Quirks and Quarks - The mystery of the drunken trees, and more…

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

This week: bees trained to keep track of time, eating small amounts of plastic can kill ocean animals, scientists spot winds blowing from our black hole, a "one-two punch" earthquake may be coming for the Pacific coast and what “drunken trees” can tell us about our warming climate.

If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, quantifying the deadly effects of plastics in marine animals. For seabirds, it's about three sugar cubes worth. For sea turtles, it's just over to baseball's worth. And for marine mammals, it's about a soccer ball's worth.

And bees that can tell time. There is a connection between the physics of time and the inner world that drives the behavior of bees during fortune. Plus, drunken trees that have a hard time standing up, Pacific Coast earthquakes may come in pairs, and echoes of the winds from our black hole. All this today on quirks and quarks. Bumblebees are incredible creatures.

Not only are they critical pollinators for a wide range of plants and flowers, but they can count, recognize human faces, and remember the smell of their favorite flowers. Well, now, according to the latest study, it turns out they can also keep track of time. Scientists in England made the surprising discovery after teaching the bees to forage for food with a simple form of Morse code. That's the system of dots and dashes with short and long signals developed to represent letters of the alphabet to transmit telegraph messages.

This finding opens up the possibility that keeping track of time may be an inherent property of neural circuits, even in animals with a brain the size of a poppy seed. Dr. Elizabeth Versace was the senior author of this study. She's a senior lecturer in psychology and head of the Prepared Minds Lab at Queen Mary University in London, England. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hello. Hi, Bob. Thank you for welcoming me. Why were you curious about whether or not bumblebees were capable of keeping track of time? We are interested in the inner world of minds, and we knew that bees have wonderful abilities. So we wonder whether they are also able to keep track of time, which is a very important dimension of our experience.

Although it is very difficult to grasp. This is because we don't have a real stopwatch. It's a bit difficult to understand how, without a sense. sensory modality, specialized for time, we can keep track of time. So why did you decide to test the B sense of timing using Morse code? We use the Morse code because we can manipulate the duration very easily. One of the dimensions of time is duration. And so we were particularly fascinated by the Morse code because using just the long and short

duration, we can combine and have different messages. And so we talk to start with the basics of long and short, which is already embedded in the basics of the Morse code. Oh, I see. So you're using light instead of sound. Well, take me through your test. How did you test the bees? We use the fact that bees are foragers, and they are motivated to go back and forth to forage

for their colony. there is a nest and there are chambers where we can put different rewards like sugar. So we thought the bees the fact that they could find some sugar solution that they like in these chambers. And in the chambers, we added also some flashes of light.

In one experiment, Bid had the long duration associated with sugar and short duration associated with quinine, the bitter solution. Okay. So how well did the bees do in determining the difference between the two other than just the fact that they liked one food and not the other? At every trial, we change the position of the flashing light so that it was not possible for the bees to identify the good food unless if they were able to discriminate between the two flashes of lights and their duration. I see. So you took away the fact that they weren't just following the food by smell. You took the food away altogether.

Exactly. They couldn't follow visual cues, like the color of the sugar solution. They couldn't find the sugar solution with the smell. They could rely only on the flashes of light. And what did you find? We found that when the bees were trained to associate the longer flesh of light with sugar solution, that they were able to discriminate between the long and short flesh of light. light. Well, how significant is it that the bees were able to do this with flashes of light of

different durations, which is something that they probably wouldn't encounter in the wild? So this shows that there is some flexibility in the nervous system of bees, and we can see something about how cognitive abilities evolves. We can also see something interesting because we are investigating what is called the psychophysics, which is the connections between the physical worlds and the inner world of animals. And so even if you're testing the bumblebee, which seems very different from humans, we're pleased to see that there is a connection between the physics of time and the inner world that drives the behavior of bees during foraging. So it's just another clue that they use in their environment to determine where food is.

This shows that bees have evolved not like robots focused on a specific task, but that evolution has equipped them to be flexible, to respond to potentially different cues that they might find in their environment. Well, why would a bumblebee need to be able to keep track of time? Everything in our lives is shaped in time, although we don't have an internal stopwatch to keep track of it. And you can think about what happens in navigation, where the optic flow changes when we move. So in navigation, we have to keep track of how fast event change or in communication. It's very difficult.

