Stuff You Should Know - How Landslides Work

Episode Date: March 27, 2014

Landslides are a form of mass movement of the Earth, and with the amount of death and destruction they wreak on the people and towns they cover, their toll can be massive. Learn all about landslides in this episode with Josh and Chuck. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me as always. Hello sir. Hello, how are you? I'm good. How's Jerry in the house? Oh yeah.

This one probably won't be our funniest podcast and I have to say that I suggested landslides without knowing about that landslide. No. I swear. No. I promise you, I sent this to you on Monday and then saw like a few hours later and I was like oh boy. I didn't, you know, I was on vacation so I didn't hear about it, but yeah, so it's super

relevant. Well yeah it is, apparently unintentionally relevant, like our black boxes episode. Yeah, it's been happening weirdly. Yeah, if you have been not paying attention to the news at all lately then you may not know, but there was a massive landslide in Washington that as of last count, I think the death toll is at like 24 which is an astoundingly high number for a landslide, at least in the United States because something like 25 to 35 people die in the U.S. a year from landslides. This one was one single enormous landslide and if you haven't seen the pictures to get

an idea of just how large it was, you should go online immediately and check it out because it was nuts what happened there. Yeah, it's about an hour north of Seattle and I know we have a lot of fans in Seattle so we're obviously thinking about everyone there, but it is, you know, there's still 170 plus people missing and it looks like it will be easily the deadliest landslide in U.S. history by the time this is all said and done. It seems like it. But I'm clearly hoping there's more survivors, but it's just a scary man to think about being

trapped like that and possibly still alive. It's just like the whole thing is upsetting. Yeah, because I mean if you were inside a structure that's now covered with mud, you might, you know, there's a chance that you are, you're not buried, the structure around you is buried. So yeah, it's pretty awful stuff. To me what's even more awful, and I read an article where an unnamed resident was saying like, yeah, we're not mad at the authorities, but yeah, apparently they didn't heed a lot

of warnings. Oh, really? This area, the area that was covered in landslide was known since the 60s in the area as Slidehill. The area itself is called the Steelhead landslide. So like imagine if the street you live on is not in Eastlake, but in Steelhead landslide. Landslide is in the name of the area that you live. So it wasn't like the biggest surprise? No, and there was a 1999 report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that predicted the

potential for a large catastrophic failure right there where it happened, and that's exactly what happened. So when the landslide happened, it covered about a square mile and is like 15 feet deep right now. Well, you can't tell people where to live though, you know? No, you definitely can't. I'm not saying they shouldn't have warned, but like people still live in flood zones and people still build their houses on the sides of a hill in Malibu.

Yeah, and I guess if you're warned and like you're willing to take that risk and you want to, then yeah, I don't want to disagree with that, but I don't know if everybody was as aware of the potential. But apparently there was a landslide in the area as recent as 2006. Really? Yeah, so apparently this was the big one and it was coming a long time and that happened. And set off by water in this case, right? Yeah, there was word that possibly it was an earthquake, but they think no, there was

a lot of rain that came before then. And so, well, let's get down to explaining what happened exactly. The landslide there is actually technically a mudslide and mudslides, landslides, a bunch of other ones, they all fall under something called mass movements. Yeah, and that is the umbrella term and that basically means gravity is at work moving something down a slope, some kind of sediment. It can be a landslide, which is obviously devastating, or it can be super slow over centuries, and we'll get into all that in a minute.

And well, we'll get into all the triggers too, but I guess we should talk about their categorized depending on how fast it's moving, what kind of materials are being moved. In every case though, you're talking about soil moving off of bedrock, the friction being overcome by gravity. That's exactly where the landslide is. It's like super fast erosion. Yeah, on any slope, you have soil over rock and it's being held in place by friction. It's kind of scary to think about.

