The Shocking Vastness of Prairie , Part 2

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome this Stuff to Blow your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with the second part in our series on the Prairie, the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America. This subject was inspired Robbed by your recent family visit to Colorado, spending some time in the western Prairie. I guess this is in the region just before the landscape turns into the rocky mountains. I couldn't remember if you mentioned last time. Did you see bison on your trip?

We did. Yeah, at the Arsenal, we saw some bison. Like I say that, that area has a number of bison and there's a lot of bison conservation that is focused there, and so we got to drive through that area and we got to see the bison, not super close because they're going to do exactly what they want to do, but we still got to see them at a distance, which was pretty cool.

It's not a petting zoo there, right right.

This is not one of those places where you hold potatoes out your window the livestock comes over. No, No, they do what they want and if you are close enough to see them, and then you're lucky.

So in the previous episode of this series, we talked about the definition of our prairie and its similarity to other ecosystems like the step. Prairies are relatively flat or rolling landscapes that are dominated not by trees and shrubs but by grasses and flowering herbaceous plants called forbes, and so one of the questions that we talked about in the last episode somewhat extensively was why are prairies filled with grasses and forbes instead of trees? What historically has kept the trees out. The answer to this question turned out to be kind of complicated, involving, but possibly not being limited to factors of climate and rainfall, pressure from herbivores, and very importantly, frequent fires, fires to which native grasses

and forbes are very resilient, while young trees and shrubs are typically not. Of course, human behavior in recent centuries has altered basically all of the factors that are upstream of the natural plant balance, and as a result, North America's prairies are seriously endangered. The vast majority of the original Eastern tall grass prairie is already gone, as we talked about last time. There are different ways of calculating how much of it remains, but some estimates say like four percent, others say less than one percent. It's mostly gone, and so this is a very precious, endangered type of landscape and there are ongoing conservation efforts to try to return some of this landscape more to its original plant

balance and original ecosystem characteristics. After that, we went on too a fascinating sort of historical niche subject about the prairie, which was about grizzly bears, grizzly bears of the plains. Today most people think of grizzlies as animals that live exclusively in like remote mountain forests, but grizzlies used to be apex predators of the prairie as well. And we talked extensively about the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early nineteenth century, which had lots of encounters with prairie bears, and we analyzed at least one of those encounters at length. We are back today to talk some more. Now, Rob, I understand for today's episode you got somewhat obsessed with prairie madness.

That's right. The other topics have had quite an effect, but this one will drive you absolutely mad.

I'd never heard of this, you know.

I wasn't really familiar with it either, though it certainly makes sense considering some of the things we talked about in the last episode. On one hand, you discussed your own personal response to the treeless openness of the prairie, that it had maybe a sort of uncanny or even threatening feeling to it, like, you know, too much space, not enough trees.

Yeah, as I said in the last episode, I don't like that I feel this way. I feel like I want to I should be able to appreciate, you know, the beauty of all different types of landscapes equally. But for some reason, maybe just the environment I grew up with, I do have a kind of bias or preference for forested landscapes. And when there is not anything taller than me vertically in an area and it's just you know, vast open space all around, that does feel kind of exposed and vulnerable and uncomfortable to me. I need tall things around me, I think, And I don't know, maybe this is something I could get over one day, spending more time in the prairie.

But I do have that tree bias.

I think, well, this, I think this is going to arguably play the scenario here. But another thing that I think plays into the scenario that we touched on last time is how we have a lot, a great deal of writing and poetry about the about about the planes the great American prairies. Particularly, we talked about the words of William Cullen Bryant, the poet who described this sense of awe at beholding the prairies. And yeah, I think both of these examples steer us naturally into discussion of prairie madness, sometimes called prairie sickness, and so forth. And I do want to stress at the outset here. This is not a scientific term. This is not a medical term, and it is primarily reported as a phenomenon of the

nineteenth century, and specifically in cases where you had European and American homesteaders, American homesteaders from the East who ventured out onto the prairies, you know, trying to you know, creating a new life, grabbing some land, you know, trying to make a lot life out there, who then experienced an array of psychological symptoms such as depression, withdrawal, behavioral changes, and in the extremes, even violence in response to the crushing, vastness, the open landscape and the howling wind of the prairie.

Now, based on what you were reading, would you say that this is something that is probably culturally contingent. You mentioned it's among like European American homesteaders, European colonizers basically in the prairie landscape. It's not something typically reported by like indigenous peoples of the prairies.

Correct, And that is very important to note, Like there's been indigenous people living on the prairies for more than ten thousand years, so this is not something that they experienced.

And so probably also not something that's like an objective human body response to the prairie landscape. It's probably more like a conditioned cultural type of response.

