The Official trailer for Primary Fault

Looking for Ground Truth in the High Fens

In seismology, ground truth is jargon that originated when discrimination of earthquakes and other seismic events from small nuclear blasts was a hot research field. It refers to the collection of data to verify the source or location of a seismic event other than just the seismic data available on a network. It could include satellite imagery or infrasound data, for example. That's a mouthful, but it really just means, verifying where something happened, seismically, from as many different kinds of data as are available. It's important, especially if the event places suspicion on a (possible) rogue state for testing nuclear weapons, to be able to verify the source of the event with as many kinds of data as possible.

Not as important as monitoring rogue states, I view research for fiction writing as an essential form of ground truth. These days, mostly, writers use the Internet as a primary source (more than is good for us), and when that isn't sufficient, must delve into books, scientific papers, newspaper articles, pursue conversations with experts, and watch films and documentaries. This kind of ground truth is especially important for historical fiction, but anytime you're writing fiction that takes place somewhere you don't know well or have never been to (a star system, the Jovian planets, or Des Moines, Iowa, for example), ground truth is highly desirable and sometimes fun.

Last Thursday, I did a bit of ground truth for the third book in my Schattenreich series (Double-Couple) by visiting the Hohes Venn (High Fen), part of the Ardennes and quite complicated geologically (meaning, I don't know enough about this to try and tell you about it). I think the important thing is that an impermeable layer of rock (in this case, I think it's Cambrian shale) creates the environment for the fens. I was mainly interested in the possibility that the Hohes Venn was potentially a sacred place in Iron Age times for the Celtic tribes that populated Belgium and the Rhineland and therefore had access to the moors and bogs that make up a good part of the fen.

There's not much literature - at least any I've found so far - to suggest it was a proven sacred place, but its proximity to the well-populated areas suggests that it could have been. And moors are well known for keeping their secrets - including bog bodies, valuable sacrificial items and so on (see, for example, the excellent, Dying for the Gods from Miranda Green, ISBN 978-0752425283). Well-preserved corpses and other artifacts have been discovered elsewhere in Germany when the peat bogs were mined and their contents exposed to the surface. But the Hohes Venn is a natural preserve and so is not subject to extensive peat bog mining.

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, so I assumed I was safe in just making up a sacred sacrificial place in the fen that would still hold its 'power' today, two centuries after the Celts would have roamed its forests and bogs. I wanted to 'walk it' myself to get a feeling for what it would be like, all the better to add that something special to my story, and as further impetus to seek out additional information and literature (yes, research is downright addictive sometimes).

So, here's a bit of ground truth from the Hohes Venn, courtesy of my walking companion, Klaus Hinzen.

Approaching the High Fen

The journey is the way.

A bomb crater, now a vibrant biotope

The bog lake

Cotton grass

One of the many bogs with very red-tinged waters

The Latest from Frog Central

Seismic Amphibians

At the Earthquake Observatory of the University of Cologne (in Bensberg) we have frogs and toads. And no, that's not a euphemism for our current crop of students. I see them whenever I go downstairs to my basement office as this window - a rain gutter window - is usually home to several at any one time, depending on the season and the weather. Since we are in the midst of a very rainy summer here in Bensberg, there is currently a healthy population. There are around ten of them in there today.

We at first thought they were falling through the grating above the window, and would carry them back down to the large pond on the Bensberg grounds, imagining ourselves with do-gooders' halos. I imagine the frogs were slapping themselves on their froggy foreheads at this. They don't 'fall in', they 'fall up'. They travel upwards and backwards through the drainage pipe - which comes out near the pond - to enter the drainage window. Why they do this is a mystery (any frog experts out there?), but they seem to enjoy being in there. They also seem to enjoy observing us and regularly clatter up to the tiny ledge on the window to see what those weird two-legged simians inside the window are doing.

I'm looking at you.

Students and staff occasionally add a bit of furniture to spruce the place up - a branch for climbing up to the small window ledge where these frogs are doing their ballet - an improvised garden consisting of a container with some moss and other plant material (since dried up, but the frogs don't seem to mind) - an ash tray with a tiny bit of water, a mini-pond - and various pieces of bark and rock for them to crawl over and under and otherwise declare as their piece of sacred ground.

They range in size from the tiniest frog (less than a centimeter), to good-sized toad - like the one in the picture; he's on the bottom. Newts also show up less often, those gadflies of the amphibian world, but they're harder to spot. National Geographic's Lucy Cooke does in-depth views on frogs and toads and other 'creepy' animals, so check it out if you want some more frogginess.

Frog ballet in Bensberg

Now, if we can only train them to predict earthquakes, I think our fortune would be made.