What better way to pass time while waiting for the dentist than spinning the Google Earth globe and seeing where you land? In this first spin-the-globe episode, I’ve landed on Samar Island in the Philippines. Let’s see where we end up from there…
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
Some resources:
Philippine flying lemur (colugo)
Philippine eagle (a critically endangered species)
How did all these arches form? Erosion and weathering — Arches National Park
Natural arch found on the Moon
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
One of the things I like to do when I’m sitting with my phone and don’t know what else to do is go into Google Earth and spin the globe around, and then put my finger on a place and just kind of see where I end up. So I’ve decided to do that for this podcast.
And this is the first spin-the-Google-Earth-globe episode. So I put my finger on the Google Earth globe and spun it around and closed my eyes. And then I landed my finger and, believe it or not, it didn’t land in water.
It landed on Samar Island in the Philippines. So what I’m going to do is tell you just a little bit about Samar Island. And then because I think it’s so much fun to think about how places are connected to each other in various ways and how fascinating this big planet is with all the different places and their various connections, I will take you from Samar Island to a few other places. And you may even be surprised we don’t even have to stay on the planet. But that’s for a little bit later.
So Samar Island is the third-largest island in the Philippines in terms of geographical area. And it has close to 2 million people. So this is not the island with the largest city of the Philippines, Manila. Samar Island is actually one-third covered by a natural park called Samar Island Natural Park.
And it is full of natural wonders. So it has a lot of caves. In fact, it has Asia’s second-largest cave system.
It has waterfalls and natural stone bridges, or arches, like the big one in Sohoton. And if you go there as a tourist, you can visit this incredible-looking arch and the caves around it, and it’s just beautiful.
By the way, I didn’t know any of this. It’s not like I did plan this, right? I just put my finger on the globe and learned about an island that I’d probably heard of before, but I don’t even remember if I had. So that was part of the fun of this.
So the big natural arch is 8 meters long, or 26 feet, in terms of its span. What we mean when we say a “natural arch” is an arch made of stone from the earth and is carved in natural ways, generally by water. I’ll talk a little bit more about natural arches in just a minute.
Samar Island also has this animal called the flying lemur, which is not a lemur. Lemurs only live in Madagascar. And it actually doesn’t fly. It glides. It’s like a flying squirrel. And 90% of the Philippine eagle’s diet is this flying lemur.
So now you know a little bit about the ecosystem on Samar Island. Obviously, it’s much more complicated than that. And I don’t need to get into all the things that the flying lemurs eat.
But the flying lemur is pretty cute. Look it up. And unfortunately, it’s suffering from major habitat destruction. And people also hunt it for food, which is too bad. You can also look up the Philippine eagle.
And again, this is a beautiful place. It’s a tropical rainforest ecosystem. And of course, being an island in the Philippines, it’s near the ocean.
So let’s talk about the natural arches or natural bridges a bit more.
They’re generally caused by water erosion, often the movement of the sea or of rivers that erode the rock and create arches and places where the rock or stone is particularly weak. But in some areas, including one that you may be familiar with, Arches National Park in Utah, the erosion was caused by weathering processes, so a bit different from just water rushing through the stone. It can be chemical weathering, which is when rain causes a chemical reaction in the rock. And it can also be physical weathering, which is caused by wind and rain erosion. And so natural arches can be found in places like Utah and in places like the Philippines and in a lot of other parts of the world.
The largest natural arch that’s been found is Xianren Bridge, or Fairy Bridge, in China. It’s spelled X-I-A-N-R-E-N. I don’t pronounce Chinese well, so sorry about that.
This is a magnificent natural arch. It is about 122 meters, or 400 feet, long. It’s just huge. That’s like the length of a football field plus another third of a football field in length. So imagine that. And eventually they say it’s going to crumble and fall, but for now it’s standing.
And this is one of the coolest things. This bridge was discovered on Google Earth. Somebody was looking at Google Earth back in 2009 and they found this magnificent bridge.