Right, if you fly into Denver, people will warn you about the altitude difference, but nobody's going to warn you about prairie madness because it's not really a thing in terms of it's not something that is going to just objectively be a factor in anyone's life. And again, it's really mostly talked about within this particular historic context and among particular people who were venturing out into this landscape.

And there are a number of other factors that are involved here. So the explanation for what's going on or allegedly went on here have more on that in a minute, and is that you could basically underline by two examples that we've already touched on. First, the poetic awe of the prairie, of which there are many examples, and this awe kind of finds its dark reflection in the fiction and nonfiction of the time that cast the prairie is something ominous and unnatural. Part of that is just sort of the power of poetry and literature. If you're going to describe a landscape, you know you're going to lean into one direction or the other. Is it awesome and does it make you feel like a god? Or is there something creepy about it? It makes you feel less than

you know? Both There are you know, potentially rewarding directions to go in in definite choices in any given work of fiction or nonfiction.

Well, I think every landscape on earth has this this dual quality. I mean, is the forest a soothing, calming, shady landscape, where you are, you know, covered nicely in these calming greens, or is it a spooky place where you hear sounds that echo between the trees and maybe spirits are trying to lead you off the path.

Yeah, and kind of going into something we talked about last time. I feel like, and this is highly subjective, but I feel like the desert environments they tend to speak more clearly on this way, and it's like, oh, it's a land of death, but it's alive, you know. It seems like the back and forth there's a lot more balanced. Prairies can maybe I'm just making them the personal argument here that they can maybe be a bit harder to wrap your head around because they're not barren.

They are full of life. But then there is the more or less flat topography and some other factors environmentally that we're going to get into here. And then the other factor is there was this frequent observation that these lands were fundamentally different compared to the lands that homesteaders called home, either in the eastern United States or elsewhere in Europe and on the literary front, some of the some really famous examples of this, and some of the most famous examples stem from Oliovog's nineteen twenty seven novel Giants in the Earth. This is a book that concerns pioneer Norwegian immigrants in the Dakota territory, with the character Barrett Hansa particularly experiencing literary, very prairie madness. Joe, have

you ever read this book?

No, I haven't.

I had to read it in junior high or high school, and this is one of those books that was assigned to me, and I do not think I give it a very dedicated reading. I remember virtually nothing of it except for the you know, the the obvious that it concerned no actual giants in the earth or no actual FLM crawling out and attacking anyone.

So I really false advertising.

One star false advertising, I guess if you're in you know, junior high or high school, well whatever age I was. But looking back on it, and you can find the full text online and you can, you know, find it in print very easily to get a copy of this book. But there are some beautiful passages that deal with this, again, particularly concerning the character Barrett, and it's it is telling that she's the one that experiences it because a lot of the alleged cases of prairie madness are very gendered in their general focusing on the housewife in a given scenario.

So I'm going to read a few passages from giants in the earth. After they had bustled about for a little while, the others left her. The moment they had gone, she jumped up and crossed the tent to look out the door. How will human beings be able to endure this place? She thought? Why? There isn't even a thing that one can hide behind. Her sensitive, rather beautiful face was full of blank dismay. She turned away from the door and began to loosen her dress. Then her eyes fell on the center pole, with its cross piece hung with clothes, and she stood a moment irresolute, gazing at it in startled fright. It looked like the giants she had read about as a child. For a long while she was unable to banish the picture from her mind.

And then here's some more that gets I think, gets back to the landscape. The broad expanse, stretching away endlessly in every direction, seemed almost like the ocean, especially now when darkness was It reminded her strongly of the sea. And yet it was very different. The formless prairie had no heart that beat, no waves that's sang, no soul that could be touched or cared. And then one more here, but more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some. Many took their own lives asylum.

After asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once been human. It is hard for the eye to wander from skyline to skyline year in and year out without finding a resting place.

Well, that sounds pretty extreme.

Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this, but I think everyone can. Certainly, if you have any familiarity with the literature, you can definitely pick up on Gothic tendencies in this writing. Really latching onto this idea. I referenced our recent Weird House cinema selection in the Mouth of Madness earlier, and these passages could very easily be passages that Sutter Kane has written about. You know, the void opening up in Monsters, spilling out of it. You know, it's that level of darkness.

I don't know what the author's intention here is, whether it's to actually project these characteristics onto the landscape, or to do what sometimes happens in fiction, which is to show what are really characteristics of the human character of the character, and they are reading their own psyche onto the landscape. It might not actually be something that is the landscape's fault, if that makes any sense. It's the person is having feelings and they're looking at the world around them, and they see their feelings in the world.

Yeah. Again, it's been too long since I read it to provide full context here, but it's my understanding that most of these ideas are centered in this particular character, and that it's not present in other characters. So I think it is very character focused here.

