Episode 1: The World of Shiny Turtles
Can you imagine what your life would be like if a volcano erupted in your backyard every month? Well, you don't have to imagine because we've already done it for you, and it is a wild ride filled with rock-eating turtles with mean senses of humor.
GUESTS
1. Thea Gessler is a getting her PhD in evolutionary biology at Iowa State University. She studies sex determination in turtles! You can follow her on twitter at https://twitter.com/theagessler
2. Mika McKinnon is a geophysicist who studies natural disasters up close, so she's basically the bravest person I've ever met. She knows all the best rocks to lick and you can follow her on twitter at https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon
3. Andrea Jones-Rooy has two last names because she's too awesome for just one. She's a political scientist, CIRCUS PERFORMER, and host of the show Ask a Political Scientist. You can follow her on twitter at https://twitter.com/jonesrooy
TRANSCRIPT
Moiya 0:06
What's up nerds? My name is Moiya McTier, and I'm the host of Exolore, a show about facts based world building. I'm an astrophysicist and a folklorist, and a science communicator, and I love imagining fictional worlds. But the problem is that I don't know enough about how our world works to build a fictional one all on my own. So I started Exolore, which is a show where I interview experts in other fields. They're psychologists and biologists and architects and ethnomusicologist you know, really cool people with really amazing talent and brilliance. And together we imagined the life and culture on an alien planet, so different alien planet each time. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about a volcano world with a geophysicist who studies natural disasters, a political scientist, and biologists who studies sex determination in turtles, so yeah, let's go. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on this new virtual version of Exolore. I'm really excited to have you. First I'd love to have you all Introduce yourself. So, Thea, you're at the top of my screen. Do you want to go first? A little bit about you?
Thea 1:17
Sure. My name is Thea Gessler. I am a graduate student at Iowa State University studying sex determination in turtles. Yeah, so my background's in genetics and evolutionary biology and I'm interested in the plasticity of sex determination.
Moiya 1:36
That's so cool. I have a giant tattoo of turtles going down my back.
Andrea 1:43
When is that revealed? Is that partway through this show?
Moiya 1:46
Yeah, halfway through the show, there's actually a striptease portion.
Andrea 1:50
Here for it.
Moiya 1:53
Mika, you want to go next?
Mika 1:54
All right. Hi. I'm Mika McKinnon. I'm a geophysicist and disaster researcher. I'm currently looking at landslides on asteroids, but I also work with earthquakes, tsunamis pretty much anything like that. I have a large collection of rocks next to me just cuz why not? Always have to have rocks inside arm's reach?
Moiya 2:15
Yeah, I thoroughly enjoy all of your threads on Twitter about, you know, identifying different rocks and where different rocks come from So, big fan. Andrea, what about you?
Andrea 2:27
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones-Rooy. I don't do anything nearly as cool as our other scientists. I'm a political scientist. I host a show called "Ask A Political Scientist" every Thursday on The Caveat YouTube channel at seven. And I study in particular, how authoritarian governments use the media, and when the media is a force for good or bad in both democracies and autocracies. Sadly, these days the news in democracies is insanely relevant to my research on autocracy. But we'll leave that there. And hopefully our planet will not fall into that trap.
Yeah.
Mika 3:04
I feel like you and I have a lot of overlap in how things go. It's like people doing things terribly wrong or planets doing things wrong either way everybody dies in the end.
Andrea 3:16
Yes.
Moiya 3:17
Well, maybe we can construct a world where things go terribly wrong, but people don't die. Yeah, that's that's what we're here to do. So for those of you who haven't seen Exolore before, the whole point of this show is that we're going to use our collective expertise and imagination to figure out what the life and culture on an alien planet could be like. Whatever you say goes. So if you want to say that the government on this planet Andrea, is totally authoritarian, and they rule their people with an iron fist, you can do that.
Andrea 3:57
I'm tempted. I'll say I'm tempted
Moiya 3:59
Whatever you want. Mika, if you want to create your ideal natural disaster response team, you can do that too. Just like whatever you want to exist on this planet. We're going to make it happen. So are you ready to hear about the planet?
Andrea 4:15
Yes. Can we move there, is my main question?
Moiya 4:19
Unfortunately, this is not a real planet. A common question I get is, are these real exoplanets because that's what I study as an astrophysicist, planets outside of our solar system. And the sad truth is that we just don't know enough. We can't learn enough details about real exoplanets to know what they're like, so we can't figure out if they have weird atmospheres or tectonic plate movement or anything like that. Not with our current technology.
