Life in the Fiery Fields

Big Bend National Park is 80

Big Bend is one of the largest, most remote and least visited national parks in the U.S. It’s a land of great diversity. More than a mile of elevation change. More than 100 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature fluctuation annually. Diverse topography—deserts, mountains, canyons, rivers and springs—with different life in each ecozone. And because of that, more ecological diversity than any other national park: more species of birds, butterflies, bats, reptiles, ants and plants. And the largest age range of fossils, too, because of its complex geologic history. It also has a long and varied human history. Just after the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago, nomadic hunters frequented the area. Tribes settled in Big Bend 7,500 years ago. Spanish explorers built forts in the area 500 years ago. Two-hundred years ago, the Apache then the Comanche displaced the indigenous Chisos tribe. The area became a stop on the Comanche Trail as they migrated from buffalo-hunting grounds in the Texas Panhandle to raid Spanish missions in Mexico. Big Bend became part of Texas when it became a republic, in 1836. Texas made it a state park a hundred years later, then donated it to the U.S. government. Since 1944, Big Bend has been part of the National Park Service—and this 80th anniversary would be a great time to visit!

The Longest, Deepest Diver

The world’s most successful research submarine, Alvin, has completed over 5,000 dives in its 60-year career. Its first mission, in 1966, was to search for—and find—a hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the deep ocean. Two years later, cables snapped while Alvin was being lifted aboard its tender ship, and it sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic … where the sub itself had to be retrieved. It has been rebuilt several times since—each time making it more robust for deeper diving. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Alvin was the first to explore hydrothermal vents. Scientists expected them to be devoid of life, but were shocked to discover communities of shrimp, mollusks and giant tube worms, supported by symbiotic bacteria. In 1986, Alvin visited the Titanic. In 2014, it searched for seafloor damage beneath the Deepwater Horizon accident. In fact, half of all deep-sea research missions have been aboard Alvin. Every few years, the sub is completely disassembled so its parts can be inspected for cracks and wear. Several subs were built along with Alvin, and several more since, but Alvin has outlasted them all. It’s now the Navy’s only sub that can transport researchers deeper than 20,000 feet. It will spend its 60th birthday doing what it does best, exploring the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska. I’m sure the scientists aboard will make time to celebrate this timeless little sub.

Rio Grande's Big Bend

Native American legend says the Creator, when done forming Earth, threw all the leftover rocks into a pile in West Texas—a jumble of geology that today we call Big Bend. It gets that name because it sits in a 200-mile-long curve in the Rio Grande River that separates Texas and Mexico. Big Bend is now a nearly million-acre national park—with a protected area twice as large on the Mexican side of the border. The reason it looks like a divine rock yard is its complicated geologic history. 450 million years ago, Big Bend was on the coast of the supercontinent of Laurasia. Around 300 million years ago, Africa slammed into it, crumpling the Big Bend region. 200 million years ago, the continent of South America tore off from this area. 100 million years later, Big Bend was submerged beneath the Cretaceous Interior Seaway, a giant sea that bisected North America from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Around 60 million years ago, the Rockies and Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain ranges began rising and met in Big Bend. And if that wasn’t enough, the area was rifted then became volcanically active 40 to 30 million years ago. You can see evidence of this complex geologic history in the hills, outcrops and steep canyon walls of Big Bend today, which makes it a dream destination for hikers, campers and geologists.

Ideal Material

If you were to design the perfect industrial material, what would it be like? You’d want it to be strong and lightweight. Easy to form into different shapes. You’d like it to be resistant to corrosion. And to heat. Ideally, you could easily combine it with other materials for more uses. And re-uses. It would be best if all these qualities came in something cheap and abundant. And in fact, they do. This ideal material … is aluminum. It’s the third-most abundant element in Earth’s crust, behind oxygen and silicon. It’s a small, highly charged atom, so it bonds well to others to form valuable alloys. Adding even a small fraction of copper makes aluminum much harder, for use in things like jet engines. A little magnesium makes it much more malleable, for things like packaging. A little boron raises aluminum’s electrical conductivity almost to that of copper, to make a cheaper, lighter wire ideal for transmission lines. It’s made from bauxite ore, in a process that requires a great deal of electricity. But it takes only 5% of that energy to recycle it. As a result, of the nearly 1 billion tons of aluminum ever produced, three-quarters of it is still in use—recycled in a closed loop so that its many benefits can be enjoyed again and again. That truly is an ideal material.

Cicada Cacophony

It’s going to be a very noisy summer! This year, more cicadas will fill the air with—song?—than any summer since 1803. Cicadas evolved 150 million years ago, and 3,000 species now live on nearly every continent. These are called “annual” cicadas. They live a few years underground, then crawl up a tree and shed their crusty “underground” skin for a final molt into their winged adult form.  They live for a few weeks, and the males screech all day long—which the females find attractive. They mate, the females inject their eggs beneath the bark of a tree, and they both die. The nymphs hatch and fall to the ground, where they burrow into the soil to grow and repeat the process. If you live in the South or Southwest, you see—and hear—the green or brown annual cicada. But in the middle of the US—and only here—a special cicada has evolved, with black bodies and red eyes. Two types exist: one lives underground for 13 years, and the other for 17. No one knows exactly how they time it, but billions emerge at once. Then, every 221 years, as in 2024, the 13- and 17-year cycles align … and they all come out together. The last time this happened, Thomas Jefferson was negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. If he knew what a racket he was in for, he might have rethought the deal.