Our World is Deep and Old: reflections on geology, literacy and reverence

A basic literacy in earth science changes everything. This is best done not through reading alone but by getting out to to visit exceptional places, where soil and rock layers can be observed, and where significant global events have shaped the landscape in distinct ways. Luckily for you, that happens to be everywhere: in road cuts, streams and lakes, the lay of the land, in the soil beneath your feet.

Learn About Reading the Landscape

1. Tips and Techniques for Exploring Place (article)
2. How to Read the Landscape (article)
3.  May Theilgaard Watt's Reading the Landscape of America
4. Robert Yarham's How to Read the Landscape
5. John McPhee's Annals of the Former World

But there is no substitute for site-specific resources, especially maps. Sadly, I've had great difficulty finding a basic set of geological maps for Louisiana.  I will thus reserve the very bottom of this post for maps and I will add them here as I find them over time. Here's one good one though:

The evidence is all around us and we can read in the landscape the stories of many great events, events that have come to shape how we live, who we are. The sediments that many people admire in the vertical bluffs of "Tunica Hills" were laid at a time during winters of the last glaciation when the frozen waters ceased their voyage down the Mississippi. The finely ground silt and clay particles on the valley were left uncovered and blown across the Midwest and down the Mississippi Floodplain. A kind of frigid dustbowl reigned, sweeping fine particles up the sides of the floodplain, forming "dunes" of clay. This is the miracle of loess that gives us waterfalls in Southern Louisiana.

Credit: Kansas Geological Survey

Credit: Louisiana Geological Survey, LSU

By geological literacy (not to be confused with the important but different Geo-Literacy) I mean a sense of the incredible depth of history, the properties of mineral, water and wind and their interactions over time. People today, young and old, depend on their local educators and resource providers to expose them to this kind of thing. But it is extremely important. Some great tools are out there in the web-ocean, if you look long enough. Like this:

Credit: Earth Science Literacy Initiative

Geological literacy gives us a lens for appreciating the many dimensions of life, including evolution and ecology.

At Glen Helen, I taught my students that the strata in earths crust are like pages in a book. We looked at fossil specimens in sedimentary rock and then outside in the dolomite cliff sides some 400 million years old. We admired the slow but persistent handiwork of water: gorges, potholes, pools and narrow bedrock channels. Kids have a fondness for rocks and minerals, streams and cliffs that made my job very easy. Learning about these things can and should be fun.

Imagine what has happened and is still happening underneath our very feet. It would seem that the sediments we've built our towns and cities on in Louisiana were deposited just yesterday. In the South Louisiana, sediments are so newly arrived they have only just begun to settle. Thus our coastal land subsides and New Orleans, under the weight of its gorgeous architecture, sinks further below the sea level than most other places.

The salt in our Tabasco comes from domes rising underneath the loose Mississippi sediments like air bubbles through thick honey. The salt itself was deposited as the Gulf of Mexico was just being born. The Pangea super-continent separated and a great salt lake formed, evaporation at the edge left salt deposits in some places 2 miles think. All this some 200 million years ago so that we can have our dash Tabasco on two eggs over easy with toast.

Credit: Louisiana Sportsman.

I relish those brief sparks of consciousness, those gazes into deep time. To touch, then, a stone and feel in its grooves the work of great mountains, shifting oceans and continents; to stand on a high bluff at the edge of the broad Mississippi valley and almost see the watermark, where the sea level rose just 1000 years ago to turn the basin into a vast estuary --that is the kind geological literacy we need. We need it to comprehend the reality we inhabit and how it has changed and continues to change.

Credit: NOAA

This ability to see into geological time does not necessarily stay with you, but must be maintained through disciplined effort and by constant interaction with the landscape. Working in an office most of the summer, I have had difficulty staying "present". But when it happens, for me the feeling is immense. It is as though the blueprint to the world lay in your hands. Understanding the patterns, you can go anywhere and never be lost.

But: there is a kind of poetic negative capability that is necessary with this geological literacy, what John Keats described as the capability "of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...."  The average person cannot, without great effort, readily know all the complexities of earth systems.  I certainly don't, though I do hope to learn a bit more. Most people, however, will not seek out this information actively. The average person can realize a basic kind of reverence.

This video is also about perception of deep time, but with a slightly finer grain and a human time scale. It is about human population. I watched it for a Population Connection workshop as part of my professional development.

And here we are in this new country, in the New World, many of our cities very recently carved out of the wildscape of the America. A mere blink of an eye.

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I remember distinctly the first day I drank well water from a friends property on the fringes of Baton Rouge. I tasted the minerals. The temperature on my tongue triggered a vision of the dark, cool aquifer, flowing always, unseen, an ongoing result of the thousands of years work leading up to this moment on earth. Sediments, weather. I thought of how much I enjoy water, how precious it is and has been to my life. How could we, as humans, such late and unruly children of time, be so irresponsible as to poison the well, the life giving force? That must be the essence of sacrilege: ingratitude. A veritable biting the hand that feeds, spitting in the face of God.

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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. --Annie Dillard, from A Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek.

You cannot step twice into the same river. -- Heraclitus c.535 BC - 475 BC

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The memory of our ancestors, in all the tragedy and wild beauty of evolution, is in the ground. We are walking on the roofs of the most exquisite museum! Such an awareness drives me to walk more slowly through the world, looking for signs that tell the story of the landscape. I strive to walk in reverent silence within the masterpiece of creation.

The Streets said it best:

For billions of years since the outset of time
Every single one of your ancestors has survived
Every single person on your mum and dad's side
Successfully looked after and passed on to you life.
What are the chances of that, like?
It comes to me once in a while
And everywhere I tell folk it gets the best smile.

Unfortunately, most of the museum remains uncurated and at the whims of the most recent and most powerful geological force--not wind or water, but man.

The archaeologists have the intelligence to preserve large portions of their study sites, for the conservation of the resource and with the foresight that perhaps others will come along with new and important questions. We could only wish that a similar caution and sophistication was applied towards our non-renewable resources.

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I actually started this post because of this in the news:

Evacuations ordered near Assumption sinkhole

 

Earth systems have that unique karmic quality to it, in that entropy drives all things towards equal distribution everywhere. All that is hidden in the earth, shall have its day at the surface. Evidence tells us that history and nature is cyclic, that you cannot create or destroy energy, that Nature is capable of unmeasurable, gratuitous wrath. Yet sometimes it seems we, as a species, think we are beyond these basic laws, or that we can engineer our way around them.We must strive to find that literacy which will help us understand and assume our position among the order of powers in the universe. Reverence is needed. Are we, as a whole, "on the edge of a cliff" as The Streets said? Who will continue to remind us of the miracle of our existence?

Here another gaze into deep history: