Coming together

I’ve been reading a bit about faults and noticing how disparate things serendipitously come together to form new patterns of thought. I’m not talking about the faults of people, though I may get around to that some day soon. I’m talking about fault lines and tectonic plates, geology and anthropology, and the coming together of ideas about far away places.

My next-door neighbor is a widely known geophysicist and a fascinating guy in a conversation. He was going on about two books he just read and loaned them to me. One is Krakatoa The Day the World Exploded: August 17, 1883 by Simon Winchester. Winchester is a fascinating writer who spins a tale around the development of geology as a science, how it relates to the famous volcano, and the effects on people, both native to the area and the colonials who moved to Indonesia.

Krakatoa was, and still is, a volcano which blew itself completely apart, shrouding the planet with enough dust to affect climate around the earth. It killed over 30,000 people in nearby areas which, until 2004, accounted for half of all the people known to have been killed in tsunamis. Krakatoa is re-growing today in the center of the Sunda Strait, 15 miles west of Java and 15 miles east of Sumatra. It sits on the boundary where the Australian plate is subducting under the Eurasian plate along a line just west of Sumatra. On this fault line, at the other end of Sumatra, December 26, 2004, a major earthquake initiated another tsunami the results of which are still being tallied. So far I have read numbers like 150,000 people killed and recently seen estimates that put the number above 200,000.

Last night I was reading in Scientific American for February 2005 about the discovery of Hobbit bones in Liang Bua cave at Flores, Indonesia, just east of Java. Okay, Hobbit is only a nickname for what appears to be a new species of homo, at least for now called H. Fiorensis. These are the tiny humans which have been in the news lately. Based on the skeletons found so far, these people were only about three feet tall with very small skulls. It appears that they may have made and used complex tools, and how they did that with such small brains is one of several conundrums about these little people. Other questions include how these people got there, and how they lived there until only 15,000 years ago.

All of this comes together in Indonesia, a place which until recently was largely a mystery to me. Isn’t coincidence wonderful?