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[Theme song plays, fades out.]
Devon: You are listening to Ouija Broads. This is Devon.
Liz: This is Liz
Devon: Liz, today, our weird story is in Washington.
Liz: Washington? I've heard of that.
Devon: Washington! You know that place! And actually, you've heard of this story, because it was the one you challenged me to talk about.
Liz: I did!
Devon: You did!
Liz: I challenged you! With a topic!
Devon: You did. You challenged me. We are going to talk about the geological phenomenon that does actually occur on every continent except Antarctica. But, right here in Washington State, specifically 20 miles south of Olympia, it is known as the Mima mounds.
Liz: Yeah.
Devon: Yeah, the Mima mounds! I've never been there.
Liz: Mmm-mm, me neither.
Devon: And I'm excited to, after researching it, after looking at some of the cool pictures. But before we talk about what they look like, let's talk about the name, 'cause the word Mima, M-I-M-A didn't mean anything to me. I kind of assumed it was a name, like, you know, named after, like, a person but--
Liz: Yeah, I thought it was like a village or a community that lived in the area. I mean, I understood it wasn't like "Mee-maw," like... Pop-pop mounds or something.
Devon: No, it, uh- there's two different thoughts. If you read Thurston County place names it means "a little further along," or if you are looking at William Bright's Native American place names of the United States, it's a Chinook word that means downstream
Liz: Those are both related and unhelpful because they only make sense if you're talking about them in a specific place.
Devon: Oh, yeah!
Liz: Like, you can't stand on the Mima mounds and go "These are the ones that are a little further along."
Devon: [echoing] --"are a little further along."
Liz: "They're right here." "They're downstream!" "No, they're not. We're looking at them. What are these things?”
Devon: What-- what-- what's your word for right here mounds?
Liz: Yeah, what kind of "Who's on first" situation are they trying to set up here?
Devon: Right? Right? And wasn't it like... I'm going to botch it. But isn't there some Australian animal that you know the White explorers asked an Aboriginal. What is that thing. And they said kangaroo. And so we were just like "cool, it's called a kangaroo" but really that's the Aboriginal word for "I don't know."
Liz: That's what I've heard.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Yeah, that it's just like [dubious noise].
Devon: [Dubious noise] That thing.
Liz: "What are you pointing at?" There was definitely... there's definitely a city on the East Coast that's named something like "wow, your clothes are really bright!" because they were just like "I assume that things that you say after I say 'what is this place called?' are in response to my question."
Devon: Oh, God love people. God love people. People are so good at naming things, Liz! These mounds, I told you they occur worldwide... And in the United States, like I said, people are great at naming them. They are called hogs-wallow mounds in southern Oregon. They are called Prairie mounds if you go over to Colorado, Wyoming, or New Mexico or the super fine and delicate folks of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma call them pimple mounds.
Liz: Okay, that's still better than what I thought you were going to say.
Devon: Thank goodness I didn't say what you thought I was going to say, because I think pimple mounds is one of the worst descriptors I've ever heard.
Liz: Ope, nope. When I was researching the ice worms, there is a term for humped mounds of dirt with grass on them that they used in Alaska, that… sometimes it feels like they were just being racist out of like... a determination, you know? You know, what does this have to do with anything? Why just put a racial slur in there? They're like, "We gotta. We have a quota."
Devon: "We have—"
Liz: Eighteenth century.
Devon: "We do have a quota." I have-- I have two fairly racist things for you in this episode alone.
Liz: Oh, that's okay. I don't need that.
Devon: No. We'll get to 'em. Don't you worry. I think that since we've said that pimple mounds are the most evocative name or I've said that pimple mounds are the most evocative name, I'll describe them.
Liz: Okay.
Devon: Basically-- Mima mounds is now a word that is used kind of globally to describe this geological phenomenon which I thought was really surprising-- that it was the least descriptive name? And yet it's used worldwide now, I guess? Except in Antarctica?
Liz: It's very unique branding.
Devon: It is, right? Specific! You have to think about that one. What would its logo be?
Liz: I don't know, I don't know what they look like.
Devon: You don't know what they look like-- Liz, they look like... they look like Astroturfed bubble wrap, dude.
Liz: Oh, that's very evocative. Thank you.
Devon: There you go. They, they are mounds. I mean, they are low, flattened, circular to ovular dome-like mounds that cover an area of landscape.
Liz: So it's like Astroturfed bubble wrap, I can visualize that, I could get into that. But how big are we talking here?
Devon: We're talking large, they are 9 feet up to 150 feet in diameter.
Liz: Wow.
Devon: Yeah. And they rise about 6 feet off the ground and they, they form-- the quote I keep reading is "conspicuous natural patterns," meaning it's over an area of landscape. The Mima Mounds National Area Preserve is 637 acres of landscape.
Liz: Wow.
Devon: So it really is at, you know, not as far as the eye can see, but as far as you can see for a long ways, these funny little domes of earth all around you.
Liz: So it's not like you just find one.
Devon: No
Liz: And you're like "oh, A Mima Mound." No, they're in lines and swirls and stuff? Is that what conspicuous natural pattern is?
Devon: Conspicuous natural pattern just means that it covers a large area. They aren't-- they're very randomized. They don't make a spiral, they don't follow, you know, a Fibonacci sequence. They don't make lines, but they are little ice cream scoops of dirt pretty close to each other. Not dirt, of turf, pretty close to each other in a... an area of landscape.
Liz: Okay.
Devon: Seriously, like, I mean I, I wasn't trying just to be funny. Bubble wrap is, is more regulated in, you know, it's like an offset grid but that's pretty close to how if you expanded that to landscape size that's pretty close to how close these mounds are in real life.
Liz: Yeah. Which is not that closely aligned with how hills work right, like..
Devon: No.
Liz: That's not how dirt distributes itself.
Devon: No, it's not. And you know, they're-- they're hard to talk about, I think, because they're-- for me they were kind of hard to conceptualize until I saw pictures. Until I saw exactly what we're looking at and realized, like, no, this stretches over a big area of land, dude. There are a lot of these little... mounds, hills. You know, mound sounds too small, hill is definitely too big, but they are... [laughing at self] Liz, they're, they're a conspicuous natural pattern.
