Through The Sandglass

Reports from the Solway Firth (2): Guest Writer and a Submerged Forest

 

My kind hosts for the Café Scientifique event were Ann Lackie and her husband, John. They had set up the group originally and are to be commended for their devotion and the enthusiasm of the community that they have established. Ann (and the adolescent dog, Meg) were my companions for that exhilarating morning walk on the beach; the storms had scoured the sand away from an extraordinary sight - the submerged forest of the post-glacial Solway Firth. Ann is, amongst her many talents, a writer (see the end of this post), and a few years ago, under her alter ego, Ann Lingard, she had published an article on the forest for Cumbria Life magazine. It is with great pleasure that I can re-publish that piece here.

“NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T”:

THE SOLWAY’S SUBMERGED FOREST

Ann Lingard

Leave your car at Beckfoot in the carpark amongst the dunes and walk down the track to the new wooden walkway onto the beach: stand there, on the pebbles, looking across the waters of the Firth towards the granite bulk of Criffel. If you are lucky, you may see low dark ‘cliffs’ on the shore, about 100 metres along your Criffel sight-line – a half-metre high, the patches of black are like shadows on the sharp edges of channels in the sand. Now walk down towards them, and the shadows resolve themselves into banks of peat. Poke them with your toe and feel how dense and sodden they are, smoothed by the friction of waves and sand. Walk on them and feel their sponginess. And gradually you’ll become aware that the dark organic mass is not only peat, but contains a horizontal tree-trunk, or even a stump that radiates roots. Wander around and you will find trunks and branches, single and entangled, embedded in the peat and sand; and erect stumps, 20-30 cms high, their tops flattened as though cut by a chainsaw. The wood is still fibrous, soft and dark; you can crumble it and tease it apart, as though it were any rotting log in a woodland. But the difference is that this woodland thrived about 8000 years ago.

However, the Solway’s tides and sands are capricious, and there will be many occasions when you go down to the shore and can find no sign of the ancient, submerged forest. One person I spoke to, who regularly surveys the Upper Solway’s shores, had never seen or even heard of the forest, and Brian Blake, whose excellent book The Solway Firth (published in 1955 and now, sadly, out of print) is illustrated by photographs taken by J. Allen Cash, notes that “Mr Cash went to Beckfoot ... the submerged forest was not visible and I regret to say the residents he inquired from had not even heard of it.” Fortunately for us, Val Corbett had no such problems as her beautiful pictures show.

Norman Hammond, of Solway Shark Watch, who also leads guided walks along the shore, told me that, “The best time to see the forests will link in with extreme high water springs and a few days with a severe gale-force blow from the North-West or better still the North-East. The North-East severe gale will move the south shore sand away on a massive scale and reveal  the forests - and usually a host of last war remains as well. It’s a case of dropping everything and getting down to the shore when conditions are okay.”

Well, I’m always happy to get down to the shore, even when conditions are not okay, and I have twice found the forest on Allonby Bay just South of the village, and once off North Lodge between Allonby and Dubmill Point. In the latter case, as at Beckfoot, there was no need to wait for the low Spring Tides – the forest was visible on the mid-shore, briefly exposed by the fierce northerly gales.

So how did a forest come to lie underneath the Firth? The obvious answer is “because the sea-level rose”, but of course the Solway has its own particular complicated version of events, which is explained beautifully simply at the Solway Discovery Centre at Silloth. The Centre is in the coverted red sandstone school, and the offices of the “Solway Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” are at one end of the building in the former Headmaster’s House. Brian Irving, Manager of the Solway AONB, designed the exhibition and is almost evangelical in his enthusiasm for everything to do with the Solway. Our discussion ranges from topic to topic, with frequent interruptions to ferret through books, and to check the maps of the coast and the channels and the other nature reserves that are pinned to the walls. We also go through to the Centre to look at the models that Brian has commissioned to explain the protracted contest between the sea and the land.