Yeah.

So there are other examples from this book. I might come back and read another line from it. But all of this effectively underlies the idea that there was something about the landscape or the contrast of landscape, combined with isolation and the severity of frontier life that could lead to mental breakdown in some and the topic seems to have entered the larger American consciousness in eighteen ninety three three via the paper or the publication The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms by E. V. Smaali sm A L. L. E.

Y published in the Atlantic and still available on the Atlantic's website. You can pull it up. I think there's a paywall if you want to read it in full, but you can also click and look at a scanned version of it as it printed. And that's how I read it.

Read it in full.

This individual, EV Smally was an American journalist, editor, and Republican political writer, closely tied at the time to US President James A. I'm going to read a few samples from this just to give everyone the vibe. Okay. It more or less begins with the following In no civilized country have the cultivators of the soil adapted their home life so badly to the conditions of nature as have the people of our great northwestern prairies. Okay, Yeah, And from there he goes on to argue that the like there are some there's some arguments here that I don't think really stand up to close scrutiny, including the idea that the European peasant. He refers to the quote European peasant as a type of person who lived a life

of joy and social interaction and that on the and that prairie dwellers essentially had none of this and were basically doomed. Here's another passage. An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the New Prairie States among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnished the largest contingent to the The reason is not far to seek.

These people came from cheery, little farm villages. Life in the Fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome.

Oh well, I don't know if there's like actual experiment to back this up, but it seems plausible to me that loneliness and isolation could be a major contributor to people having psychological problems.

Yeah, and that is certainly a possibility here. Like, one of the realities is that you did have these homesteaders going out living in very isolated circumstances and living a hard life in an environment that they were not accustomed to different environmental factors that we'll get into here. So yeah, I want to stress that, even though I'm having some fun with the way that this is written, and also certainly singling out that this is a paper that made a big impact on how people thought about prairie madness. Yeah, not everything in here should just be dismissed. Like there are some possible connections to be made here.

Yeah, I mean, like it even strikes me as possible to pick up on something I was saying about the characters in that novel that one could easily read psychological difficulty stemming from, say, loneliness and isolation. Could you know, take those problems and interpret them as problems related to the landscape, when really maybe the landscape doesn't have that much do with it. It's just like what you're looking at while you're feeling the fact that you don't have any friends and haven't seen anybody but your husband and years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You're a few more quotes though, from this paper quote the silence of death rests on the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds. And then here's one more. There is but one remedy for the dreariness of farm life on the prairies. The isolated farmhouse must be abandoned, and the people must drawl together in villages. The peasants of the Russian steps did this century years ago, and so did the dwellers of the Great Danubian Plane. And so he ultimately positions isolated life on the frontier plane as standing in just stark opposition to sanity, to intellectual development, and just the rational progression of society. So he's not the final word on all of this. And there have been some papers that

have really gone into this and looked at it in different ways, looking at it as a literary trope, looking at it and as it may connect to sensory deprivation and so forth. I was looking at a particular paper, This is Unsettling Landscapes, Prairie Madness and Eco Gothic Themes in US Plains Literature, published in Great Planes Quarterly from twenty nineteen by Vanessa stein Rotter, And in this she points out that prairie madness is of course a recurring theme in the fiction and poetry of the US Great Plains, and the author stressed various ways that the feature of the plain's environment stabilized non native settlers sense of place and control. So she points out that this was of course, again not a medical phenomenon, This was not a scientific term,

and she also citing the work of Sarah Brooks. Sundberg points out the cases of white female settler mental and or emotional decline in the prairie might not have actually been that widespread. But even though we see this all the time with things, even though there may not have been as many cases of it, it became an idea that was difficult to dispel. It became a popular way of thinking about life on the prairies because again, outside of the actual environments of people living out there, you had people, say, reading that article in the Atlantic or reading poetry and fiction that drove home this Gothic idea, and therefore it becomes very difficult to shake, and it just becomes a staple of fiction and nonfiction writings of

the time about the Prairies.

How prevalent we think a problem is often has little to do with the raw numbers of how often it's occurring. Often it has more to do with like how sticky the idea is? Is it like really interesting or scary or captivating to the imagination.

In some way? Right?

And of course we see a more pronounced version of that when things become actual social panics, you know, so for instance, satanic panic, the idea there's the satanic forces at work in the world today. We've we've done episodes about this before. In this case, I don't think that prairie madness ever reached a level of true social panic, but it just becomes this sort of sticky idea.

Yeah.

So, the author here points out that fiction writers were especially drawn to the idea because of those terrific Gothic undertones, as well as quote its potential to engage larger, often gendered anxieties or feelings of powerlessness within restrictive social and cultural roles.

Yeah.

