James' World 2

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Last May, I compared the COVID-19 pandemic to a grueling marathon. I’ve come to see that was not quite right: when you’re out running, no matter how hard it is, you know you’re done after 26.2 miles. But since the pandemic began two years ago, the finish line keeps moving. Now the ultra-contagious Omicron variant is raging across the country. Hospitals and schools are overwhelmed—and you might be feeling absolutely fried even if you’re not a nurse or a teacher. 

For some ideas for how to think about this latest phase of the pandemic, I went to the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, as well as traditional teachings and age-old wisdom. This is the thinking behind groundedness, and idea I developed for my book The Practice of Groundedness, an instruction manual for developing the internal strength and fortitude to sustain you through ups and downs. If resilience is about bouncing back, groundedness is about holding your ground, about not getting knocked down during hardships and challenges.

If there ever was a time to prioritize these values, this winter sure seems to be it. The following principles might help serve as a guide for what (knock wood) will hopefully be the last long winter of this pandemic.

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Illustration by Rob Vargas

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The Davis-Schrimpf seep field is located about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of Palm Springs, Calif., at an elevation of 230 feet (70 meters) below sea level. Here, carbon dioxide gases gurgle to the surface as a result of a magma zone found 1 mile (1.6 km) below the Earth’s surface cooking the gas from carbonate minerals.

Over 50 mud volcanic features are found in this seep field, including gryphons, gas vents, salses, mudpots, and springs all located within a 2-square-mile (5-square-km) area.

Gryphons are small earthen mounds built by the eruptions of mud volcanoes. The fluids that create the gryphons are powered by hydrothermal carbon dioxide gas mixed with near-surface brines and are merely warm to the touch rather than hot.

The viscosity of the mud extruding from a specific mud volcanic vent will help determine the height that each gryphon grows to. The amount of escaping carbon dioxide gas also influences the erupting power of the mixture and thus how high the small mountain of mud will grow.

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(Image credit: Linda and Dr. Dick Buscher.)

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The mound appears to be 20 to 40 feet (6 to 12 meters) high and 100 feet (30 m) wide, DIG Gwadar Moazzam Jah, a district police officer, told Pakistan’s Geo News. It rose out of the sea at a spot located about 350 feet (100 m) from the coast, he said.

The news sparked lively chatter among geologists, who debated whether the hill was a landslide, a fault scarp or even a hoax. A fault scarp marks vertical displacement along a fault, anything from a small step to a huge, steep cliff.

Scientists are still far from consensus, but many think that Pakistan’s newest piece of land may be a mud volcano.

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On September 26, 2013, NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this image of a new island off the coast of Pakistan. The “mud island” rose from the seafloor near Gwadar on September 24, shortly after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rattled the Balochistan province of northwestern Pakistan.

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At the start of December, the Tor Project’s support email inbox began receiving an unusual number of messages from users saying they were encountering problems accessing the digital anonymity service. “It was not just one or two, but like 10 people asking,” says Gustavo Gus, community team lead of the Tor Project. At the same time, staff at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which measures and tracks internet censorship, saw indications that suggested Russian internet service providers (ISPs) were blocking the Tor network.

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Photograph: Kirill Kukhmar/Getty Images

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