EDITORIAL: Take time Monday for nature's marvels

Apr. 5—Monday's solar eclipse will be one of nature's great marvels — one we won't see again in our area until August 2045.

For us, the eclipse will start at 12:34 p.m., reach its maximum of 95.5% totality at 1:52 p.m., and end at 3:10 p.m.

Take time, make time to see it. To experience it, actually. There will probably be a noticeable temperature drop. Animal, insect, bird and even plant behavior will be affected.

Our thanks to those area and state organizations that will provide a front-row seat to the event, including:

—The Creative Learning Alliance will hold a viewing party on Monday at 300 S. Main St., the former Joplin Public Library, as part of its "Solar-bration 2024."

—George Washington Carver National Monument will host events beginning at 11:30 a.m. Monday.

—Missouri State Parks will have many state parks in the path of totality, including Echo Bluff, Taum Sauk and Johnson's Shut-Ins, and has events and educational experiences planned.

From Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" to H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," solar and lunar eclipses are woven into our cultural stories, too, unfortunately in ways that sometimes cast a shadow of ignorance over earlier generations and other cultures and emphasize our superiority. That is ironic when you think about it because they were in many ways much closer to the natural world and its wonders than we, and maybe understood things about humanity's relationship with the cosmos that have been lost to us.

Sabine Stanley, a professor in Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University, wrote recently: "Thousands of years ago, early scientists used eclipses to refine their calendars by pinning down the regular characteristics of the Earth's and the moon's orbits. As the moon passed in front of the sun, an ancient astronomer could also figure out the diameters of both bodies."

Modern scientists have used to eclipses to confirm Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and it was during an eclipse in 1868 that scientists discovered the element helium.

That we have mastered enough science to grasp all this is a marvel of another kind.

"I've always been amazed that total solar eclipses are possible," Stanley wrote recently in The Washington Post. "The sun, an 870,000-mile-wide ball of gas over 90 million miles away from us gets completely blocked by the moon, a 2,100-mile-wide ball of rock 240,000 miles away. If the sun were a bit bigger or closer, or if the moon were a bit smaller or farther, totality would not occur. There's no scientific reason for this; it's a wondrous coincidence."

We are blessed to live in a world — a universe actually — filled with miracles and marvels. Including eclipses.