Sunday, December 22, 2013

Michael Levy and The Ancient Roman Lyre



Michael Levy has a brand new album out! You can buy it in various forms by clicking the links below.

Release of my album "The Ancient Roman Lyre"!

I am pleased to announce the release of my brand new album, "The Ancient Roman Lyre"...


The free PDF of the detailed album notes can be downloaded here 

I would be enormously grateful if everyone could please "spread the word"!!

Many thanks, everyone...any reviews of the abum on iTunes, Amazon or CD Baby would also be most greatly appreciated, in my relentless, Herculean efforts as an aspiring independent musican, to get my little-known lyre music heard by the rest of the unsuspecting world - cheers!!

Saturday, December 14, 2013

King David's Chanukah Wish List



Back in the dim, dusty days when I worked in the music department in Borders, I talked with a customer who was especially fond of harp music. “I love the harp more than King David!” he announced, happily. I was able to hook him up with several harp albums that day, but I wish we had stocked albums by Michael Levy. That customer would have gone into the stratosphere if he could have heard Michael's music.

Now you can hear it for free! Click the links! Write reviews! Get cracking!!!

A MASSIVE Christmas Present For All My Fans!

A MASSIVE CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR ALL MY LYRE MUSIC FANS!!! For a limited time, absolutely EVERY one of my 23 releases since 2008 is available for FREE (or as much as anyone thinks my music is worth!) from Bandcamp! If the "free" option is selected, all I would kindly ask in return, is to post a review of the album or single on either iTunes or Amazon..and to spread the word about my little-known lyre music to the rest of the unsuspecting world...

Here is the link to my Bandcamp Page:


Seasons Greetings, Everyone!

Friday, December 13, 2013

Officer Bernadette Kicks Butt



I enjoyed Anne Hillerman's new book, Spider Woman's Daughter, set in her late father's Navajo Detective series. I confess, once I realized she was a writer who had published a book about her father's journies in Navajoland (Tony Hillerman's Landscape), I was hoping she might pick up the reins and write a book in his series. When Spider Woman's Daughter was released, I snatched it up and dove into it. I quickly discovered that Anne Hillerman has her father's knack for building suspense and character. Even more important, she knows how to allow the reader to work on the mystery along with the main characters. I loved being able to learn more about the characters of Officer Bernadette Manuelito and her mother, as well.

Not to sound like a Philistine, but I did not discover Tony Hillerman's detective series until two years ago, after I began to work at the Heard Museum's book store. My mother was devoted to the series for many years, waiting for each new book with bated breath, so I knew they wouldn't disappoint me once I picked them up. And yet I still didn't read them – not until I read Talking Mysteries byTony Hillerman and Ernie Bulow (Ernie Bulow also wrote Navajo Taboos). This slim volume contains an introduction by Ernie Bulow, a quick autobiography by Tony Hillerman, an interview in which Bulow and Hillerman discuss writing and writing methods, and a masterpiece of a short story by Hillerman. Be sure and turn all the way to the end of the book, where you'll find gorgeous illustrations by Ernest Franklin depicting Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee on the trail of a mystery. Once I had seen those illustrations, I knew I had to start reading about the characters.

I have now read all but the last two books in Tony Hillerman's series, and I've been very spoiled by being able to pick them up without having to wait for them to be written. Alas, I'll be forced to wait with everyone else for Anne's new books in the series.

So – how much did I enjoy her book? So much, I'm looking forward to reading the next one. Considering the big shoes Anne had to step into, this is high praise. But one word of warning: things get hairy really quick. You'll be on the hook until the very end!

I decided not to try to use any of the cover graphics for these books from google - they would only be taken down, because they're proprietary.  The photo at the top of this post was taken in Petrified Forest/Painted Desert national park, which is also Navajo Country.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Yodeling Goats Drive Big Box Bookstore Into Bankruptcy


Years ago, my friend Eileen Rowan and I worked together at the same Borders, and somehow we got onto the topic of the yodeling goatherd song from The Sound of Music. We noodled together a goofy poem about yodeling goats. We didn't finish it, and I stuck it into a file and forgot it.

Then recently I was putting together a little display at the Heard Museum book store for a classic kid's book titled, The Goat in the Rug. I thought of our poem and dug it up. It only needed a couple of lines to be complete. So here it is, the yodeling goat song, written by two miscreants on a slow night at Borders:

The Yodeling Goat Song

This is the song of the yodeling goats
They never eat books but they eat lots of oats
They live in a castle surrounded by moats
Those dawdling, oat-eating, yodeling goats.

Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely-doo
If you think they’re funny, then I think so too
Sing Yodely-ohdely-dohdely-day
They moved in last week and it looks like they’ll stay

The yodeling goats, the yodeling goats
They like to eat fish, so they have shiny coats
They read magazines and sport colorful totes
Those oft-toting, fish-eating, yodeling goats

Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely-dorm
Don't buy them a jacket, 'cause they're always warm
Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely-day
They ring all the doorbells and then run away

The yodeling goats, the yodeling goats
They don’t give a fig for the DOs and the DON’Ts
They don't cross their Ts and they don't mark their quotes
Those fig-tossing, mis-quoting yodeling goats

Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely, please
Let's run in the meadows and climb all the trees!
Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely-dug
There's a goat in the pen and a goat in the rug

The yodeling goats, they have golden throats
And sing acapella, they know all the notes
They tap dance all summer, then drink root beer floats
Those tippy-tap, rooty-beer, golden throat goats

Sing yodley-ohdely-dohdely-dend
This yodeling goat song, will it never end?
Sing yodely-ohdely-dohdely-dain
Come back here next week and we'll sing it again!



Wednesday, November 13, 2013

The Oldest Song in the World



Michael Levy and his performance of the Oldest Goldy-est gets some press in Australia – follow the links!

The Oldest Song in the World - on the Other Side of the World!

My arrangement for solo lyre of the oldest complete song so far known from antiquity, the 2000 year old ancient Greek drinking song,"Epitaph of Seikilos", has been featured in a newspaper story  in the Australian Daily Telegraph...right on the other side of the world, from here in the rain-ravaged UK! The complete story can be read here

...It is just a pity that my early grainy Youtube video featured in the story, was filmed with my (rather suitably) "Iron Age" webcam! 

Monday, November 11, 2013

Ancient Music and The Scum Gentry



Michael Levy goes multimedia in his collaboration with a poet, an animator, and The Scum Gentry – click the links below to check it out!

Irish Poetry - Recited to my Lyre Music

I am pleased to announce the creation of a new animation featuring my composition, "Orpheus's Lyre: Lament For Solo Lyre in the Just Intonation of Antiquity". The animation is a collaboration project between the animator,Ciaran Leahy and the Dublin poet Peter O'Neill, based on his poem 'The Execution of Orpheus at Ephesus'. This animation was developed to feature on an Irish Arts & Media online magazine called "The Scum Gentry".

Below is a link to my new blog, featuring all the details about the poem and the Youtube video of the animation: 

Friday, November 1, 2013

Find Michael Levy on SoundCloud!


Michael Levy has a profile on SoundCloud now – check out the link below!

Ancient Lyre Music - Now on SoundCloud!

I am pleased to announce the launch of my new profile on SoundCloud - hopefully another 21st century means of bringing forth my 21st century (BC!) lyre music to the rest of the unsuspecting world...please feel free to share with the rest of the known UNIVERSE!


The direct URL to my new SoundCloud profile is:

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Em's Smashwords Interview



What inspires you to get out of bed each day?” asked the Smashwords Interview site, to which I replied with my own interpretation of inspiration: "I have to go to the bathroom.  And then the cats pounce on me."

My Smashwords Interview is live now, so you can follow the link and get the unadulterated truth as I answer questions about the Writer's Life, and how I have hopelessly mangled it. Find out what my writing desk looks like, and why it really belongs to a pint-sized thug named Jingle Monster. Thrill to tales of what Phoenix was like in the 1960s, and how cheap comic books used to be. Be astounded as I recount how easy it was to waste more than a year in a self-promotion campaign that pretty much didn't work. Visit my Smashwords Interview and be the first among your friends to say, “Well that's fifteen minutes I'm never getting back.”

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Big Business Is Doo-Doo (And Not In a Good, Fertilize-the-Crops Kinda Way)



I've heard it since the 1960s, and some of you may have heard it since the 1930s: Big Business is no friend to the worker. This is a Commie attitude, but it's also true – it can't be denied. The goal of any big business is to hire as few people as possible to do as much work as possible for as little money as possible. If the Big Business model is to be realized in its purest form, there should also be no benefits to go along with any job, other than the privilege of having it in the first place: no sick days, no insurance, no overtime, no paid holidays or vacation (in fact, no time off at all), no breaks, no limits to the hours worked daily, and no compensation for injuries received on the job. After all, if you work hard enough for your pittance, the quality of your character and your own native intelligence should shine forth and cause you to advance in the ranks until you become prosperous, right? After all nepotism, cronyism, and pure greed never factor into the equation at all.