During the last Ice Age, one huge glacier swept south and east to the Tyne from Scotland, meeting another glacier that ground its way North and West from the ‘Lake District’; as these melted, a large lake of glacial meltwater formed in the area bounded by the Scottish lowlands, the Pennines and the Fells. Then, as the ice retreated, so the shores of the lake were gradually colonised by plants and animals. What went on here was a reflection of everything else that was going on at that time in Britain, Brian tells me. “There was a wave of plant colonisation spreading North, a ‘tundra front’ moving North, with dwarf plants – dwarf willow and dwarf birch. The standard ecological colonisation.” I think about the tundra vegetation that I saw in Greenland a couple of years ago - juniper, and low flattened willow, dwarf birch and blaeberry blazing red and orange in the autumn, clinging to the sparse soil that was only inches above the permafrost - and try to imagine it spreading across from Silloth to Whitehaven and Dumfries. A fitting link with the Greenland Pinkfeet geese that now migrate here in the Winter.

Here on the Solway, around 8000 years ago, the air and soil started to grow warmer, and wind-blown tree seeds were able to survive and germinate. According to Brian, a pine forest gradually spread across our landscape, obliterating the tundra vegetation and lasting for a couple of thousand years. Mammoth, bison, giant deer and sabre-toothed cat grazed or hunted amongst the trees and on the grassland. Perhaps the landscape looked like that around Victoria Bridge just South of Rannoch Moor, where remnants of the ancient Caledonian pine forest still hang on? The forest there is sparse, the remaining trees scattered thinly amongst the rock and heather and pale tough grass, and beneath them lies an older forest, its ancient and bleached trunks and branches exposed where the peat has been cut to make a ditch. The “Solway” pines, though, began to disappear about 7000 years ago, succeeded by deciduous oak and alder and hazel. This new forest was low and dense with a thick understorey, Brian says: “You’d have found it almost impossible to walk through.” But perhaps you would not have wanted to, in any case, because this was a time when wild pigs were common. The forest would have been full of bird-song, you might have caught sight of elk or deer grazing, or even the now-extinct Auroch, Bos primigenus, a large ‘wild cow’.

We think of geological change in terms of blocks of time: 9000 years BP, 7000 years BP. But of course the process of change is gradual, and during this period the glaciers, here and elsewhere on Earth, were continuing to melt and pour their waters into the sea. The sea-level rose gradually and inexorably. It crept higher on the southern shore of the huge forested “Solway” basin, and the salt water oozed amongst the trees. Salt crystals blocked the water-channels within the tree-trunks so that the branches died of dehydration. “It was like beaver damage,” according to Brian Irving. “The twigs then the branches die and fall off, and you’re left with the spikes of stumps sticking up in the water.” Once the sea had made an entry it washed in further and invaded the immense freshwater lake and so the Solway estuary was born and broadened, fed by rivers of glacial meltwater, and flushed twice daily by the tide. The forest was drowned beneath the Firth, and should have been destroyed and lost forever. In theory, we should not even know it had been there.

The glaciers were melting. Imagine those huge masses of ice and boulders, weighing down and compressing the land; as they retreat, the pressure on the underlying land is released and the land rebounds and rises. This is what happened in the Solway basin, twice. The sea flooded in and drowned the land, but the land then rose; the still-rising sea encroached again but yet again the land rose. The evidence is there in the two “raised beaches” – the road from Allonby to Mawbray runs along the “Twenty-five Foot” or “Neanderthal” raised beach. But even this story is probably too simple. Frank Mawby of English Nature told me, “There would have been little islands at high water, and some quite dramatic drops in sea-level too. If you look at the marshes today, you can see little bits of raised beach all over the place.” In some places growing trees would have been overwhelmed by peat rather than by the sea. And Dennis Dickins, who runs Cumbria Environmental and Geological Services at Watch Hill, stressed the fluctuating climate and conditions: “There’d be a wet period when the woodland would retreat, then this would be followed by advantageous conditions for a couple of hundred years, so you get the trees re-invading. There was constant change.”