Liz: They look really intentional. And they--
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: I feel like if I came over a hill and saw this I would think that I had come across something that either like a farmer was doing or was the result of, like, burials or something.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Yeah, you would be like "what is going on with this?" This is not just hills-- this is bubbles.
Devon: Bubbles.
Liz: This is ground bubbles.
Devon: Yes. Ground bubbles. Why are they-- Well, so your, your logic, your line of thinking is right in line with what the first white people who saw them thought. I mean of course white people, you know, Caucasian settlers were not the first people to interact with Mima mounds because they had been part of the landscape that Native Americans had inhabited for thousands of years. But---
Liz: Well, that's informative in itself, though
Devon: It is, right? So we know they've been around.
Liz: It would be pretty scary if you came out just one day and your whole field was like that. It would be like crop circles.
Devon: It would be like crop circles. Definitely, my face has come up with a whole bunch of Mima mounds in one day.
Liz: [laughing] Oh, no.
Devon: Oh, no! But no, they were first, I guess... Come to the attention of white settlers in 1841 when Captain Charles Wilkes who was leading the US Exploring Expedition-- Exploring Expedition is a lot-- But the, he was leading the US Exploring Expedition that was charting the Northwest.
Liz: Okay.
Devon: And his journals are what record you know the first - that we know of - white people interaction with them where he says "We soon reached Butte prairies which are extensive and covered with tumuli or small mounds at regular distances asunder. As far as I could learn, there is no tradition among the natives relative to them. They are conical mounds thirty feet in diameter about six to seven feet high above level and many thousands in number."
Liz: Now I'm wondering, did they not have a story about that? Or did they just not tell him.
Devon: Well-- [laughing]
Liz: And they were like, [bored voice] "Yeah, I don't know."
Devon: Yeah, that's--
Liz: Because it's like me, where it's like, "What happened to the last ice cream bar?" "Yeah, I don't know. Shit's wild."
Devon: "I'm not really sure. I guess-- it's just, you know... Strange world, lots of things happen."
Liz: Yep.
Devon: Well, okay. So you picked up on that. The, the current population was like, "I don't know what they are." But Captain Wilkes was pretty sure that they looked like burial mounds to him. And, of course, burial mounds have valuable relics inside. So even though the Native Americans had said, "There's nothing in there," and Captain Wilkes was pretty sure there was something in there and it was related to, y'know dead people, "He was like "let's open 'em up and figure it out."
Liz: Uh, yeah, they were correct to not tell him anything, because he is apparently a grave robber.
Devon: Total jackass grave robber. Yeah. What he writes in his journal is: "Being anxious as to ascertain if they contained relics, I subsequently visited these prairies and opened three of the mounds, but nothing was found in them but a pavement of round stones."
Liz: [exasperated sound] And this is the kind of thing where it's like, if you're in the UK, you do find those burial mounds and barrows and stuff with hoards of treasure. But for all he knows this is like going into Westminster Abbey with a shovel and just prying up rocks.
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: Like... You don't know! They didn't say, "And we don't care if you dig them up, that's how boring they are."
Devon: [laughing] "And knock yourself out there, duder."
Liz: "Yeah. Have fun. Help yourself."
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: "I didn't say we weren't gonna use them. I just said that you didn't need to worry about it. I didn't say it was okay to wreck them."
Devon: Captain Wilkes needed a talking-to.
Liz: Yeah...
Devon: Captain Wilkes was not the last person to guess what the hell these mounds are. Why were they created? How were they created? What are they made of?
Liz: Wait, so back to Captain Wilkes. He didn't dig into one, though, he was just like, "Note to self, come back and grave-rob these."
Devon: Oh, no, he dug into three of them and said he just found a pavement of round stones.
Liz: Interesting.
Devon: Yeah. So they did not contain relics. Didn't find anything that he thought was unusual or out of place in them. And that's kind of what modern day scientists have said. Y'know, even though Mima mounds vary by region and sometimes the mounds within a certain area vary a little bit as to their composition, they generally are all a blanket of prairie grass over loose sand and fine gravel and decayed plants and sometimes the soil profile is a little bit different or a little more complex like -- In particular I guess in the Mima mounds there are a few -- in the Mima mounds in Washington I should say, there are a few that folks have-- that scientists have dug into and they realized that they contained more than the average amount of carbon and charcoal?
Liz: Hmm.
Devon: And they found out that it's because the Native Americans in the area used to set brush fires as plant control and cultivation and things like that. So scientists are like "Oh cool. So we can see, y'know, that this is -- there was a fire here years and years and years ago, centuries and centuries and centuries ago, and so that's altering the carbon profile of the soil.
Liz: Okay! But that's the kind of sophisticated analysis that you're not going to be pulling off on an expedition--
Devon: Totally not.
Liz: --a couple hundred years earlier.
Devon: Totally not. What, what Captain Wilkes sees is probably what you or I or most people would see which is like "Okay, well this looks a lot like the dirt that is the dirt from around here. All right, cool."
Liz: "Sure some dirt!”
Devon: "Sure some dirt!" So we know what they're made of. But still, why are they formed? What-- what caused the Mima mounds? And there are theories that range from dry natural geological processes to very interesting fantastical theories involving everyone from Paul Bunyan to aliens being responsible.
Liz: We have-- see, this is the sweet spot where, like, "Here's what scientists would tell you, and here's somebody who has a very active imagination. Here's what they would tell you."
Devon: "Here is their super colorful theory."
Liz: Yup!
Devon: Do you-- I know that you've kind of read about the Mima mounds, are there any theories that you want to throw forward? Or that you've heard?
Liz: I only read enough about them as I was sort of scanning them and adding them to the list that I know they're not burial mounds.
Devon: Yes.
Liz: So I'm a step up from Captain Wilkes, I guess.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: I think they are a natural phenomenon but I have the feeling that it is going to be like -- like the rocks that slide around--
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Or the singing sand or something--
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: --where I say that I want to understand how it works, and then people try to explain to me how it works and my brain just goes, "[affirmative] Mmhmm, the goblins, yep. Mmhmm."
Devon: Precisely.
Liz: "Okay...
