Mages summoned lightning to pry Surzi from his desert den, but the hoary beast chuffed a laugh filled with power & caught the magic in his own. As lilac lightning eroded in the air, they learned their efforts to dislodge him were why the desert lingered. --- ## ANALYSIS I've written before about my harrowing adventure with a desert storm, for an earlier story about Surzi, [Petrichor](https://eleanorkonik.com/petrichor/) %% ( [[2021-09-08 Petrichor (MF) (DRAFT)]] ) %%. This week I want to talk about the neat stuff that happens because of desert lightning, and why I love deserts even though they can be terrifying. Fulgurate tubes look like fossilized lightning. They're formed when a lightning strike vaporizes the sand or stone it hits, then fuses the nearby stuff into the shape of lightning. Rock and sand generally doesn't melt unless exposed to temperatures of at least 1800°C; lightning strikes average out around 2500°C — [five times hotter than the surface of the sun](https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2019/08/26/fulgurite/). They're pretty rare, especially the kind made in rock. The ones made from sand become natural glass, and can be several meters long, although they're very fragile. They're usually created high up on mountain peaks, since they act as natural lightning rods. There are other really neat rock formations in the desert too, of course. My favorite is the "desert rose." They're crystals and sand, and tend to form when things like shallow salt basins evaporate. Some of them really do look like roses, although others just look like funky flowers. My husband got me one as a present, and they're pretty cool. But pretty rock formations are only one of the reasons I like deserts. The lack of humidity is really nice — 100 °F in Nevada honestly feels better than most 85 °F days in Maryland. My husband grew up in the American Southwest and, in an ideal world where climate change and politics make it possible, we'd love to retire there. There's this idea that deserts are barren wastelands, aberrations of the natural order fit only to be fixed. No spoilers but uh, a big chunk of the plot of _Dune_ is about trying to take a desert planet that is naturally a desert where the whole ecosystem is designed around being a desert and basically destroying that whole way of life — including destroying the sole means of production for a vital life-extending drug that is the single thing that allows for interstellar travel and trade. Honestly, the older I get — and the more I read — the more this aspect of _Dune's_ plot falls apart for me. I've been reading a bunch lately about indigenous groups trying to protect their traditional ways of life and local ecosystems from imperialist and colonialist efforts. To my mind, this includes things like trying to force natural deserts to become greener and "more productive." Part of my feelings on this come from the fact that I've been reading _[The Dawn of Everything](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything)_ by David Graeber & David Wengrow. At the beginning of the book, they touch on how given a genuinely informed choice between a "civilized" lifestyle and a "barbarian" lifestyle, people will often choose the "barbarian" lifestyle — whether they were born to "civilization" or not. The authors give multiple examples, but the recurring theme seems to be that, once given the opportunity to live in societies with class divides that result in poverty for some people, and those without them, most people prefer the society without poverty — even if they, themselves, aren't threatened by hunger or destitution. Even if the "more equal" society is also more violent. I sometimes wonder if the narrative of refugee-style immigration, where people leave impoverished and war-torn countries to find a better life in a more "civilized" or "prosperous" country, gave me the (unexamined until pretty recently, really) idea that most people, given a choice between a subsistence lifestyle and modern amenities, would choose the latter. But from what I can tell, members of relatively undisturbed indigenous groups are rarely the ones fleeing their homes... unless [climate change and government mismanagement of the land has utterly wrecked their way of life](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/tuareg-migration-critical-component-crisis-sahel). It's just really hard for me to believe that so many of _Dune_'s desert-dwelling Fremen would get on board with deliberately destroying their way of life so that things would be greener and maybe easier for later generations. They were trying to create a type of "paradise" they had never seen or experienced, at the direct cost of their entire planet's geology one export that offered them wealth, and not even because of a psychic prophet but rather the word of one renegade scientist from a different culture. Particularly in 2021 it just doesn't feel plausible to me anymore, which is kind of a bummer because I really do like deserts and stories set in deserts — which is one reason I wrote _Shock_. ## Further Reading - Here's more about [petrified lightning](https://interpretivecenter.org/the-truth-about-petrified-lightning/), including some examples of it showing up in pop culture. - There's a gorgeous photo of an enormous [desert rose cluster](https://www.geologyin.com/2017/06/how-do-desert-roses-form.html) over at _Geology In_.