Stuff To Blow Your MindWhat exactly is mud? Where does it occur and how does it factor into animal behaviors and human activities? In this multi-episode Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Rob and Joe immerse themselves in the mysteries of mud.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part four. And I would say probably it's got to be the final part right now, at least the final part for now of our series on mud. So in previous episodes in the series, which if you haven't listened to them, you should go back and check those out first, but we talked about the history of mud on Earth. It's a more surprising and dynamic story than you might imagine. That was in part one. We talked a bit about what defines mud. You know, it tends to be, of course, wet soil of a smaller particle size that gives it that sticky consistency. We talked in part two about animal behavior and mud, such as pig wallowing, Arnold Schwarzenegger wallowing mud, what do they call it, mud skippers, the fish that have these interesting mud habitat behaviors, and other things like that. In the episode just before this one, we talked a lot about mud bricks, the history of mud in human construction. And today we're back to sort of round things out with the grab bag of different little topics that didn't make it anywhere else.
That's right, Yeah, this will I think this will be the capstone for this series. But Mud does open up the possibility for some standalone episodes later on. I think there's a It ends up touching on so many different aspects of the world and our habitats and also human creation. So who knows, there may be more mud in the future, but this is going to be like the This is the bedrock mud. This is the initial foundation of mud bricks upon on which we might build future episodes.
That's right, that's right. So to kick things off today, I wanted to start by thinking about a principle that maybe should be used in the natural sciences. We'll see, and it's basically the heavy metal principle of nature, which states that for every phenomenon in nature, there's a good chance there is a heavy metal version of that phenomenon. If you start with the kind of like an easy listening or jazz or country of your classic mud puddle, the heavy metal version, I think is the mud pot So you think of a normal mud puddle, there's usually a depression in the ground where surface water collects after rain soaks through the soil, especially if the soil particle particles are small, creates an area of plastic or even fully liquid mud. And if water stops flowing into the puddle from above, it can dry up. But now imagine a mud puddle with a thick liquid consistency, sort of like paint, but boiling bubbling, like a big pot of stew, forming opaque bubbles of gas that the gas is clearly trapped in those clay particles rising up from below, and you can see them form into spheres on the surface sometimes and they stay there for a moment before they finally burst, and depending on the consistency of the mud, might splatter all over the place when they do burst, maybe even throwing clumps of mud up into the air such that it piles around this puddle of mud, forming mounds or even a cone that the mud puddle rises from, or a weird kind of collar of mud splatter all around. This is a mud pot, and it's also it could develop into one example of a term. There's a term called mud volcano that actually seems to be used to refer to a multiple very different things, but one thing that gets called a mud volcano is the kind of mound that can build up from the life cycle of a mud pot.
Quick Weird House cinema trivia here for you, Joe, Can you name two movies that we've covered that feature boiling mud or the appearance of boiling mud, no matter how they actually created it via actual footage or some other kind of technique.
Oh wow, you are really stumping me. I seem to recall there's some boiling mud in Legend. Isn't that where Meg Mucklebones lives? But I don't think we actually watched Legend for Weird House?
Did we? No? No, not as of this recording.
Oh wait a minute, did we do Labyrinth? No, we didn't do Labyrinth. But Labyrinth has boiling mud, doesn't it?
Uh? Yeah, or something that looks like it. Now, the two movies that I believe we've watched that have boiling mud or the effect of boiling mud, Planet of the Vampires and nineteen seventy eights Beauty and the Beast.
You're exactly right, Both of those just escaped my memory. But yeah, two masterpieces in their own right.
Came into my head as you were describing it. Because it is a very like otherworldly feeling thing. Though even though it is very much all of this world, it kind of lends itself to alien environments or environments like in Beauty and the Beast, which are supposed to be kind of like on the edge of the civil lies world, sort of bordering on the supernatural. Yeah.
Yeah, in the Beating in the Beast, there's like boiling mud or at least bubbling mud even within the grounds of the castle, I think, isn't there. I think, so, yeah, there's like a courtyard that has mud pots within it, and that seems yeah, at the edge of fantasy. But to look at a mud pot and understand what's going on here, I think we should start with the concept of a hot spring. So hot spring's form when water heated by geothermal energy deep underground rises to the surface and forms a pool, or when water that collects at the surface due to you know, regular runoff and surface features is heated by steam more heat from below, and this surface water can be anywhere between you know, pleasantly warm bathtub temperature and lethal boiling. So you do not ever want to jump into a hot spring unless it's one that is like very well known in advanced to be a consistent safe temperature if in out, stay away. I've read something like twenty people are known to have died from jumping into or falling into hot springs at Yellowstone National Park in the United States alone.
Yeah, I remember reading about some of this when we were doing some episodes on springs and holy waters associated with springs.