Devon: Yeah. The sliding stones of Stone Track Playa are not-- it's not-- oh my God, it is not frost under the rocks that melts makes them slide, it is obviously ghouls. I will broker no scientific theory on that because, yeah, that's one of those things where I'm like... Well, I guess it be cool to know, but actually deep down, it wouldn't be cool to know. Let me keep wondering what pushes these rocks at night.
Liz: It feels like-- have you been following the whole Reddit glitter thing?
Devon: Oh God, yes.
Liz: Did you see that there's a show that says they solved it?
Devon: No... What does that show say it is?
Liz: They say that it's the boating industry that-- so, okay-- so to back up for people who aren't familiar with this. Because we're Reddit millennials, we're not, like, TikTok millennials... [laughing]
Devon: No... No... as much as...
Liz: That means we have mortgages...
Devon: That means we have our mortgages. But if you're on Reddit, you should go see r/tiktokcringe. And it's actually if you sort by "top" they're really good. They're not cringy at all, they're wonderful. I love TikTok, it's like Vine's younger brother.
Liz: It makes me happy. I don't understand the meme where you only see one person come into frame and then the song is playing and a bunch of people pop up--
Devon: Yeah. Neither do I.
Liz: But it makes me giggle every time.
Devon: It's funny!
Liz: Yeah. Anyway, so someone posted this mystery and it was in. I think the New York Times or The Washington Post or something about basically establishing that there is an industry that uses tremendous amounts of glitter--
Devon: Mmhmm.
Liz: --that is a closely held trade secret. And if you found out what it was, it would be very devastating for them. And I think they also said something about like, "it's in plain sight they just don't want people to know that it's glitter." And of course this brought on rampant speculation about what it might be. And notably for, for my purposes in terms of how satisfying I find the boat paint explanation, is that the very next thing they actually talk about is automotive paint.
Devon: Okay.
Liz: There is no -- I grew up around boats, like it's not a secret that there's a lot of glitter in boat paint.
Devon: Right?!
Liz: That's how boats look. Like, they, they look like the kinda fancy nails that you've got to sit for an hour and a half to get at the salon
Devon: Absolutely
Liz: They're very fancy, acrylic, shellacked... glitter everywhere.
Devon: Oh, yeah!
Liz: So although -- I guess, I'm not saying like "you didn't uncover anything interesting." Cuz like, no, they definitely verified that the boat paint industry uses a ridiculous amount of glitter and that's worrisome because of microplastics in the ocean and so forth. But I'm like, "that's not... it."
Devon: No.
Liz: That just can't be it.
Devon: No. No. That's not surprising at all to me. Yeah. Boats are supposed to look like the bowling ball that you and your brother fought over who got to use at the bowling alley in 1983. What I liked is the theory, was that it's in toothpaste.
Liz: That made sense to me, that it's in toothpaste and see... That would be the kind of thing where you're like, "It is in plain sight... but we don't like to think that we're putting glitter into our mouths..."
Devon: Totally.
Liz: Because it's something consumable.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Whereas people are trying to say "Well, they don't want you to know about the glitter because of microplastics." Like, that's not on enough people's radar. Like, I know everybody decided to have a little wankfest about straws and try to make people with disabilities' lives more difficult--
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: Because we all want to blame it on, hmmm, we want to blame it on people just trying to live their lives, rather than accept the industrial contribution to the destruction of the oceans.
Devon: Oh, yeah.
Liz: But I feel like, that's not going to affect people! Nobody cares--
Devon: Nobody cares.
Liz: --about oceans getting more plastic from boats.
Devon: No.
Liz: Like, that's not -- that's, that's not devastating. So I'm like, glitter in toothpaste made sense to me. I don't buy the cosmetics thing...
Devon: That's, like, obvious.
Liz: We all know you're not supposed to get glitter in your eyes and there's a difference between cosmetic glitter and craft glitter...
Devon: Totally.
Liz: And it can really fuck you up, but like again... That's not it.
Devon: No.
Liz: It would have to be something --- you see, it gets in your brain, though, because you're like "Okay, so what is something where it's in plain sight but nobody thinks about it?" And so you turn it over all the time because you can rule a lot of stuff out. You're like "Well, its not in like dog food or baby formula." It's not in plain sight in that way. So where the hell is it?
Devon: Yeah
Liz: Where's the glitter?
Devon: Where's the glitter?
Liz: Where's the glitter, man? If it's not in boat paint?
Devon: I... [laughing]
Liz: [sings to the tune of Jimmy Buffett's Boat Drinks] Boat paint!
Devon: No, I think -- I do think that boat paint is a red herring. I'm going to go with toothpaste as... I've, I've definitely not read another theory, and I sure as shit haven't come up with a better theory. I drew a total blank when they said in plain sight, would kind of rock your world in a bad way if you figured out what it was. I can only think of something that you put in your body and the only thing I can think of that I put in my body-- [pauses] One of the few things I can think of that I put in my body that is glittery would be toothpaste.
Liz: Yeah, yeah. Toothpaste could kind of make sense.
Devon: Right?
Liz: It's presumably not in a food product because the FDA has regulations around them.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Similarly, I don't think it's in medication.
Devon: No!
Liz: That would -- That's pretty closely scrutinized as an industry in term-- I mean, like, the whole generic and patent thing means that the formulas of medications are really closely held and carefully detailed.
Devon: Right.
Liz: So it's not that... Yeah, and I'm like, it's not lotion, like, we've all had shimmery lotions or whatever
Devon: Oh yeah, forever.
Liz: That's not news.
Devon: Oh my god.
Liz: Toothpaste is the closest I can think of. But even then I'm like, "would that really rock people's world? If they found that there was glitter in toothpaste?"
Devon: It definitely makes me feel... Well, it definitely elicits a reaction from me. I guess I shouldn't be shocked, but it's one of those "Oh, I didn't know I was eating plastic bits." You know? I didn't...
Liz: But why would your teeth not be glittery though, after you brush your teeth? Is it like, really, really, really fine glitter?
Devon: Hmmmm, I don't know. Glitter never sticks where you want it to stick. If I wanted it to stick to my teeth so that I had that cartoon like [makes 'bing!' sound effect] shine you know-- it wouldn't happen.