It's very different if we say that something like a dog is chasing a thing. cat or if a cat is chasing the dog. So the temporal aspect of these events is very different and has a different meaning. So being able to keep track of durations and order is an important skill for all animals. Well, we certainly know humans have internal clocks. I mean, I have one because every morning, when I set an alarm, I always wake up about two minutes before the alarm goes off. My body wakes me Yes, this is one of the many internal clocks that we have. And we don't have just one. So the mechanisms of this internal clock that you have every morning are more related to genes and proteins.

Instead, when we deal with stimuli events that are in the range of seconds or even shorter than seconds, we cannot use these mechanisms. So instead of using genes and proteins, it's more likely that we use neurons that can keep track of events in the range of seconds. So what does this tell us about bee cognition, their inner world as they experience it? This shows that there is a connection also in bees between the physics aspects like time and their ability to represent the physics of time. because they have to remember different durations

and compare what is in their mind with what they see. And so this really tells us something about the ability to represent not only aspects that are present in the moment, but remember and compare past and present. But it's still amazing when you consider how tiny a bee's brain is. I mean, what's the say about the intrinsic property of this ability to process time in even the simplest nervous systems?

This can really inspire the development of different systems because if bees that have a brain that is much smaller than the 84 billion neurons of humans can process time, we can probably create artificial intelligence systems that are more scalable and more agile

instead of training them for millions of trials like the current mainstream of artificial intelligence is doing. So the idea would be to take inspirations from bees and other smaller brains to create more efficient, more scalable tools that can support us. It's fascinating. We can train our biggest electronic brains based on bees. I think so. Dr. Versace, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much.

Dr. Elizabeth Versace is a senior lecturer in psychology and the head of the Prepared Minds Lab at Queen Mary University in London, England. Every minute, humans dump a garbage truck's worth of plastic into the ocean. That's a shocking statistic. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that it's causing all sorts of problems for marine animals that ingest it. Yet the results of a new study that quantified how much plastic it takes to kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals is still rather mind-boggling. This comes as the United Nations Plastics Treaty negotiations have stalled, leaving the future of any binding international agreements on what to do about plastic uncertain. Here in Canada, we're also in a bit of a plastics limbo as we wait for the Federal Court of Appeals ruling on the government's bank.

of certain plastics, like straws, shopping bags, and takeout containers. The argument is over whether or not the government's classification of plastics as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is justified. Meanwhile, scientists continue to gather evidence about the effects of plastic in our environment. In the new study, researchers looked at more than 10,000 necropsies of marine animals to figure out how much plastic in their bellies could be considered lethal. And their results show that it doesn't take much. Dr. Chelsea Rockman is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto and a scientific advisor to Ocean Conservancy. Dr. Rockman, welcome back to our program.

Oh, thank you for having me back. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay, lay it out for me. How much plastic is deadly to the animals that you looked at? What we were looking at is how much plastic is 90% likely to. kill a sea bird, a sea turtle, or a marine mammal. And this is how much plastic is in the stomach at any one time. And what we found is that for seabirds, it's about three sugar cubes worth. For sea turtles, it's just over to baseball's worth. And for marine mammals, which are a little bit bigger, whales, dolphins, it's about a soccer ball's worth. So the amount of plastic in the gut basically scales with the size of the animal, which makes sense. And for here, we're looking at

just how much might be likely to harm an organism to the point where it would be the cause of death. Now, were you looking at chemical toxicity of the plastic or just its physical presence in their stomach? It's a great question. We were not looking at chemical toxicity. What this data is only looking at is physical acute injury from the plastic. So, for example, if the plastic causes like obstruction or blocking of the GI tract and the animal can't eat its food, if it causes injury, like a puncture, or if it actually causes like the gastrointestinal tract to twist. I don't know if you've ever known like an animal that gets bloat when it eats the wrong things. The GIT kind of twists in stress and that can be the cause of death.

So it's all physical effects from the plastic itself. What kind of different plastics did you find in the animals? Oh my goodness. We found all kinds of different types of plastics in the animals. animals. So basically we looked in more than 10,000 animals or we used data for more than 10,000 animals. For the seabirds, 35% had plastic in their stomach. For the turtles, almost 50%, and for the marine mammals, 12%. And it was anything from fishing debris to plastic bags to bottles, to bottle caps, to lighters, to rubber, to balloons. And we looked at the types. And we also looked at the sizes and the

shape to try to inform just how much plastic in volume to get it that those answers in sugar cubes and sports balls might be likely to harm an animal. Well, you've already mentioned a couple of effects, but how do the different plastics or different forms of plastic affect how they're going to kill the animal? Yeah, so we did find that some of the different types, like it does seem to matter whether they're eating balloons or soft bags, but it kind of varied by the type of animals. So I think what was most striking to us was hard pieces are likely, are more likely to cause harm and that's likely from physical injury.

