About

MountainMysteryCoverThe Mountain Mystery blog tells the story of how we learned about our planet’s landscape. Prairies, hills, the ocean floor, and especially mountains have an amazing tale to tell. Scientists – mostly geophysicists – discovered the shape, size, and materials that define the Earth; and then showed us how the pieces are constantly changing.

This blog borrows from the book The Mountain Mystery, but also links things you will read about in the news to our planet’s long, evolving history. Whether it’s the discovery of Columbus’s lost ship or an earthquake in Chile, there is an earth story in it.  These stories tell us much about where our planet has been and where we – the human animals – are going next.

The blog author, Ron Miksha, is a science, history, and travel writer based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Ron has worked as a radio broadcaster, a beekeeper, and he is a geophysicist. He has written two books, dozens of magazine and journal articles, and complements his first book, Bad Beekeeping, with a popular blog at www.badbeekeeping.com. Ron wrote The Mountain Mystery for everyone who has looked at a mountain and wondered what miracles of nature set it upon the landscape. For more about Ron, including some cool pictures taken when he was a teenager, please check Ron’s site: miksha.com.

4 Responses to About

  1. gpcox says:
    August 6, 2014 at 5:54 am

    It is a pleasure to meet you.

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  2. highvioletblog says:
    May 8, 2015 at 5:19 pm

    Hey Ron, nice work. I wondered if that peasant image of Giordano Bruno is really him or just used for illustrative purposes. would be great to know, thanks.

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    • Miksha says:
      May 8, 2015 at 6:14 pm

      Thank you for your question. The image of the philosopher Giordano Bruno is an artistic recreation based on an illustration from a 1700s version of the 1578 book Livre du Recteur, which is kept at the University of Geneva. Livre du Recteur was written in 1578 – Bruno would have been 30 years old, and the woodcut seems to suggest that approximate age. However, the woodcut was made about 100 years after Bruno’s execution. It was drawn for a republished edition of Livre du Recteur. What I reproduced on the Heresy without Redemption post is therefore an artistic creation based on a copy of a copy. We can not be sure he looked like the young Neapolitan monk shown in the picture. But it probably is about as good as it can get.

      Giordano Bruno

      Not long after Copernicus presented the idea that the sun is at the center of the solar system (and long before almost anyone else agreed), Bruno had this to say about the universe:

      “There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth. For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming worlds which are as magnificent as our own, perhaps more so, and which enjoy the fructifying rays of a sun just as we do, should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect inhabitants than our earth. The unnumbered worlds in the universe are all similar in form and rank and subject to the same forces and the same laws. Impart to us the knowledge of the universality of terrestrial laws throughout all worlds and of the similarity of all substances in the cosmos! Destroy the theories that the earth is the centre of the universe! Crush the supernatural powers said to animate the world, along with the so-called crystalline spheres! Open the door through which we can look out into the limitless, unified firmament composed of similar elements and show us that the other worlds float in an ethereal ocean like our own! Take comfort, the time will come when all men will see as I do.”

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