Liz: No, no, you'd look like Fury Road. "Witness me!"
Devon: Wouldn't happen.
Liz: And then you'd shake a bunch of glitter into your mouth with some Mod Podge...
Devon: [laughing] Oh my goodness...
Liz: [makes furious mouth sounds]
Devon: [mimics the furious mouth sounds]
Devon: Yes... yes... I recently did a craft at Becca's Halloween party that involved glitter on a witch hat, and Jason wouldn't let me bring it home because he brought up the deal we made after our wedding. Which was that I will not allow glitter to come into our home knowingly, because we still find some of my green glitter from my wedding shoes - which I haven't had in nine years - in his beard.
Liz: Okay. That's pretty impressive.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: Between my crafting stuff and having a 6-year-old girl, I definitely have plenty of glitter around and she will just like... She had glitter as dandruff for awhile there-
Devon: Oh, my goodness.
Liz: Cuz we only wash her hair once a week and she's got pretty thick hair. So I try to brush, and like the glitter is just like, "No, I'm staying here on the scalp."
Devon: "Yeah, I'm here"
Liz: And I was like "How did you get glitter in your hair? This much glitter? How? How?" She's like "I don't know." And then I was just brushing her hair [frustrated sounds] for glitter and she's like, "I guess maybe it was when Caiden poured all the glitter in my hair" and I'm like "yeah, maybe..."
Devon: Yeah. Could be, could be.
Liz: Could be. We'll never know!
Devon: No it's a mystery to this day. Much like the Mima mounds.
Liz: Yeah. Thanks for bringing it back around. I'm glad we brought up the glitter thing though because I have theories and opinions.
Devon: Well, it's a good one and I want to talk about -- I've wanted to talk about it on the show, but how do you make it specific to the Pacific Northwest? Well, guess what. Life finds a way.
Liz: Yeah, it does.
Devon: [Affirmative hum] When we talk about theories let's start with the kind of plausible ones and then we'll work our way to the fun, weird ones.
Liz: That's the ticket.
Devon: It's so what we do around here. When I was researching the kind of plausible geological phenomenon theories, a lot of them involved glaciers. Which...
Liz: Yeah.
Devon: ...is not really weird for the Pacific Northwest because we have those, what are they called? The, the erratic stones? Or the, the, the alien stones? They're the giant fucking boulders that have been deposited at random-ass places around the PNW because of the Missoula flood or because of the, the glacial ice sheets that used to cover this area and pushed these rocks from somewhere to the middle of nowhere. So that's not it's not a weird theory, I don't think. You know in 1913, we've got a geologist named Harlan Bretz whose theory was that when a glacier is melting, it melts at different rates and it will form these things called "sun cups," where it's a depression, a divot in the glacier, y'know, that's melting more rapidly. The sun's striking it just right or whatever, and that's where soil will wash into it, and kind of... You have this little sediment slurry in the bottom of this sun cup. And so, when the whole glacier melts you've got these tiny little depressions that are full of sediment that when they touch ground, they're like "Oh cool, now we are a mound."
Liz: That makes sense. Because it's not like when you get a heavy snow and it melts it all melts evenly. Like, even just a little drip from a tree or something will make a surprisingly deep divot.
Devon: Right. Or like in the, you know, Everest where they've got the-- what are they called? The seracs, the ice seracs, which are just these giant big pillars of ice that are formed because the sun melts stuff in weird ways.
Liz: Yeah
Devon: So that's...
Liz: Yeah, water's an odd substance.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: It doesn't -- it's, it confounds us, I think. It confounds us because it's both very, very powerful but also sometimes it's very hard to see what it's doing. You can't really conceptualize that a river made the Grand Canyon.
Devon: No
Liz: Like I think we can say it but we're like, "No."
Devon: "No. That doesn't make sense to me. Are you kidding me? Water carved all the way down there?"
Liz: "Nah... I can pick water up with my, my hand."
Devon: "With my hand! I put that on my face! That's not what it does."
Liz: [chuckles] Okay so, I would buy that.
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: Just because I feel like almost anything around here or wherever is explainable by these major -- I don't even know what you'd call them. They're climate events and they're geologic events.
Devon: Totally.
Liz: Yeah. Ice sheets, glaciers, floods.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: All that kind of stuff.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: They check out, and they're the kind of thing that, it wasn't until relatively recently that we were able to get a broad enough perspective and to know how to zoom in our perspective whether it was, y'know--
Devon: Mmhmm.
Liz: Way, way out to see the Caldera of Yellowstone or way way in, to get it, like, carbon dating.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: We haven't really been able to recreate that stuff for very long. So I'd buy that.
Devon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you just said some of the other, like, glacial theories, which are... Floods, you know, there are sediment-rich deposits that happen after glacially dammed lakes are freed, you know?
Liz: Yeah.
Devon: And then that was a theory. It was also posited that permafrost at the end of a glacial area would have cracked into these, like, many-sided shapes and ice formed in the cracks. And then as the climate warmed, the ice melted, and the soil was left in these kind of rounded shapes, y'know, cuz the ice drove in there, in these wedges, and broke it apart. And then you've also got, you know, runoff from glacial meltwater or snowpack is just eroding soil between trees and shrubs, and that leaves the kind of dirt around in a mound. and the trees and shrubs aren't there anymore, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't have been there, and that's what happened in this, this geological event.
Liz: That would be kind of cool.
Devon: Yeah! Mmhmm.
Liz: It's like a fossil, in a way.
Devon: And another theory is that there were ancient forests in the area and the mounds are the remains of the decayed stumps around which the windborne soil and sediment formed.
Liz: Ahhh.
Devon: That was the theory that I thought was likely was that they were... It's a word called aeolian.
Liz: Okay.
Devon: And you see it on beaches when there is a plant growing in an area that has a lot of loose sediment and wind. As the wind carries that soil, that sediment, that dirt, whatever... It can get caught on the plants and then you create sand dunes effectively.
Liz: Aeolian, like the god of wind!
Devon: Yeah, there you go.
Liz: I get it
Devon: You get it.
Liz: Because they do look like dunes... They're like inland dunes.