And then the other one is rubber. So balloons, types of plastic that are made out of rubber also seem to be most deadly. But I feel like what's most important here is just how many pieces, for example, or how much can be likely. We know that there's a lot of plastic pollution in the environment. And when I go out on beaches, I see lots of pieces of plastic on beaches. And for example, here in Toronto, we clean up tens of thousands of pieces of large plastic every summer just from Toronto Harbor alone. And hundreds of thousands sometimes of the smaller pieces just from Toronto Harbor alone.

And if we take our numbers and we put it into pieces, we found that in a seabird, just 23 pieces can be 90% likely to kill an animal, which means if seabirds are eating the plastic we're finding in Toronto, we're potentially saving animal lives by that cleanup that we do every single summer. It's interesting that you're talking about large pieces of plastic because we hear a lot about microplastic where they might not even know they're eating it, but why would they even be eating big pieces of plastic like balloons? You know, it's a great question. You're right, and I mostly study microplastics,

and I've been spending years right now trying to develop monitoring methods for microplastics and risk assessments. And in doing so, we realize, you know, we don't have this quantitative information for the big pieces. And it's necessary. And actually, we've known for much longer than we've known about microplastics that animals are eating, you know, bottles and bags and straws and that they're becoming entangled in it. It's kind of the poster child for how plastic is harming wildlife and that we see those images

all the time. But we didn't have good quantitative information on risk. and that quantitative information is really important for governments when it comes to, for example, you know, labeling plastic as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act or, you know, pushing the urgency of mitigation. But I don't see the appeal to the animal of eating a balloon that's flowing on the water. People think that, so for example, sea turtles eat plastic bags because they look like jellyfish. people think that I think the most compelling evidence for me is there's a scientist named Matt Savoca who's looked at how the biofilms.

So like the little pieces of algae and very microorganisms grow on the plastic. And that creates a smell that's similar to wildlife. And so maybe if they're using smell to find their food to them, a plastic bag that doesn't look too different than a jellyfish also smells like their food and they're more likely to eat it. So why they do it is a bit of a mystery, but if you think about it, a zooplankton eating microplastic is not that different from a whale eating a bag. It's just a scale in size. Well, if it's physical stuff in their stomachs, why don't they just poop it out like regular food?

Yeah, great question. They can't. Some of it's not the right shape and size. In fact, one of my most formative moments in school for me, I was in undergrad and I did a study abroad in Australia and I was asked to write a research proposal on anything about the ocean. And we were at a research station at Stradbrook Island. Nobody lives on the island. It's just a research station.

There was plastic all over the beach. And there were sea turtles at the research station there to recover. And recovery meant to spend time to poop out the plastic or for them to lavage, like make the animal throw up to get rid of the plastic. plastic. They weren't doing it on their own. They weren't doing it on their own fast enough, and they weren't getting nutrition. So they were syringe feeding them the nutrients they needed while they waited for them to poop out the plastic so they could go back into nature. And in seeing this and the plastic on the beach washing in from currents, I thought I would like to write my proposal on this topic. And then I never turned back. Here I am 20 years later, still studying

plastic pollution. So it takes time for them to get rid of that material. Oh, but did they eventually poop out that plastic or throw it up? They did. The people who were there, the veterinarians, did a great job, and I was able to see at least one turtle go back when we were there. If the plastics are filling up their stomachs, does that make them sort of feel full so they don't eat as much? Yeah, so I think one of the most common theories

for how plastic, of all sizes, micro-macro, affects animals, is this food dilution effect. So if an animal is eating plastic and it's filling up their stomach, they feel full, they're less inclined to eat the nutritious food that they need to grow, to reproduce, to live. And so then that food dilution effect can cause harm in animals. And so we know this is a problem for microplastic. And it seems pretty clear that it's also a problem for this type of plastic because of the fact that when we look at the volume of plastic likely to harm these animals,

it scales perfectly with size, which really suggests that that food dilution effect is also likely to occur. Even though in this study, we really could only look at acute injury in the necropsy to be sure that an animal did indeed die from the plastic. Likely, that number might be lower if we're looking at more mechanisms of effect. Boy. How much bigger do you suspect this problem to be if your study only looked at animals washed up on beaches? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So we were really limited to only looking at 10,000 animals. And in fact, most of them were marine mammals. We had sea birds and we had sea turtles, but the great majority more than half were marine mammals. Most were also from the United States, Brazil and Australia. We did have 100 animals out of the 10,000 from Canada. But most of them were from elsewhere. So first of all, your question is, you know, if we're only looking at the dead ones, what can we ask of the alive ones? Well, that's a great point. So our, our, our, our, our Our methods are very conservative because we're only working with the animals that wash up and looking in their gut and looking at necropsy. So what about the animals that eat plastic in the ocean is one question?

