Tea at Trianon: The Largest Volcanic Eruption in Human History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 7, 2025

The Largest Volcanic Eruption in Human History

From Smithsonian:

Our story begins on a very bad day about 74,000 years ago. The planet was starting to move out of one of its more recent ice ages, although in the tropics there was little change in climate between the Ice Age glacial episodes and the warmer interglacial episodes. A wide range of late Ice Age mammals inhabited the world, including woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths up in the cold regions of Eurasia, along with huge bison, giant deer, wild horses, and a variety of smaller mammals. Giant lions, sabertoothed cats, and huge bears fed on these large prey animals.

People lived in many parts of the Old World by then but had not yet reached Australia or the Americas. The bulk of the human population were archaic members of our species, Homo sapiens, which first appeared in southern Africa about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. By 74,000 years ago, these people had spread out of Africa and may have occupied much of Asia, as well as parts of southeastern Europe. However, Europe was still dominated by another human species, the Neanderthals, who had adapted to life on the edge of the northern ice sheet. In contrast to archaic Homo sapiens, Neanderthals had a shorter, stockier, more muscular build and shorter limbs, a body type suitable for attacking large prey and adapted for reducing heat loss in the cold climate. In the far reaches of Asia, ancient humans had spread to many of the islands of modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia. On one now known as Flores, east of Java and Bali, they evolved into a dwarfed species, Homo floresiensis. Now nicknamed “hobbits,” these people stood only about 3 feet and 7 inches tall, shorter than any modern adult Pygmies (given their small brain size, some anthropologists question whether they are even in our genus, Homo). Flores is part of the island chain (including Sumatra, Java, and many smaller islands of the Malay Archipelago) that makes up of most of modern Indonesia. These islands are built completely of volcanoes, both active ones and ancient, dormant ones. Their climate is tropical and their jungle is dense. So much vegetation grows on the rich volcanic soil, in fact, that it’s often hard to recognize signs of volcanoes there. (Read more.)