Devon: Yes.
Liz: Which are fascinating in their own right.
Devon: Yeah. So that seemed like a really likely theory to me. We've got other scientists who were saying "No, no, no, it's not wind, it's, it's seismic." So Andrew Berg is a geologist for the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Spokane. Shout out to our hometown boy.
Liz: What-what.
Devon: And one of his-- you know, his theory, the thing that he really thinks has formed these, is that it's possible that they're from earthquakes generating vibrational shockwaves and so those travel through the soil and the mounds form as a result when the earth settles again.
Liz: I would understand this much better if - I'm going to assume - Dr. Berg could show me with like, a sandbox.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Maybe like one of those turtle sandboxes. And some playground sand and like, a hammer?
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Or to simulate the tectonic plate shifting?
Devon: The shock waves.
Liz: Maybe we can, like, bury my hand under it? And then I can have my hand come out, as is a big hit with the two-year-old crowd? I just need to see how this works because I can't really visualize how the shockwaves would do that although I can't rule it out. I mean every--
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: It feels like every place on earth is perpetually in that cycle of going from really really disrupted to flat and back.
Devon: [laughing] Yes.
Liz: I believe it, regardless. If you're like "this is getting flatter" I'm like "okay. If you're like: "These mountains are getting higher." I'm like "sure."
Devon: Yeah, works! Great! If you can't show me in a sandbox, I'm not listening.
Liz: [sputters, laughs] I just want everybody to make science that tactile.
Devon: Yeah. Dr. Berg meet us. Mobius.
Liz: Yeah.
Devon: New Year's Eve 2020. We'll -- We'll meet you there. It'll be like Sleepless in Seattle and you're gonna tell us all about this.
Liz: I'll be wearing a red carnation
Devon: ...and that's all...
Liz: No. Not with that much sand around. You kidding?
Devon: It's going to get where you don't want it to get, no matter how many clothes you wear.
Liz: That's the secret of glitter. That's the secret. All sand is glitter.
Devon: What the beach industry doesn't want you to know.
Liz: [laughs]
Devon: And it's like how sea glass is all frosted over because of, uh, the, the way, the action...
Liz: I think you mean "frosed across." [laughing]
Devon: "Frosed across!" It's "frozed acrost!" You had too much fun with William Clark's journal. I told you that there were some weird theories as well--
Liz: Yeah.
Devon: And also some racist theories.
Liz: Uh-oh.
Devon: So let's do one that knocks out both of those: Paul Bunyan hired a bunch of Irishmen to help him build the American Great Wall of China.
Liz: And-- Yeah, I'm just going to wait till you finish...
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: What I'm going to charitably call a thought, here...
Devon: A thought! And the, the "lazy Irishmen" walked off the job because they were lazy Irishmen and they just dumped their wheelbarrows full of dirt wherever they wanted and thus formed the Mima mounds.
Liz: That's not even a logical racist story.
Devon: Are there any that are logical?
Liz: A great wall... Well at least they're somewhere... It's, like, they're trying to put people down and so they attribute stuff to them that a human would do if they were lazy.
Devon: Yeah, there you go.
Liz: It's just like... there's a great wall to keep who, where? And why did they line up all their dirt like bubble wrap? This doesn't even make a little sense.
Devon: Nope.
Liz: This wasn't even Paul Bunyan's job, he wasn't a manager.
Devon: He wasn't a manager! He wasn't building a wall! He was cutting down trees with his ox and his girlfriend with the big bustle and she rode a catfish or whatever.
Liz: That was extremely sloppy.
Devon: That was Pecos Bill. I don't know. We just wanted-- we just wanted to harp on the Irish that day.
Liz: Apparently!
Devon: And you know, we have the Mima mounds handy and we knew there weren't Native Americans buried inside of them. So. That's-- I mean, that's, that's the dumbest theory I guess I heard? Because like you said, it's not even grounded in, in anything that I can get behind. The weirdest theory I could find was that they have been created by aliens as a form of communication.
Liz: The contact theory.
Devon: Yeah. And, like, I don't unders... I mean, dude, are they like... Are they visual Morse code? Are they like.... Braille? Do the aliens come down and touch them to get a message? I don't understand how they're supposed to work because they're not like the Nazca Lines who form at least a pictogram.
Liz: Yeah, are they communicating to us?
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Yeah. What?
Devon: Because we're not getting the message.
Liz: It's been a couple thousand years and we didn't get the message, so that's awkward.
Devon: We--
Liz: We've been leaving them on read.
Devon: They slid into our DMs and we just didn't even answer back. We decided it was more likely that a fake tall man with a fake blue ox really didn't like an entire race of people. That was more logical--
Liz: They were making a dirt wall, apparently.
Devon: Yeah, they were making a dirt wall of China. The problem with the alien theory-- obviously we've just come across a couple of them, but also I was really bummed because when I first started researching them I thought I'd bring you some kind of alien or UFO story, because we haven't-- I haven't really dug into like abductions or extraterrestrial things beyond foo fighters or some cattle mutilation. But this is one of those problems that I think you and I have a lot, which is, just blog after blog after blog says, "Oh yeah. One of the theories is aliens." But it never attributes it to anything, it never gets specific and it just feels like it's this big, y'know, tail-chase of which blog originated this story. How can I find the singularity where where this theory started?
Liz: Yeah. You're like, "No, who actually thinks that it's aliens and what do they have to say about it?"
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: Not just like, "Well, some people think it's whatever." It's like, yeah, I mean... It's a big planet. I'm sure you can find somebody who thinks anything, but like, what's the logic.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: What's the-- I mean, not to be like a meme from five years ago but it's like that history channel guy, right? He's going "Aliens!"
Devon: Aliens!
Liz: You're like, what about aliens? They're communicating what with us? Does it bother them that we haven't figured it out? Is... Why... Like, that's just such an inefficient method.
Devon: Yeah, that is the full and total theory. Aliens.
Liz: ...aliens.
Devon: Well, it wasn't aliens, Liz, because in 2013 scientists cracked it.
Liz: Whoa.