And then the other is what about in other parts of the world, right? We're only getting a snapshot. So it really shows us, A, we need more data. Not every country is collecting this type of data when they have animals washing up on the beach. But number two, how can we collect the monitoring and risk assessment data? we need without having to necessarily look at dead animals. And so I think that's our next step with Ocean Conservancy. We're starting a working group, bringing together experts around the world that have been looking at big plastic debris and their risk and trying to develop monitoring

protocols and risk assessment frameworks that can be used alongside those that have now already been produced for microplastics. So this is exciting. And I think, you know, that's what I think will be a really important next step from this study is giving governments what they need to monitor. Now, we've been talking just about the physical effects of plastic, large plastic in the bodies of animals, but what about chemical toxicity? How could that also be playing a role and how lethal plastic is? Right. So that's the thing is, yeah, so we were conservative because we looked at acute injury. We missed the food dilution effect, but we're also missing toxicity. And that's true of risk assessments for both microplastic and macroplastic.

And that toxicity will be due to the additives that are put in plastics to make them, you know, flame retardant or to make them flexible, more durable. And we know that some of those chemicals can cause endocrine disruption, meaning those chemicals can cause changes to the reproductive system. So, for example, in a study we did in our lab, we looked at how microplastics impact fish. and we found, in addition to changes that are likely from food dilution, we found a thinning of the corion, which is basically the eggshell and the ovaries of the fish.

We found that the fish that were exposed to plastic, the eggs that they laid were more friable or more easily to break. And we found that their offspring, their babies, were more likely to be deformed. And so these impacts are much harder to measure in nature, much more difficult to put in a risk assessment. but there's evidence that these chemical effects are likely occurring. And a big question is how do we measure them? And then how do we manage them? Should we make plastics with different chemicals? And that's a big conversation happening right now at the global scale for the international agreement that's being negotiated.

Were you surprised by these numbers? No, I get asked this a lot if I'm surprised by these numbers. And I feel like after 20 years of studying this problem, I wasn't hugely surprised and also in seeing what I see for microplastics and all the images of seabirds with plastics in their gut. For the first five to ten years of this field, people were just trying to understand how common plastic pollution was. And, you know, we were finding it everywhere. And then we started looking in different organisms and we were finding it everywhere. And so I feel like I'm not surprised by what we found in terms of the number that can harm an animal.

I was more surprised by the lack of data and the need for more, which really just says to me, we really need to spread this message and try to get more and more monitoring so we can better understand. But also, you know, the fact that the amounts are kind of small says we should urgently be working on mitigation strategies today. And luckily Canada is, and hopefully we continue to do so. Well, why is it important to have hard data like these? It's what the government wants to see. I think that, you know, there are some people who would like to see thresholds for risks set at zero because they think no plastic should be in the environment.

And that's well and good, but that's not the way that, you know, governments and frameworks operate. They want to know how much is too much. And for example, that the lawsuit in Canada that was mentioned earlier on when the federal government labeled plastic is toxic, under our Environmental Protection Act, SEPA, they used that in order to ban certain single-use plastic items, to change our waste management infrastructure. And the industry groups came together and sued the federal government

because they felt they didn't have enough quantitative information to really do a proper risk assessment. And right now, that decision is sitting in the courts is what will happen with those policies. And so since that original decision, risk assessments quantitative, have been done for microplastic, and now they've been done for macroplastic. And that data should be able to be used to inform decisions moving forward to hopefully really

prevent more plastic pollution from entering our Great Lakes and our oceans surrounding our country. Dr. Rockman, thank you so much for your time. No, thank you so much. Dr. Chelsea Rockman is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder.

I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide. And the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get you. your podcasts. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio One and streaming live on the CBC News app.

Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, Pacific Faults showing signs that earthquakes may strike in a one-two punch. In one case, we even have evidence that the lower bed was deposited and it wasn't quite finished depositing when the second bed landed on top of it. Every galaxy we've ever studied has a supermassive black hole in its center that produces winds of burping and churning gases and matter that spews out from around its event horizon. Whenever astronomers study these black holes, they're actually studying this spewing stuff, since they can't see into the black holes themselves. So the winds are important for studying how black holes work in galaxies.