It really is. You know it's true, but then when you read it, it's like, wow. Yeah, I mean, if you've ever dug a hole in the ground, it's not easy. It's not like silt or something like that. It's like ground, it's hard ground, but that stuff is, it's not fused to the bedrock beneath. There's a kind of friction that's holding it in place and that can fail and that's what a landslide is. Exactly.

Like you said, gravity overcomes friction and it can on some very large scales, it can on small scales. And then like you said, depending on the type of movement, how it moves, what's moved, you have different categories of mass movements. Landslides are just one of them or a slide is one category. The slides, creeps, slumps, and flows. Yeah, creeps are obviously super slow. It can be months, years, it can be centuries of creep.

And that is when the sediment, when the friction is not working, but it's not completely destroyed. So there's still some friction. Yeah. It's just moving super slow. And that's usually as a result of a lot of freezing and thawing going on to change the composition of the soil. Yeah, when the freeze comes through, the sediment in the soil is pushed upward as it freezes and when it thaws, it falls back downward.

So what you have, if you look at it on a geological time scale, is basically an undulation up and down of the soil that is moving downward on a slope. Like millimeters at a time. And then the telltale signs though, you can see that a creep is happening because telephone poles will be kind of askew trees or something like that. That means that you're standing on or looking at a slumping slope. Yeah. And you won't see it happening.

No, but I did see a pretty awesome GIF. I can't remember where. Was it Time Lapse? Yeah. It's a Time Lapse GIF and it wasn't over the course of a year, it was over the course of I think several days in San Bernardino or whatever, but it's like, whoa, there it goes. It makes you feel unstable. Yeah.

Like the earth beneath your feet. Yeah. Well, I mean, the earth is a constantly evolving mass, you know, soil is being moved from here to there and there's all sorts of different agents of change, and it moves in different ways. It can creep. Yeah. I think I said a slumping slope.

That's not true. That was a creeping slope. Yes. A slump is when you have a big chunk that breaks off as a whole chunk and just moves. That's a slump. Yeah. And that can be, the actual thing can be called a slump too. It can have a couple of meanings there for that word.

Like the big piece can be called a slump. Right. Or the movement is the slump. If they're not sliding like they used to. Right. They're in a slump. Yeah. True.

And basically the base can't support this big chunk on top of it, and again, it's usually due to moisture and water is the general cause for slumps as well. Yeah. Water is like the primary, all-time leading, winningest cause of mass movements because either like in a slump of good analogy or a good example is if you're at the beach and you just see like a whole hunk of wet sand shear off of another hunk of wet sand, you just witness the slump. And actually water can create stability for sandy, loamy, or clay soil.

Yeah. Like you build a sandcastle, you want the sand wet. Exactly. Up to a point. Right. When you add too much water, it becomes saturated and then you have a slump or you have a slider, a flow. Yeah.

And with other types of mass movement, that water can get underneath and interrupt the friction between the soil and the bedrock. Right. And that's when you have some sort of movement as well. So that's creep and that's slump. And then finally we have flow, which is just basically a soupy mix of water and rock and soil and other materials. And it's just...

Those are usually the deadliest. Yeah. Because it spreads further. That's like a mud flow or an avalanche. And they get everywhere, they'll enter into everything. It's not just like a bunch of dirt. It's like a river, a fast-moving river of mud and debris. And I misspoke earlier.

That's in Oso, Washington. That's what that was. It was a mud flow. That started it. That came down and covered everything of mud, which actually hampered rescue operations because apparently it's just like quicksand right now. Oh, yeah. It'll suck you right in.

Man. Yeah. So in the case of... Well, in the case of anything other than a creep or a slump, if you're talking about a quick landslide, it happens just like in a snap, it's going and picking up speed. But it is the result of years and years of slow, steady erosion, basically. It's not something that just happens or it can be triggered. We'll talk about earthquakes and stuff like that.