It’s kind of hard for me to believe that nobody had seen it before. There must have been people who saw it. But anyway, it was not well known or widely known until somebody noticed it on Google Earth.
And it is very remote. Apparently it requires a three-hour rafting trip up the river to get there. Again, if you want to have a look, Xianren Bridge, or the Fairy Bridge, in China.
Let’s think a moment about these natural bridges or natural arches. We can use the term interchangeably. And I was thinking, okay, well, where else can we find this interesting geological phenomenon? And I wondered, well, do they exist off of the planet? And I know we’re talking about this planet in this podcast primarily, but I was thinking about, like, does this happen on other planets or other places in space? And sure enough, they have found not one, but two natural bridges on the moon. It’s pretty incredible. You can see the images, and I will share the link to the images in the program notes here.
So these natural bridges on the moon, scientists believe that they were caused by parts of the moon’s surface collapsing into a lava tube when lava was flowing through it, not by water flows on the moon, but by lava flows.
So you might say, well, yeah, of course, because I mean, there’s no water on the moon, right? But that’s wrong. They have now confirmed that there’s evidence of water on the moon. And not just evidence. I mean, there is water on the moon. They confirmed that in 2020 on a NASA mission. And I remember seeing the headline, but I read a little bit more about it. It’s so fascinating. Isn’t it really like we always learned that the moon was a desert — but it’s got water. The water is on the moon’s sunny side, not on the dark side. At least they haven’t found it on the dark side.
And there’s not just a little. So within one crater of the moon that they studied, they found the equivalent of one 12-ounce bottle of water, which is about a third of a liter of water within one cubic meter or per cubic meter of moon soil. That’s a considerable amount of water, I think, but it’s not, it’s not just, you know, flowing. It’s not puddles or pools of water. It’s water molecules that are sticking to or embedded in grains of lunar dust.
So if we went to the moon, it’s not like we could just lean over and get a drink. Anyway, we would have to keep our spacesuit on, but the water molecules are there.
Okay. So we’ve been to Samar Island, and we’ve been to China, and we were in Utah for just a second. And then we’ve been to the moon.
So what, what’s the point? What does this all have to do with anything? Again, I really am fascinated by how diverse the earth is, but also how you can make connections and find things in common in all sorts of places and in places you might not even predict. And then the moon, well, yeah, it’s not Earth, but it’s kind of closely related, right? So I think it counts.
And I do have a sense of wonder in all of this diversity and commonality.
So what does this mean maybe for you? You could think about water sources where you live. How did the water get to the source in the first place, and how is it extracted so that you can use it? I mean, we know that we couldn’t easily go to the moon and drink the water that’s on the moon, but they probably could figure out how to extract it and use it for a moon colony. Not that I’m saying they should, but it might be possible. It’s easier for us to get water, but there are some challenges to that as well. So that’s one connection I can make.
Are there any natural bridges or similar landscape features near where you live? And if there are, have you visited them? Have you noticed them? Do you pay attention, or maybe you want to go have another look?
And how might erosion by wind or water change the area where you live to make it look totally different? Whether or not there are any natural bridges or anything like that, whether or not you live in a place that’s completely flat, wind and water are still changing the landscape.
We talked about the flying lemur and its main predator, the Philippine eagle. And there’s a good chance that the only animals flying around where you live are birds and insects. That’s true for me. But do you have eagles near you? What do your local eagles eat if they don’t have access to flying lemurs?
And another question you could think about is what interesting or unusual things can you discover by taking 10 minutes to search your area on Google Earth, or by spinning the Google Earth globe and putting your finger down and seeing where it might lead you. So that is a challenge that you can take if you want to do something besides look at Facebook or your messages or play Wordle. You can do those, but maybe also take a look at this really interesting planet. And in the meantime, I will find some more things to talk about and I will talk to you soon.