Devon: BBC, Seattle Times, and many other major news outlets were reporting in December 2013 that scientists had finally proven the origin of the mounds, with the American Association for Advancement of Science's headline reading: "Mima Mound Mystery Solved." And Live Science's December 4th headline was much less coy and said: "Great Pyramids of the Gophers - Mima Mounds Mystery Solved.
Liz: Oh, boy.
Devon: Oh, boy is right. Well, what scientists found by studying pocket gophers in San Diego was that pocket gophers, when they dig, they push soil upwards not downward, apparently. They will kick it out of their burrows into a mound-like shape. And these same scientists also discovered that a typical Mima mound is about the size of a very territorial pocket gopher's home range. Earlier in the episode, I said that they were anywhere from nine to one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, so that doesn't quite scan for me? But I will say that I am not a zoologist and I certainly don't study pocket gophers or mounds, so I don't know what "typical" is in this space, you know?
Liz: So the premise is that basically this is like, the spoil? The excavation dirt? Do pocket gophers live like in little pocket gopher suburbs, like they each have their own little dig? And that's why the piles are there?
Devon: That was kind of the theory, right? Was that they're each digging their own, that these mounds aren't necessarily just the, the... What did you call it? It was a great word for it. The excess--
Liz: Spoil?
Devon: Yeah. They weren't just the, they weren't just the discarded soil because apparently... Well, I've got to go into this a little bit more... Not chronologically, but I think, linearly. For a gopher to have created this mound or these mounds, apparently it would take 500 to 700 years and many, many, many, many hundreds of generations of gophers digging to create mounds of this size. The reason why they would create mounds like this, scientists speculated, was that the area in which Mima mounds are often found is typically waterlogged. So they thought, okay, so the Gophers aren't-- you know, the mounds aren't full of gopher holes necessarily. They're not full of, like, this little subterranean dwelling. But it does make an area of land above the water table. So when the water is-- Er, when the ground is waterlogged, there is an area of land for the pocket gophers to get up above that water line.
Liz: And the pocket gophers don't build their homes in those because they're just not evolved to do it? It hasn't occurred to them?
Devon: I don't know. That that's where the theory broke down for me. But dude, scientists were sure that this was it. They were positive their 3D modeling showed that, yeah, it's possible for a pocket gopher to make this kind of structure and whether or not they actually live within the mound, there could be reasons for them to do it, y'know. Meaning they need [indecipherable, "lown?"] to get up above the water table for.
Liz: Are there pocket gophers around every place, or, or similar creatures around every place with Mima mounds?
Devon: Hey guess what? There are not! Which is why--
Liz: I'm so good at science!
Devon: You are so good at science, which is why I was really surprised that the Internet caught on to, "it was totally gophers," when we know that they [Mima Mounds] occur on six of the seven continents, pocket gophers do not occur on six of the seven continents. The ones in South Africa, scientists were like, well, they're not pocket gophers, they're termites. Termites are creating these mounds.
Liz: Well, we know what termite mounds look like!
Devon: We know what termite mounds look like! And also, you know, thank-- thank goodness that scientists like you, [laughs] not like me, who's just like, "There's glitter in our toothpaste!"
Liz: [laughing]
Devon: Scientists like you, who are going-- [laughs] who are going, "that dog doesn't really hunt," are researching it and not just saying "okay, that's a good enough theory, that's the best one we've come up with."
Liz: Listen, "good enough theory" doesn't get you five-year grants from NIH.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: "I can do better," is what you tell the government.
Devon: And, I tell you what, a scientist said they could do better. And six months after, so 2014, the headline that Live Science came out with: "Mysterious Earthen Mima Mounds Created By Plants, Not Animals."
Liz: Burrowing plants.
Devon: Burrowing plants!
Liz: [laughing] Hundreds of years of little Audreys.
Devon: Yeah, it was Audrey Twos, were just doing their chain-chomp, Mario plant-eatin' shit through the earth and creating these giant barfed-up mounds of dirt. The end.
Liz: Yeah. Wait, what was the actual explanation?”
Devon: The actual explanation is that... It's, it's a lot like the Aeolian theory that we talked about earlier--
Liz: Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
Devon: --with a little bit of of extra. So what the University of Cape Town researcher Professor Kramer and his team said, you know, "It's problematic to attribute these to animals because pocket gophers, termites, animals that have digging and mounding behavior do not occur wherever mounds are found. However, it sounds like vegetation spatial patterning could be the cause for this." And what that is, is when you've got plants... Individuals or small groups will spread out their roots and they drain the surrounding area of water and nutrients and so their little areas remain fertile. And because there's now areas of desert, basically, between these plants... That erodes--
Liz: [clicks tongue] Yeah!
Devon: --And naturally causes this hillock, right? And then, not only do you have that you've got the Aeolian factor, where you've already got a high point with things clinging to it. Any wind that comes by and stirs up shit is going to definitely deposit said soil and shit on these mounds, further increasing their size.
Liz: Yeah. And then any other little plants that can live, like, in the shadow of the original are going to die and contribute dirt to that. Okay.
Devon: Yeah. Yeah.
Liz: I guess the part that's giving me frustration, is I feel like there should be a way to determine whether the mounds are composed in a fashion that you would expect from dirt being moved?
Devon: Mmhmm.
Liz: Like, like in the way that an animal would? Or whether they've sort of accreted around a point.
Devon: Right? Doesn't it seem--
Liz: Right, like there's a difference between scooping sugar out of a jar and making cotton candy.
Devon: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Doesn't it seem like you could slice into it like a piece of cake and pull out this, y'know, chunk and be like, "Oh, okay, the sediment in here shows that, yeah, the stuff that should be at the top of a soil layer is at the bottom. Y'know, a gopher is digging and it's depositing the closest to the ground stuff on the bottom of this new mound and as it digs deeper that gets higher up. I mean...
Liz: But they're very old, right?
Devon: They're quite old!
Liz: Right? So...
Devon: They're quite old!
Liz: Maybe it's like, you could know if it was new, but after hundreds of years of settling and weather and plants being on top of it, you can't tell anymore?
Devon: And it's six feet. I mean that's-- you're still just within, like, the earth's crust.
Liz: Mmmhmm.
