Sometimes popular culture enters the geologic literature in odd, unexpected ways. For instance, one pair of researchers in 1991 wrote their abstract about seafloor topography as a parody of that old campfire song about the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. (You can read it below.)
Occasionally a researcher is more inspired. I'm thinking of Kenneth Hsü, who among other things did some important work on the ocean's carbon cycle. He was struck by the geochemical evidence from 65 million years ago, around the time of the great impact that killed the dinosaurs—apparently, every living thing in the ocean's surface waters had died at the same time. After that, the sea was largely a sterile waste for thousands of years.
To put a name to this extreme event, Hsü turned to Stanley Kubrick's classic film "Dr. Strangelove" and its Doomsday Machine. The evidence, wrote Hsü in a 1985 paper, pointed to a catastophic "Strangelove ocean" where the carbon cycle had shut down for many thousands of years. The phrase was so vivid that it stuck.
In "Dr. Strangelove" the Russian ambassador described the Doomsday Machine: "When it is detonated, it will produce enough lethal radioactive fallout so that within ten months, the surface of the Earth will be as dead as the Moon!. . . a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years!" This was in 1964, long before the first studies of "nuclear winter" and the research into asteroid impacts that followed. But the things we know today about giant impacts show how prescient Peter George, author of the book that became "Dr. Strangelove," was when he came up with the Doomsday Machine.
The Strangelove ocean is a great concept with a cool name. Little wonder, then, that "cyberpunks," whoever they are, started using it—or at least, started putting it in their glossaries—around 1994. Of course, they never had much occasion to talk about the Cretaceous impact event and its effect on the global oceanic carbon cycle. So when cyberpunks say "Strangelove ocean, dude," they mean a literal dead sea in which everything has been killed by pollution.
You know, I don't think they have much occasion to talk about that either. And the fact that all of the "cyber glossaries" use the exact same phraseology suggests to me that they don't really use the expression at all for anything. But they had the basic idea right. And maybe the notion of a Strangelove ocean created by human idiocy is truer to life than the geologist's version, even if it hasn't happened yet.
PS: Here's that silly abstract:
Fractal Analysis of Deep Sea Topography
Marc Spiegelman and Chris Scholz
Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory
Recent high resolution mapping of deep-sea topography shows clearly that there's a hole in the bottom of the sea. To repeat, there's a hole in the bottom of the sea. There's a hole—there's a hole—there's a hole in the bottom of the sea. Moreover, more careful analysis indicates that there is a multitude of scale lengths in the bathymetric data. For instance, there's a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. There's a bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. There's a frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. And there's a flea on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. Figure 1 shows the 5 orders of magnitude inherent in the data plotted in log-log space and indicates a fractal dimension d = 2.76. Plotting in log-frog space gives d = 2.5. No attempt has been made to understand this result.
______________________________________
| |
| 0 |
| 0 d = 2.76 | -log M
log | |
M | 0 | (anti M)
| |
| 0 |
| |
| 0 |
|______________________________________|
flea frog bump log hole
Log T
