The Accidental Diarist
adapted from
Reading the Rocks, by Marcia Bjornerud, 2005
Earth’s
life
story
is
written,
very
literally,
in
stone.
Unfortunately, stone has a reputation for being uncommunicative.
The expressions stone deaf, stone cold, and stony silence reveal much
about the relationship most people have to the rocks beneath their
feet. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated texts, telling tales
of scorching heat, violent tempests, endurance, cataclysm, and
reincarnation. Over more than 4 billion years, in beach sand, volcanic
ash, and granites, the planet has unintentionally kept a journal of its
past.
As literature, Earth’s telling of its own story varies from
breathless thriller to mundane diary. The action ranges from the
metabolism of microbes to the building of mountains. Equal coverage
is allotted to the fragrant beauty of life and the fetid details of death.
Some events are covered at tedious length, others only fragmentally,
requiring the reader to piece together the plot and characters.
But since it is the story of our dwelling place, of how we came to
inherit this home from ancestors that lived and died during mainly
good and some very bad times, it is arguably the one text that should
be required reading for every earthling. We may be able to learn a
thing or two about survival from a structure that has maintained
itself in grand style for more than 50 million human lifetimes.
Notably, after millennia of experimentation, Earth and its
myriad systems have learned to harness energy and balance
opposites: mixing versus sorting, large versus small, cooperation
versus competition, conservation versus innovation. If this balance
had not been struck, life could not have persisted on the planet for
nearly 4 billion years.
Earth’s equilibrium is perhaps its most remarkable character
trait. While our sister planet, Venus, has grown hotter and hotter
over time and our brother planet, Mars, has slipped into a deep, cold
sleep, Earth has remained both awake and equable. The earliest
entries in the rock record indicate that liquid water has been stable at
Earth’s surface from the beginning of its history. Our planet has had
its fevers and chills, but nothing that its immune system could not
overcome. This is because Earth avoids crises with an ancient and
astonishing system of checks and balances involving the oceans,
atmosphere, biosphere, and solid Earth.
The rock record was not written for our benefit, but we would
be foolish not to heed its wisdom. The greatest lesson we can draw
from Earth’s story is that we are the youngest children in a
generations-old dynasty, and that our own short biographies bind us
to a far richer and deeper family saga. In reading the rock record we
we may anthropomorphise the Earth a little, but we also
“geomorphize” ourselves, rediscovering the history of the Earth
imprinted on us.
Bjornerud, Marcia. Reading the Rocks. New York, NY: Westview Press, 2005.
Preface
adapted from
Rise of the Ranges of Light, by David Scott Gilligan, 2011
The Hindu religious tradition recognizes a trinity of gods that
together represent the nature of the phenomenal world.
The first
member of the trinity is Brahma, the creator, who brings things into
being and breathes life into the world. The second member of the trinity
is Vishnu, the preserver, who sustains life and being through time. The
third and most widely worshipped member of the trinity is Siva, the
destroyer, who makes wreckage of being and life and reduces the efforts
of Brahma and Vishnu to utter ruin. Thus the slate is cleared for
Brahma to come and make the world anew and Vishnu to hold its
course. But without the change that Siva brings, the evolution of the
world as we know it would stop, and there would be no continued
renewal, no reinvention, no evolution. The death of one thing brings the
life of another. The landscape evolves and none can foresee the ends to
come.
The story of California is about evolution of place, and man’s
relationship with place. These two threads meet and intertwine when
landscapes and life evolve and we are there to interpret the evidence, to
tell the story. That means being out with the living land, roaming its
curves and recesses, observing, questioning, speculating, and interacting
with it. It also means asking why change is occurring; what, if any, its
patterns are; and how we perceive change in the world around us.
California’s story is set in the mountains. Here there are more
different kinds of habitats, and species of plants and animals, than in
any other similar-sized piece of land in temperate North America. The
diversity, geological and biological, of California is unprecedented largely
due to the state’s position at the edge of the continent of North America.
Here is a place of intense and immediate tectonic activity, which begets
topographic diversity, which begets climatic diversity, which begets
habitat
diversity,
which
begets
biological
diversity.
California’s
geographic position at the latitudinal junction between the subtropics
and temperate regions also makes it a natural biological meeting place
for a stunning array of life, where species with Arctic, desert, and
neotropical origins meet and intermingle. The place is also, quite literally,
one of the newest on earth, freshly hewn, young and full of vitality, a
place where you can literally watch the earth in the making. It is at the
leading edge of the world in both a physical and biological sense. It is
happening.
