GEOLOGY 101
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Meta igneous
Meta sedimentary
Conglomerate rocks
Conglomerates rock
Rocks rock
Wal mart
GE
Bechtel
Exxon Mobil
Halliburton
Rocks rock
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Chaos
Cooking
Cooling
Churning
Elementary
Ignorance
Metamorphoses
Into conglomerate
Rock
Conglomerates rock
Landslides
Earthquakes
Mudslides
Waves and waves
of churning
crumbling
transforming
Geology into theology
Geology
Theology
We are in
for a very dangerous ride.
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
The miracle of life on Earth
happens here on Earth
Igneous
Metamorphic
Sedimentary
Elementary
Rudimentary
Ignorance
Rocks
Rock.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
In the Beginning
It all begins with geology. I stare at the frozen snow and see how it is carved by the wind and shaped by the change in temperature. I read the layers of this winter's storms in the changing textures of the ice crystals. It resembles the lay of land. It is a microcosm of the earth.
It all begins with geology. The ancient stories are written in the rocks and the shape of the landscape. 4.6 billion years of stories. Languages lost and folded upon each other. Frozen and scorched. Fluid and solid. Spewed into the sky and forced into the depths of the magma that underlies the ground we stand on. Mountains rising and disappearing. Oceans closing. Continents colliding and sinking. This is the story of Earth.
I try to grasp my own insignificance in the face of all this. I think of the way that John McPhee decribes it as I look at my hand. "With your arms spread wide to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins at the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file, you could eradicate human history."
I break it down as I gaze at my outstretched arm towards my right fingertips. This is all the Pre-Cambrian geological period. In this period, the oldest algae fossils appeared three billion years ago. The first signs of life. The oldest rocks on earth are somewhere near 3.8 billion years old, and the moon rocks 4 billion. The oldest rocks in the Berkshires are a mere one billion, probably around the elbow of my left arm. As I work my gaze down to my wrist, time compresses. Animals appear in abundance, mountains rise and erode, and the dinosaurs disappear just as the fingers of my left hand branch out 250,000 years ago. And still life changes. The land changes. And still there are no humans. The ice ages that have scarred the surface of the land that we see today emerge in the period represented by my nails. And still there are no humans. In all of the outstretched topography of my arms that represents the history of this planet, there are no humans. Not until the very outer edge of my finger nails do we walk the earth.
I think about it, and I think about global climate change and how, yes, we may extinguish life as we know it, but we will not extinguish life, and we will not extinguish the earth. We are just one small speck in the gigantic spectrum that is held in the stories of the stones.
It all begins and ends with geology.
It all begins with geology. The ancient stories are written in the rocks and the shape of the landscape. 4.6 billion years of stories. Languages lost and folded upon each other. Frozen and scorched. Fluid and solid. Spewed into the sky and forced into the depths of the magma that underlies the ground we stand on. Mountains rising and disappearing. Oceans closing. Continents colliding and sinking. This is the story of Earth.
I try to grasp my own insignificance in the face of all this. I think of the way that John McPhee decribes it as I look at my hand. "With your arms spread wide to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins at the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file, you could eradicate human history."
I break it down as I gaze at my outstretched arm towards my right fingertips. This is all the Pre-Cambrian geological period. In this period, the oldest algae fossils appeared three billion years ago. The first signs of life. The oldest rocks on earth are somewhere near 3.8 billion years old, and the moon rocks 4 billion. The oldest rocks in the Berkshires are a mere one billion, probably around the elbow of my left arm. As I work my gaze down to my wrist, time compresses. Animals appear in abundance, mountains rise and erode, and the dinosaurs disappear just as the fingers of my left hand branch out 250,000 years ago. And still life changes. The land changes. And still there are no humans. The ice ages that have scarred the surface of the land that we see today emerge in the period represented by my nails. And still there are no humans. In all of the outstretched topography of my arms that represents the history of this planet, there are no humans. Not until the very outer edge of my finger nails do we walk the earth.
I think about it, and I think about global climate change and how, yes, we may extinguish life as we know it, but we will not extinguish life, and we will not extinguish the earth. We are just one small speck in the gigantic spectrum that is held in the stories of the stones.