Yeah, and sometimes it can be deceiving, Like there are tragic cases of people just trying to like get close to see what the temperature is like and then falling in and dying. There was a case like this I was reading about from the year twenty sixteen where let's see. Well, so I was reading an article about it from the local news station KULR eight in Billings. I guess Billings, Montana, near Yellowstone, And so the headline was man killed in Yellowstone hot spring allegedly trying to quote hot pot. I guess hot potting is like, you know, jumping into a hot spring to hang out in it. But to read from the article, it says the man who died in a Yellowstone hot spring last summer was apparently looking for a place to hot pot in the park. Yellowstone officials recently released the final report on the incident following a Freedom of Information Act request. The victim's sister recorded the incident on her cell phone. The accident happened in Norris Geyser Basin on the afternoon of June seventh. Deputy Chief Ranger Laurent Veresse says, it is a very dangerous area with boiling, acidic waters. So the article tells the story of how the man and his sister went off the approved path and they were checking out different like hot springs or maybe more mudpot type areas to see what the temperature was, and unfortunately, the man, while trying to get close to check the temperature, slipped and fell in, and the article says, quote search and rescue rangers who arrived later did find the victim's body in the pool, along with his wallet and flip flops, but a lightning storm stopped the recovery efforts. The next day, workers could not find anys Veras says the water was churning and acidic. He remarked, quote, in a very short order, there was a significant amount of dissolving. So the apparently boiling and acidic conditions in the water essentially disintegrated the victim's remains.
Oh wow, so it is no joke.
Do not mess around with like, oh, maybe I'll go check out this hot spring and see if I should get in.
Yeah, listen to your park rangers, obey signage.
But so okay, So that's hot springs water that pools on the surface that is either connected to a hydrothermal system that heats it, or is heated by heat coming off of a hydrothermal system below in the ground. So also in this family of surface outlets for geothermal energy are fumaroles, which are holes in the earth where steam rising from geothermally heated water escapes. A mud pot is, in a way still a type of mud puddle. Mud pots are pools where water collects and mixes with clay particles, forming a thick liquid mud, usually gray or cream colored, sometimes black, but there are other colors possible too. This mud puddle is heated by geothermal activity from below, or at least is permeated by gas that's released from below, and mudpots often release hydrogen sulfide gas, which smells like rotten eggs. And while people who see these things often describe them as marvelous, one of the most amazing things they've seen in nature, if not exactly beautiful. An element of the mudpot encounter, described at least as often is the dank, putrid smell, which is in the air before you can even see the thing. You might maybe you hear it, but you smell it now. An interesting thing is I wonder if this reflects a development in the understanding of mudpots. But I've read different accounts of the most common ways that mudpots are formed, So I want to start with an older account, from a reputable source, but an older one. This is from a textbook from the nineteen twenties by the American geologist Lewis V. Pearson that essentially describes a mud pot as like a hot spring, but with limited water supply, and Pierson says it goes like this. If there is basically a net positive flow of water into a hot spring, meaning that more water is flowing into the hot spring, either from below or from above, or the combination of both, than the rate of evaporation of that water, this will lead to overflow from the spring, and the water will overflow the basin of the pool and drain away. And in fact, if you look up pictures of hot springs, you can often see rocks nearby stained where the runoff from the spring is going. It'll maybe carry colorful extremophile microbes with it, so you'll see almost kind of like a little red river running off the side of it. And so in these cases, if the flow of water into the pool is positive, the water stays relatively clear, relatively limpid, in Pearson's words, often a deep blue or green color, though it can appear different colors like red or yellow, again due to extremophiles present.
Now.
Of course, presumably if the net flow of water into the pool is strongly negative, the pool will just dry up. But Pearson says if the rate of evaporation is roughly equal to the rate of inflow of water into the pool, the hot spring neither dries up nor overflows. Then the acidic water sitting in the pool dissolves the surrounding rock into clay, which then mixes with the water and forms mud, and you are left with a pool of hot, bubbling mud, which is sometimes described as boiling because of the way that it bubbles. It certainly can look like it is boiling, but technically I've read that these mud pots have variable temperature. They are sometimes less hot than the boiling point of water, which, of course, at one atmosphere of pressure is one hundred degree c or two twelve fahrenheit. In some cases, the mud pot is actually much cooler than that, but the mud is still bubbling because of hot gases from below, so hot gases in the earth are still rising up through it. In that case, it's not actually the mud boiling, it's just it's being permeated by gas that's trying to rise. Pierson says that the mud in these pots can be different colors. It can be white, yellow, red, purple, or black. This is often due to the presence of oxides of iron or manganese. I think manganese oxides tend to be more black. Of course, iron oxide tends to be more red. And for this reason of all these different colors, these mudpots are sometimes called paint pots. They can look like a bubbling pool of paint of different colors mixed together.
Now.
