Museums

Inside the Lava Dome

A new volcano theme park stirs in southern France

By Robert Kunzig

Vulcania, the European Park of Volcanism
Saint-Ours-les-Roches, France
www.vulcania.com

On a clear, windswept day in November, from the top of the Puy de Dôme in the Auvergne region of central France, you feel as if you can see the whole gentle country. To the south stretches the Plain of the Thousand Cows, doubtless busy making cheese. Cloud shadows sweep across copses and hedgerows, and all around you the bucolic landscape is punctured only by . . . a passel of volcanoes. Volcanoes? They don't leap to mind when the average tourist thinks of France, and indeed, on the lovely map of the world's active zones that graces the entrance hall of Vulcania, the single-topic museum-cum-science park that opened recently just a few miles from here, France is entirely devoid of the colored lights that indicate sites worth watching. But the youngest of the many craters you can see from the Puy de Dôme—some softened by woods or meadows, some filled with lakes—erupted just 6,000 years ago, a blink of the geologic eye. Our Stone Age ancestors were there to watch.

Vulcania is an architectural jewel cut into a basaltic lava that surged down the flank of one of the Puy de Dôme's neighbors 30,000 years ago. As you approach on foot from the parking lot, your first sight is of The Cone, an idealized 93-foot-high rendering of a stratovolcano—a steep, conical volcano—made of local volcanic rock and cut open to reveal a reflective inner surface that channels sunlight into the entrance hall below. To reach the entrance hall, you proceed down a long ramp that spirals around an artificial crater, which is agreeably ornamented with rumblings and puffs of smoke. The rumblings resume in the first gallery, where video images of eruptions are projected onto mock volcanic slabs. In the next gallery, the Etna Room, you can peer through the rear window of a Fiat buried under ash and see, as if you were looking through the windshield, a clip from the film Stromboli of Ingrid Bergman fleeing an eruption. In other galleries there are sharp displays explaining plate tectonics, and some marvelously icky mud volcanoes, bubbling nervously.

The heart of each gallery, however, is a film, and visitors tend to gravitate toward it. As a result, some of the films require long waits. And though volcanoes come in a wide range of personalities, a certain sameness inevitably creeps into the moving images. "I wish the movie weren't about volcanoes—I wish it were a story," said Elizabeth, my 10-year-old thrill-seeker, as we donned our 3-D glasses for the last film of the day.

For my money, the designers of Vulcania would have been better off devoting fewer resources to film and to "interactive" computer screens (which don't add much to what's already on the Web), and more to physical models like the mud volcanoes. Why not a giant hall-filling model, say, that actually erupts real-looking lava and ash, with a cutaway section showing magma oozing up through internal fissures? That caveat aside, though, the Auvergne itself is well worth a journey, and Vulcania is well worth a visit when you're in the Auvergne. In the end we all did thrill to see a 3-D mammoth bellow with rage as it lumbered out of the screen at us, only to be overtaken by a nuée ardente, or ash cloud, roaring down a volcano. It gave us something to think about as we stood atop the Puy de Dôme the next day. Though all those volcanoes we admired are fast asleep, they are not all definitively extinct. A volcanic eruption in the center of France? It's certainly not to be wished for—but what a story it would be.


 
Gizmos

AirZooka
$12.99
www.airzooka.net

Even the simplest-looking apparatus can turn out to be surprisingly complex. The AirZooka is just a big, brightly colored plastic barrel, a little narrower at the front, with a loose plastic sheet attached to a pair of elastic cords at the back. Pull back on the sheet, let it go, and—whump!—you've fired a (harmless) 60-mile-per-hour blast of air at an unwitting bystander 20 feet away.

Simple, unless you're the target. You were just hit by something that wasn't just wind but wasn't entirely solid either. Yet after traveling a fair distance, it still felt compact. The directions on the box say it's a ball of air, but how do you make a ball out of air? And why should it hold together for any distance at all? Herb Tranthum, one of the engineers who designed the AirZooka, explains it this way: When you fire an AirZooka, a high-pressure shock wave leaves the toy first, quickly followed by an air ball. The shock wave creates a vortex of swirling air in its wake, which keeps the air ball intact and in place. If you've pulled the plastic sheet back just right, the ball threads the spinning ring of air and carries it on to your target. If your shooting angle is a bit off, however, you shoot a ring of air, not an air ball—though it feels the same to your target.