It all begins and ends with geology.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Common Sense
"Will the time ever come when, again, Nature become the Teacher of Man?" I come in from the woods this morning thinking about Thoreau's question. I have just spent a weekend in Northern Vermont studying animal sign and forest ecology. There was no snow there. It was very eery. No snow in the beginning of January. The woods were deep in mud because the four feet of snow from the previous week had melted in the record temperatures. We shook our heads. Global climate change.
Today as I head into the woods on the morning after a new snow, I am surprised to see snow fleas (achorutes nivicolus). These insects, also known as springtails, always seem to me a sign of spring since they emerge on the warmer winter days to feed on leaf mold. I don't usually see them in January, but then there is nothing predictable about winter anymore.
I think about Thoreau's question and the fact that it was posed in the 1840's some one hundred and seventy years ago. The natural sciences were in their infancy then. There were no computers, no doppler radar, no electron microscopes, no electricity even. What was catalogued about Nature was observed on two feet and mostly with the naked eye. Thoreau's world must have been much quieter than ours and yet he still had to retreat to Walden Pond in order "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Thoreau's question has haunted me since I first encountered it in high school when I read Walden. It is still so fresh and so real. I think of his solitary shack at Walden Pond now an island in the midst of suburban sprawl as Massachusetts loses forty acreas a day to development. I think of the species on this planet that will be extinct before we will ever know they existed, and all the manner of flora and fauna that are struggling to adapt to a new natural order as we enclose ourselves in temperature controlled environments and relate to each other through electronic keyboards.
I remember when I first gazed upon Mt. Katahdin. I had spent two months walking towards it on the Appalachian Trail and first saw the summit with sixty miles left. I was awestruck. Thoreau had a similar experience on his first encounter with Katahdin. It inspired him to write, "Think of our own life in Nature--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"
Indeed, who are we? Where are we? Today the leaders of India and China have met. They agreed that they really have the right not to think about cutting carbon emissions because they deserve to have the same lifestyle that the more developed western societies have, and I think of Thoreau. He knew nothing of melting glaciers and too warm winters. He knew nothing of the decimation of the rain forests and the green house effect. He never heard of coral reefs bleaching or acid rain on his own northern forests. Global climate change still had more than a century to unfold. The species had yet to reach the tipping point. His voice is still a cry from the wilderness. He knew then, that in order to survive as a species, human beings need to make Nature their teacher. Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury to choose to be disconnected from the source of our own lives.
Who are we? Where are we? It's all just such common sense.
Today as I head into the woods on the morning after a new snow, I am surprised to see snow fleas (achorutes nivicolus). These insects, also known as springtails, always seem to me a sign of spring since they emerge on the warmer winter days to feed on leaf mold. I don't usually see them in January, but then there is nothing predictable about winter anymore.
I think about Thoreau's question and the fact that it was posed in the 1840's some one hundred and seventy years ago. The natural sciences were in their infancy then. There were no computers, no doppler radar, no electron microscopes, no electricity even. What was catalogued about Nature was observed on two feet and mostly with the naked eye. Thoreau's world must have been much quieter than ours and yet he still had to retreat to Walden Pond in order "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Thoreau's question has haunted me since I first encountered it in high school when I read Walden. It is still so fresh and so real. I think of his solitary shack at Walden Pond now an island in the midst of suburban sprawl as Massachusetts loses forty acreas a day to development. I think of the species on this planet that will be extinct before we will ever know they existed, and all the manner of flora and fauna that are struggling to adapt to a new natural order as we enclose ourselves in temperature controlled environments and relate to each other through electronic keyboards.
I remember when I first gazed upon Mt. Katahdin. I had spent two months walking towards it on the Appalachian Trail and first saw the summit with sixty miles left. I was awestruck. Thoreau had a similar experience on his first encounter with Katahdin. It inspired him to write, "Think of our own life in Nature--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"
Indeed, who are we? Where are we? Today the leaders of India and China have met. They agreed that they really have the right not to think about cutting carbon emissions because they deserve to have the same lifestyle that the more developed western societies have, and I think of Thoreau. He knew nothing of melting glaciers and too warm winters. He knew nothing of the decimation of the rain forests and the green house effect. He never heard of coral reefs bleaching or acid rain on his own northern forests. Global climate change still had more than a century to unfold. The species had yet to reach the tipping point. His voice is still a cry from the wilderness. He knew then, that in order to survive as a species, human beings need to make Nature their teacher. Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury to choose to be disconnected from the source of our own lives.
Who are we? Where are we? It's all just such common sense.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)