But in general, it's the weathering down of objects. And I guess the difference we should describe between weathering and erosion is erosion is transporting the weather material and weathering is the actual wearing down of that material. Right. So they're different. Yeah. So if you have a rock that's a nice big solid piece millions of years later, it's been weathered into a bunch of soil and then as it's lost its composition, it can move more

easily and when it moves, it's being eroded. So erosion is the process of movement. The weathering is everything that leads up to that ability for it to be moved. Yeah. And weathering is important because your weathered landscape is going to be much more likely to landslide. That's why you'll see them in more extreme environments where you get like tons of rain or like a lot of snow, maybe heat, cold, water, and oxygen.

Those are all things that impact weathering or the cause of weathering. And there's two types of weathering. There's mechanical weathering and there's chemical weathering and mechanical weathering is basically the material is broken down but it retains its same chemical composition. Like the rock. Right. Yeah. But it was broken down into smaller pieces of itself, say by wind or something like that.

Yeah. Or water lapping against it. Now if you had those pieces of rock that were in water that ultimately over the course of years dissolved it, it would be in solution and it would no longer chemically resemble itself. That's chemical weathering. Right. So like if you pour acid on your hand, it's going to reconstitute into something else

on the other end, the hole that burns through it. The stuff that ends up on the table is not really the same thing as your hand. You just chemically weathered your hand. Wow. That's a pretty extreme example. And then you talked about the constant state of movement on the earth. That's going on at all times and that's basically, if you're going to have erosion, you're going to have a deposit somewhere and it's just a constant cycle on the earth of weathering

carried away by erosion and being put somewhere else in cases of landslides, the bottoms of hills. Yeah. When we toured Guatemala, Jerry and I, or I should say me, we were at the site of a landslide that had happened. I will never forget. Yeah. And they, you know, you could still see in the sort of jungle-like forest the swath that

had been cut through years earlier. Because all the stuff on either side was old growth. And then the stuff through the landslide flow was, yeah, it was much younger, shorter, like a different kind of green as well. And they pointed out that we were like 12 feet higher than basically standing on bodies. Yeah. The old village, they were unable to recover about 250 people. Yeah.

It was really upsetting. Yeah. And remember, their children were running around, all these orphaned children. Like they were just kind of, they belong to the remaining village now. It was really something else. Well, yeah. And just when they said, like, you're like 12 feet higher than just the whole land raised up because of this landslide.

It was one of those lands that, like, you just kind of chewed on for a little while before you finally understood, like, the full gravity of it. Even though, like, while I was standing there, I was like, oh, this is nuts. Yeah. And the more I thought about it, the nuttier it got. So the sediment, we talked about the deposition at the bottom of the hill, the sediment is known as talus. Right.

Let's see the official word for it. When it's from a landslide. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's being carried down. And with erosion, there are five different things that can act on it, which are water, which we've covered in wind, and then gravity, of course, which we mentioned, and then waves and glaciers, too.

And technically, gravity is a part of all of them. Right. Yeah, that's true. A part of all mass movement. But those five agents of erosion, there are different things that can trigger a landslide or a mass movement. And really, if you think about it, all a mass movement is like a landslide. Yeah.

It's just erosion at high speed. Sudden and high speed erosion is basically what that is, rather than taking millions of years to move from here to there through wind or waves or whatever. It's just, it happens in a moment and it happens on mass. All right. So you mentioned the triggers. We will cover those right after this message break. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. So tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope.

But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts.

I think about this every day, truly every day of my life. I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we mentioned triggers. The landslide always has to have a trigger that has to be something to actually set it off.

Even though it may be years and years into making, something finally pushes that button to make it happen. It forces gravity to overcome friction. That's right. One of the things that we mentioned already in the case of Washington was water. And that is probably the most common. Heavy rainfall. I know in California and Los Angeles when you see houses slipping off the hill in Malibu,

it's because they don't get a lot of rain. And when they do, things like that happen. Yeah. And it's either water saturating the ground and just making it so heavy that it flows downward or it gets down in between the soil and the bedrock and just causes the whole thing to, it undermines everything. Either way, water equals a lot of movement. Earthquakes.