The physics of this device—involving the Bernoulli effect, toroidal vortices, and other such phenomena—is so intriguing that teachers may be using the AirZooka for their classroom demonstrations. But the wacky pleasure of shooting air balls requires, fortunately, no advanced degree.

— William Jacobs


 
Films

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That Sinking Feeling, Again
Don IMAX 3-D glasses for a guided tour of the Titanic, a man-made wonder reclaimed by Mother Nature

By Joseph D'Agnese

Ghosts of the Abyss
Walt Disney Pictures
Directed by James Cameron

New cameras able to withstand water pressure 2.5 miles under the sea reveal areas of the Titanic not seen since the ship sank in 1912. Photograph courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures.

James Cameron is a man obsessed. His blockbuster film Titanic won 11 Oscars in 1998, but the director clearly can't get enough of the doomed ocean liner. Three years later, he returned to the hulking ghost ship of the North Atlantic, accompanied by historians, scientists, and the Russian crew of the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, the world's largest oceanographic research vessel. The result is Ghosts of the Abyss, an IMAX 3-D documentary that provides an unprecedented peek at the world's most famous grave marker. This time, there are no panpipes, no sophomoric love stories, and, thank goodness, no Celine Dion.

Technology is the crowning glory of the film. Cameron spent bags of lucre from the box-office triumph of Titanic to design cameras that could withstand crushing sea pressure and navigate the wreck in ways human divers could not. The onscreen heroes are a pair of swimming robots named Jake and Elwood, who come equipped with lights, fanlike propellers, cameras, and all the spunky charisma of R2-D2. Small enough to squeeze into holes in the ship's hull, the bots nimbly navigate the dead ship's unpredictable hazards and beam back images to the team's three-man submarines. In this way we're privileged to behold parts of the luxury liner that have not been seen since it sank. The ghostly artifacts include leaded glass windows in the main dining room; the brass bed where the unsinkable Molly Brown slept; the Marconi wireless room that sent the ship's last anguished cry for help; and the great coal engines stilled by 91 years of brine.

Obscured by barnacles and sea organisms, shipwrecks can make incoherent footage. To aid comprehension, Cameron resorts to split screens, computer animation, and ghostly actors who re-create the ship's final moments. All this interpretive icing threatens to sink the ship a second time. The most powerful stuff is right in front of us, if only the filmmakers would shush and let us watch the show. One realizes, as Cameron's expensive cameras rove the wreckage, that it was not really hubris that sent this great work of human hands to its death but Mother Nature. And now she is finishing the job. An onboard microbiologist waxes poetic about the millions of sea dwellers—crustaceans, seaweed, and primitive fauna—that are slowly digesting the ship and returning it to the earth.

It's a powerful message, and about the only one to be found here. We don't learn anything new about the hows and whys of the Titanic's demise. There's no startling new evidence that rewrites history. And that's just as well. The beauty of Ghosts of the Abyss is that it immerses you in larger-than-life underwater footage you won't easily forget. You slip on IMAX 3-D glasses and pay an hour-long visit to an inaccessible realm, where a tragic vessel speaks more clearly than its handlers ever could.


 
Documentaries

Coral Reef Adventure
Produced by MacGillivray
Freeman Films
Directed by Greg MacGillivray

On a clear day, astronauts can peer down from space and behold one of Earth's most magnificent wonders: Australia's 1,200-mile-long Great Barrier Reef. The splendor of this coral paradise, however, can't truly be fathomed without diving beneath the sea. Armchair adventurers can take the plunge by viewing the new film Coral Reef Adventure, showing in IMAX theaters. As the lights turn low, the giant movie screen fills with hidden wonders: Lavender sea fans wave in the ocean currents, pale gray corals with handlike tentacles extend their grasp, and thousands of yellow-and-silver butterfly fish dart through the water like swarms of aquatic bees.

Veteran divers and filmmakers Howard and Michele Hall began their journey in May 2000 at the Great Barrier Reef, an undersea habitat resplendent with life. But further east, near Fiji, they discovered sterile seascapes where the vivid pinks, reds, and yellows so common in Pacific corals had turned a stark, deathly white. Coral reef experts trace the devastation to human factors—water pollution, overfishing, and global warming. If current trends continue, they say, all of the world's coral reefs—home to one-quarter of the planet's marine life—could disappear in just 30 years.

That's sobering news, especially in contrast to the exhilaration of the movie's deep-sea excursions. In one sequence, the Halls' camera team dives 370 feet below the ocean surface into uncharted waters, where biologist Richard Pyle discovers five fish species never before viewed by humans. "There are not many places on planet Earth where you can explore an environment that nobody's ever seen," says Howard Hall. "To see animals unknown to science is magical."

