CTHULHU — and the Life That Woke After 100 Million Years

FILE 03 — CTHULHU. Not a god. Something that cannot wake itself, and whose sleep leaks. This is its file. CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open — the Elsie Garland 01:52 File designation 02:02 01 — The Record 03:20 The earthquake of 28 February 1925 04:32 The swamp, 1907 06:20 02 — The Nature 07:35 Tennyson's Kraken 08:48 Cryptobiosis 09:51 The nematode in the permafrost 11:39 03 — The Contact 12:08 The sleeping sickness 14:18 The St. Augustine monster 16:05 Julia 17:06 04 — The Implication 18:41 Closing — Site U1365 22:17 Next file SOURCES • Lovecraft, H. P. — "The Call of Cthulhu", Weird Tales (February 1928); "The Nameless City", The Wolverine (November 1921); letter to Duane Rimel, 23 July 1934 • Tennyson, A. — "The Kraken", Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) • Natural Resources Canada — the Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake, 28 February 1925 • Leeuwenhoek, A. van — letter to Hendrik van Bleyswijk, 9 February 1702 • Keilin, D. "The Leeuwenhoek Lecture — The problem of anabiosis or latent life." Proc. R. Soc. B 150, 149 (1959) • Shatilovich, A., et al. Doklady Biological Sciences 480, 100 (2018); PLOS Genetics 19(7), e1010798 (2023) • von Economo, C. — Encephalitis lethargica (1917; English edition, Oxford, 1931); McCall et al. J. Neurovirol. 14, 177 (2008); Hoffman & Vilensky, Brain 140, 2246 (2017) — encephalitis lethargica • Oliver Sacks Foundation — Awakenings (Beth Abraham Hospital, L-DOPA, 1969) • Pierce et al. Biol. Bull. 188, 219 (1995); Biol. Bull. 206, 125 (2004) • NOAA PMEL Acoustics Program — "Julia", 1 March 1999 (sped up 16× as NOAA publishes it) • Morono, Y., et al. Nature Communications 11, 3626 (2020) — IODP Expedition 329 • NINDS — Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep DISCLOSURE Owen Tregarth, the schooner Elsie Garland, her crew and her log are original fiction written for this channel; the log's noon position was chosen to sit beside IODP Site U1365. Every other person, paper, recording and measurement named in this episode is real. The log pages, charts and calendars are drawn plates; the charts use Natural Earth land data and published coordinates. The "Julia" recording is NOAA's, sped up 16× as NOAA publishes it; hydrophone hiss was reduced and the sound boosted so it can be heard, and it is played twice. The narration is synthesized. CREDITS Imagery licensed CC BY: Shatilovich et al. 2023, PLOS Genetics (4.0) · Morono et al. 2020, Nature Communications (4.0) · Wellcome Collection (4.0) · John Newcomb (3.0, JOIDES Resolution). All other imagery is public domain or CC0, chiefly Gustave Doré, Francisco Goya, Odilon Redon, Edward Burne-Jones, Johannes Vermeer, Ernst Haeckel, Julia Margaret Cameron, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Martin, Pierre Denys de Montfort, Andreas Cellarius, Ivan Aivazovsky, Joseph Rusling Meeker, David Roberts, Edward Collier, Vincent van Gogh, Charles R. Knight, Henry Winkelmann, E. A. Hodgson, the Flammarion engraving, the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the British Museum, NOAA, the Ocean Drilling Program and the Smithsonian Institution, with H. P. Lovecraft's own 1934 sketch. Chart plates use Natural Earth land data. #cosmichorror #lovecraft #cthulhu