But that's old news. All of that has been said before, and much better, by others. I've got my own argument for why Big Business is doo-doo. It comes from an experience I had at Borders, the big book chain that bit the bullet back in 2011. Prior to the sinking of that ship, we were engaged in rearranging the deck chairs, and at that point the doo-doo had become so thick, we were slipping and falling into it.


Things had become particularly nasty in 2008-2009. A new CEO had been hired, and though he resembled Mister Rodgers, he was actually the malignant doppleganger of that guy. He decided that we had to become relevant to our venders (the publishers who provided us with our product) by turning selected titles into bestsellers. (Personally, I think we would have become more relevant to them by paying them what we owed them, but that's just me.) The best way to do that, according to him, was to recommend these titles to absolutely everyone who came through the front door, regardless of what they were looking for.

So we all had to sit through training films on the computers in the back office to prove we could sell these select titles to people. In the films, a Borders employee would pose as a customer and ask the other Borders employee (posing as herself) for a book. Invariably, the sort of book they wanted was exactly the sort of thing we were promoting that month. We all electronically signed our initials at the end of these programs to indicate that were were enlightened as to the technique of selling books people didn't want and hadn't asked for.


One month, our selected title was in the Zombie Classics series. I don't recall the exact title, but for the sake of argument let's call it Jane Zombie. So, here I am at the information desk, answering phones and desperately trying to think up ways to insert the subject of zombies into the conversation without sounding like a nut case. A guy walks up and asks, “Do you carry the Chilton manuals for car repair?”

In the old days, I would have said Yes and walked him back to the car repair section, then helped him find the title he needed. Under the new regime I was obliged to say, “Yes sir, it's called Jane Zombie. It's the story of an undead governess who eats brains and repairs cars.”


Okay, I didn't actually say that, but I was sorely tempted.

That CEO eventually utilized his golden parachute and quit the company, moving on to another field where his techniques at mental torture might actually advance national security (or so I imagine). His methods for saving Borders from destruction did not work (because, as I mentioned earlier, they did not include the method of paying our bills). Borders went down, and a good many people drowned or died of hypothermia. Another Big Business success story (at least for the executives who managed to squeeze fat “retention bonuses” out of the dying carcass).

I'm not trying to say none of that crap goes on at the small/medium business level. There are plenty of self-made men and women out there who will bite your head off if you ask for any time off, who can't afford to offer insurance, or who may fire you because you're good-looking and that may threaten their marriage (or hire you for the same reason).


But the funny thing about good workers is that they really are hard to come by. Smaller businesses tend to have bosses who interact with the workers and who are involved in daily operations on the ground level. They notice who is competent, and reliable, and honest. Big businesses are managed from an extreme distance, they don't know or care who works for them unless the margin moves perceptibly, which it may do for any number of reasons. If there are hundreds of small businesses operating in a given town, you have choices where to work. If there's only one, and it's Walmart – god help you.

Here, let me recommend a book that may help you with your plight. It's about a zombie governess who eats brains and earns extra income through stock investments.



Once again, I have plundered Ernest Hogan's stock of wacky illustrations, which somehow always seem to fit the tone of these posts. I have probably used some of them before, but that's just a bunch of tough noogies. 

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Mucho Mega Music from Michael



Michael Levy has some wonderful news about his re-re-release, and some fabulous links for you to follow. Check out every single one of them, and don't forget to write reviews!

Third Time Lucky!

I am pleased to announce the re-re-RE release of my second compilation album, "Musical Adventures in Time Travel"...phew!

Trying to compile a suitable selection of the best tracks from my lyre albums has proved to be a task which almost needed the invocation of Apollo to achieve. It all began earlier this year...

At 23 tracks, the first release was far too long to fit onto the physical CD of the album (manufactured on demand by Reverbnation) and I grew to hate the album artwork I somewhat too hastily came up with!

In the second release, I loved the album cover -  "Alcaeus of Mytilene playing a kithara while Sappho listens" by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1881".Tadema does through art, what I intend to do through my music! However, at 22 tracks, I still could not squeeze them all into CD format, and since its release, I had recorded my new extended length single, "Orpheus's Lyre: Lament For Solo Lyre in the Just Intonation of Antiquity" and my audio producer, Dominik Johnson also came up with an amazing new mix for my other extended length single, "Ancient Lyre Strings", both of which I wanted to include in the final compilation...ARGH!