In short, California has a good story because it is a particularly rich
one. But the idea of change and its application to landscapes extends far
beyond California to just about anywhere on planet Earth, from the poles
to the tropics, from the mountains to the sea. Everywhere you go the
story is much the same. But the details are different, and understanding
the details is part of what makes life rich and beautiful.
Change can be tough to absorb, but it makes the world a dynamic
and mysterious place to live. Change keeps us on our toes. It keeps us
awestruck with the world.
Gilligan, David Scott. Rise of the Ranges of Light. Berkeley, Ca: Heyday Books, 2011.
A Flash in the Pan
adapted from
Rise of the Ranges of Light, by David Scott Gilligan, 2011
Last night I sat up late and examined the stars. I tried to discern
if they were really moving away from each other. I didn’t see any
movement and figured that as short-lived humans in a universe some
fifteen billion years old, perhaps we are a little too new on the scene
to see much action. But the stars really are moving away from each
other and I know this. I have studied it.
Yet, while the whole universe spills itself out like a jar of
marbles dropped onto the pavement, expansion isn’t all we see going
on. Somehow, amidst all this separation, matter is also drawn to
itself. Galaxies, solar systems, even the very Earth beneath our feet,
are contracting. Science calls this gravity
Expansion and contraction. If there are two opposing forces that
keep the whole show of change going on in the world, these are the
forces. As long as the stuff of the universe keeps expanding and
contracting, we have something to work with.
I imagine the Earth in a state of eternal convulsion, pulling in on
itself in order to make right its hasty design, sorting out its
component parts. As the Earth pulls on itself, the heaviest stuff, like
iron and nickel, moves towards the center. The lighter stuff gets
displaced outward. All the while the innards of the Earth decay,
giving off radioactive heat. Yet even while it contracts, life on Earth
diversifies, evolves, and expands. The Earth, with everything in it
and on it, including me, is an expression, a manifestation of the
universe. In this supreme moment, I am in awe of this curious ball of
metal and dust, rock, water, and life hurtling through the singing
cosmos, and I am keenly aware of myself, a speck in the midst of it
all, a flash in the pan in a universe forever in the making.
But night is the time for pondering ideas, and day is the time
for seeing them at work, for testing these heady themes against the
hard stone of the earth. I sit staring up at the face of the mountains in
the first light of day. I have looked at these mountain for years. Up
there amid the late-lying snows of winter is some of the oldest rock in
the Sierra Nevada of California. Rock that has been the floor of a sea.
Rock that has been twisted and bent, rock that has buckled under the
pressure of rising volcanoes. Rock that has been relentlessly ground
down by the combined forces of water and gravity. Rock that has
been injected from beneath by one of the biggest reservoirs of magma
on the planet. Rock that has been boldly uplifted to nearly fifteen
thousand feet while the rest of the West was stretched to become
some of the thinnest crust on earth. Rock that is swirled and richly
folded, contorted, and beautiful. Rock that is making perhaps its last
precarious stand on the surface of this wildly spinning globe. Stone
with a story. Today I will climb its flanks and try to read the story.
Gilligan, David Scott. Rise of the Ranges of Light. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Press, 2011.
The Glaciers
adapted from
the writings of John Muir
Tracing the ways of glaciers, learning how Nature sculptures
mountain-waves in making scenery—beauty that so mysteriously
influences every human being, is glorious work.
All California has been glaciated, the low plains and valleys as
well as the mountains. Traces of an ice-sheet, thousands of feet in
thickness, beneath whose heavy folds the present landscapes have
been molded, may be found everywhere, though glaciers now exist
only among the peaks of the High Sierra. No other mountain chain
on this or any other of the continents that I have seen is so rich as the
Sierra in bold, striking, well-preserved glacial monuments. Indeed,
every feature is more or less tellingly glacial. Not a peak, ridge,
dome, cañon, yosemite, lake-basin, stream or forest will you see that
does not in some way explain the past existence and modes of action
of flowing, grinding, sculpturing, soil-making, scenery-making ice.
On the sides of the moraines we find terraces, indicating fluctuations
in the levels of the glaciers, caused by variations of snow-fall,
temperature, etc., showing that the climate of the glacial period was
diversified by cycles of milder or stormier seasons similar to those of
post-glacial time.