That can definitely trigger a landslide. We've covered earthquakes. You should go listen to that show if you have it. It's a good one. But you've got the vibrating of the Earth's crust and that is going to disrupt that friction pretty easily. Yeah. Another big one is wildfires, which you would think, well, how would a wildfire trigger

that? I'll tell you how. Vegetation, the roots of vegetation, can lock soil into basically a totally solid cemented state. And as long as you have thick vegetation on a slope, it's going to be fairly stable. When a fire comes through, it burns out all that vegetation and often burns the roots as well, leaving not only less stable soil, but actual pockets in that soil too. So now it's kind of pebbled, which makes it a lot more vulnerable to landslides after

a wildfire. Yeah. I'm just guessing here, but I would guess a landslide could happen even long after a wildfire. Yeah. If those roots die away, it would just become even less stable. And then volcanoes, volcanic action is a big cause. There are a couple of different kinds of flows that can contribute to a landslide from a volcano.

One is called a pyroclastic flow. And that is after your dome has collapsed or during an eruption, and these are super high speed. They've clocked them at 450 miles an hour, 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. A lot of flowing at you at 450 miles an hour. I can't even imagine that, like what that would even look like. 724 kilometers per hour?

That's easier. Well, there you go. Then you just imagine 450 miles an hour. Yeah, but I mean, I don't even know what that looks like. Yeah. You know, or the one in... It looks like instant death. Yeah.

Exactly. And then they are something called a lahar, which is an Indonesian word. And this isn't, doesn't have to be during an eruption, but it can be. And it is set off by water as well. It's almost always near something called a stratovolcano, which are like super steep cones. And a lot of times there's either a crater lake or it's snow capped up top. And so that's the water agent.

A lot of times it's the snow and it sort of looks like wet concrete flowing downhill. Yeah. And it may or may not be set off during an actual volcanic eruption. It could happen anytime. Yeah. And it's much slower, you know, 20 to 40 miles an hour. But still, if you're in a golf cart, you're dead. Yeah.

That's a good point. And while it's not fast, it has a lot more rock. So it is one of the deadliest lahar is, I think, because of just the sheer, like it can carry like a big boulder in the middle of that wet concrete. Plus a volcano also. It's just, it's not very stable because the composition of it is usually pretty loose, rocky soil. Yeah.

And if you had water, it immediately turns to slurry, and when they erupt, they tend to shake the ground a little bit, which is what happened in the largest recorded landslide in 1980, Mount St. Helens. Yeah. Everybody knows the eruption, but there was actually an attendant landslide that is on YouTube. You can check out, as a matter of fact, we're putting a post up of just amazing landslide footage that you can check out on our website, just go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check

out that post. There's just some crazy stuff that people just happen to be filming, and all of a sudden, the earth changes right before your eyes. And one of them is this Mount St. Helens eruption, where just the whole mountain is basically just melting in front of you. I remember that one. Did you? Oh, yeah.

I was only four. Yeah. I was nine, so it was on my radar slightly. That one traveled at speeds of 150 miles an hour, and again, Washington State, not getting a break, destroyed 27 bridges, about 200 homes, miles and miles of road, and covered 23 square miles with debris. Yeah. That was Mount St. Helens.

Well, you know what? Just a landslide. Another frequent hazard associated with landslides is, if you think about it, when all of this earth is coming down, it's coming downward into a lower space, which is very frequently a valley, which is very frequently a river valley, which means that the river is damned now, so it's flooding behind it. Yeah. Right?

So you have a flood hazard immediately. And then if that river or if that dam breaks, then you have another flood hazard downriver all of a sudden too, which is something that's going on in Washington right now. Yeah. That happened in, I think it's the most expensive landslide in U.S. history in Thistle, Utah in 1984. The same thing happened there. It dammed up the Spanish Fork River and caused much more problems just because of the flooding.

Yeah. And that was a $200 million fix in 1984 dollars. And that was even when Reagan was in office, so it's not too much different from the 2013-14 dollars. This is Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay.

