers cubed, or about 1.3 Mount Everests. All told, this Wall has on the order of 10^15 joules of gravitational energy locked up in it, about a thousand times more than the pyramid at Giza (~10^12 joules). This is roughly the same amount of energy required to launch 1,000 of the Apollo 11 Saturn V's, and the minimum amount of energy that would have been needed to construct the Wall.
You can build stone up to quite a height, but ice, not so much. Among the tallest fully stone structures is the Washington Monument at 169 meters, and the tallest ice structure I could find was an ice palace made in China in 2013, at 48 meters.
The physics that govern whether or not the Wall from Game of Thrones would be possible are a bit beyond my grasp, but the short answer is that the Wall absolutely could not stand, and I can't tell you just how much it couldn't stand because I'm not an engineer, but let's agree that it's a lot. Sidenote - I was using Wolfram|Alpha to do these calculations, and I was hoping to get one of these bad boys:
... but I didn't. If you're curious about the question in the text field above, check out the answer HERE.
<SPOILERS>
The Dothraki
We'll start the spoiler section off with one from Season 1. In Game of Thrones, there is a group called the Dothraki, which are very similar to the Mongols in the early 13th century, just before their unification under Temujin, better known as the great leader, or Genghis Khan. Both groups have a relationship with horses, are nomadic, and have specific rules against bloodshed, considering it dishonorable, among other similarities. Be waned, this next part is gruesome, it's Mongol history, after all (feel free to skip ahead to the Wildfire section). Being a big Mongol history geek, I was amazed in season one, when I saw the death of the character Viserys, executed by having molten gold poured on his head, I immediately thought of the once governor of Otrar, a man called Inalchuq. Genghis Khan formed his empire from scratch by unifying many warring groups in the Mongolian steppes. In expanding the boundaries of his empire to new cities, the first step was usually to send a few ambassadors, along with goods for trade. This was exactly how he proceeded when reaching out to the city of Otrar. Accounts differ, but due to either some small insult or greed, the governor Inalchuq seized the caravan and massacred every member, selling the goods and pocketing the dough (there may have been yeast, but dough here refers to cash). News got back to the great Khan, and he responded by sending three more emissaries to demand punishment of the governor. The governor responded by beheading one emissary, unpleasantly dishonoring the other two, then sending them back to their Khan. In retaliation, Genghis Khan personally led a months-long siege of Otrar, eventually breaching the walls and cornering the Governor, who was then summarily executed, reportedly by means of having molten silver poured onto his head. Sound familiar?
Wildfire
Wildfire, the green flame that is nigh impossible to extinguish, played a big role in the Battle of Blackwater, repelling Stannis' ships, but the destruction of the Sept of Baelor was where we saw the destructive power of wildfire on full display. Wildfire acts a lot like a real-world substance called Greek Fire. Greek Fire has a long history, as it is an umbrella term describing many war-based applications of fire used by many historic cultures before and after the Greeks.
Image: Wikimedia
To simplify things, I'll discuss what I have come to consider as "standard Greek Fire." For the purposes of this post, "standard Greek Fire" is a highly flammable mixture of naphtha (pitch), saltpeter, sulfur, and calcium phosphate. A lot of the ingredients for self-oxidizing black powder are here, as well as pitch, a very sticky and flammable substance. This particular cocktail of ingredients would have been particularly devastating to a fleet of wooden ships approaching a foreign shore. Being self-oxidizing, Greek Fire could potentially burn underwater, and the pitch would have provided adequate stickiness to keep fire near wood for long enough to do some actual damage. Greek Fire could have been deployed much the same way as depicted in the show: little clay pots and containers, set alight and hurled at the invading fleet.
Image: ancientresource.com
In digging around about Greek Fire, I found this quote from the Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville, describing the use of Greek Fire in the Seventh Crusade:
"This was the fashion of the Greek fire: it came on as broad in front as a vinegar cask, and the tail of fire that trailed behind it was as big as a great spear; and it made such a noise as it came, that it sounded like the thunder of heaven. It looked like a dragon flying through the air. Such a bright light did it cast, that one could see all over the camp as though it were day, by reason of the great mass of fire, and the brilliance of the light that it shed."
That sounds a lot like Game of Thrones to me.
Dragons
This is a big topic, so I'll try to briefly touch on a lot of interesting points in this last section. Dragon Fire How do dragons go about making fire? We know they breathe it out of their mouths as seen time and timeagain, but how is it done biologically? Looking at game of thrones might give us our best clues, because we get some nice close-ups of the dragons' 'fire organs.'
Image: HBO
In the scene above the dragon is threatening to produce fire, but not actually breathing fire, giving us a good look at how this feat might be done. Notice that the fire originates in the far back of the throat, in the center. This goes against my initial theory that the dragon might mix two highly reactive chemicals, combining them outside of the mouth to avoid burns much like a flamethrower.
Image: HBO
I initially thought that these ducts on either side of the dragons jaw (above) would spew out those reactive chemicals, but now I'm thinking that these ducts may expel an accelerant, rather than the primary flame mechanism. Alright, on to a reasonable model of how this might be done, and how the ability might have evolved. The digestive system produces a lot of flammable gasses, as seen in this clip from the show Mythbuters. Dragons, as obligate carnivores would have a short digestive system that produces a lot of natural gasses such as flammable methane. If the dragon evolved to store and pressurize this methane, while making it available to the front end rather than the back, this is the beginning of a functional flamethrower. As for production of a spark to set everything alight, two theories that dominate the discussion:
1) Dragons eat small rocks to aid digestion like many birds do, and among these rocks might be particles of flint and steel, which may coat the teeth and produce small sparks when clicked together.