So, and I think there's a case to be made that that's maybe what we see in and Giants in the Earth. You know, it's not just about spooky landscape making people feel spooky, but maybe getting into some of these deeper concepts. Steinroder focuses on the landscape's role in the scenario, but points out that other scholars have examined the importance of gender and family relationships, domestic violence, and cultural and physical isolation that are often bound up in the scenario. So again, any as we've been alluding to any given potential case of prairie madness, any individual experience that could be chalked up as being prairie madness. They're going to be, They're potentially all these other factors as well,

and again just potentially a hard life as well. I was reading some of the settler accounts of how frightening prairie fires could be. You know, we touched on that already, just the idea that like a fast moving fire could just rip across the prairie.

Yeah, totally.

And as we talked about in the last episode, fear of these prairie fires and what they would bring the led to attempts by European American settlers of the planes to suppress naturally occurring prairie fires to stop them from spreading, which actually ended up being very harmful to the prairie ecosystem.

You know, the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains more often intentionally both used intentionally set prairie fires in some cases for like the management of bison prey and things like that, and also allowed them to occur more, which was much healthier for the prairie because, as we know, the natural plant balance depends on the fires.

Yes, absolutely.

So.

Steinroder again focuses on the landscape's role, and I'm just going to boil like our key findings down here are key arguments, and that is that the features of the landscape can destabilize one sense of control. It can make it feel like you are not a complete autonomous agent in this kind of humanless wilderness. That and that also it can just be very difficult to just comprehend the landscape around you, that there's something ineffable about it, and that that can can also feel kind of crushing.

Yeah, totally.

Now, I think the same could probably be argued about various other landscapes, and you know, you could probably apply this to things that we might think of as the opposite of the prairie, like the mountains. But still, I think it's an interesting argument.

You know.

I think she's acknowledging all these other factors and also the idea that there may have been far fewer cases of this than we actually think. But the landscape definitely plays a role either in the cases or our idea about these cases. I want to turn to another paper I was looking at here. This one's by Alex d. Veles, titled The Wind Cries The Effect of Soundscape on the Prairie Madness Phenomenon. This is from twenty twenty two in historical archaeology, and this one basically talks about the possibility that you could have specific details of the sounds of the prairie that could have been like a catalyst for prairie madness, so something in those howling winds, for example.

There's a paywall in this particular paper, but James Gaines wrote a good piece about it for Atlas Obscura the same year, and I recommend that as well. Okay, so veils examined human hearing patterns and spectral data on Great Planes soundscapes. Now, to be clear, these are like contemporary soundscapes, and one of the things that is outlined in that Alice Obscure article is that you know, it would have been different back in these days. We changed the environment quite a bit. So it's possible that, you know, what he's studying here, wouldn't you know, one hundred percent be the environment that the settlers found themselves in. But any rate examines these things, ultimately proposing that affected settlers might

have suffered from misophonia or hyperacusis, thus making them more sensitive to environmental sounds and with both conditions worsened by stress. Again, stressful environment potentially in and of itself, not counting social factors, and you know in the author also links some of this to some of the symptoms described in the literature on prairie madness, such as in the extreme's depression, insomnia, irrational behavior, and so forth. So the focus here was on low frequency environmental noise, which can potentially overstimulate the nervous system in certain individuals, as well as those continuous or supposed to continuous roaring winds out across the prairie.

And as points out that every landscape that humans live in has plenty of sounds for us to hear, but that in cities these sounds are more diverse and essentially become a kind of white noise. I think a lot of us that live in cities we can speak to this.

You know.

You just get used to the sort of bustle of say a large urban environment, and a lot of it fades into the background. Yeah, I mean you still there'll be things like horns and so forth. It still can get your attention and throw you off, but for the most part, it all just kind of becomes the background noise. Meanwhile, on the planes, especially in these historic settings, there's less background then, and the sounds that do exist. They coincide with a sensitive range of human hearing that the brain pays more attention to interesting, so gains in that Atlas obscure piece on This also cites Adrian K. C Lee and auditory brain scientists at the University of Washington who said that the sound environment reminded them of since redeprivation

chambers as well as anechoic chambers zero echo chambers. And these are cases where we have sonic environments that have been engineered in a way that they can cause the brain to quote naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning up or down the volume to better distinguish what's going on.

I don't know how well validated this is, but I at least recall reading anecdotal reports that anichoic chambers can make people feel very uncomfortable. Yeah, like going in them after a while, Like the sound environment is literally unnerving. People don't like it, and it makes them feel weird and they.

Need to leave.

Yeah.