But the action of flowing ice, whether in the form of river-like
glaciers or broad mantles, especially the part it played in sculpturing
the earth, is as yet but little understood. Water rivers work openly
where people dwell, and so does the rain, and the sea, thundering on
all the shores of the world; and the universal ocean of air, though
invisible, speaks aloud in a thousand voices, and explains its modes
of working and its power. But glaciers, back in their white solitudes,
work apart from men, exerting their tremendous energies in silence
and darkness. Outspread, spirit-like, they brood above the
predestined landscapes, work on unwearied through immeasurable
ages, until, in the fullness of time, the mountains and valleys are
brought forth, channels furrowed for rivers, basins made for lakes
and meadows, and arms of the sea, soils spread for forests and fields;
then they shrink and vanish like summer clouds.
Flowers of the Sky
adapted from
The Mountains of California, by John Muir, 1894
It is hard without long and loving study to realize the
magnitude of the work done on these mountains during the
last glacial period by glaciers, which are only streams of
closely compacted snow-crystals. Careful study goes to show
that the pre-glacial condition of the range was comparatively
simple: one vast wave of stone in which a thousand
mountains, domes, cañons, ridges, etc., lay concealed. And in
the development of these Nature chose for a tool not the
earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the
stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snowflowers
noiselessly
falling
through
unnumbered
centuries,
the
offspring of the sun and sea. Laboring harmoniously in united
strength they crushed and ground and wore away the rocks in
their march, making vast beds of soil, and at the same time
developed and fashioned the landscapes into the delightful
variety of hill and dale and lordly mountain that mortals call
beauty. Perhaps more than a mile in average depth has the
range been thus degraded during the last glacial period—a
quantity of mechanical work almost inconceivably great. And
our admiration must be excited again and again as we toil and
study and learn that this vast job of rockwork, so far-reaching
in its influences, was done by agents so fragile and small as
are these flowers of the mountain clouds. Strong only by force
of number, they carried away entire mountains, particle by
particle, block by block, and cast them into the sea;
sculptured, fashioned, modeled all the range, and developed
its predestined beauty. All these new Sierra landscapes were
evidently predestined, for the physical structure of the rocks
on which the features of the scenery depend was acquired
while they lay at least a mile deep below the pre-glacial
surface. And it was while these features were taking form in
the depths of the range, the particles of the rocks marching to
their appointed places in the dark with reference to the coming
beauty, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky marching to
the same music assembled to bring them to the light. Then,
after their grand task was done, these bands of snow-flowers,
these mighty glaciers, were melted and removed as if of no
more importance than dew destined to last but an hour. Few,
however, of Nature’s agents have left monuments so noble and
enduring as they. The great granite domes a mile high, the
cañons as deep, the noble peaks, the Yosemite valleys, these,
and indeed nearly all other features of the Sierra scenery, are
glacier monuments.
Contemplating the works of these flowers of the sky, one
may easily fancy them endowed with life: messengers sent
down to work in the mountain mines on errands of divine love.
Silently flying through the darkened air, swirling, glinting, to
their appointed places, they seem to have taken counsel
together, saying, “We are feeble, yet we are many, and together
we will be strong. Marching in close, deep ranks, let us roll
away the stones from these mountains, and set the landscapes
free. Let us uncover these clustering domes. Here let us carve
a lake basin; there, a Yosemite Valley; here, a channel for a
river with fluted steps and brows for the plunge of songful
cataracts. Yonder let us spread broad sheets of soil, and here
pile trains of boulders. Here make ground for a meadow; there,
for a garden and grove, making it smooth and fine, spicing it
well with crystals, garnet feldspar, and zircon.”
Thus and so on it has oftentimes seemed to me sang and
planned and labored the hearty snow-flowers; and nothing
that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and
beauty of their work. Like morning mist they have vanished in
sunshine, all save the few that still linger on the coolest
mountainsides, and, as residual glaciers, are still busily at
work completing the last of the lake basins, the last beds of
soil, and the sculpture of the highest peaks.