At the center of our Milky Way galaxy is our own supermassive black hole called Sagittarius. A-star. And while our black hole should also have these hot gassy winds blowing out of the galaxy plane, astronomers spent half a century looking for them and came up empty. Well, now we finally have the first ever hints of our black hole's missing winds. It was captured by Dr. Lena Murchikova in a study that has yet to be peer-reviewed. She's an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois. Hello and welcome to our program. It's a great pleasure to be here, Bob. First of all, tell me about the winds in other black holes in other galaxies.

What are they like? So black holes tend to consume material because black hole attract gas. It circles around them. It's getting heated. And during the fall into the black hole, some part of this gas is getting ejected. We often see them as this line features coming out of the black hole. black hole, we call them jets if they are very long and very thin. But in general, winds can be very wide, and in those cases we tend to call them winds or outflows. What do these powerful

winds and jets do to the galaxy that they're in? This is a great question, because those winds can absolutely change the galaxy. Black holes can be so powerful that can blow away all of the gas inside the galaxy, and the galaxy can stop forming stars. I'm trying to picture what these jets and winds would look like if you could get close. Do they come from really close to the black hole? It's event horizon, like along the edge of it? We believe they come from very close to the event horizon, because nothing can come from inside the event horizon.

It's mostly the places where the material which is swirling into the black hole is particularly hot. So why has it been such a challenge to see winds from our own black hole in our galaxy? Our black hole is not very big. On a cosmic scales, we have a sort of pathetic excuse for a black hole. It's very small. Really? So it's small.

It's weak. And the amount of gas which falls into it is very small. The only reason we see this is because we're going. closed it. From the other point of view, it is the closest black hole to us, right? And in a sense, this black hole for us should be what sun was for us when we developed the theory of star evolution, because we looked at this big object right next to us and learned as much as we can from it, and then apply it to the other stars in the universe. And this is what we should do with our own galactic black hole to learn as much from it as possible and then apply to other galaxies in the universe.

Now, in addition to being a small black hole, what about the problem that it's in our own galaxy? We have to see through our galaxy to get to it. Is that a problem? Yes, this is a big problem because the region, as astronomers call it, is very crowded. It means there is so many stars and so many objects in there. It's also shielded by a lot of for gas, meaning it absorbs a lot of light. And so it's pretty hard to see into the galactic center. So what did you use to try to see into the center of our galaxy and try to identify these winds coming from the black hole?

We used Alma, which is Atacamo large sub-millimeter array. We combine about five years' worth of the data. And we also employed very much. careful data processing, which we believe have never been used to improve qualities of imaging. Now, Alma, that's a huge radio aeroy of radio telescopes on top of a mountain in the Atacama Desert. I've actually been up there. It's quite impressive.

Well, that's absolutely beautiful, yes. So what did Alma see when you looked at the black hole? So what we were planning to see? We were planning to image this region around the black hole, which is about one parsec around it. And we were thinking that we need to do it with very, very high precision, so then we can look at this region and find some small signatures of the outflows, particularly we were planning to look for something relatively big coming out of the black hole, because we would assume that if it was small jet, we'd probably already seen it.

So we were planning to look for some tiny signatures and do some very involved analysis. But instead, when we made an image, we were completely shocked to see big conical clearing coming right out of the black hole. It was incredible. A conical clearing? What do you mean? It's like imagine a black hole blows the material, but it blows in some direction. So it kind of clears a cone starting where the black hole starts and it's going outside.

Oh, I see. So did you actually see the wind or did you just see a hole where that material should be? We've seen just a hole where the material should be with very sharp edges. So the material's already been blown out? So it's either material being blown out

or it's material being heated and stopped being visible in this particular line of cold molecular gas. How big is this cone? So it's a lens of at least one parsec. One parsec, that's about three light years long. That's quite big. It's very big, yes. So what could these winds tell us about how our old galaxy evolved?

So when we study black holes, we study how material falls into them and how black holes blow winds. This discovery shows us that the black hole eat different types of gas. We clearly see it does. We also see the wind coming out of the black hole

and we can calculate the power of this winds. So it gives us clues to how we should model the black holes like our own galactic center. Well, you mentioned that in other galaxies, these winds can blow away gas and inhibit the star formation. Obviously, our galaxy is forming stars because, you know, our sun's here, we're here. So maybe it's good that it's not on the plane that it missed. I think we just like that our galaxy has a small black hole.

So what happens in the life of the black hole is that the black hole sit at the center of the galaxy and say nothing happens. Then material accumulate and start falling over the black hole and black hole lights up and firework starts. It starts blowing crazy winds. Those are not crazy winds. Those are weak winds. It starts blowing really crazy wind. Can't do some damage on the galaxy. But at the same time, it kills its own material supply.

It blows away everything, including the gas which feeds it. And then a quiet period of starts because black hole just killed its own supply. and that it sits there and wait for some gas to come back. We have the signatures of past activities in our galaxy, so we know the galactic center getting active periodically. Well, I guess we should all be thankful that our galaxy has a small black hole in its center. That's absolutely true. Dr. Murchikova, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure. Dr. Lena Murchikovah is the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University. As natural disasters go, earthquakes can be among the most devastating. Oh, my God. But they don't just happen anywhere. There are particular regions that are more susceptible to earthquakes than others. One famous zone is the San Andreas fault in California.

But there's another danger zone further north called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The Cascadia Zone runs from Vancouver Island down to northern California. scientists have long worried that a major event in the Cascadia zone could unleash one of the biggest disasters the continent has ever seen. But new research examining seafloor sediments off the coast of California where these two zones meet has revealed an ominous surprise. It turns out that the seismic activity in the two regions may be synchronized. And that means the big one, as people on the West Coast call it could turn out to be the big two. Dr. Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist and Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University led the team that published this latest study.

Dr. Goldfinger, welcome to our program. Oh, thanks, Bob. Thanks very much for having me. First of all, describe these two seismic zones to us. What do they like? Well, the subduction zone, the Cascadia subduction zone is typical of many subduction zones around the world, similar to Sumatra and Japan that had magnitude night earthquakes in 2004 and 2011. And there are major plate boundary systems where one oceanic plate is diving underneath, usually a continental plate, and usually at a shallow angle, so they have a lot of frictional contact, and they tend to make the very largest of earthquakes. The San Andreas fault is also a plate boundary system between North America and the Pacific

plate, but it's a vertical, what we call a strike slip fault. where the blocks are moving side by side. And they can also make very large earthquakes, but not as big as subduction zones. They typically top out at magnitude 8 or so, maybe a little bit more. Okay, so the subduction zone is a collision where the continent goes over top of the ocean floor, like a big SUV hitting a small car,

goes over the top. And San Andreas is more like a side collision where they're side by side sliding across each other. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly right. Well, tell me about your recent study. find out the link between the two.

This is something we've been curious about for a long time, and we, around the early 2000s, we started to notice that the radiocarbon ages for given events on each side looked very similar, but radiocarbon has large uncertainties, and so there was no smoking gun there to say that there was any real connection. It was just an intriguing hypothesis. So we started with this coincidence of ages, but there was another problem with these beds, these event beds are called turbidites. They're basically submarine landslide deposits. And the ones in Cascadia looked fairly normal. They're very simple to understand. Imagine, you know, swirling some sand around in a bucket and it all goes to the bottom. And that's about

all there is to a turbidite. And on the Cascadia side, they look much like that with the sand at the bottom. On the San Andreas side, though, they seem to be sort of double-decker turbidites with all the sand at the top. And that caused us to scratch our heads and just wonder and wonder for actually an embarrassingly large number of years how that could possibly be. But it turned out that it wasn't a single bed with the sand at the top. It was two bits. And seemingly little time had passed between them. And that's when the sort of light bulbs began to go on, that we were really seeing two earthquakes stacked on top of each other. And this location, these sediments on the ocean floor that you were looking at, are in the zone where the two fault zones meet?

Yeah, that's right. And that was also a major clue. So what does that tell you then about how the earthquakes in these two regions were synchronized? The timing is an important issue. And so with radiocarbon, as I mentioned, we couldn't nail down timing to better than 100, 150 years. But the stratigraphy, the actual deposition of the sediment,

gives you a relative idea of the timing. And in one case, we even, even have evidence that the lower bed was deposited and it wasn't quite finished depositing when the second bed landed on top of it. And so that gives us a very tight relative timing of hours to maybe a day or two at the most. And that event occurred about 1700 and the tree ring evidence that came out actually while our paper was in review had 1698 to 1700 as the age of the penultimate San Andreas earthquake. and that matches the famous 1700 Cascadia earthquake,