Therefore, in the third and final release, I edited the compilation to my favourite18 tracks. These include the track "Realm of the Ancestors" -  for possibly the first time in 3000 years, a unique duet of lyre and harp, featuring the wonderfully delicate harp accompaniment to my spontaneous lyre improvisation, provided by the talented folk harpist, Rebecca Penkett

In my endless quest of seeking musical perfection, my final version of "Musical Adventures in Time Travel", now includes all my extended length singles, including a track which only exists by pure serene serendipity...

"The Battle of Thermopylae - Paean For Solo lyre", another of my recently released extended length singles, was originally nothing but a random rough recording I did whilst improvising in my experiments to try and imitate an electric guitar pitch-bending "whammy bar" on lyre - using my right hand wrist as the said "whammy bar" on the top string above the  bridge, during some wild strummed sections!

I uploaded the raw audio file to Mediafire for possible future use and then completely forgot about it - for 3 years!! It was only whilst I was providing Dominik Johnson with the Mediafire URLs of my raw audio files for mixing in compiling "Musical Adventures in Time Travel", that purely by chance, I happened to accidentally copy and paste the URL to my frenzied lyre whammy bar improvisation, instead of the track I actually intended to send Dominik to mix!

The result is a bit rough and hissy compared to the other tracks in the compilation, but it sure ROCKS!!! Here is a video I recently uploaded to my Youtube Channel, featuring a clip of this piece:



The Rocky Road To Musical Perfection!

My second compilation also demonstrates the ruthless, relentless refining process I have put myself though over the last few years! My arrangement for solo lyre, of Dr Richard Dumbrill's interpretation of the 3400 year old Hurrian Hymn Text H6, started out as a now virtually viral, lo-fi Youtube video (recorded back in 2008 with my then suitably "Bronze Age" webcam!):


I eventually recorded a better quality version of this arrangement, which I bravely attempted to mix myself on my chunky old desktop, which then featured in my early experimental album from 2009, "An Ancient Lyre" - the only album I have ever been bold enough to attempt to produce from scratch myself!

Later in 2009, thanks to the now sadly defunct Myspace, I became acquainted with the awesome music production skills of Dominik Johnson, who masterfully re-mixed the raw audio of the recording - this then featured as track 1 from my first compilation album of 2011, "Ancient Landscapes".

In my new version of the Hurrian Hymn, now forming track 1 of "Musical Adventures in Time Travel", this time, I recorded my arrangement on my new hand-made lyre, using strings made of wound silk (made by ancient string technology expert, Peter Pringle) for a unique, truly ancient timbre - these strings provide almost the nearest match in tone to the unpolished strings of either wound gut or natural fibre which were generally used on the actual lyres of antiquity.

In this new arrangement, I also tuned my lyre in the wonderfully pure-sounding just intonation of antiquity, and for the repeat of the theme in my new arrangement, I experimented in the ancient Mesopotamian percussive lyre playing technique (using a small wooden baton to hit the strings, rather like a hammered dulcimer).

In the production of this track, Dominik also somehow managed to create a haunting natural reverb, authentically sampled from an actual Iranian cave -the relentless quest of seeking musical perfection!

This final arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn is currently being used in support of the exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum - "Mesopotamia - Inventing Our World" (CDs of "Musical Adventures in Time Travel" are also available to purchase from the Royal Ontario Museum Shop). Below is a video featuring a clip from my new arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn:


The physical CDs of my compilation album "Musical Adventures in Time Travel" and indeed, of absolutely every other one of my many releases, are available to order, anywhere in the world, from my Reverbnation Store. This epic new compilation album is currently available from iTunesAmazonand lossless audio or 320kbps quality MP3s of the album are available to download from both CD Baby and Bandcamp.

NB! Any new reviews of either this new album or any other of my releases on either iTunes or Amazon would be utterly, amazingly appreciated - many thanks!!




Thursday, October 3, 2013

Maybe It Takes More Oomph




We have some interesting examples of continental rifts in the world, as well as spreading ridges in oceanic crust – and since these are both examples of diverging boundaries, geologists are justified in assuming that similar processes are involved in rifting. But that's a hypothesis. Observations of the process of rifting in the real world are revealing that continental rifts are more complicated.