Yeah, so this level of weirdness could potentially creep in. You start hearing all sorts of things that interfere with your slumber. Really almoso kind of induced misophonia. So you know, you might be hearing the sound of like, you know, insects, or the wind you know outside, like you know, hitting parts of the external structure of the house, that sort of thing. So, you know, I think it is it's an interesting idea. I think, you know, that we do have to remind ourselves not that we shouldn't place too much emphasis on a singular type of stimuli. And I don't think that's ultimately what the author, the original author was arguing here, but they were just saying, look, here's just one potential piece of the puzzle that could have

played such a factor. And the winds, you know, absolutely could have been a factor. We touched on the prairie winds already in this series. The winds can be seasonally quite intense, especially in March and April, but also anytime you have temperature contrasts driving large scale weather systems across the plains, and the natural habitat again offers virtually nothing in the way of wind breaks. So you'll find localized areas of higher wind in the United States and Canada and certainly during pronounced storms, but on a statewide level, the Great Planes represent the largest continuous windy environment due to these just vast, unobstruct did flat terrains, and that would have especially been the case historically before these landscapes

were reduced. Though again we have to remind ourself of the subjective nature of such things. So turning back to poetry, I just want to present two examples of authors describing prairie wind. The first is from Giants in the Earth that I already referenced.

Barrett, can I guess this passage is going to be not a fan of the prairie wind.

Yeah, especially since it concerns the same character. That's a good bet.

Okay.

Barrett could not go to sleep for a long time that night. At last, she grew thoroughly angry with herself. Her nerves were taught as bowstrings. Her head kept rising up from the pillow to listen, but there was nothing to hear, nothing except the night wind, which now had begun to stir. It stirred with so many unknown things.

Okay, so not.

An endorsement of the prairie wind. But then I want to read just a couple of stanzas here from Prairie Winds, a poem by Helena Coleman, who lived eighteen sixty nine through nineteen fifty three, a Canadian poet, and you can look this up online. This poem is available in full at all poetry dot com. I love all things that God has made that show his ordered care and might, But most I think I love the wind that blows at night. It holds so much mystery, like that in mine own restless heart, brother to me and well beloved, O wind thou art, So here we is a divine wind on the prairie, inspiring wind on the prairie, as opposed to the night wind that contains unknown threats. So again, it's also very subjective and then can be tweaked. It

e's a direction with the language, with the poetry.

I like how both of them appeal to the mystery in the wind, except in one case the mystery seems threatening and the other case the mystery is I don't know, so the divine possibilities unknown.

Yeah, And I do want a flag too that in these various discussions of prairie madness that you find, sometimes they're talking about the roar of the wind, the sound of the wind, and other times you're talking about the silence of the great plains. So I don't know. I guess there is kind of a maybe it's both of those working together, you know, where you're maybe having these contrasts where you're like, how can this place be so empty and so loud, and then later it feels silent as well. So I think all of this is fascinating.

I don't think any of it suggests like an equation for prairie madness that you know holds one hundred percent true. But we can identify these various the various themes that become popular about it, and these infectious thoughts regarding prairie madness, and we can identify some of the factors that may have played a role in any actual historic examples where people's mental state was pushed in a negative direction, maybe in part because of the landscape or because of the other details of the environment. Yeah, I know that we have no we have We probably don't have anything like a true pioneer of the of the of the frontier prairie out out there listening that can chime in here.

But I'm sure we have some listeners who moved to the Great Plains from other areas, maybe lived in more isolated locations, who can maybe speak to a little of this or certainly can apply their own experiences to these examples of prairie madness, and you can give us a little field report. Yeah, I did not experience anything like prairie madness when I in my very brief experience as a tourist checking out the prairies. I just I found it all fascinating. Maybe a little hot at times, it's very sunny out there, but yeah, I didn't feel anything like prairie madness.

Well, I'm glad to hear that. Are you ready to talk about the tangent I went on for this episode?

Yeah? Yeah, what have you got for us?

Okay?

So I got sucked into a little geological or you might even call it a topographical mystery related to specific prairie landscapes, and that is the mystery of the so called Mima Mounds, named after the Mima Prairie in southwest Washington State, which is now a protected area at US National Natural Landmark. So the word Mima Spelledma originally comes from the language of the Shahalis tribe, in which mima means newness, as in something that is new and is related to or at least sounds like a word in the same language that.

Means to be surprised.

I was reading about this in multiple sources, but I especially want to shout out. So I was looking at some like technical papers and stuff, but I want to shout out a short informational booklet I think, mostly geared towards students, put together by the Washington Geological Survey, which is great to look up if you want to see illustrations and you want easy to understand explanations of the main theories behind these formations. So what are the Mima mounds?

A mundane way of putting it is that they are little hills, lots of little hills crowded together. Now, initially that probably doesn't sound very intriguing or mysterious, but I think you will immediately grasp what is interesting if you look at a picture of them. So, Rob, I've got some pictures for you to look at in the outline.