Pierson says that as more clay is dissolved into the water, the mud becomes thicker. Of course, so you're getting more soil to the same roughly the same amount of water. So as you mix in more sediment it becomes a thicker consistency, and this makes the ebulition, meaning the bubbling, less regular. So imagine the way that, like a soup in a pot on the stove, as it becomes thicker, the bubbling becomes less regular and more kind of random and chaotic and violent rob it. Do you know what I'm talking about from cooking experiences.
Yes, yeah, it can kind of even like shake the pot.
A little bit, right, yeah. Yeah, So this is my experience in the kitchen. Like you boil something with basically a watery consistency or broth like consistency, the bubbles will be pretty even. There'll be a steady rate, you know, they'll pop evenly as long as the heat is consistently applied. But if you were talking about like a very thick stew, you can sometimes get much less predictable and more explosive bubbles. So it might not bubble at all for a bit, and then suddenly a huge bubble pops and it splatters all over the stovetop.
Yeah yeah, I was cooking one of these just last night.
Well, apparently a similar thing that happened as the mud in a mudpot thickens with thick mud, steam builds up higher pressure before rising to the top and popping, which means it can happen, in Pearson's words quote spasmodically and with some violence, the mud being thrown into the air and about the vent where it collects inconsiderable masses. And this is one version of the concept of the mud volcano. Because the mud pot that bubbles this way and kind of builds up mud around it can form a cone that looks like a volcano mountain, it looks like a cone volcano, or it can kind of form a caldera around itself made out of ejected mud. Now, often this mud erodes very easily, so this building process can be kind of cyclical. But yeah, it can build up a little sort of mini volcano made out of mud and just kind of keep popping and spewing onto itself. Pearson says that this usually marks the end of the period of activity for a hot spring. As the activity of a hot spring is dying away, it's more likely to go through a mud pot and a volcano period. Now, I mentioned I came across some different accounts of what is exactly going on in a mud pot. That was the older account. There a lot of the more recent sources I was looking at describe the source of the water going into the mud pot as placing more emphasis on that being surface water. So, for example, the National Park Service has some materials about what's going on with the mudpots at Yellowstone, and these sources claim that it essentially acts more like a double boiler. So, again with kitchen analogies, I guess that's where we have a lot of our experience with boiling liquids a double boiler. If you never used this, rob it's like you put like a glass bowl on top of a pot that has a little bit of water boiling in it, and the steam from the boiling water rises and it gently heats the bowl from below, as opposed to just you know, putting whatever you have in the bowl in the pot directly and having hot metal applied to it.
I don't think I've ever done this myself. Interesting.
Sometimes it's used usually when you need to heat something very gently, like if you're trying to heat something that could easily overheat and would be ruined by doing so, like if you are making It's used sometimes in baking, when you need to melt chocolate to a particular temperature. To get the inconsistency you want, or if you're making like a hollandaise sauce, because you know, you heat a hollandaise sauce too much, and you know with scrambled eggs. Okay, all right, but so anyway, it's just like letting the steam from below do the heating of the food, as opposed to letting applying direct heat from the heating element through the metal to the food. And the source from the National Park Service claims that in the case of these mudpots, what's usually happening is that water from the surface collects in a basin or a depression that is not actually connected to the water flow from the hydrothermal systems in the ground. Instead, the bottom of the basin or the depression is usually considered impermeable because of lining with fine particles of clay. So that's sort of your bowl. The bottom of the double boiler and the hydrothermal system below releases steam and usually some hydrogen sulfide gas, which rises through the bottom layers of clay and causes the mud puddle to both heat up and bubble as the gas rises to the top. Then you have again extremophile organisms microorganisms in these pools that can use the hydrogen sulfide gas to make energy, and in the process they create sulfuric acid, which turns the mud pool extremely acidic, and then it helps dissolve more rock in the surrounding basin and turns that into clay, and so the mud just like you know, you get continuous supply of new clay particles from that dissolution, and it gets thicker and thicker. And this source also says that mudpots can be a by the season, so like rain and melting snow can make the mud and the pots cooler and thinner, and then hot, dry weather in the summer can cause them to thicken or even dry up completely, which means that these are ultimately somewhat transient and dynamic features. Like a mud pot or a mud volcano of this variety might only be active for a few months. It can also be active much much longer, but it might just be a very brief, shortly lived thing. Before maybe it just transforms into a kind of fixed fumarole where steam is coming out of a hole in the ground. Now, there is another use of the term mud volcano that can refer to a different geological process that can in some cases be extremely explosive and large in scale and violent. I was reading about this in an article from December twenty twenty by a ut Ostin geologist named Michael R. Hudic. That is, it's it's a particular example of a mud volcano that occurred in Indonesia in two thousand and six in the Siduarjo regency that is known sometimes as the Lumpur Siduarju. Lumpur is the word for mud, And there was this massive, sudden eruption. There was like steam releasing from a vent in the ground and rumbling, and then it started just exploding with these huge amounts of mud that ended up completely engulfing villages in the surrounding area. It was like many acres and people had to be evacuated in order to get out of harm's way. These villages were completely swallowed up in mud. There were like these farming villages in the area. And so this is not like a little mound of mud ejected by a puddle. This was like a landscape destroying, violent ejection of mud. And it seems like in many of these cases where there is this large, explosive kind of mud eruption, and one thing that might be going on is the interaction with hydrocarbon gases, so for example, methane, and of course methane being very flammable, can make these eruptions actually flaming eruptions, where like when the hot methane comes into the atmosphere, it can ignite. The cause of this particular mud volcano eruption in two thousand and six is apparently controversial. It seems like a lot of people have attributed it to drilling of a natural gas well in the area by an oil and gas company. Of course, the oil and gas company claims, no, it wasn't us it was a naturally occurring event, but it did seem to be significant hydrocarbon gas involved in this kind of eruption. And this kind of thing is scary because it's hard to imagine. I mean, I guess we are familiar with the concept of like an igneous volcanic eruption, you know, where it's like a rock volcano erupting and it's releasing all of this gas and rock and molten rock and pyroclastic flow and all these things. And so I guess we are already familiar with the concept of large destructive volcanoes. But the idea that it could just like flood a landscape with mud is another stranger and differently frightening version of that kind of image.
Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to have vast quantities of mud where you know mud will be seasonally or otherwise. It's another thing for mud to just suddenly appear where it's not expected. And this seems to be like one of the more exaggerated cases of it, you know, whereas the vast quantities of mud just emerging and taking over people's homes and so forth. Yeah, Now, on the subject of mud volcanoes, I have also been reading a little bit about this idea of mud volcanoes on Mars. I don't know if you came across any of this. I was looking at a paper from twenty twenty quoting Peter Burrows, a professor geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and basically he proposed that mud from mud volcanoes may have flowed in Mars past, and therefore some of the things we see in visuals from Mars that looks like it could be the result of lava flows could perhaps be the result of mud flows in the past, so he and his team conducted experiments to see how this would work, and found that while the mud eventually would freeze under those Chili Martian conditions, there would be a little time for it to flow, freezing and crusting over at the surface, initially enabling it to move a bit before the freeze firmly took hold. Because I guess that, you know, it's one of the things about thinking about mud elsewhere in the universe. We have plenty of sci fi visions of muddy planets, but for mud to be there, you need some sort of moisture to be there as well. But we do, I think, love the idea of mud planets. You know, take any especially any kind of like exotic terrestrial environment, and somebody somewhere has turned a whole planet into that. You know. Yes, so you have jungle planets, you have desert planets like Oracus. If you look at Star Wars, you have planets like Dagoba, just a swamp world. Not only does it have a lot of mud, like the mud and the muck will just swallow up whole spaceships.
That's true, though, you know, it's interesting. They never say in the Star Wars movies that the entire planet Dagoba is a swamp, but you just assume that's the case.
Yeah, I think I've seen some maps and these are you know, like you know, artistic interpretations that kind of run with that, and it's like, oh, yeah, whole planet just swamp. And that raises a lot of questions like what how would that work? That would the entire planet be a swamp? Does that mean it doesn't have oceans, it just has swamp? I don't know. I should look into this and say, I'm sure some people have written some papers about this sort of thing.
Yeah, I wonder if you, like, could you have a swamp if you didn't have other types of regions to support the U like the geological and atmospheric conditions that would create a swamp.
Yeah.
Now, come back to Wars in just a second, but I want to hit another couple of cosmic mud examples. One concerns SMAP SMAP, which is also a Japanese boy band. Apparently this became obvious when I was researching this, but in this case it stands for Soil Moisture Active Passive. That's NASA's environmental monitoring satellite launched in twenty fifteen and still active as of this recording. I think it's supposed to be active through at least the end of twenty twenty three. But it can measure land surface soil moisture up to a certain depth. So it's an eye in the sky essentially on mud. And the data that it collects is useful because it spills over into better understandings of the carbon cycle, weather and climate models, drought monitoring, and so much more. But of course that's concerning Earth. We know there's mud on Earth. This is another idea I ran across this, the idea that you at one point anyway had just cosmic mud ball flying around through space.
Okay, so if you imagine like a comet as a formation of ice and dust that's flying around in space, of course all the ice is frozen, Like what if a comet was wet.
Yeah. I actually found some discussion of this in a twenty seventeen article for New Scientists by Sam Wong. In this it doesn't conserve comets, but it concerns asteroids, particularly early asteroids or carbonaceous asteroids, that may have delivered water and organic molecules to Earth. And apparently it can be helpful to model them as just big old mudballs. So the idea here is that ice, dust and chondrules come together and the pressure has not yet compacted it all into rock right away. It will in time, but at this point early on, it hasn't all been compacted into rock, and the ice will end melting due to decaying radioactive atoms in the dust and gas, resulting in a quote unquote schelegi mud wow, And this would eventually become rock again, but for a time they would be muddy asteroids. According to the modeling by Philip Bland at Curtain University in Perth, Australia and his collaborator Brian Travis at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
That is interesting. Okay, so they got they've got a pretty strong internal heat source because they've got all these young radioactive atoms in them that are still decaying at a pretty rapid rate. So they're keeping the ice content like melted and moist. And then of course they've got all like the dust and rock soil content in them. And yeah wow, this like big balls of mud flying through space.