Andrea 4:48
Okay. Well, we'll save this for the future when we can.
Moiya 4:51
Exactly. So this imaginary planet is one that has a lot of volcanic activity. I don't know if there's any sort of quantification for volcanic activity here on Earth, because that's maybe something you could weigh in on. But this planet just has a lot of volcanoes going off all the time. There actually is a moon in our solar system called Io. It's one of Jupiter's moons, and it's a very volcanically active world. I think it's the most volcanically active body in our entire solar system. You can imagine that this planet is kind of like that, except for that one difference everything else is exactly like Earth. So it's the same size. it orbits the same type of star it has a moon. It has water and the same atmospheric composition. It just has a shitload of volcanoes going on. My first question for Mika because I just don't know enough about volcanoes is would volcanic activity affect other things on the planet other natural disasters? Like is it tied to seismic activity at all?
Mika 5:55
All right, so the whole reason we have an atmosphere in the first place is because we have volcanoes. They're the original source of gas that we have coming out. But the only reason that we get to keep that atmosphere is because we have a liquid iron outer core that has a magnetic field, which then protects that atmosphere from constantly being stripped off. So having the volcanoes alone is not enough to guarantee that we have atmosphere, we're going to say, hey, this plant has the same interior going on.
Moiya 6:23
Exactly.
Mika 6:25
Next question is going to be are we talking about volcanoes that are similar to Hawaii? So ones that are on oceanic plate and a really gentle effusive volcanoes they produce great big huge domes, like Olympus Mons on Mars is like this. Or are we talking about things more like Krakatoa or Mount St. Helens that are like those sharp pyramid volcanoes with a lot of silica which is glass. A lot of silica, a lot of quartz that traps all the gas and then you have big, violent eruptions. Those two things you're going to have them in different places. Some are going to be on land, some are going to be an ocean and it's inherent to that situation, but we're going to say it's like Earth. So you've got a mix of land and ocean so you're gonna have a mix of both the dome volcanoes and the pyramid volcanoes. Great. You said there's going to be smoke? There's no smoke from volcanoes at all. And ash is actually tiny shards of glass.
Moiya 7:18
I feel like I've been lied to my entire life.
Mika 7:20
Yeah, no, there's there's no smoke from volcanoes. That's all ash and all of that ash is not like fireplace ash, not like birch trees or whatever. It's teeny tiny shards of glass.
Andrea 7:30
Where does the glass come from?
Mika 7:32
So that's what happens when we have rock that is like liquid molten rock, and then you fling it into the air, and it cools down really fast. Into itsy bitsty teeny tiny bubbles. And you've seen this before, it's obsidian. But all the microscopic bits, everything that looks like those big dark clouds, that's all glass.
Moiya 7:53
That's so cool.
Mika 7:54
So never huff a volcano, is our lesson here.
Andrea 7:57
I gotta change my whole afternoon plans. Okay.
Mika 7:59
Yeah, just No, no volcano huffing.
Andrea 8:02
Okay.
Mika 8:03
And there's a whole bunch of like toxic gases that come out of this. So we talked about this in Hawaii, we talked about volcanic fog bog is like the low lying clouds of toxic gas. And it can actually go down the sides of the volcano and then settle down into the valleys and then kill everything in the valley with carbon dioxide, and no air. So that would be for our biologists to talk about in terms of what happens if you have so much volcanic activity, like do we fill all of the valleys with like this differential layer of no oxygen in the valleys, because I don't know. So there's that. Then we've got mid ocean ridges spreading, we don't think of those as being volcanoes, but we've got a lot of volcanic activity, you're going to have a lot of tectonic movement going on. And those plates are going to spread so you're constantly getting that new sea floor, which means you're going to get more things like hot springs, like the undersea version of that would be the the black smoker events. Which is where you find all the ridiculous extremophiles that do things like eat gold or eat arsenic of poop gold and you're like, "ah, how is this a creature"? Biologists, please help.
Andrea 9:10
That is what I do in my spare time, but we'll set that aside.
Mika 9:13
Yeah, yeah, like everybody who eats toxic waste and excretes precious metals. That's what you do with deep ocean vents. Um, yeah. Daily checklist. So we got that problem, then you're asking about earthquakes. Every time we've got that magma moving around, it makes Earth vibrate. Everything makes the Earth vibrate. Right now we're seeing globally seismic noise dropping because people are sheltering in place, and we can actually tell whether or not people are obeying their shelter in place by how much that background seismic noise is dropping,
Moiya 9:45
And that's just from people like walking?