Here this first one. In the outline, you can see the nice green landscape, but all of these hills. This is a photo from one of the sites in Washington State, and what we see is a vast field of several square miles full of little hills, each between two and seven feet tall and between eight and forty feet wide, covered in prairie grass and flowering herbs, and occasionally with little trees or shrubs growing on them, but mostly not mostly just this grassy landscape with these basically evenly spaced little hills. These hills sometimes get called soil pimples or even goose bumps on the earth, and that comparison makes even more sense if you look at them from above from imagery that's created using aerial photography or other top

down imaging methods like lidar from above and rob I've got a couple of images of this that you can look at in the outline as well. We'll describe these for people listening at home. So the first one is a photograph taken from above, and then the second one is a lidar image.

And looking from above when.

You're not distracted by other surface features like plants or buildings, you know what it looks like To me? It looks like the skin of a beaded lizard. It really does, yes, So the mima mounds are squeezed together into the landscape in a way that feels both regular and irregular. Irregular in the sense that they are not in rows that line up or anything like that. It's not a repeating pattern, but they feel regular in the sense that they are crowded together without significant gaps, and the spaces between them feel like they are confined to a regular, very small size.

It looks kind I was trying to think of an analogy to picture. It looks kind of like what would happen if you got a bunch of different but similarly sized coins and you put them all down on a table lying flat, and then you push the mass of coins together from the outside of the of the mass, so that this pile of coins has like or no space in between the coins, but they're not overlapping.

Yeah, yeah, I get what you're laying down here. Yeah, something about just you know, how tightly compact everything is, like the bumps or mounds or not uniform in their size exactly, but yeah, they seem to there is this feeling that they are bunched together.

Yeah.

Now another thing is if you're thinking hills, you might be getting the wrong idea because these do not have the long, rolling, natural feeling of hills in the traditional sense like you would see in the you know, the foothills of a mountain range or you know, most naturally occurring hills. Something about them, maybe the way that they're relatively small and.

Tightly packed together.

It feels unique, unique from most hills. And yet they are not totally unique as features or geological formations. If you dig them up and look inside them, they are these small piles of silt, sand, and pebbles, and similar patterns of small hills and mounds, sometimes with similar constituents inside them, also called Mima mounds. Even when they're not inside the Mama Prairie region, or called Mima like mounds, these similar mounds can be found in other places in North America and even on other continents. So there are a bunch of different places beyond the Mama Prairie where you will find Mima like mounds. And there's still debate about some of these formations. We actually don't know if they are all truly the same type of feature with

the same underlying cause, or if they're only superficially similar goosebumps in the earth with different causes. Now that brings us to the question of what is the cause? How were these hundreds of little mounds formed? And we still don't know. This is an open scientific question. And I thought it might be interesting to do a brief look at few of the competing hypotheses. I can't promise I've captured all of the hypotheses in circulation today, but I think I've got the main ones that are out there now and have been out there in the past.

But to be clear, UFOs write out non ufis.

Obviously, some people are going to say that anything that looks weird or interesting, and these do look weird and interesting. Somebody's going to say, yeah, that's the that's crop circle type.

Thing, landing zone. I don't know.

Maybe this is where the Aliens they were going to build some pyramids, but they gave up early.

I don't know that.

But yes, the ufologists are going to be on this, But no, that is not That is not a good theory in my opinion.

And then at the same time, we shouldn't, like surface level, confuse these with nouns and like the mound builders and mounds elsewhere in the America, is that it seemed to have definitely had an origin in human construction by indigenous peoples.

No, from what I was reading that they do not seem to have major characteristics of mounds built by human and so human construction is not one of the leading theories, at least in any of the sources I was finding. People may have thought that a long time ago, but not in modern science. So let's go through some of these hypotheses about how they were formed. One is the so called sun cup hypothesis. This was originally proposed by a geologist named J. Harlan Bretts in the year nineteen thirteen.

Bretts specialized in the geological history of the Pacific Northwest, and he studied how the landscape had been shaped by glaciers and by glacial outburst floods. A glacial outburst flood is a flood caused when a glacier lake suddenly breaks free of its containing structure. Essentially, there's a natural dam of some kind, maybe made of ice or of earth, that gives way, and then this huge lake of glacial meltwater is released onto the lands below. And so the sun cup hypothesis goes like this. Thousands of years ago, the surrounding area, especially this big vast landscape just north of the Mima Prairie, was covered in a glacier, and the Mima Prairie itself became blanketed in a thin sheet of ice and snow, and the sun shined down on

these thin sheets of ice and snow in the relevant areas and melted them in irregular patterns called sun cups. You can actually watch sun cups form on patches of snow melting in the sun today. There are these irregular patterns of differential melting that look kind of like inverse goosebumps, little depressions or cups crowded together like a random honeycomb pattern.