Muir, John. The Mountains of California. New York, NY: The Century Co., 1894
Bloody Canyon and Mono Lake
adapted from
My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir, 1911
Early in the morning I tied my note-book and some bread to my
belt, and strode away full of eager hope, feeling that I was going to
have a glorious revel. The glacier meadows that lay along my way
served to soothe my morning speed, for the sod was full of gentians
and daisies, calling for recognition as old friends, and I had to stop
many times to examine the shining rocks over which the ancient
glacier had passed with tremendous pressure, polishing them so well
that they reflected the sunlight like glass in some places, while fine
striations, seen clearly through a lens, indicated the direction in
which the ice had flowed. On some of the sloping polished
pavements abrupt steps occur, showing that occasionally large
masses of rock had given way before the glacial pressure, as well as
small particles; moraines, too, some scattered, others regular like long
curving embankments and dams, occur here and there, giving the
general surface of the region a young, new-made appearance. I
watched the gradual dwarfing of the pines as I ascended, and the
corresponding dwarfing of nearly all the rest of the vegetation.
I explored the chief tributary basins in succession, their moraines
and splendid glacier pavements, taking them in without any
reference to the time consumed in their study. When I saw the
magnificent moraines extending in majestic curves from the spacious
amphitheater between the mountains, I was exhilarated with the
work that lay before me. It was one of the golden days of the Sierra
Indian summer, when the rich sunshine glorifies every landscape
however rocky and cold, and suggests anything but glaciers. The
path of the vanished glacier was warm now, and shone in many
places as if washed with silver. The tall pines growing on the
moraines stood transfigured in the glowing light, the poplar groves
on the levels of the basin were masses of orange-yellow, and the lateblooming goldenrods added gold to gold. Pushing on over my rosy
glacial highway, I passed lake after lake set in basins of granite, and
many a thicket and meadow watered by a stream that issues from the
amphitheater and links the lakes together; now wading through
plushy bogs knee-deep in yellow and purple sphagnum; now passing
over bare rock.
Mountains, red, gray, and black rise close at hand on the right,
whitened around their bases with banks of enduring snow; on the left
sweeps the huge red mass of Mount Gibbs, while in front the eye
wanders down the shadowy canyon, and out on the warm plain of
Mono, where the lake is seen gleaming like a burnished metallic disk,
with clusters of lofty volcanic cones to the south of it, rising abruptly
out of the desert like a chain of mountains. The largest of the cones
are about twenty-five hundred feet high above the lake level, have
well-formed craters, and all of them are evidently comparatively
recent additions on the landscape. At a distance of a few miles they
look like heaps of loose ashes that have never been blessed by either
rain or snow. A country of wonderful contrasts.
Hot deserts
bounded by snow-laden mountains, cinders and ashes scattered on
glacier-polished pavements, frost and fire working together in the
making of beauty. Reading these grand mountain manuscripts,
displayed through heat and cold, calm and storm, upheaving
volcanoes and down-grinding glaciers, we see that everything in
nature called destruction must be creation... a change from beauty to
beauty.
At sundown the sombre crags and peaks were inspired with the
ineffable beauty of alpenglow, and a solemn, awful stillness hushed
everything in the landscape. I crept into a hollow by the side of a
small lake near the head of the canyon, smoothed a sheltered spot,
and gathered a few pine tassels for a bed. After the short twilight
began to fade I kindled a sunny fire, made a cupful of tea, and lay
down to watch the stars. Soon the night-wind began to flow from the
snowy peaks overhead, at first only a gentle breathing, then gaining
strength, and in less than an hour roaring and moaning down the
canyon as if the work it had to do was tremendously important and
fateful; and mingled with these tones were those of the waterfalls on
the north side of the canyon, now sounding distinctly, now
smothered by the heavier cataracts of air, making a glorious song of
savage wildness. My fire squirmed and struggled as if ill at ease, but
the big resiny roots and knots of the dwarf pine could neither be
beaten out nor blown away, and the flames, now rushing up in long
lances, now flattened and twisted on the rocky ground, roared as if
trying to tell the wind stories of the trees they belonged to, as the
light given out was telling the story of the sunshine they had
gathered in centuries of summers.
The stars shone clear in the strip of sky between the huge dark
cliffs; and as I lay recalling the lessons of the day, suddenly the moon
looked down over the canyon wall, her face filled with eager concern,
which had a startling effect, like a person entering one’s bedroom. It
was hard to realize that she was in her place in the sky, looking
abroad on half the globe, land and sea, mountains, plains, lakes,
rivers oceans, ships, cities with their myriads of inhabitants sleeping
and waking, sick and well. No, she seemed to be just on the rim of
Bloody Canyon, and looking only at me.
Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1911.