Tea at Trianon: Mountains Underground?

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

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Mountains Underground?

From Daily Galaxy:

Something vast is lurking beneath our feet—so immense and anomalous that scientists are rethinking what qualifies as the tallest “mountains” on Earth. A new study published in Nature reveals the existence of two colossal subterranean structures stretching from the core-mantle boundary deep within the planet. Towering up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) high—nearly 100 times taller than Mount Everest—these features sit beneath Africa and the central Pacific Ocean. They’re not made of rock in the conventional sense, but their scale makes them the largest identified features inside Earth. The discovery not only redefines Earth’s internal landscape—it introduces a powerful new tool for exploring planetary evolution. These dense regions may be billions of years old, preserving chemical signatures from early Earth and potentially influencing surface phenomena like volcano formation, plate tectonics, and mantle convection. (Read more.)