Mika 9:47
Walking, traffic. Normally, you can see rush hour you can see tea breaks when people all go outside at the same time and leave. You see a spike in little seismic noise traffic. We can see like ocean waves crashing, we can see lover's lanes, which is the most entertaining to me of all our unusual seismic signals. Like "oh, you thought you were alone in the woods? You're not".
Andrea 10:10
What about the exactly two times, I did a 10 minute high intensity workout video, does that bring our numbers back up cuz I worked super hard for those two 10 minute intervals over four weeks?
Mika 10:21
Get that like seismic activity happening. Make the ground shake a little bit?
Andrea 10:24
Yeah. Yes. Planks and whatever. Yeah.
Mika 10:27
Yeah, so you're gonna have a lot of volcanic activity, you're gonna constantly have a magma shifting around, which means you're gonna have a really high background noise, which means whoever's on this planet isn't going to have a very good idea of what's going on inside because you're gonna have huge amounts of background noise, but you also have a huge amount of source vibration traveling through so ...
Moiya 10:50
When you say background noise, do you mean like, can they literally hear it? Can you hear this activity?
Mika 10:56
For the most part no, it is a pressure wave. It's just a pressure wave too low frequency for us to hear it. So it's a really low rumble that we don't get to hear because our ears are pathetic.
Moiya 11:08
Right. Um, I want to save plenty of time to get into the bio.
Mika 11:16
Yeah, that's a great point because hey, maybe the biology is going to respond to having like this constant, like low level rumble happening all the time everywhere.
Moiya 11:25
Yeah, so let's move on to the biology. Given the amazing just like crash course in volcanic activity that we just got, what types of traits or characteristics do you think that people on this planet might evolve to, like, deal with their harsh environment? And Thea, maybe you can weigh in first?
Thea 11:46
Yeah. So when you say volcanic activity, what I think of, is like, I envision organisms having like a really, really quick lifespan. So things that have they reproduce a lot They reproduce fast, so that they can get their offspring out. And onto that next generation
Moiya 12:04
Is that because it's just so dangerous that you want to make sure people will survive?
Thea 12:10
Like that risk of disruption. So you can't count on having a long lifespan, like, for example, humans are used to now we see examples and other organisms like rodents, they're kind of your characteristic, quickly reproducing species or insects so things like that. Um, I also think about dispersal is probably going to be really important. So anytime you get these eruptions, if they're going to take out a whole area that globe, organisms are going to want to be able to disperse to a new environment so that they can survive or their offspring can survive. So dispersal traits could be important. So kind of one of the great dispersers are like palm trees and like the coconuts just kind of float across the ocean and they've kind of colonized the world. Because they're able to disperse far distances because of the characteristics of their seed. So I imagine traits like that.
Moiya 13:06
What would a trait like that look like? In a, like a living sentient being?
Thea 13:14
Hmm. So in humans, or something... That's a good question. Um, well, the key is to be able to, like, kind of weather out the storm. So you're gonna want to be able to maybe like recede into something, maybe like a turtle shell to kind of get away from and protect yourself from that extreme environment and get away from it. Or also, like birds, they can fly, they can fly to a new environment. So any sort of like trait that allows you to move away or like change your behavior in such a way to move to move to new conditions,
Moiya 13:55
And turtles can swim right, they could escape through the water?
Thea 14:00
Yeah, so like sea turtles, they could swim across oceans. Um Blanca Turtles are also aquatic so they can swim so yeah, swimming would be a great treat as well.
Moiya 14:11
I would be very down to have, like, just like a super powerful race of turtle people on this planet.
Mika 14:19
What about like that whole collection of sharks that live inside of volcanic cave where they're massively adapted to handle high acidity? So one of the things volcanoes produce, they produce a lot of carbon dioxide. Carbon Dioxide reacts with ocean water, you get carbonic acids in there, you get a buffering happening. If you have a lot of volcanic activity, you'll have high acidity oceans, which means you won't have many seashells. The turtle shells would dissolve, they're not calcium carbonate are they?
Andrea 14:50
I don't like to think about that.
Mika 14:52
Like clam shells would dissolve in the ocean, but I don't know what a turtle shell is made out of.