So Rob, I've got a picture for you to look at in the outline here. But folks at home, you can google sun cups in snow if you want to see it. You've probably seen something like this yourself before. Maybe a little of shaded patch of snow or something thing lingers for a while, it gets beamed on by the sun over and over, partially melts and then refreezes, that kind of thing, and you get these these little these patterns of cups and depressions in the ice.

Yeah, if you live in areas that gets received snowfall, then you've probably seen this before. You just didn't know what it was called.

Yeah, So Brett's argued you had something like this happening. This big layer of snow and ice over the top of this prairie. And then water flowed over the top of this ice that had had these sun cups forming in it. So maybe this is from a you know, maybe a glacial outburst, flood or something. You know, water flows over the top, and as it flows over the top of this ice, it deposits sediment such as silt, sand, and pebbles or gravel in the cups, and this keeps happening.

Over time, the deposits in the sun cups build up and become quite large. Then the landscape the ice melts away, so the cups are now gone, leaving only the deposits behind. So what had once been piles of sediment accumulating in the bottom of these ice cups now become little hills with no ice cups. One that I want to mention that from what I can tell, is not really still in the mix anymore, but it was historically important was the frost polygon hypothesis. Apparently in the mid twentieth century, it was a popular explanation to say that frost polygons had formed the mounds, and the idea goes like this, you have frozen soil that cracks in a polygon pattern.

You've again you've probably seen something like this yourself. Actually, you may have seen images of polygonal cracking in dry or frozen soil. You think about like soil that gets wet and then gets parched and dries out, it cracks in these kind of weird again, kind of honeycomb like pattern.

Yeah, this reminds me their actual There are these texture paints you can get. These are used in the miniature painting and all, where you lay this sort of thick paint with like little grains in it. You lay this out over like the base that a miniature like human soldier is going to be standing on, and then as it dries, it actually like breaks up like this. And it's not necessarily like completely you know, you're not just saying polygons necessarily, but the way it breaks up, you get these little gaps and it creates this wonderful effect where it looks like dried earth.

Yeah, cool, cracked landscape.

Yeah.

So you can actually have a similar thing to that happening with icy soil ice that you know, it freezes and then it cracks and inside these cracks. The idea wind with the frost polygon hypothesis. Inside these cracks they would fill with rain water or maybe floodwater. They'd fill up with water and then freeze again, and so the freezing would cause the water track in the cracks to expand each time, because water expands when it freezes, and this would widen the cracks. So it freezes pushes the soil away to the sides, and as a result of this process you get like freezing and then warming, and then the warming conditions would melt away the ice and when it flowed away, it would leave these large spaces

in between rounded mounds that had been pushed up by the expanding frost. Apparently, there was a big geological conference in the eighties which examined this hypothesis and concluded that it could not adequately explain at least some of the mounds. So I think this is not a major contender for the explanation anymore. Another idea is the vegetation anchoring hypothesis.

The Washington Geological Survey booklet calls this the runoff erosion roof anchor hypothesis. But the common feature of these explanations is that there are plants growing on the prairie and the roots of these plants grip the soil and help protect it from erosion, and the mounds in this hypothesis would represent places where plant roots once held the soil together, while channels were carved around the mounds by surrounding soil erosion. Okay, then we get another hypothesis. This one's interesting gophers. So in nineteen forty two, a couple of biologists named Walter Dohlquest and Victor Scheffer proposed that it could have been bioturbation by gophers. So how would gophers have built these mounds?

Don't they dig tunnels underground? How would that result in mounds? Well, the idea goes like this. When gophers dig tunnels, they displace soil. That soil has to go somewhere, so they dig out cavities in the earth, and then they throw the displaced soil into a pile behind them, and this excavated soil gets packed into a big mound. And these piles can actually they're not just waste. They can be useful to the gophers because then when a rainstorm comes, the gophers now have high ground they can retreat to to get away from the flood. And if you study gopher behavior. This hypothesis says gophers actually tend to space their burrows a fairly reliable distance apart from one another, though not in exactly like regular patterns or rows. And

this spacing could match up roughly with the spacing and irregular arrangement of the Mima Mounds.

Okay, so the idea here being yeah, that the Mima mount spacing is a visual representation of gopher territories.

Yes, and I believe this hypothesis is still in the mix as well, could be gopher related. Another hypothesis is glacial outburst flooding. So it's worth mentioning. I think I said this a little while ago, but the Myma Prairie is right at the southern edge of where a giant glacier reached down to about sixteen thousand years ago, and some researchers think that the Mima Mounds could have been formed by here. This concept is coming back a glacial outburst flood from the glacially damned lake known as Lake Carbon.