Yeah yeah, So I before I ran across this, I didn't even think this was possible. You know, you think of mud as being something you're going to encounter, particularly on an Earth like world. Now, coming back to Earth, Wak worlds and Mud. Another Star Wars planet of note, especially if you've seen the movie Solo, which came out several years back. There's a planet called Membon, and in that movie we see Imperial mud Troopers or swamp troopers as they're sometimes called, engaged in some sort of drawn out battle on this world. And Joe, in case you haven't seen this, I included an image here of what mud troopers look like as compared to just normal Imperial stormtroopers.
Looks like a dirty job, looks like this may be like the last thing that, like all the other troopers try to sign up for different detail and you know, the last picks for all the other ones, like Nope, you cannot go to Hawth and be a snowtrooper. You got to be a mud trooper.
Yeah, And I think that's the way it's presented in the movie too, Like Han Solo, a young Han Solo is a mud trooper on this awful world. Then, of course they're also drawing in a lot of comparisons to trench warfare and war's past and so forth, which will we'll get back to in a bit. But one of the interesting things, and of course this is kind of across the board when you look at sci sci fi often is looking backwards and taking things from the past and putting this futuristic spin on them. Because I don't recall, and I could be wrong. It's been a while since I've seen Solo, but I don't think the Imperial mud Troopers leveraged any kind of Sci Fi technology to deal with the mud. It seems like they would have leaned heavily on repulsor technology to kind of float above it, or to use some sort of technology to either rapidly dry out muddy conditions or to like flash freeze them so that you wouldn't have to get slogged down in them. It seems like that would be something to try if the Imperial budget allowed for it. I guess they spent that all on big walking machines that are gonna, yeah, I guess in theory, not get bogged down in the mud. Off the top of my head, I don't think I can even think of another sci Fi vision where there's any kind of like sci Fi treatment of mud like this be wrong because I'm not. I mean, there's a lot of military sci Fi out there, so someone might have looked at it. I do remember a gadget in John Steekley's Armor that is like a people in power armor versus insect aliens on a desert world that involves sand clotters and a machine that would turn the sand of the desert into solid walls of fortification. So I imagine you'd want something like that, something that, through sci Fi shenanigans, can instantly dry out an area or make it solid, as opposed to shifting sand or in this case, like mud that's going to cling to you and suck you down into the muck.
I don't know if sand is the best choice for that. Wouldn't it be better to use a cohesive soil with smaller particles like clay or silt?
Yeah? Yeah, So I don't know any of you out there, who certainly are more red and military sci fi than me, there might be an example of this, so right in and let us know.
Now. Of course you keep saying military sci fi in particular, and it makes sense why you would do that, because of the the significance of mud in combat and warfare in human history.
That's right, Yeah, you know mud. I was thinking about this a lot like mud is not only an environmental condition that occurs naturally in the world, but it's often this condition that is at an interaction point between the natural world and human activity. You think of muddy roads, right, We think of paths that are not well maintained that get really muddy and sloppy in places. And then there are several walks that my family does like this in the area where you know, we know exactly where that muddy stretch is, and there are often a lot of slapdash efforts to mitigate it, you know, boards that are thrown down on the rock. Yeah, and you know that works for a little bit sort of. That also creates additional splash hazards and new and exciting ways to slip and fall in the mud. But yeah, mud is also a big factor in human warfare and has been for a long long time. You pointed this out to me, and this is something that has been covered in various articles over the last couple of years. But there is a Russian term putitsa that refers to a season or seasons of the year when unpaved roads become treacherous due to the mud created by rain and or melting snow on said roads. It's had a major impact on land wars in Russia and Eastern Europe, for ages, impacting the Mongol invasion, both World Wars, and also the Russo Ukrainian War that, as of this recording, is still ongoing. It's been observed that among Russia's mistakes during the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine, they underestimated the muddy roads season that was just kicking off at that time.
Right, So this is sort of one of the factors affecting the seasonal planning of offensives in conflict in Eastern Europe.
Yes. Yeah. And on the other hand, another major area for mud and war is the First World War. And I mean you can instantly picture this probably if you've seen images, footage and fictional recreations of those trench warfare environments. What do you think of You think of like blasted landscape, you think of mud, You think of these just awful conditions where like the natural world is just worn away and all that remains is mud and fortifications and explosions and death and pain.
Yeah, like heavily shelled or trodden over areas where it seems like a lot of the plant life has been killed and stripped away, and now like the roots are, it's not really holding the soil together the way it was, and now it's just mud.