Devon: Or you know... So maybe there isn't that much of a difference? I don't know and scientists don't for sure know either. My theory is... I think it's got to be a combination. I think it just happens to be-- What is it called when it's, um, co-vergent [convergent] evolution? You know, where, like pigeons and humans or pigeons and mammals both developed a milk like substance to feed their young. But they are so far apart from each other it's not like evolutionarily they, they came up with these things and continued to branch. They're, they're on totally different limbs of the tree here, but they both happened to hit on a thing that works to feed young. You know, so my thought is that it's like this co-vergent evolution but whatever the geological equivalent is where it's like, well, some of these mounds can be found formed in a couple different ways. It could be seismic activity and that's what's happening here. Over there? Yeah, some, some gophers are just absolutely super industrious and making mounds. Over this way, it's the vegetation spatial patterning stuff. You know? [distressed sound] I'm super far out of my element here. I feel like I know more when I'm talking about ghosts than the real world. But I I don't know that it's logical to assume all Mima mounds are formed in the exact same way.
Liz: I track that, and I have a slightly different theory?
Devon: Okay.
Liz: Which has the same part as yours, which is that I think there may be some kind of geological phenomenon where if you have an accretion point you can get that Aeolian effect, right?
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Whether it is maybe... Not a super industrious gopher, maybe just a gopher made a little mound that was a foot high.
Devon: Right.
Liz: And over hundreds of years, it became more.
Devon: Right. Right.
Liz: Or termites, or whatever.
Devon: Right.
Liz: Or a plant. And so there is an end product that looks very similar from place to place, but the initial point that stuff started to accrete around could be gophers or seismic activity or plants or something else.
Devon: Right.
Liz: And just because it comes, like-- yeah, like what you were saying, just because it looks the same in the end or similar doesn't mean that it has the same origin. Like again, to go back to the ancient aliens guy. Why-- why are there pyramid-shaped things in Central America and in North Africa? Well, because that's the best way to pile up a lot of rocks and have them not fall down.
Devon: Right?
Liz: Yeah. Like a pyramid is just an organized heap.
Devon: Yep.
Liz: And so a Mima mound maybe is a disorganized heap--
Devon: [laughs]
Liz: That you get if conditions are right and you have that little scratchy initial factor that can come from a lot of different sources.
Devon: Yeah. You have whatever that little thing is but it's still a little tiny bit of sand in the oyster that it's going to form that pearl around.
Liz: Yes. You got what I was thinking.
Devon: Yeah, I pulled that right out of your brain. Yeah, dude, all I know is that I am not buying the Paul Bunyan theory.
Liz: Yeah, I think I'm comfortable ruling that one out.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: I feel like I wanna go roll down one--
Devon: I was just thinking that!
Liz: Like we roll down the hill behind Moran Prairie.
Devon: Yeah! I want to roll down one hill, but they're close enough, I want to see how far I roll. How much does that momentum carry me up the next hill?
Liz: [laughing] A little roller coaster?
Devon: A little roller coaster, right. Oh my God, I would get so nauseated. I get so motion sick.
Liz: Why couldn't they have said, like, " Long ago, many children were fighting and so instead of having them fight over who was King of the Hill, God made a million hills."
Devon: Wow.
Liz: "To make them realize how pointless this was."
Devon: [laughing] I was gonna say "So they could each be king in his own right." And you were just like, "So they all realized they were dumbasses."
Both: [laughing]
Liz: Maybe the earth is just cold.
Devon: Oh my God, it's--
Liz: They're— its goosebumps.
Devon: Goosebumps, I don't...
Liz: Why don't they call them goosebump mounds? That's better than pimple mounds.
Devon: That's way-- Have you ever, ever called them, um... Have you ever heard somebody call them "goose pimples." I hate that.
Liz: I hate that, too.
Devon: Yeah. "Goosebumps" is cute.
Liz: I don't even like the word "palimpsest" because it makes me think of pimples.
Devon: Okay. Tell me what the word palimpsest is, because I've never heard it.
Liz: It's not a word you encounter much. It's kind of like being allergic to star anise... It doesn't really affect my life that much.
Devon: [laughs]
Liz: But that, like-- in the olden days, when you would write like left to right, top to bottom across something?
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: And then you would either, like, flip it and write across it.
Devon: Oh! Yes.
Liz: So that you can basically write twice on one piece of paper and you're filling it in?
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: It's-- for some reason, a lot of authors like to use it as a metaphor, like, they're like "His skin was a palimpsest of scars and tattoos telling you about his life--" And I'm like, "STOP IT."
Devon: Stop it!
Liz: Hate that word.
Devon: Oh my God, that's pretentious. I mean the word is fine, whatever, I don't-- I don't dig it, but I don't hate it. But I really do hate the, "his skin was a palimpsest."
Liz: Yeah and it's like pimple and incest in a word.
Devon: Ew!
Liz: It needs banned.
Devon: Oh!
Liz: It needs to be banned, as a word.
Devon: That word is absolutely stricken from the record.
Devon: Go away, pimply incest. Sick.
Liz: [laughing] What were we talking about?
Devon: Palimpsest? Gone! Paul Bunyan? You're out of here. Aliens? Not enough evidence, try again.
Liz: Although, you know goosebumps are exactly the same thing, in a way, because they're, they're the hair follicles, right?
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: The skin just doesn't spring up into those shapes spontaneously, it's because there are things protruding--
Devon: Protruding!
Liz: --that it gathers around.
Devon: Yeah, and I read that it's your, your... When you're cold, you get goose bumps because your little arm hairs are trying to raise up and trap as much heat close to your skin as it can. And I'm just like, "Oh, wow that's like a screen door trying to keep out a hurricane. What is happening, little dudes?" No. You're not keeping in anything just by raising up on little stalks. I just---
Liz: Mmhmm. Good effort.
Devon: What I'm going to do to keep in my heat is get fat. Let's make some blubber
Liz: I'm a sea-type mammal, not the land type.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: You might be confused by the fact that I'm on land all the time.
Devon: It's possible but I clearly do not have a pelt. I clearly was meant to put on a lot of weight very rapidly, so that I could submerge myself in water all day. Thank you.
Liz: Safely. Do you think that animals like seals and sea lions... Are they just cold all the time?
