Today's Wisdom - The Eruption, the Blue and the Wall

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Today's wisdom explores:

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In April 1815, a mountain in Indonesia exploded with a violence the modern world has never seen equaled. Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, erupted with such force that it blew away the top 4,000 feet of its own summit. The blast killed around ten thousand people directly, and as many as 71,000 across the region. It also hurled a vast veil of ash and sulfur gas into the stratosphere. Here it spread into a thin, planet-wide haze that reflected sunlight back into space. People across the Northern Hemisphere noticed the sky itself had changed as sunsets turned an eerie blood-red, and a pale, persistent fog dimmed the Sun. Almost no one guessed the cause was a volcano on the far side of the world.

The consequences arrived the following year, and 1816 earned its grim nickname: the Year Without a Summer. Across the northeastern United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe, warmth simply failed to come. Snow fell in New York and Maine in June. Quebec City was buried under nearly a foot of it, and lakes in Pennsylvania froze over in July. The frosts destroyed crop after crop, and the failed harvests drove food prices into a full-blown subsistence crisis. The cold drove a wave of ruined New England farmers off their land and westward toward the Midwest. Thomas Jefferson, struggling with his own fields at Monticello, called it the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in American history.

That same dismal summer, a group of young English writers were holidaying by Lake Geneva: the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, the poet Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. The cold rain trapped them indoors for days, and to pass the gloomy hours Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. Mary Shelley, haunted by the darkness outside, imagined a scientist who stitches a creature together from dead matter and shocks it into life. From that candlelit competition came Frankenstein, published in 1818 and now regarded as a founding work of both gothic horror and science fiction. The same contest produced John Polidori's The Vampyre, the story that would later shape Bram Stoker's Dracula. A single eruption, on an island most Europeans could not have found on a map, gave the world its most famous monster.

For most of art history, blue was the hardest color in the world to hold onto. Painters could find reds in the earth and greens in copper, but a deep, permanent blue eluded them. The only real answer was a single semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli. Ground down, it produced a pigment called ultramarine, from the medieval Latin for "beyond the sea," because the stone reached Europe from so staggeringly far away. Almost every scrap came from one place: the Sar-e-Sang mines in the remote Badakhshan mountains of Afghanistan. From there the stone crossed Asia and the Mediterranean along the Silk Road, its price multiplying at every stage. A Renaissance painter asking for ultramarine was really asking for a mineral that had traveled half the known world to reach his palette.

Turning the raw stone into pure blue was brutally difficult. Lapis is shot through with impurities like calcite and glittering pyrite, which dull the color to a lifeless gray if they are left in. Craftsmen had to grind the stone, knead it into a dough of wax and resin, and work it through repeated washes until the pure blue flakes separated out and sank. The yield was tiny as a kilogram of good lapis surrendered only around 30 grams of top-grade pigment. Patrons commissioning a painting would set out in the contract exactly how much ultramarine the artist was to use, and pay for it separately.

Because it cost a fortune, ultramarine was rarely wasted, and where a painter chose to spend it tells you what he valued most. Artists reserved the color almost exclusively for their most sacred subjects, above all the robes of the Virgin Mary. The blue itself broadcast both her holiness and the wealth of whoever had paid for the work. Michelangelo carried it onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Titian poured it across skies that still blaze today. Yet the pigment was so ruinous that Michelangelo is said to have left his painting The Entombment unfinished because he could not afford the blue it needed. The Dutch master Vermeer used it so recklessly, lavishing it even on shadows and everyday scenes, that he helped drive his own family into debt. The reign of the impossibly expensive blue ended in 1826, when a French chemist worked out how to manufacture a synthetic version almost chemically identical to the real thing.

Around mile 20 of a marathon, something brutal happens to a great many runners. The legs turn to lead, the pace collapses, and the finish line that felt within reach drifts impossibly far away. Runners call this "hitting the wall" or "bonking." The cause is a fuel called glycogen, the form in which your body stores carbohydrate in the muscles and liver. Glycogen is your high-octane fuel: it burns cleanly and fast enough to power a hard pace, and your brain runs almost entirely on it. The trouble is that the tank is small. At marathon effort, your glycogen stores last only around 90 to 120 minutes for most people, so the reserves begin running dry somewhere between miles 16 and 20. A Harvard model published in PLOS Computational Biology put the depletion point for hard-running athletes at around mile 20 to 21.

You are never truly out of energy, because even a lean runner carries enough fat to fuel several marathons. But fat is a slow-burning fuel that the body releases far less efficiently, and it cannot support a fast pace. When the fast fuel runs out and the body switches to fat, the pace drops sharply and involuntarily. Glycogen is also stored locally, so the reserves in your leg muscles can only power those same legs. Once a working muscle is empty, it is empty. The brain suffers too, since it depends so heavily on glucose, which is why bonking brings not just dead legs but a fog of confusion, irritability, and a sudden urge to stop.

The good news is that the wall is largely preventable, and the fix comes down to fuel and pacing. Carbohydrate loading in the days before a race maxes out your glycogen stores at the start, and a carb-rich breakfast two to three hours before the gun tops off the liver. During the race, take in carbohydrate steadily through gels or sports drinks from early on, rather than waiting until you feel empty, so a trickle of fuel keeps arriving before the crisis hits. The gut can only absorb so much on the move, which is why runners train their stomachs in advance. The wall is not universal, and some runners, well trained to burn fat efficiently, never fully hit it. But for most, the marathon is really two races: twenty miles of running, then a final six that test how well you fueled for the first twenty.

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The A Little Wiser Team