I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. Oh my husband. Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back.

The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all and now he's sharing the things he can't

unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say.

Attention to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The submarine landslide we should probably talk about. That is in the ocean and that is, you can have an earthquake under the ocean triggering a landslide underwater which will trigger a tsunami. Yeah, I can. A one, two, three punch basically of natural disasters happening. Yeah.

All in concert. Actually, I don't know if this really technically counts, but seeing that little bit triggered a memory of the Lake Penure disaster in Louisiana in 1980, Texaco was drilling in Lake Penure. Apparently they didn't consult the map closely enough and they were using a 14-inch diameter drill and they drilled into the lake bottom which was on top of a salt mine and they drilled into an operational salt mine and the lake got sucked into the hole in a giant whirlpool that took about like 30 to 50 of the surrounding acreage around the lake into the lake with it.

Holy cow. 11 barges were sucked in. The flow of water reversed so it went from fresh water to salt water. It sucked the gulf into it for a second. And then a couple days later, after there were like 400 foot geysers as like these shafts were filling with water and the air was being displaced and a couple days later after the water pressure stabilized, like nine of the barges popped back up and like went back to floating after being sucked down into this diamond mine.

That's crazy. And apparently there's footage of it, it's awesome. It's like just the most amazing thing, I guess more amazing than that is no one died. There was one guy on the lake who was operating the drill, he got all and then there was a guy fishing on the lake and he zoomed his boat to shore and made it like inland far enough that he made it but I think three dogs died. Lake Penure, P-E-I-G-N-E-U-R disaster, check it out. I was all excited and then the saddest thing ever, man that's crazy.

But there had to be some sort of erosion going on there and technically it was submarine erosion. The most deadly landslide in the history of the world was in 1920 in China, December of 1920. It was triggered by an earthquake and as many as 200,000 people died in that one and some of that was from the earthquake but they said the landslide was responsible for most of the deaths. Yeah, like I said, in the U.S. it's like 25 to 35 deaths a year.

Worldwide it's more like 4,000 and then on years where there's terrible earthquakes it will go up into the tens of thousands and then there was a mudslide in 1999 in Vargas State of Venezuela that killed like 30,000 people, just covered a bunch of towns like all at once. It was a mudslide or mudflow I guess. Well one thing I thought was interesting was that and I think Jennifer points this out early in the article that while in these states we don't see a lot of deaths from landslides each year, they're the most expensive natural disaster over I think tornadoes, earthquakes

combined in this country. And if you will consult your homeowner's insurance, you will almost definitely find that landslides are not covered. Yeah. Nope. Well I guess we should get to that point then that is it us, is it humans that are causing these things? Yes.

Always? Not always. No, animals can cause it, like a goat can cause a landslide if it really is unsure-footed. But goats don't blast mountain tops with dynamite. That's one. Yeah. Deforestation is a big problem, road building and through the mountains. Yeah, because think about it, when you have a mountain and you cut a road through it,

all of a sudden what was once a relatively gentle slope are now two steep slopes on either side just aiming right at the road. Well yeah, and I think everyone's probably driven on mountain roads where they either have chain link fencing on the side of it which is scary enough or I guess it's even scarier when they don't have fencing but they have signs that say watch out for falling rocks. Yeah, good luck pal. There are things that people are doing though when they do build roads, they sometimes will put in drainage pipes to carry away water which helps impermeable membranes like plastic

sheeting. Yeah, so it can't trickle down and retaining walls. And reforestation, so if you're going to clear cut an area, if you're going to harvest timber, maybe go back in there and try and reforest. Plant something. Yeah. You know, for a number of reasons really, I can't believe that that's not a law, that if you take X number of trees down you have to plant X number of trees and the number you

plant should be more than the number you took. Is that not a law? I'm quite sure it's not. We can't even get black box recorders ejected for an extra like 50 bucks a plane, remember? I remember. There's no law for that. Hey, but here in Georgia we just passed a law where you can bring guns into churches and bars.