Devon: I don't think they are! I think... Aren't they supposed to be warm all the time?
Liz: I guess I'm just wondering if it bothers them.
Devon: If it bothers them? That's a good point.
Liz: Because I mean you you would be born to it, right? You would just have to deal with it. But are their lives just kind of a little shittier than if they lived someplace where it wasn't so freezing?
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: Or does it not make a difference to them?
Devon: I don't... well... hmmm...
Liz: I don't really need to know either way, because it will perturb me, like... have you heard of Greenland sharks?
Devon: Yeah!
Liz: They're like, the sharks that live for hundreds of years.
Devon: Yeah, yeah.
Liz: They-- all their teeth fall out.
Devon: They all fall out...
Liz: And every single Greenland shark goes blind because they get these parasites that get on their eyeballs.
Devon: Ugh!
Liz: And when I heard about that, it bothered me for like, a month. Like, I would seriously just lie there in bed thinking about, like, [tearfully] "Why don't we just take the parasites off? For the poor Greenland sharks?"
Devon: [laughing sympathetically] Oh, honey...
Liz: "Why can't we just go do that?”
Devon: Why can't we?
Liz: They don't need to go blind! [in less plaintive tones] It's like, there's nothing for them to fuckin' SEE, Liz.
Devon: [laughing] Were you thinking this--
Liz: They live underwater. They live under the ice. Like... It is their way of being.
Devon: Oh, my God.
Liz: Like, there's no philosophical or, or zoological logic to what you're worried about, but it just troubled me greatly.
Devon: Were you pregnant while you were having this crisis?
Liz: No! I'm just like this.
Devon: That's so not Scorpio of you. I had to look it up for you while you were talking. "Do sea lions get cold?" According to coral world v dot com, "They are able to maintain their high body temperature which is between 95 and 98 Degrees and they help keep heat in. However, a sea lion can get cold.
Liz: [gasp]
Devon: That's... So sad! So they can get cold, buddy, I'm really sorry. They're like your Greenland sharks with the blind eyes.
Liz: I have enough worry for all the creatures of all earth.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: All the people, and all the creatures.
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: Well, that's the problem with watching nature documentaries, right?
Devon: Yeah.
Liz: You don't want the lioness and her cubs to starve--
Devon: Nope.
Liz: But you also don't want to see the gazelle go down.
Devon: No! No. Why can't we all just eat-- I was going to say, "Why can't we all just have a hamburger," and then... That's complicated, Devon.
Liz: [laughing]
Devon: No one tell me!
Liz: Nobody tell Devon what beef is.
Devon: I don't want to know! I just like my burgers.
Liz: Have you tried the impossible burger yet?
Devon: No, I have not, but it's on my list. Have you?
Liz: Yeah, I want to check it out now. No, I haven't tried it but often... Often, I find that... There's some stuff that you cannot substitute. Bacon is definitely one of them.
Devon: Mmhmm.
Liz: Like meat bacon is... And I'm not trying to do the whole, like, thing we were all into five years ago, like "Bacon, blah blah blah!"
Devon: Oh yeah, right?
Liz: "I'm so hedonistic!"
Devon: "Bacon's my personality!"
Liz: But vegan… like, Morningstar Farms bacon is like somebody photocopied bacon onto a paper towel.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: It's just... no.
Devon: I'd rather-- I'd rather have the memory of what bacon truly is than the cheap simulacrum that makes my palate sad.
Liz: Yeah, it's kind of like, like a Ludovico Technique to make you not miss bacon.
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: Like, "You liked bacon?" [sound of a slap] "No, you don't!"
Devon: "No, you don't!"
Liz: "Now you DON'T want it!"
Devon: "You don't want bacon, cuz this is what it is!"
Liz: "Take another bite of this paper towel!”
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: "Try thinking about bacon again."
Devon: [laughing] That's fucked up.
Liz: [laughing] But I love their buffalo wings!
Devon: Morningstar, please sponsor us. [more laughter]
Liz: I think you did a really good job with this episode.
Devon: Thank you
Liz: I'm very much looking forward to sharing it with the world.
Devon: I'm looking forward to sharing it with the world! I would really like to know what people's theories are as to how the Mima mounds form, and I'd really like to know if anybody's gone to it, because I've read a bunch of blogs, I've seen the photos, I've read the National Park website... I mean, it sounds really cool, but I want to know like, what does it feel like there? Do you-- do you notice the change in height? Do you walk up and down them and go, "huh." You know you're like the Joker when only one of the building [sic] blows up, and you just kind of throw your hands out and that's it, I guess. Or is it cool?
Liz: Yeah. Plus I, as you know, believe that I have some kind of magic insight and that if I just--
Devon: Oh, yeah!
Liz: Was on one, I would somehow know more than--
Devon: You would!
Liz: --people who do geology for a living.
Devon: If you laid hands on it.
Liz: [fake gasp] "It WAS the Irish! It was a conspiracy, though!"
Devon: [laughing]
Liz: That wasn't even who moved dirt around in the Northwest! That's a lazy story.
Devon: I know, isn't it bad?
Liz: [disgusted sigh]
Devon: There you go, Liz, that's the Mima mounds.
Liz: Nice work.
Devon: Thank you very much. Folks we would love if you continue this Mima mound conversation with us on social media--
Liz: -- social Mim-ia--
Devon: Where you will find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter... Did I, did I slur?
Liz: No, I just said "social Mim-ia--"
Devon: I thought you said Minia. Yeah, I obviously misheard. We would like you to join us on social "meme-ium." I'm just mad because I didn't think of it myself. As well as, you will be able to find these and other show notes on our website ouijabroads.com, you can find us on patreon.com/ouijabroads where you can throw a couple of bucks our way if you'd like help us pay for said website hosting. We are also on the podcatcher of your choice. You can find us on Podbean, on iTunes. We are... Where else are we, Liz, did I list them all?
Liz: Yeah, sure!
Devon: I think I did. Well, folks with that, we certainly hope that you live weird--
Liz: Die weird.
Devon: And stay weird.
Liz: Nice work, bud.
Devon: Thank you. Thank you for listening, nice work to you…
[Theme music comes in, fades out.]