Thea 14:57
It's bony. So there is that calcium element, but there's also cartilage, so it's also tissue based. So it's a mix of factors.
Moiya 15:07
We could make it out of something else.
Thea 15:10
True
Moiya 15:12
What would be a good material to survive this acidic water and acidic environment?
Mika 15:21
Pyrite! Fool's gold!
Thea 15:23
Oh, so they're going to be golden turtles?
Andrea 15:25
Oh.
Moiya 15:26
So we have gold turtles?
Andrea 15:27
That's better than my idea. I was like plastic obviously like... wait, maybe there's not plastic.
Mika 15:32
So could we incorporate high rate into a biological structure? So it's got a little cubicle structure molecularly speaking, it looks like salt does. I mean, biology and chemistry are not my thing at all, but if you could have like insert little cubes and just replace which cubes you have with pyrite cubes, those are really volcanic and handle that sort of environment well.
Thea 16:00
Biological structures often have like really cool organizational patterns. So imagine that could like be incorporated somehow to grow, use that as like your base.
Moiya 16:14
Yeah, if they eat it,
Thea 16:16
Or incorporate it into their body and use that as like a framework.
Mika 16:21
Munch on the volcanic rocks and be like, "I shall eat the pyrite". Like, you know, goats eat salt and just have that as part of my shell because calcium carbonate is just not going to exist. All you would have is like anytime you have calcium carbonate in a highly acidic ocean, it would just bubble at you, and you'd have like a fizz coating that dissolved.
Moiya 16:40
That's so cool. All right, so we have our fool's gold turtle people, and they get the pyrite into their shells by eating it. So we have part of their diet covered. That's fantastic. What I'd like to start thinking about what they actually do, how they behave in this environment? Mika, I don't know if your work covers kind of procedures for how you should respond to natural disasters? What types of procedures do you think they might put in place?
Mika 17:13
So, I'm going to tie this directly into the political track here so we can also integrate Andrea into it. So you're going to be in a situation where you have constant high disruption events on such a reoccurring basis that normality is disruption. So, but it's always going to be localized. So the volcano, every time you have a really, really big eruption, it can send enough ash high enough into the atmosphere that you have a like a dark layer that cools everything. So you'll have a year or two where everything is colder. But anytime you have just small eruptions, it takes out that island and everyone else is fine. You have to pick everybody up and leave and wait for that island to settle down and cool down and it takes like 20 years before the lava fully cools again, and maybe 100 years to break it back down into plants, but then you could like, go back to that island and go settle again. So it almost needs to be a nomadic sort of thing happening with constant disruption. Your infrastructure couldn't be very big, you'd have to have like a lot of oral storytelling happening. So if I give you that situation what came in terms of politics?
Moiya 18:24
Create your ideal environment for this world, Andrea?
Andrea 18:28
Wait, so why can't we have like written communication? This is very intriguing, would it all just dissolve or something?
Mika 18:35
Well, I mean, you could have it but where would you store it if you're constantly having to evacuate?
Andrea 18:40
Right.
Mika 18:41
Right. Like you have to be able to pick up and go all of the time.
Andrea 18:44
Yeah.
Mika 18:44
So you're gonna need to prioritize what you take with you. So, to get through the written into the technology era. How are you going to do that?
Andrea 18:56
You're not going to bring your collection of Harry Potter books?
Mika 18:58
You constantly have libraries burn down. Like every 15 years all of your libraries on your island are...
Andrea 19:04
Cool. I didn't even think about that part. Right. Excellent. The question is, would they even want to have some kind of global government at all some local governments, any kind of organizational structure and if we're living in a world that's super nomadic, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, the history in the human world on Earth, you know, there were early forms of, you know, institutional organization where there were, you know, chains of villages where you would have like, rules in place where you'd communicate and currency would come out to organize trade, and occasionally, they would, I'm really oversimplifying the origin of the nation state, but occasionally they would have like kings or rulers who would aggregate a bunch of wealth and in exchange for, you know, being taxed. That king or ruler would be expected to protect you and your community against outsiders. But all of that is predicated on everyone more or less being in one place. And you know, early humans were nomadic, but once we got agriculture and other things, we could stay in one place. That's when we started to really see more formal government that takes the form that we have now with recorded written constitutions that lasts a really long time, and things like that. Is that fair, right before agriculture, etc, humans wandering around?
