Randall Carlson
speaker
1,469 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Randall Carlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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that if you have a geometry that governs the whole, you also use that same geometric scheme to divide up the space within so that the part reflects the proportions, the geometric proportions of the whole. And this was believed, and I think to be the case, is that this is what leads to harmony and resonance in a structure. And I cited how, you know, in the human body we find the same idea.
If we look at, for example, elbow to fingertip, and we were talking earlier before the recording about the golden section, sometimes called the divine proportion, and I said if you take a line, you divide it asymmetrically, there's one point that divides that line so that the ratio of the small to the large segment is exactly the same as the large segment to the whole or the sum of the two. Right.
And I said that, and, and so in this lecture, I was pointing out that this life seems to have utilized this, this particular geometric relationship, because we find it over and over again, embedded in all kinds of things like phylo taxes and, you know, in the botanical realm, in the, the animal kingdom in particularly so in humans.
And I was citing this idea of scale and variance, we might call it that. So in other words, the scale, the ratio, the proportional relationships between the parts and the whole are invariant no matter what the scale is. And I said the same thing holds true in geology.
And that's why if you take a geology book and you look at it, oftentimes you'll see a photograph and there will almost always be something in that photograph for, for a sense of scale, because in oftentimes it'll be the traditionally the geologists will put their rock hammer in the picture or their hat. Or if it's a larger image, there'll be a person standing there, right?
Otherwise you're going, okay, is this, are we looking at a six foot outcrop or a 600 foot outcrop? And I was citing scale and variance in geology. And I cited this example that we're looking at right here. And I commented about how I had this sort of intuitive response to standing on this bluff, looking into this channel. And there was a fellow in the group that had had a geology degree.
And he said, no, no, no, no. going to correct me. These things happen over millions of years. I said, I don't think so. I think I'm right and you're wrong. But it kind of annoyed me. So I really dove in. I did a lot of research. I even ended up enrolling and it was enough to motivate me. I said, okay, I'm going to really learn some good solid geology.
I enrolled in university and spent a couple of years studying geology. came out of it convinced that I was right and he was wrong. And now since then, you know, I've, there have been papers presented. And so the, the large channel now, and this is ignored and you can, you can, you can, this is the verification comes through multiple different ways.
Um, but anyways, this is now recognized as, and has been even given name glacial river Warren. And as it's peak discharge, um, its volume of flow was 4,000 times greater than that of the modern Minnesota river. Glacial river Warren.
Yes.
Very fast.
Oh my God. Yes. Let's see. Um, Yeah, we can actually, and you can follow that. It loops up to the northwest. You can follow it right on up. It's just obvious. You can see that was a giant meltwater sluiceway, and then you get up there to the lakes. If you keep going, there will be Big Stone Lake. Big Stone Lake was the the out, the out, yeah, Ortonville there. That's right in there.
So this was just below the outburst of this great meltwater lake. And like I said, big stone lake is a hint of, because there's a bunch of really big stones laying there in the pathway that got rolled and tumbled in this. I mean, we're talking about a major catastrophic outburst flood here. And, uh,
So, you know, growing up in that landscape was, people would say, well, how did you get interested in this? Well, I don't really know. There was no, there was, you know, there was a few points where, like this, I cite this example, but, you know, I grew up in this landscape that was right on the edge of what is called the superior lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
So where I lived, we had property on a lake, and it was basically a leftover meltwater puddle. And when you look at the landscape, you might see a fairly level field that a farmer has. And then right in the middle of it, you got this steep mound. And I would look like, why is that hill right there? Well, it turns out that that was probably called a cane, which is...
Where you might have a, uh, like a hole in an ice sheet and you get a lot of wash overwash or stuff into the hole in the ice sheet and it leaves a pile of stuff. On the, on the ground, like you can imagine you got an ice sheet, let's say the ice sheet is three, four or 500 feet thick, and you've got this hole that goes to the, to the ground.
And now you've got all of this melting and all of this water is pouring in and the supercharged with sediment. Then you also have Kettle Lakes where you might have like an outwash plain from like the glaciers are there. Seasonally, they will melt in the spring and you'll have this big outwash.
Like if you go to Indiana, you can actually see there's the hummocky moraine that represents the terminus of the ice lobe. And then south of there, it's just flat and you'll see, you'll be driving there and it's very flat. And then all of a sudden it gets hilly. Gets hilly because this is where the, the, the, the moraine is. And the moraine is the, the material that's created by the glaciers.
When they're grinding their way across the land, it pulverizes into the creates this material generally called tail. Until can be structured sometimes, like you'll have terminal moraine at the end of the ice. You'll have, um, recessional moraine where if the moraine melts, if the ice sheet melts back, pauses, it'll build this. this pattern of moraine.
You might have lateral moraine where you might have two mountain glaciers coming together like this. And as those glaciers are grinding their way through the mountain valleys, they're picking up all of this material on the bottom and on the sides. Then when they meet,
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