Yeah, And if you've ever taken a poetry class, you may have run across the fact that, yeah, there's a lot of great but depressing poetry and writings in general that came out of this time period, people describing these conditions, describing the horrors of war and the horrors of chemical war and so forth. One of the best literary treatments of war and mud, however, just has to be that of American British war nurse turned novelist and poet Mary Borden. In nineteen seventeen, she wrote a poem called the Song of the Mud. You can find this in full on Poetry Foundation dot org. But it's really really good. Joe, were you familiar with this poem?
I don't think so.
Yeah, this one is a new one for me. I this is not one that I remember covering in poetry classes. But she writes of quote, the frothing, squirting, spurting liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds unquote, as well as quote the thick, elastic mud that is needed and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses, though she also juxtaposes this with more natural seeming aspects of mud, even like mud as something that can be beautiful. From Afar, I'm going to read the final stanza from the poem, but again I encourage everyone to go out and read it in full quote. This is the song of the mud. The beautiful, glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin. The mysterious, gleaming, silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys. Mud, the disguise of the war zone. Mud, the mantle of battles, mud, the smooth, fluid grave of our soldiers. This is the song of the mud.
Wow, that's interesting, And I don't know the connotations of mud is used and that stands at least are more I don't know, more positive than I would have expected.
Yeah, I mean there's there's a lot of dark imagery in there about it, like swallowing up guns and taking people down and like like not only like the physical power of the mud, but also like the emotional toll of the mud, which I'll come back to in a bed as well.
When I was thinking of World War One poetry and the concept of mud, I thought of the one of the poems of Wilfrid Owen. I just had to look it up because I didn't remember the name, but it's the Apologia pro poemate Mayo, which I think means defense of my poetry. And this is by Wilfrid Owen, who was a British poet who fought in World War One. Wrote a lot of poetry associated with the war, like Anthem for Doomed Youth you might have read. But the opening stands of this poem was, I too saw God through mud, the mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled, war brought more glory to their eyes than blood, and gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
Oh wow, Yeah, I don't remember that bit, but I remember Owen. He's definitely one of the names that comes up when a poetry class steers sharply into the trenches.
Yeah.
Now, a book that I mentioned earlier in this series, Mud, a Military History by C. E. Wood, is a full book dealing with mud. In war. And so if you need more of this, I highly recommend you pick up that book. It's very well written, it's you, it's very absorbable. But in it would stresses that while more permanent domains of mud are certainly important in warfare, you need to know where the swamps, marshes and bogs are and how to either circumnavigate them or utilize them, force the enemy to move through them, that sort of thing. But the main area of interest in the book is transitional mud. That is the kind that arrives and departs without significant warning.
Okay, so this previously traversible landscape suddenly has mud in it that is going to interfere with your progress.
Yeah, And this becomes key because I mean, this is not something you can necessarily plan for, or planning can fall short of taking it into account. And it's a variety of mud that has played a crucial role in the history of armed conflict. One of Wood's main focuses in this is how mud hinders forward advancement in warfare, so impacting combatants, animals, and machines of war, and of course not just war machines and soldiers and tanks and horses with knights on them and that sort of thing. But of course everything that supports a war effort, that supports an army and its advancement, the vehicles that are carrying food, any kind of medical support that is in tow all of that sort of thing as well. So generals have to contend with the impact of permanent mud, seasonal mud, random transitional mud, in addition to all of the other threats and challenges of battle, all the other environmental concerns that will come into play. And there are also huge human health and mental health challenges with mud that the author deals with in greater detail. There's a great quote in the book though, about this, attributed to historian Martin Gilbert. Quote. At night, crouching in a shell hole and filling it, the mud watches like an enormous octopus. The victim arrives, it throws its poisonous slobber out at him, lines him, closes round him, buries him. For men die of mud as they die of bullets. But more horribly, mud is where men sink, and what is worse, where their souls sink. Hell is not fire, that would not be the ultimate in suffering. Hell is mud?
Wow? Well, there is something I think interesting there in that mud in a way militates against people's ability to see their own suffering as noble or to see it in any grandiose terms, that there's something kind of humbling and humiliating about suffering brought on by an environment of mud. And thus like death in mud is an image that brings a lot more despair than the idea of a sort of like violent death or death in fire.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now on thinking about this though, hell is mud, that of course made me think of Dante's Inferno, and I was like, I remember there being some mud in Dante's Ferno somewhere. You have varied all the different circles and bulgs in Inferno. They have different characteristics, different flavors. And indeed there is a circle in Dante's Inferno where there is mud. It is the third Circle. And I had to I had to look it back up again. I was looking in my translation by Durling and Martinez, and this is just a couple of lines from it. Quote, I am in the third circle with the eternal cursed, cold and heavy rain. It's rule and quality never change. Great hailstones, filthy water and snow poured down through the dark air. The earth stinks that received them. It's also the realm of Cerberus. But when quote the great worm opens his mouth to growl at Dante and Virgil, Virgil throws dirt into the monster's three mouths, and the monster gobbles it all down delicious. Yeah. Yeah, is durling, and Martinez explained in the notes in my translation of Inferno, the mud food connection is key here. Quote the rain, hail, and snow and resulting mud are versions of the food and drink to which the gluttons were addicted in the last analysis, merely visions of the elements earth and water.