Mika 20:34
So what would you have about this in the disaster context, it works even without a centralized point of government as we have the mutual aid agreements? So it's the the trading off of resources and you could still have agriculture if it was aquaculture so you're right land is constantly changing. But you could do like deep ocean fishing or you do like oyster gardens or things like that, and have those be stable so we can get agriculture.
Thea 20:59
Can we move this life underwater? I mean, that would be probably more stable.
Mika 21:04
It works with our turtles.
Moiya 21:06
Yeah, let's do that.
Mika 21:07
Like jellyfish and pyrite. Okay, so we've got mutual aid agreements, we have a variation of like wild farmed agriculture, aquaculture.
Andrea 21:19
Yep. And that this is also making me think of some really great work by a scholar named Elinor Ostrom, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics and is a political scientist, who basically -
Moiya 21:31
When was that?
Andrea 21:32
Oh, I don't know when she won. But she's she wrote in the like 90s mostly.
Moiya 21:42
Of course, alright.
Andrea 21:43
It was very recent.
Moiya 21:44
That's sad. Let's go on.
Andrea 21:45
Horribly recent. Yes. Um, but she wrote a lot about collective action, and how you as local communities you can basically grow cultures to enforce things. Like preventing overfishing or hoarding of resources in ways that are much more sustainable and local, rather than having an overarching government. So this was in response to a lot of arguments about how do we make sure that people don't like over-fish or factories pollute. And everyone was leaning towards like large central governments to enforce these rules, because they're sort of counter to markets. And she showed that in various communities around the world, people were able to opt into this sort of cooperative, tit for tat, mutual respect culture, that allowed us to make sure that like, "I will let you fish your area, I will fish my area, and we won't, you know, hoard resources for ourselves". But that's a very rare thing. And the risk is if we don't put that kind of early stage culture into place among our sentient, aqua, human-esque turtles, that we're going to end up on the other side of things, which is you have access to a particular natural resource, however temporarily, and then you hoard all the resources and you become this tyrant I was describing before, where you are the person who's in power And you know, sort of rich get richer, powerful get more powerful. That said, this idea that no one - at least based on location, really aggregate a ton of resources could be this very interesting if we think this is normatively a good thing, this interesting shake up every 15 years or so, at least in certain parts of the world where either the president or the Jeff Bezos, or the whoever of the world, whether they concentrated power or concentrated resources, kind of it all just gets shaken up, and they start a new, right and so early stages, I would imagine that it would be very hard for anyone to really amass much power or influence. That said, I would imagine that if these beings are self interested, like humans are, they would find ways to transport that power, whether it's reputation or carrying certain precious metals with them that are particularly valuable, or carry some sort of weapon maybe they develop a nuclear weapon that's not that big or whatever. So I'm very worried and how we make sure that we protect this species from one or two let's say, tyrants from overtaking.
Thea 24:03
Mika, you said that the volcanoes produce the pyrite? So are we going to have these pockets of pyrite by each volcano? Are these going to be like our wealth centers because everyone depends on them?
Mika 24:15
I'm thinking, what does wealth look like when you have a lot of volcanoes, because volcanoes produce like all the random exotic metals, like you've got all these random concentrations of everything from the deep Earth coming up. But what you don't have is soil. Right? Like if you're constantly coating your land surface with fresh rock, then suddenly your most valuable resource is poop, because you need to recoat your soil all the time. So you need to break down your rock into mineral components. So like having like a little collection of plants or fungi or seeds or whatever that speed up that rock breakdown process, that weathering process and weathering tends to happen so rocks are most stable under the conditions under which they form. So it's like grabbing another rock?
Moiya 25:05
Amazing.
Mika 25:08
We have here a rock that looks all brown and rusty in places. It literally is rusty. This is a very iron rich rock I had a magnet it would stick to it. The longer it's been at the surface it's been exposed to air to water it has rusted. So all these rocks with constant volcanism are constantly forming at the surface. So they're really resistant to weathering. So you need to get them under weird circumstances. So you're gonna have slower weathering rates. So soil is your precious metal, your ultimate resource is soil.
Andrea 25:39
You're right, so that might be what ends up being a currency if we assume that currencies are inevitable, as opposed to just sort of a barter trade system. The question though, is there a possibility in this world for something ... where they store all those seeds? Will people start putting soil into things like that? Would that be like the banks that people could have and that could protect your wealth?
Moiya 26:02
We can make that happen.