— Maia Weinstock


 
Books

Why, Oh Y . . .
How manly can one chromosome be?

By Carl Zimmer

Y: The Descent of Men
By Steve Jones
Houghton Mifflin, $25

In the 1960s, a team of scientists studying the DNA of men imprisoned in a Scottish institution for violent offenders reported that a disproportionate number of them carried an extra Y chromosome. From that correlation the scientists theorized that this abnormality more or less doomed a man to a life of violent crime. One Y chromosome programs a fertilized egg to become male; the Scottish researchers concluded that if you double the Y—as happens in one out of every thousand male births—then you double all the aggression ostensibly hardwired into all men.

Yet, as Steve Jones points out in his book Y: The Descent of Men, the underlying science was faulty. The original study that kicked off the XYY craze was based on a grand total of two men whose cells harbored the extra chromosome. When scientists later looked at bigger samples, the correlation weakened. Some scientists still insisted that an extra Y might produce a slight tendency toward antisocial behavior. But even that fragile link has been attacked, and now geneticists generally dismiss it altogether.

The extra-chromosome canard is one of many myths about manhood that Jones sets out to demolish in his witty, informative book. Jones, a genetics professor at University College London, offers his readers a tour through the latest research on the male sex, drawing on work ranging from endocrinology to ornithology. The perspective that emerges is fascinating in its complexity. The path that a fertilized egg takes once it gets a Y chromosome, for example, is not a straight shot to machismo. At every step of the way, hormones and environmental forces put it in "constant danger of being forced back onto the broad path to femininity," Jones writes.

Jones knows full well that many of his fellow scientists want to cook manhood down to simple slogans. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, claim that the minds of men are shaped by the ancestral urge to spread their seed. But Jones argues that the definition of a man shifts with the culture in which he lives. Today's man shares the workplace with women, he may have children through in vitro fertilization, and he may use Viagra to help promote matrimonial bliss. To ignore this cultural reality, to try to stamp all men with some genetic or evolutionary brand, is foolish. After all, the males of our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, lead utterly different lives. Male chimpanzees rule despotically over females, while male bonobos live at the edge of a female-centered orgy. "Animals have males, but only Homo sapiens has manhood," Jones says.

Although Y is only 272 pages long, Jones packs it with detail. Readers learn about the latest technology for castrating cattle, the medical consequences of circumcision, the secrets revealed by paternity testing, and the sperm-filtering anatomy of female crickets. Yet although many of his anecdotes are entertaining—such as the one in which scientists boiled 6,000 gallons of urine in search of testosterone—they don't come together into a compelling narrative. Perhaps Jones decided that a mountain of details would confound readers with the complexity of manhood. But Y ends up more scrapbook than book. Scrapbooks do have their joys, though. Just watch what happens at the next party when you casually bring up the hydraulics of erections or the fruit flies that make finger-length sperm. Once you have everyone's attention, be sure to set them straight on the double Y.


 


Science Best-sellers

1.	The Universe in a Nutshell/illustrated Brief History of Time (boxed set) By Stephen Hawking, Bantam
2.	Backyard Ballistics By William Gurstelle, Chicago Review Press
3.	Faster than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation By João Magueijo, Perseus
4.	Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain By Antonio Damasio, Harcourt
5.	Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age By Duncan J. Watts, W. W. Norton
6.	The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story By Richard Preston, Random House
7.	The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Obsession, Perfume, and the Last Mystery of the Senses By Chandler Burr, Random House
8.	The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number By Mario Livio, Broadway
9.	A Shortcut through Time: The Path to a Quantum Computer By George Johnson, Knopf The quest for a future computer colossus that could perform 18 quintillion calculations with a single molecule.
10.	The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega—the Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe By John D. Barrow, Pantheon
Exclusive to Discover from Barnes & Noble Booksellers

 

We also like... Books

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
W.W. Norton, $23.95


Written in Bones: How Human Remains Unlock the Secrets of the Dead
Paul Bahn, editor
Firefly Books; $35 hardcover, $24.95 paperback

Fans of the TV drama C.S.I. may be surprised to learn that forensic science is not just a tool for catching criminals. In Stiff, Discover contributing editor Roach offers a fascinating survey of the data yielded by corpses both medieval and modern. One chapter, for instance, shows how bodies recovered from the doomed 1996 Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 helped determine the cause of the crash. Written in Bones, a book filled with photographs of skulls, bones, and bodies frozen and mummified, reveals how archaeologists unravel the mysteries embedded in corpses hundreds or even thousands of years old. You'll learn what killed Tutankhamen and why scores of Inca children were sacrificed some 500 years ago and left atop snow-capped Andean peaks.

Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe
That Spawned Life as We Know It
Gabrielle Walker
Crown, $24.95

Harvard geologist Paul Hoffman believes Earth underwent a major ice age 700 million years ago that turned the planet into a giant frozen ball. Walker, a science journalist, argues that Hoffman has uncovered compelling evidence in locales like the Namib Desert and the Arctic's Barents Sea that suggest such an icy period may have caused the Cambrian Explosion, a great proliferation of multicellular life 600 million years ago.

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
Bill McKibben
Times Books, $25

Future technologies—such as nanobots cruising our bodies in search of killer microbes—may unburden us from disease and increase our life spans. But could they rob us of our humanity? McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, ponders some of the dark risks posed by new advances in medical science.
— Maia Weinstock


 




"Inside the Lava Dome." Vulcania's Web site, www.vulcania.com, has all the expected information about planning your visit to the park. You'll also find a portfolio of famous volcanoes and some stories and activities for children.

"Krakatoa, South of Paris," by Mark Adams, from Outside Online, discusses Vulcania, the politics of getting it built, and how the French public is responding to this somewhat out-of-character attraction: outsideonline.com/outside/ features/200211/200211_out_there_1.html.

"AirZooka." Go to www.airzooka.net to learn more about AirZooka or to order one for yourself, in a variety of colors. While you're there, take a look at the heartfelt, occasionally wacky testimonials from AirZooka owners. You'll find a bit of vortex physics and a gallery of interesting smoke-ring pictures at www.woodrow.org/teachers/esi/1999/princeton/ projects/fluid_dynamics/vortex.html.

A fairly technical discussion of vortices in superfluids, with a nice, though rather large, movie of the computer simulation: www.nist.gov/public_affairs/ smokerings.htm.

"Life in a Whirl," by Steven Vogel (Discover, August 1993, page 80) is a primer on the dynamics of vortices and the many organisms that rely on them. This article is available at www.discover.com.

"That Sinking Feeling, Again." The official Web page for Ghosts of the Abyss includes background information on the expedition as well as brief biographies of the many people involved: www.disney.go.com/ghosts.

Find out more about the Titanic's construction and demise, and learn about the technologies that allowed the wreck site to be explored, at the Web site for the museum exhibit Titanic Science (which has recently completed its national tour): www.titanicscience.com.

More interested in the cameras than the ship? Read this article in Film and Video Magazine: www.filmandvideomagazine.com/2002/10_oct/ features/return_deep.htm.

See the technical specs for the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, a photo of the ship, and contact information—just in case you'd like to rent it: oceanic.cms.udel.edu/ships/country/ Russia/Keldysh/Akademik_Mstislav_Keldysh.html.

"Why, Oh Y . . ." Read a transcript of a talk Steve Jones gave in November 2001 on a related topic: www.scienceyear.com/about_sy/events/pdfs/Steve_Jones_Transcript.pdf.

Read a brief, kid-friendly interview in which Jones discusses his career path and inspirations: www.planet-science.com/about_sy/index.html? page=/about_sy/events/steve_jones.html. At www.carlzimmer.com you'll find links to recent articles by Carl Zimmer, a brief bio, and information about his books.

"Coral Reef Adventure." The Official Coral Reef Adventure Web site offers lovely, vibrant photographs; educational information about reefs; a Fun Zone with games and activities for kids; and links to many organizations involved in protecting these ecosystems. You can also find out whether the film is playing near you: www.coralfilm.com.

Howard and Michele Hall's Web site includes daily logs from their expeditions to the South Pacific during the making of the film: www.howardhall.com.

The U.S. Coral Reef Task Force addresses the problems facing the future of these endangered habitats and works toward preserving them for the future. The site also has some basic info on coral reef ecology and threats: coralreef.gov.

Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove. "Climate Change, Coral Bleaching, and the Future of the World's Coral Reefs." Published by Greenpeace: www.greenpeaceusa.org/media/publications/ coral_bleaching.htm.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's coral reef-monitoring program: orbit-net.nesdis. noaa.gov/orad/coral_bleaching_index.html.

The Environmental Protection Agency's coral reef protection site: www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/coral.