The City Beneath Seattle, a Volcano in the Distance, and the Layers of Reality

Multiverse Monday

We just wrapped up our third Emerald City Comic Con here in Seattle, and once again we had an absolute blast!  Seeing familiar faces, meeting new ones, and experiencing the incredible kindness people show our little coffee company is hard to put in words. We’re genuinely humbled by the support we’ve received from both longtime friends and the many new ones we met this week.

Somehow Seattle has quietly become a bit of an obsession for us.

Part of it is the city itself. It’s beautiful, surrounded by mountains and water, and it has a personality that feels a little different from anywhere else we’ve been. Part of it might also be the food. We discovered Vindicktive Wings while we were here 3 years ago, and let’s just say things escalated quickly. We ate there four times in six days.

So yes… Mikey like wingy.

But as we wandered around the city between convention days, we stumbled across something that fascinated us even more than the wings.

There is another version of Seattle hiding beneath the one everyone walks through every day.  Not metaphorically. Literally.

And because we happen to be here this week, it felt like the perfect inspiration for this week’s Multiverse Monday.

Seattleites know this story pretty well because it’s part of the city’s history. But for many people around the country, the idea that there is an entire buried version of Seattle beneath downtown is something they’ve probably never heard about. We certainly hadn’t, and once we learned about it we were instantly fascinated.

And it turns out this strange piece of history fits surprisingly well into the kinds of questions we like to explore on Multiverse Monday, where we dive into some of the more fascinating ideas in science, space, and the mysteries of the universe.

The Seattle Underground: A Hidden City Beneath Pioneer Square

The story of the Seattle Underground begins with the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which destroyed most of the city’s original downtown business district.

When Seattle rebuilt, city leaders decided to solve a long-standing problem. The original streets had been muddy, low, and prone to flooding because the city sat so close to sea level. Instead of rebuilding exactly the same way, engineers raised the street level across several blocks of downtown.

In some areas the new roads were built twelve to twenty feet higher than the original ground level.

The original sidewalks and storefronts did not disappear. They simply ended up underneath the new streets.

Today several blocks beneath the Pioneer Square neighborhood still contain pieces of that original city. Old brick corridors, storefront entrances, and walkways remain below modern street level. Visitors can explore preserved sections through the Seattle Underground Tour, which takes people through these historic passageways and tells the story of the buried city.

Two versions of Seattle exist in the same physical space. One busy and modern above ground. The other quiet and frozen below it.

Seattleites know this history well, but for people visiting from around the country it can be a surprising discovery. We certainly had no idea until we learned about it, and once we did it immediately sparked our curiosity.

Because when you step back and think about it, the Seattle Underground becomes a surprisingly good metaphor for something we love talking about on Multiverse Monday.

In quantum physics there are theories suggesting that reality might not exist as a single simple layer. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Many Worlds interpretation, suggest that multiple versions of reality could exist simultaneously, branching and overlapping in ways we do not fully understand.

Of course the Seattle Underground is not a parallel universe hiding under downtown.

But it does give you a fascinating visual for the idea.

One version of a city existing directly above another version. Two layers occupying the same space, separated only by a shift in perspective.

Most people walking through Seattle never think about the older city beneath them. Yet it is still there.

And sometimes the best way to imagine big ideas about the universe is to start with something surprisingly close to home.

Seattle already gave us one strange layer hiding beneath the streets. But the city has another one of those moments that makes you stop and think.

This time you just have to look up.

Mount Rainier: The Volcano Watching Seattle

Look toward the horizon on a clear day and you will see Mount Rainier rising dramatically beyond the city skyline. The mountain stands more than 14,400 feet tall and sits about sixty miles southeast of Seattle.

The first time you see it, it almost looks unreal.

Mount Rainier is not just a mountain though. It’s an active volcano.

Deep beneath the snow and glaciers that cover its peak, magma slowly moves while pressure builds within the Earth. Most of the time nothing dramatic happens, but the forces below the mountain are constantly shifting.

We actually wrote a deeper dive into this topic last year in our article about volcanoes and the incredible forces moving beneath the Earth's surface, because volcanoes are one of the most dramatic reminders that our planet is far more active than it appears.

Lenticular Clouds and the UFO-Shaped Skies of Washington

Mount Rainier also produces one of the strangest atmospheric effects you can regularly see on Earth.

When powerful winds move across the mountain they create standing waves in the atmosphere. Moisture condenses along those waves and forms smooth disk-shaped clouds known as lenticular clouds.

These clouds often appear as perfectly smooth, layered disks hovering above the mountain.

To someone unfamiliar with the science they can look remarkably like hovering spacecraft.

Which makes it even more interesting that one of the most famous UFO sightings in history happened right here in Washington.

In 1947 pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine bright objects flying near Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. He described them moving across the sky like saucers skipping across water. Newspapers shortened the phrase to flying saucers, and suddenly the modern era of UFO sightings had begun.

Whether Arnold witnessed unusual aircraft, atmospheric phenomena, or something else entirely is still debated today. But the sighting helped cement the Pacific Northwest as a region often associated with strange aerial observations.

The Limits of Human Perception

All of this leads to an even more fascinating question.

How much of reality are we actually able to see?

Neuroscientists studying perception have discovered that the brain receives enormous amounts of sensory information every second, but the conscious mind only becomes aware of a small fraction of it. Researchers like Dr. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, often describe the brain less as a camera and more as a storyteller.

Instead of presenting every detail of reality, the brain filters and simplifies information in order to help us function in the world.

In other words, the reality we experience may only be a small slice of what is actually happening around us.

Movies like The Matrix explored that idea in dramatic fashion. The characters eventually discover that the world they see is just one layer of a much larger system.

Science is not claiming we live in a simulation, of course. But it does show that our perception of the universe is far from complete.

A Multiverse Thought from Seattle

Which brings us back to this fascinating city.

A modern city built on top of an older one. A massive volcano quietly shaping the land nearby. Cloud formations that sometimes resemble hovering spacecraft. And a human brain that filters most of reality before we even notice it.

When you start connecting those pieces, the universe suddenly feels a lot more mysterious.

Here at Merlin’s Munchies Coffee Company we have always loved those kinds of mysteries. The strange corners of science. The places where imagination and discovery overlap. The possibility that reality might be far more layered than it first appears.

If you’ve seen our artwork, especially the story behind our very first coffee label, The S’more Slayer, you already know that the idea of hidden worlds and layered realities has always been part of our brand.

Maybe the multiverse exists somewhere unimaginably far away among the stars.

Or maybe parts of it are hiding much closer than we think.

Sometimes beneath our feet. Sometimes just beyond the limits of our perception. And sometimes discovered while wandering through a city you thought you understood.

Not a bad thing to think about over a cup of coffee.

Happy Multiverse Monday.