Sort of portraying the like the the worthlessness of the pleasures of gluttony. That like that you're just sort of concerning yourself with material rubbish rather than having your mind on heavenly things.
Yeah, and also like the sense that it's it's all mud anyway, or even that it's it's all excrement. There's also a lot of dog imagery here. Obviously we have Cerberus with the three dog heads, and then we also have pig imagery thrown in and also mud excrement comparisons as well.
Hey, pig imagery bringing us back to pig mud wallowing, which actually turns out to be a quite clever adaptation of nature.
Yeah.
Anyway, so brief departure into hell, but coming back to the surface world and the hell we make for ourselves there. Coming back to war as what explains that the mere challenge of moving around and mud can lead to exhaustion for the individual soldier, and this exhaustion can prove fatal. It can also hold true for pack animals as well. So you know, if you're in a very muddy situation and you're having to just move through mud constantly or for a lengthy period of time, like that's just making every step so much harder. And there's a good chance you're already doing something exhausting, that is mentally trying. You're already under a great deal of stress, and now each each time you try and lift your boot your foot out of the mud, more effort is required of you. Now, there have been efforts to improve footwear for soldiers at different time periods, such as having wider essentially kind of like plank bottom shoes that the US Army experimented with special mud boots and shoes in World War Two, and then again in Vietnam would include several prototype photos here. Joe I included a screen cap here for you to look at these. They're not much to look at, but you can see they're like basically different designs of wide flat surfaces that would be scrapped or somehow attached the bottom of boots.
Some of them look like huge wooden hoofs.
Yeah, they do. And you know, I'm not certain because it's just the subtitle. He was very brief, but I guess it's possible that some of these could be for horses. I don't know. Maybe the round one that's kind of hoof shaped is for a horse. I don't know, huh, because certainly, you know, horses would be of concern, and well, not all of these military engagements. Of some of them. Tracked vehicles like tanks and half tracks perform better in some muddy situations, but a tract vehicles certainly can get stuck in the mud. As Wood points out, they can also slide out of control through the mud and down muddy hillsides as well. Tracks can spread weight out more evenly than tires, So that's one of the appeals of having tracks or half tracked designs in these vehicles, but yeah, they're still not perfect. And then if you throw trenches into the mix, as it was encountered in the First World War, especially, you know that one of these big tanks can get stuck in the trench, and therefore you need, like other vehicles to lay down temporary bridges so that the tanks can make it across those trenches. Now, coming back to health though, human health and mud, Wood also points out that extremely muddy conditions often lead to deteriorating sanitary conditions. Wood points out that wounded soldiers rarely reach medical facilities clean, so and then this make sense. You're in muddy conditions, you're going to enter into the medical facilities muddy and that and also it means that oftentimes it's not just like any kind of pure mud, That mud is going to be mixed with all manner of unhygienic ingredients from the war zone. Muddy conditions also severely hinder the ability to just evacuate the wounded or to have medical personnel come in to deal with people who are wounded.
Yeah, Now, in addition to all these general concerns, it seems like I have memories of reading about at least interpretations of some decisive battles in history where mud played a role in how the battle turned out, or at least some historians believed that it did. Like I seem to recall the Battle of Agincore as one example.
Yeah, the Battle of Agincore is a big one. This is from fourteen fifteen English victory over the French in the One Hundred Years War. The French had to advance heavily armored knights through very muddy conditions. And this key to this too is that this was transient mud. I've read this was These were not muddy conditions that were expected. This was I believe there is like a huge storm, so they weren't prepared for it. They marched anyway, and they end up sinking in the mud, especially if they've been knocked off their horse, easily immobilized once unhorsed in all that heavy armor. And it's said that, you know, some of the French knights drowned in the mud there.
And this seems to be kind of a pattern that emerges in history, like it is bad to be caught as the side in a battle that is trying to advance through the mud.