2) Dragons may use static ignition to ignite the fuel mixture, basically making use of static electricity to start a "pilot light."
Lastly, what about an evolutionary reason for fire breathing to come about? Dragons use their fire to intimidate, and as an offensive weapon, but I think the evolutionary driver may have been the ability to cook their food. Humans, once we learned how to utilize fire, immediately put it to use cooking our foods and meat. Eating cooked meat increases the caloric benefit, is safer and more efficient than eating raw meat. This, more than the offensive capabilities of fire breathing, would probably be the best evolutionary driver of the fire breathing ability. A Quick Note on Dragons and Wyverns People have argued at length about what constitutes a dragon, and what constitutes a Wyvern. A Wyvern, for those who have not heard the term, is a weaker and less powerful 'cousin' of the dragon, and has two feet and two wings. A dragon traditionally has four legs, as well as two wings on its back. If we go strictly by the number of legs, many traditional dragons are in fact Wyverns, including those appearing in Game of Thrones.
Image: HBO
Poser
It's my personal view as a descriptivist, as long as your meaning is clear, call it what you want. I wouldn't say that creature above is a weaker relative of a dragon... at least, not to its face. Can Dragons Fly? Some scientists used to be convinced that bumblebees couldn't fly, according to their understanding of physics. It turns out that bees can fly [citation needed] but we only figured it out after filming them in slow motion.
People have since asked that same question about dragons. Dragons obviously come in many shapes and sizes, but overall, small dragons probably could fly, while larger ones could not. The main factors to consider are the square-cube law, and the body-weight-to-wing-size ratio. The square-cube law is the idea that the larger something is, the more volume it has in proportion to its surface area. Compare a human to an elephant; the elephant may be 2 or 3 times longer than the human is tall, but an elephant weighs many many times more. This is because as you increase something in one dimension, say length, the other two dimensions must increase as well (height and width). A human twice as tall as another won't weigh twice as much, but rather 23, or 8 times as much.
Image: N.R. Eccles-Smith
Steven
Let's consider a 5 meter, 1000 kg dragon named Steven, and a dragon that is twice as long named Carol. Sizable Steven has a 5 meter wingspan, and his wings are 2 meters wide, giving his wings a rough surface area of 10 square meters, and a body weight of 1000 kgs. His body-weight-to-wing-size ratio would be 100:1 (every square meter of wing must lift 100 kg).
Image N.R. Eccles-Smith
Carol
Colossal Carol, on the other hand would be twice as large, with a 10 meter wingspan and 4-meter-wide wings, giving her 40 square meters of wing real estate (a squared factor for two dimensions). Her weight, however increases as a cubed factor, so Carol would be an 8,000 kg dragon, and have a body-weight-to-wing-size ratio of 200:1. For comparison, an eagle can weight about 5 kg, and has a wing surface area of a little less than a meter squared, so their ratio is roughly 5:1. My best estimate for the largest dragon that could fly might be about car-sized, if it used most of its body weight for flight muscles and ate fairly constantly, which is essentially the formula for a giant hummingbird.
How Big do Dragons Get? According to legend, the dragons in the Game of Thrones universe never stop growing, but just get larger and larger. The idea is that the only way to kill a dragon is via combat. Some have been documented as living for centuries. This reminded me of a somewhat humbler animal here at home: the lobster. Before I get too in-depth in nerding out about lobsters, I need to talk about two quick things, senescence and telomeres (a word that spell check insists is a misspelling of "omelette"). Senescence is the usual process of aging and includes things like the general weakening of the body, greater vulnerability to disease, exiting sexual maturity, and making terrible jokes. Telomeres are the 'caps' of chromosomes - long repeating sequences of DNA base pairs that exist at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, the chromosome becomes just a little bit shorter, and the telomeres are there so that this shortening of the chromosome destroys the useless genetic sequences, rather than any genes we would prefer to keep around.
Image: med.stanford.edu
Telomeres in green
So what does this have to do with lobsters? Lobsters do not undergo senescence in the same way most animals do. They are able to grow, mate, and go about their daily life right up until their death, just like dragons. Rather than slowly getting old and breaking down, they generally die by being eaten, molting their shell (a strenuous activity) or by getting a lethal disease. Some even make the claim that lobsters are immortal, even though this is not the case. They can, however, get impressively big.
Image: National Geographic
Part of the reason lobsters can get so large and live so long is that they have an particularly effective enzyme called telomerase that repairs damage to telomeres after cell division. Humans have this enzyme too, it just doesn't work as well (Interesting note, the 'useless' sequence that gets added to the ends of our chromosomes is "GGGTTA" over and over again). Some of the interesting work in the field of gerontology (the study of ageing), looks at the Hayflick Limit, the number of times the telomeres can undergo cell division without losing functionality. The Hayflick Limit is much higher in lobsters than in humans.
Back to the main point - In the Game of Thrones universe, dragons can live for centuries, and they never stop growing. This is probably because a dragon has either impressively long telomeres, resulting in a high Hayflick Limit and long life lacking senescence, or they have fantastic telomerase, achieving the same end result.
</SPOILERS>
If you stuck around and read all that without having seen the show, thanks, and I hope you were able to learn a few things along the way, and if you are a show-watcher, enjoy this little extra nugget of Game of Thrones goodness in the off season as we wait for Season 7. Cheers, - Scott I don't publish these regularly, so the best way to know when a new one is up is through email subscription (one email per post, never more): tinyletter.com/scottsieke
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