So around this time this Lake Carbon somehow spilled out of its containment, it flooded the landscape, and as it did so, it picked up tons of volcanic rocks and sediment from the Cascade Mountains and washed them downstream, leaving them in piles along the path of the flood. Now, what would be the evidence that the mounds could come from this event? One thing cited by that Washington Geological Survey booklet is that you've got mounds in a place called Rocky Prairie upstream from the area of the Mima Prairie upstream in the what this flood zone would have been.

And these mounds have more volcanic rocks and bigger rocks, and then the Mama Prairie mounds downstream have smaller rocks and smaller, finer sediment. And that pattern, you know, the bigger rocks upstream, more volcanic rocks, and the smaller sediment downstream, that would fit with a flood formation mechanism. Also, the mounds tend to be stretched or elongated parallel to the direction that this water from the flood would have been flowing.

Though from what I'm reading, I think it's possible that a glacial flood like this could have shaped mounds, even if it wasn't the thing that originally formed them.

Okay, one more.

Idea, this is the earthquake hypothesis. This one appeared more recently. It was put forward by a geologist named Andrew Berg in nineteen ninety and to illustrate the idea behind it, you can start with an experiment. If you take a flat surface like a table or a drumhead or anything like that, and you spread out an even layer of fine silt or sand on top of that surface, then you make the surface vibrate. So maybe you hit the table or the drumhead repeatedly with a mallet. Causing the surface to vibrate, will tend to make loose sediment lying on top of it arrange itself into interesting geometrical patterns.

You might have seen something like this if you've ever watched these demonstrations of like a sound from a speaker acting on sand on a flat surface, Like you can play different frequency tones through a loudspeaker over a drumhead like surface, and it will make the sand sort itself into these fascinating geometrical patterns driven by the sound waves.

These arrangements tend to be caused by the interactions the kind of resonance of different waves going back and forth, and you get these places where the waves, you know, they sort of line up and they form these standing peaks, and then also place is where they cancel each other out and create these valleys. Anyway, Berg proposed that earthquakes in the past had caused a similar thing to happen with loose soil on top of the Mima Prairie. So interesting idea there too, And ultimately, from what I can tell, this really is still genuinely a mystery.

It is not solved.

Each hypothesis I think has its own defenders and advocates, but there is not agreement within the scientific community or the communities involved that like which one is the best explanation. So this made me curious, like, if you're out there listening right now, you're a geologist or somebody with some other relevant expertise, and you want to write in about which hypothesis seems strongest to you and why, please do get in touch. Our email is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

You know, I was looking at this booklet you referenced earlier, the one for students, and I really enjoyed that the different hypotheses are presented by a talking gopher name Goodwin, and good one is very very clear that these are presented in no particular order of likelihood, so that you can decide this is a very balanced gopher. And I appreciate even though one of the ideas concerns gophers, and you know, you would otherwise be led to think, well, good, one's going to want to really push the the one that champions his own species abilities. But no, he's calling it right down the middle.

I was thinking that exact thing.

It's like, oh, we want to have a talking gopher, but that's going to make it seem like the gopher hypothesis is the real winner, and we.

Don't want to imply that. So we've got to say, you know, we're not favoring any one of these.

But which one illustrates the easiest, which one potentially speaks to children better? You know this is this is the one to go in. So yeah, totally the right direction for the booklet. Well, that's fascinating. Yet I was not familiar with these these particular mounds. I've not traveled to this part of the country before. But if I if I make it out that way, I'll have to check these out.

Well.

As I said, they're not only in southwestern Washington. There are Mama like mounds actually in many places throughout North America, and there are similar formations on other continents as well. So you can look up maps of Mama like mounds, you know. There there are places you can see them all over different regions of the prairie. There's some like in Texas and other places farther in the Northwest Prairie.

So yeah, there you can look for things like this in lots of places.

Huh.

You know.

I just pulled up a map of where one finds Mima mounds throughout North America, and there are there. They are in place that you can find them in California. You can find them in Arizona, various other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana. So yeah, they're they're out there. I just need a I need a I need to put them on the itinerary.

I guess. Yeah. I'd like to see some too. Yeah.

All right, Well, I think that's all for this episode on Prayer. We're going to gohea and close out this this episode, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there again. Anything you have to contribute regarding these topics, any field reports, be it mound based or prairie vibe based. You know, certainly write in and we would love to hear from you, and you know, we'd like to use at least some of our listener mails in future listener mail episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You generally do about one of those a month, maybe sometimes two, depending on how much, how much is coming in and what sort of buffers they need to put into the schedule.

Let's see. As always, we would just remind everyone out there, the Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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