Yeah, because I mean all these factors are going to come into play. It's going to slow you down. This stuff's going to get stuck, and then when the battle turns against you, it's going to turn even worse. A couple of other examples that come up frequently. There's the mud March from the Battle of Fredericksburg eighteen sixty two in the American Civil War. This was on the Union side. General Burnside's troops were and it ended up having to go through some really muddy conditions and a number of key artillery pieces and wagons became trapped in the mud, delaying the Union advance. And this was due to like sudden stormy conditions that were not expected that made it difficult to move these key pieces. Now, the Battle of the So from nineteen sixteen, this was this is another example that comes up now. This one, though, is an inconclusive battle of the First World War between German forces and some British and French forces. Entailed massive casualties on both sides in very muddy trench warfare conditions. So not a situation where like the mud gave either side an advantage, but just made it. It seemed to contribute it to it just being like an awful, awful battle for both sides. Now, as I mentioned already, like muddy conditions, muddy trench warfare. It's like just kind of you instantly picture it when you're thinking of World War One in particular, or perhaps like Germany's in the Eastern Front and World War Two, and both of these are theaters of war that have been recreated in various films over the years and TV shows and the like. But also you just tend to see a lot of muddy war conditions and muddy battlefields and especially muddy conditions after the battle in other films and also in video games. And I had never really thought of this before, but I was reading a little bit about this on the blog The Excellent Blog, a collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by historian Brett Devereaux. I've referred to this blog a few times because it's a great read. He does things like, you know, analyze the warfare in The Lord of the Rings, both the books and the Peter Jackson movies and so forth, does a lot of talking about Roman military, So.
It's like a military historian writing about topics nerds would be interested in, yes.
Very much so. So if you're into a lot of these nerdy settings, or you're into ancient warfare and medieval warfare and so forth, I definitely recommend it. But I was reading one of his posts where he points out that that, yeah, you see a lot of films and especially video games that depict the aftermath of pre modern battles as being just muddy and bloody messes. And he points out that this doesn't seem to be the norm, you mean, in reality. In reality, yes, it was not always just a muddy mess after an ancient or medieval battle took place. Right now, that's not to say that you don't have, like the examples we're discussing, where you have definite muddy places that either erupt because there's a great like it's a road where there's a lot, a great deal of travel, and then it becomes muddy. And then you have transient mud in the mix. You have muddy conditions popping up because of extreme storm activity that's taken place. But he points out that like if you just have like a normal grassy environment field somewhere where there's a battle taking place, it's not like a single battle taking place there over the course of a day or even a couple of days is going to just wear down all the vegetation and turn it into mud. In particular, he points to photographic evidence from the American Civil War that shows that, Yeah, you can have a large army, say, moving through an area, and it's not going to kill off the grass and muddy things up over the course of a single day or a couple of days. It's the sort of thing that occurs due to prolonged traffic, prolonged activity, and also environmental conditions thrown in there as well. So you know, all of those things you see with like a trench warfare environment, but it's not just going to pop up over the course of a couple of days because an army moved through a place, or even because two armies clashed at a particular location.
Yeah, so maybe when people are dug in and there's there's frequent foot traffic or heavy machinery moving around, or when an area is subject to prolonged shelling or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, I see the appeal of it in cinematic portrayals and dramatic portrayals of the aftermath of war, because it's like we have been bloodied, people are suffering and wounded, and it makes sense that you sort of heighten that feeling that the earth itself, the world is wounded by all of this, like the wrongness of everything that has occurred here. So like I like that connection, and I think it certainly plays well. But it's it's a fun or an interesting commentary on this to sort of put it in, you know, look at it within the perspective of how battles seem to have actually impacted or not impacted the environment.
So it's not necessarily the battle of a single day that can turn a place muddy, but it's more like the prolonged human presence, which maybe why you can see places become very muddy if they're also like the site of a festival or fair grounds, how muddy that can get.
Yeah, it gets very muddy very quickly. You see this with with places that even you know are more or less permanent. You know that they're having to continually figure out how figuring out how the water flows and how to keep mud from becoming a problem. But yeah, it's it's you do see it at festivals a lot. I guess that what the nineties Woodstock oh a example of really muddy conditions and people getting into the mud, and it also becoming sort of a hell escape in that particular encounter. But there's also mud at the original woodstock, and you know, there's sort of these scenes of sort of innocent, hippy enjoyment of muddy conditions, you know, slattering yourself with mud. So you know, being covered in mud and trapped in mud is not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly, you know, in if you're also engaging in a in a bloody battle, I don't think anyone's going to be a fan. All right, We're looking at the clock here and we realize we have to end Mud Part four, despite the fact that we did want to get in a little bit at least into the discussion of mud and religion. One of the most obvious aspects of this being that so many religions, especially ancient religions and mythologies, involves some idea of humans being made for mud or clay or dirt, but particularly clay and mud, you know, very much leaning into the idea of a creator deity or deities as being potters that are molding us and perhaps baking us, in making us what we are. But then we also had some other stuff to say about that, so well, I don't know, we'll have to come back to this in some form. I'm not saying we're gonna come back and do Mud Part five because we already said we wouldn't do that, but we did leave the door open for various mud creatures to slather in. So yeah, we'll discuss it off Mike and come back. All right, Well, we're gonna go and close it up. But we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on just mud in general, experience with mud, experiences with muddy conditions, mud in military science fiction, mud, and in military history in all of is fair game writ in. We would love to hear from your reminder that are core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind here on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed We have listener mail episodes on Monday, Short Form Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday, and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other. To suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