One reason may be that oceanic crust is denser, but thinner than continental crust. The difference between them is demonstrated when the two types of crust are driven together. Continental crust is fat and buoyant, so the immense pressure pushes the thinner, denser oceanic crust beneath the continental crust (subduction). Water vapor that subducts with the oceanic crust allows it to melt at lower temperatures than it normally would, and the partially melted stuff rises through the continental crust above the subducting slab. As it rises, the reduced pressure allows it to melt further, where it also melts some of the surrounding continental rocks. It may pool between sedimentary layers, forming plutons, sills, and dikes that cool underground, or it may extrude onto the surface and form volcanoes. That's what can happen at a converging zone. But at the other end of that zone is a rift.


Oceanic rifts are ongoing projects – upwelling convection currents in the mantle inflate and stretch the crust above, causing fractures. Magma squeezes through fractures, forcing the crust apart even further, and forming spreading ridges. You might think that the magma would cool and plug the holes – something that happens quite often when magma extrudes onto continents. But the plug is temporary. The centers of those new dikes are weak, and they fracture from the pressure of the uprising heat, allowing more low-silica magma to flow into the new fracture.

Silica is sticky stuff. Magma with a higher silica content is less runny. At oceanic rifts, the runny, lower-silica magma is a lot less likely to clog up the dikes and vents through which it is welling. That low-silica magma actually cools at higher temperatures, and water is present to speed that cooling. But when magma cools, it shrinks, and fresh hot stuff can well up around it, gradually forcing the rift zone apart. You can actually observe the whole, extrude-shrink-extrude-again process in the nifty pillow lavas that form around oceanic volcanoes as magma hits the water, instantly cooling to form a shell, which bursts at its weakest point and forms a new blob when more molten rock is forced into it. (If there was a cable channel just for watching pillow lavas form, I would sign up for it.)

Oceanic rift zones seem to last as long as the upwelling convection currents that drive them (a phenomenon called slab pull may also be involved, with the weight of the dense continental crust being subducted into the mantle possibly pulling the plate from the other end). But continental rift zones may require more oomph to keep them going.


This oomph could be a mantle plume (as is the case with the caldera below Yellowstone), or an upward convection current combined with a mantle plume (as is the case with the rift zone in Iceland.) But Yellowstone is considered a supervolcano rather than a rift zone, and Iceland is a comparatively small chunk of continental rock. There's a continental rift under way in Colorado and New Mexico, but it's pretty low key when compared with the poster child of continental rifts, The African Rift.

Theoretically, the African Rift is doing the same thing that the Arabian Gulf is doing, forming a basin as the crust spreads apart that will eventually open up to form a new sea. The Atlantic Ocean formed that way when Pangea broke apart. Since spreading ridges in oceans are faulted all the way down to the mantle, you could expect that a continental rift would also have faults that run that deep. Evidence for that can be found in low-silica volcanic rocks in the Southwest U.S. Arizona even has a shield volcano, the sort of volcano one would usually expect to find above a mantle plume forming an island chain (like Hawaii). Yet the volcanoes along the U.S. Rift are not all of this type. Likewise, the volcanoes that have formed along the sides of the rift zone in Africa are a grab bag of different types, anything from volcanic vents and relatively flat volcanoes, to giant composites like Kilimanjaro.


What this suggests is that sometimes low-silica magma is reaching the surface along these rifts (often creating extensive sills and dikes along the way), and sometimes it's mixing with the continental rocks it encounters on its upward journey and melting that stuff, introducing more silica into the mix and building composite cones at the surface, or cinder cones, or volcanic domes, or even creating plutons that cool underground.

Besides the silica ratio, another thing that determines the size, shape, and explosiveness of volcanic features is the amount of volatiles in the mix – gases. High silica/low gas mixes produce volcanic domes that extrude almost like toothpaste. Low silica/high gas mixes produce cinder cones. An intermediate mix can produce a composite volcano, like the one above Flagstaff, Arizona (far inland from where you would expect to find such a structure). The super-volcanoes of the Western U.S., Yellowstone and the Valles Caldera, are very high-silica caldera volcanoes that fractured the crust overlying them with expansion caused by heat, which allowed gases to escape through the cracks, widening them further and causing a collapse. The collapse of that surface material into the caldera produced titanic explosions. The rhyolitic tuff (fused ash) of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico was created by an explosion from the Valles Caldera. Compare all that complicated stuff to good ol'oceanic rifting, and it just seems like such a straight-forward process in comparison.


Continental rifts seem like a lot more work. Maybe that's why continental rifts sometimes seem to just stop. The rifting had some oomph when it started out, but the upwelling current shifted, or the plume stopped, or the older part of the craton, where the crust is too thick to be rifted, moved over the whole bubbling mess. (The tectonic plates, including continents, move gradually but steadily over the upper mantle.)