which is well known to have occurred on January 26, 1700. Wow. So they both happen at the same time. Do you know which one happened first? Yes. In all the cases that we have good evidence for, it looks like Cascadia happened first. It's the big dog in the system with the magnitude 9ish earthquakes,

and the San Andreas earthquakes are typically smaller. or the 1906 earthquake that damaged San Francisco was a magnitude 7.9. So it looks like the big dog is driving the system and triggering the San Andreas. So what causes these two to synchronize like that? Well, the hypothesis is that if you have two faults that fundamentally have similar repeat times, that when you have an earthquake, you release a lot of stress locally where the plates were locked up, but then you transfer that stress to areas nearby. And so you transfer stress to another fault system or another part of the same fault, maybe.

And this has been observed many places around the world. And so you load that other fault up and you bring it closer to failure than it might have been otherwise. And so if you do this enough times, eventually they can synchronize or partially synchronize so that they're going off together most of the time. And tuning forks and metronomes are known to do this just by influencing each other with their vibrations. Oh, so are you saying the two zones have the same natural frequency where one resonates with the other? Yeah, that's right. It appears that they're close enough in frequency that one essentially tunes the other. And it's not perfect, though. They're not quite the same. And so the 1906 earthquake

went off by itself with no Cascadia matchup. And there are others in the record that have done the same. So it's partially synchronized. So they go off in close proximity. most of the time, at least for the last 2,500 years or so. So what might this mean for how these fault zones might rupture in the future? Well, it looks like, at least if they keep following the track they've been on for the past 2,500 years, it looks to me as if once Cascadia goes that there's a very high probability that the San Andreas would go relatively close in time. You could sort of consider Cascadia to be a potentially a precursor.

event for a San Andreas earthquake. And the difficulty is, of course, we don't know whether it's, it doesn't predict anything. It just suggests that San Andreas might go in, you know, hours, days, weeks, months, decades, something like that. But it's better than nothing and could be a useful, a useful warning for Northern California. But on the other hand, if they both go off at the same time, that's a lot of geography we're talking about here, stretching from Vancouver Island down into California with the major cities along the way. Yeah, that's right. That's the sobering thing about all of this, is that Cascadia, for years, as people have talked about it, has become known as the really big one. And now we might have to consider that that could continue down as far south

of San Francisco. It's a little hard to imagine what that would be like. So what are the implications of this research in terms of emergency planning? Well, I think there's two things. The big obvious one is that we might have to plan for and expect to have two events at close to the same time. Maybe not on top of each other, but close enough that it would matter. And then the second thing is that if the San Andreas is triggered from its north end, its rupture then would go from north to south, which was the opposite of the 1906 earthquake. And what that means is ground motions would be higher in San Francisco than they were in 1906. And people who work in the Bay Area are concerned about this possibility

because 1906 was actually the best case scenario where the earthquake started near San Francisco and propagated the other direction. So if most of the earthquakes do the opposite, then ground motions for the next Bay Area earthquake would be higher than 1906. Dr. Goldfinger, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Bob.

Thanks for having me on. Dr. Chris Goldfinger is a marine geology, and Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University. There's something strange going on with trees in our northern landscapes. In some permafrost regions, trees are leaning precariously in one direction or another. They're called drunken trees because, like a person after too many drinks, they're tipsy. But this weird-looking phenomenon has nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with our warming climate. It's a sign that something unusual is going on underfoot that's a sign that's a weird-looking phenomenon.

affecting their stability. And new research suggests this may not be good news for our planet's carbon storage capacity. Dr. Raquel El Faro Sanchez began researching these drunken trees as a post-doctoral fellow at Wilford Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Now she's a research scientist at the Northern Forestry Center in Edmonton, Alberta. Hello and welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Hello, thank you so much for the invitation. It's an honor. First of all, tell me what these drunken trees look like on the landscape? Well, as you very well described, they are just trees that lean in very different directions.

So the peculiarities when you see many of them together, all that different direction, it really makes you think that the trees are drunk, which is probably where the terms come from. What kind of trees are they? Well, usually the most common species that you find in a drunken forest is black spruce. This is because this species is adapted to growth in harsh conditions, like the ones that happen in the drunken forest, as these trees are mostly growing over permafrost. Black spruce have the capacity to live over very shallow soils, like the ones that you find in permafrone's landscapes, and it's also adapted to grow in very cold conditions and nutrient-poor soils. Another landscape, for instance, where you find a lot of drunken forests is the boreal forest and the pitlands.