Oh, I thought you were going to say that I'm actually rejoicing for another law. I don't know if it was signed into law or if the house passed it and it's on its way. It is now a crime to drive slow in the fast lane or it will soon be when they pass this law. What? Give me some parameters. It's called the slow poke bill. Okay.

And if you are impeding the flow of traffic, not even if you're going under 55 or under 45, they're so aware that Georgia drives fast that they say if you're impeding the flow of traffic, even if other people are breaking the law and you're going the speed limit, you are breaking the law by being a slow poke in the fast lane, which is the most glorious law in any city or state has ever come up with. Well, if you... State's right. If you go to Europe, the left lane is just for passing.

You shouldn't even be traveling in the left lane. It's supposed to be. You go around someone and then you stay out of it. It's supposed to be that way here too. Boy, it ain't. No, but if you've got the chops, you can travel in the fast lane as long as you're not holding people up, the ones that are really like need to go to jail are ones that are just knowingly are like, I'm driving the speed limit, so you don't own the road.

It's like, well, there's 10 people behind you that you're holding up, so you're the one who goes to jail now in Georgia. That's going to be tough to enforce. Okay. Well, it's totally subjective too. I mean, it's like a cop can... It's totally up to the cop to enforce or not, but yeah, it's still... I think it's a grand gesture.

Agreed. Slow pokes. Okay. So if you want to learn more about landslides, you can type that word into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. You should also check out geology.com. They have a really great page with lots of different subpages on landslides. Yeah.

And if you're in that area and have been impacted, we would love to hear from you. Yeah, for sure. And we're thinking about you guys, obviously. I think, did we say search bar at any point? Yes. Well, then that means it's time for listener mail. All right. I'm going to call this possibly the Unabomber is writing us.

Hey, guys. I want to send out a note from the Great North. I've been listening since my buddy Adam played me the Lego podcast a few years ago. And since then, I've been a fairly regular listener, but never more so than over the past few months. Because last spring, I moved from Minneapolis to Juno, Alaska, for job gardening at a public arboretum. Sounds like a lovely job, by the way.

It does. Well, I live in a little shack in the woods near my work about 25 miles out of town, about a half a mile from my nearest neighbor, almost free of rent, close proximity to work, and uniqueness of the situation is what drew me to it. I have no internet. I have no cell phone service. So every time I head into town, I stop by the library or a coffee shop and download more of your podcasts, new stuff and oldies, but goodies that are still new to me.

I have gotten into the habit of listening to you guys most evenings while making or eating dinner. I know some people in our town, but in the interest of using less gasoline and sparing my more or less meager bank account, I spend the majority of my nights out here alone. Whenever I do go into town or one of my friends makes their way out here, I tell them about whatever I've learned from you guys. Listening to you banter and learning a lot of interesting new things has definitely helped me keep my firm grip on my sanity.

Winter is basically wrapping up here. It was long and harsh. We had 96 inches of snow in December alone. I'm really looking forward to spring and summer when Alaska comes to life with tourist seasonal workers and long sunny days. But I'll still find time to listen to your good stuff, so keep it rolling. I am happy I decided to live out here this past winter to beautiful spot and a good adventure, but would have been a lot more difficult without the company of you guys.

We do rule. We do rule. And that is from Will. And Will, that sounds like my kind of life, buddy. I'd love to do that. That is unabomber-esque. I could sands the bombing, I could be the unabomber. Well, I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, Will.

Thank you for letting us know that we're helping you out out there. If you want to let us know that we're helping you out, whether you live alone or are part of a Brady Bunch or something like that, you can get in touch with us. First of all, you can hang out with us on social media, look for SYSK podcasts on things such as Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter feed, Facebook. Yeah, we are new to Pinterest and Instagram, so we'd love for you guys to check us out there. It's very entertaining.

Yeah, it's been fun. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com, and you can find all of our information and all sorts of great stuff at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable

happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.