One failed rift is the North American Mid-Continental Rift (extending from Lake Superior to Oklahoma), which seems to have pooped out about a billion years ago. At that time, we were part of the supercontinent Rodinia, which split up about 750 million years ago. Two other supercontinents formed and broke apart after that. Eventually, North America will collide with Asia, and the rifting will start somewhere else.

But regardless of what happens in the future, the African Rift is happening right now, in some ways that were predicted, and in some ways that were not. It will continue to be a fascinating example of what happens when continents are pulled apart.





Sunday, September 22, 2013

In Search of the Roman Whammy



Michael Levy poses an interesting question in his new blog post – follow the link and let him know what you think!

Did the Romans Invent the "Whammy Bar"?

New blog just posted on my website, about a fascinating potential new musical discovery from a detailed painting of a Roman Kithara found in Herculaneum, which seems to amazingly show the 1st century CE equilvalent of a pitch-bending "whammy bar!"

Here is the link to this new blog:


Your thoughts and comments to this blog are most welcome!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Let's Just Suck That Pesky Carbon Out Of The Air With Our Giant Vacuum Thingee



There has been a lot of talk (and study) recently about the concept of carbon sequestration, the idea that CO2 gas could be pulled from the atmosphere and stored in sedimentary layers underground, or even under the seafloor. Some very smart geologists are working on this problem, and we may see an attempt to implement the idea within the next few decades. But I'm always curious when I hear about these sorts of projects, because I wonder just how much non-geologists understand about faults and fractures in the Earth's crust, even the non-geologists who have a financial stake in what their geology experts tell them.

Okay, maybe especially these guys, since money folk and bureaucrats tend to be people who think in terms of deadlines and progress reports: this phase of the project was completed on schedule, this other phase is over schedule, the cost breakdown is this, etc. They're thinking weeks ahead, sometimes decades ahead for some aspects of a project. But geology is often reckoned in millions, even billions of years. What's even trickier is that, despite this immense time scale, geology can also change suddenly and catastrophically, in a matter of seconds. Thirty feet of sediment can be deposited by a flash flood, tons of volcanic ash can hurtle toward a town at 100km an hour. And in the case of carbon sequestration, the problem is that faults move.


CO2 is heavier than the mix of gases that make up our atmosphere. If a large amount of it is suddenly released, it will flow and pool almost like water at ground level. It is invisible and odorless, so it overtakes unsuspecting people and animals and suffocates them before they realize that anything is wrong. Eventually it will mix with the other gases and be reabsorbed into the atmosphere, but not before killing every oxygen-breathing creature in its path. Villages next to lakes that have formed near the continental rift in Africa have suffered from accidents like this from gases generated by volcanic activity under the lakes, releasing the CO2. So when geologists are trying to advise people about where sequestered CO2 could safely be stored, they have this possibility in mind.

Yet the geologists can only advise, very few of them are in a position to make the final decisions about whether a project will go forward and where it will happen. And when it comes to faults, we're mostly engaged in guesswork. This became very plain to me when I recently toured Kartchner Caverns, in Southern Arizona, with the head geologist for the State Park Service. He said that they could see where a few of the faults in the landscape were by looking at the mountains and valleys on the surface. But once they went underground, they found many more faults and fractures that could never have been seen without the benefit of a cave system.


Improved seismic monitoring has proved that the Earth's crust is constantly moving, shrinking, expanding, fracturing, dissolving, collapsing, and getting pulverized, thanks to the titanic pressures of the surrounding rock and the heat generated in the mantle. What appears to be motionless to us on the surface is actually dynamic.

So theoretically, tons of CO2 could be stored somewhere, a fault could move, and gas could escape and suffocate people and animals. So they have to find a place that seems relatively stable, but they also have to find one that isn't too close to human habitation, because no place on the Earth's surface is 100% guaranteed to be stable. Storing the gas in the ocean floor, where the immense pressure of the ocean will keep it dissolved in those sediments, is a safer bet, but then you have the added cost and difficulty of getting it down there.


So where will the gas end up? If they get to be too good at pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere, will people say, Whoopie! We can generate as much CO2 as we want! Will it trick us into keeping old technologies that are causing problems?

If the sequestration process works, it may have an interesting side effect – it may cause calcite to form when moisture enters the soil. In Arizona, moisture reacts with CO2 in the soil to form CaCO3. Who knows, maybe a whole new generation of caves will sport formations resulting from reactions with the CO2 we placed in overlying beds.

That alone might make it worthwhile . . .