Andrea 26:03
I mean, I don't know if that's good or bad, right? So, I guess going back to the politics of it, so we want to make sure presumably, that this is a place where these creatures can, you know, I like to think this is normative and it's my opinion, but live in a place where they all have access to enough materials to eat and live and thrive and all those things. Hopefully, they can create and enjoy and consume some kind of art or whatever it is that this being likes to do, and also can live in a way that protects them from fear of invasion, right? And so typically, at least when I think of nomadic societies, I think of as my grip on history is very slender. Like the Dothraki in Game of Thrones, where it's like, you have to go and you're fighting and you're conquering. And it's never you can't just live and enjoy your life, right. And so some form of world government or regional governments would be helpful for this kind of protection, right. And the other thing that government can be good for is providing things like infrastructure, which could help with the dispersion that we were talking about before. And you know, governments, as we're seeing in the current world can be, they're not the only solution, but they can be useful for disaster mitigation, like natural disasters, like the pandemic, they don't always do a good job. And there's a lot of garbage research. There's really good research that shows depressingly that demo democracies are particularly bad at protecting citizens because of the incentives around elected officials to show that they recovered well from a disaster, and there's not much reward for preparing and avoiding one. So how do we put into place some kind of structure and maybe doesn't even need to look like government to get people the various benefits of what would look like government infrastructure if we needed protection from fear of being attacked at all times, some kind of rule of law, but without this, like, you know, someone putting all this soil into some, you know, underwater vault, and thus harnessing all the power and subjecting everyone to the miserable life.
Moiya 28:03
I imagine that it takes a lot of soil to do any type of process on these rocks, right? Like, you just need so much soil that your own personal store of it probably isn't very useful. Right, Mika?
Mika 28:16
Well, I mean, how much do you need to plant to grow? And do our turtles care about land? Like if they're primarily aquatic species, and then that falls apart? It they're eating like jellyfish and pyrite, and then go back to the biologist here on what do our turtles value?
Moiya 28:33
Yeah. Like what, what are their biological needs?
Mika 28:35
What are their needs and we'll figure out which of those is scarce?
Thea 28:39
I don't know that soil is necessarily essential because there are plants that don't require soil. They're less common... but like air plants.
Mika 28:55
I'm just like, everything is inside reach for me right now.
Andrea 28:59
Yeah, what could have been magical world are you living in I can't reach anything.
Mika 29:03
I'm pretty much like Mary Poppins. I just, I have a bag of holding that's just outside the screen limits. I just kind of keep reaching and things show up.
Andrea 29:12
Do our turtles need a giant fake painting that I bought on the internet four years ago? Because I have that to show off.
Moiya 29:18
Yeah, great.
Mika 29:19
How do our turtles perceive things? Like are they primarily light or do they do like water pressure sort of things like what are their primary senses so we understand what their art looks like?
Thea 29:31
So, they don't have like ears, per se, but they can sense like vibrations. They have eyes, obviously. I believe smell is pretty important, so aromas,?
Moiya 29:44
Even underwater? Does smell carry that well underwater?
Mika 29:48
They're particles. So it's just a different thing happening. But so how do they hunt for jellyfish? How do they know where the jellyfish are?
Thea 29:57
I don't actually study sea turtles. Maybe they just kind of follow the currents?
Mika 30:06
So all this volcanic activity is going to do some really weird things to currents as well, right because you have all these heat spots, literal hotspots. So two primary types of volcanism you can have tectonic plates pull apart, move side to side, or come together and if they come together, and they're both continental plates that crash up and you get the Himalayas, but if one is oceanic, or both or oceanic, the cooler denser plate will go underneath the ocean plate or the older ocean plate if you've got two of them together and that plate going underneath melts, and feeds the volcanism on top. The other type of volcanism we can get as you like a hotspot, think of it like a candle inside the mantle, and the plate going on top produces a series of volcanoes and that'd be like Hawaii. So the Emperor Hawaii chain is the Emperor is the oldest if now dormant volcanoes and that the plate has pulled across and now the most active volcanoes are on the youngest island. So you could have the wealthiest people living on the oldest Island, where there's no longer active volcanism. And then if you are on the lowest of your social class, then you're going to be in the most hazardous location, which is the biggest, youngest Island.
Moiya 31:18
I like this. I mean I hate this, but yeah, it makes sense.
Andrea 31:20
I hate it too. We're getting to a very like current day climate change situation where the wealthy are in positions where they tend not to be affected directly by this.