There is where we find mostly black spruce. You're talking about not just drunken trees, but a whole drunken forest. Yeah. How extreme can the leaning trees get? Well, they can get as bad as falling over. Really? Yeah. So with our research where we are trying to identify first is how many of these leaning events happen per tree.

And then what is the intensity of the leaning? It will tell you how many degrees they are tipping. And yeah, you know, like the trees, they cannot tip too much because at the end they will end up falling. Wow, they're falling down drunk. Yeah, totally. How common is this phenomenon in the north? It's very common because, as I said, we find them in boreal pitlands, and that covers much of the boreal forests in Canada. We also find them in Alaska, in the same type of boreal forests, and in northern Eurasia.

You find them mostly in flat terrain because they are found in wetland areas. So, yeah, they are pretty common, and they are getting more extension because of, climate warming. Well, tell me about that. How is the tilting of the trees happening? Well, the trees are leaning because of the ground instability that the seasonal and long-term changes in ice-rich permafrost is causing on the landscape. So at the end, these tilted trees, they are forced to use part of the nutrients that they get from photosynthesis to regain their vertical position, no? So stay upright. This affects negatively the overall growth and carbon storage. So basically the trees grow less because they use the nutrients to stay upright.

Wow. So as the permafrost melts, the soil gets soft and they just lean over to one side with the soil. Yeah, yeah. That's mostly like that. The thing is that it happens seasonally. So every year, the trees that are growing over permafrost, the top layer is called the active layer, and that thaws in spring or summer, and they freezes again in fall. You say that the trees try to straighten themselves up. How do they do that? Well, yeah, these are really good questions. So in our study, we try to understand this phenomenon. So with a very large collections of wood samples that we have from the Norwest territories, from each tree we have a disc that we cut kind of at the base. And if you see this disk, you can see that the ruins, that form the annual growth of the trees,

they are not circular or concentric. They are oval. They have like dark areas. The name is reaction boot. So in these dark areas, the tree is trying to, as the name says, to react, trying to counter out the linen event. And the trees grow less, and it takes a lot of resources to the tree to regain this vertical position. Oh, I see. So you were looking at the tree rings, and you found they were growing faster on one side than the other? Yeah, it was very eccentric. These linen events, they can last from a couple of years, going in one direction.

and then the eccentric rins move in a couple of years to 180 degrees in the opposite direction, then 90 degrees in another direction. And in other types of samples from different landscapes, we see that these leaning events they can last decades, even 30 years growing in the same direction kind of tipping. But our results show that at least more than 80% of the samples show one leaning event. Our results also show that there is an increase in this number of leaning events associated to climate change. Just to go back to the drunken analogy here, the trees are trying to straighten up just like a drunk tries to keep from falling over

by staggering in the other direction. Yeah, they are doing their best. What kind of impact might this unusual growth in the trees have on their ability to store carbon? So we are seeing widespread reductions in growth. This is a very significant. result because we are using almost 1,000 samples across all the latitudinal gradient where we have permafrost in the northwest territories and we see without no doubt that the trees that have higher number of linen events, they grow less. As the trees grow less, what will happen is that we will have less carbon storage in this boreal forest. But we can go even further as sometimes or eventually the trees will tip, they will fall over.

We will have also an increase in mortality. So again, the carbon storage will be reduced. Well, if we have a lot of extra dead trees in the north, will that increase the fire risk? Oh, yeah, for sure. Like increasing the fuel load in the landscape, that increase the fire risk, that's for sure. But also at the same time when the permafrost thaws,

it can create like waterlogging conditions. so a lot of superficial water that can, at the same time, can reduce fire risk. So it's really microclimate, I would say. There is microconditions that will define if there is fire risk or not. But yeah, that's a possibility, yeah. Well, the next time I'm walking through a forest, if I see a dr. dr. Trey leaning over, I'll give it a little push and try to help it stand up again. Yeah, please do that.

Dr. Sanchez, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Dr. Raquel Elfaro Sanchez is a research scientist at the Northern Forestry Center in Edmonton, Alberta. Well, we're approaching that time of year again when we want to satisfy your science curiosities on our annual holiday listener question show. We got a fun question from Tom Riddle in Orangeville, Ontario about a certain pollinator's table manners. We appreciate that, Tom, but we need more. So, send us your burning science questions, and we'll see if we can get an answer for you.

And that's it for Quirks and Quartz this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our web page at cbc.ca. slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast,

get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quirx and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bukowitz, Livia Diring, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Jim Levens, and our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening.

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