As for the drowned forest, each time the land rebounded some of the forest was lifted too. And with regard to that wet period, never complain that “it always rains in Cumbria”! About 7000 years ago, in the Atlantic Period of the Holocene, the climate was especially wet, the hills were almost permanently hidden in cloud and the rain poured down, day after day. Plants struggled to survive in the water-logged ground. These were perfect conditions for sphagnum moss to grow and accumulate water like a sponge. Reeds flourished but most of the other vegetation died and decayed and became compressed to form peat; the peat spread, blanketing the valley floors and creeping up the hillsides, burying the remains of the forest. On the raised beaches, the peaty “raised mires” formed. Hundreds of years passed, the mires or “Mosses” dried out, sedges grew, the moorland was colonised by woodland carr, silver birch and heather. The drowned forest was hidden deep down beneath the layers of peat and vegetation.

Peat is cold, oxygen-depleted, acidic, a good preservative. It preserved the “bog bodies” of Lindow, Tollund and Grauballe Man. Lindow Man (actually, only his upper half) was discovered in a Cheshire bog in 1984 and was probably a victim of a ritual sacrifice by ancient Celts. He died a three-fold death, finally being cast face-down into a peat-bog on Lindow Moss, a symbolic drowning. The two Danish peat-cutters who found Tollund Man in 1950 thought they had found the victim of a recent murder, his face was so “fresh” and well-preserved. This is characteristic of bog-bodies, their skin is “tanned” (a chemical process similar to turning hide into leather) and their internal organs and skeletal framework are thus often remarkably intact. Grauballe Man was found in a Danish bog in 1952, and is 2000 years old. Recently his body was analysed using computerised tomography (CT) scanning, a non-destructive technique by which X-rays generate 3D images. The computer is programmed to recognise different tissues according to their different densities in living patients, so it was a surprise to the researchers to find that the density corresponding to “skeleton” was absent from Grauballe man. The acidity of the peat had dissolved the calcium in the bones and tooth enamel, and the demineralised skeleton was more like rubber than bone. Even more surprising was the discovery that Grauballe Man had undergone some posthumous cosmetic surgery: his chubby cheeks had been padded out with plasticine by the museum’s curators in the 1950s!

Are there “bog bodies” buried in the Solway peats? Who knows? There were certainly humans living here 2000 years ago, but it is unlikely that humans hunted amongst the forests a few thousand years earlier. When I asked Frank if there were any “bog bodies” in the Mosses, he laughed and said, “No. But there was a cow found in Solway Moss!” Unfortunately it wasn't accompanied by any ”bog butter”, the 2000-year-old parcels of butter and lard, packed in wooden boxes or animal skins, that have been found buried in Scottish and Irish bogs. (There is a very interesting story of the "soap woman", whose fatty tissues were converted after death  ... but no, that takes us too far from the Solway.)

Returning to the Solway, Brian Irving told me that very little biological research has been carried out on the submerged forest. “The conditions were acidic so you wouldn’t get survival of calcareous shells, so there’s no evidence of land snails. Our information is based on things which survive the acidity – mainly plant remnants, pollen ...” Apparently an attempt was made about 25 years ago to radiocarbon-date a fragment of wood from the forest that lies just South of St Bees’, but I have been told there was some problem with the sampling technique; “8000 years old” is the date that’s quoted.

And I cannot pin down whether the submerged forest was oak or pine. Dennis Dickins thinks it was oak. Brian Irving thinks it was pine. Brian Blake writes in his book that “I was told that from some of the remains, and the prone trees are more than stumps, hazelnuts sometimes are found.” When I put the question to Frank Mawby, he said at once, “Oh – probably birch!” and then added, “I brought up a hazelnut once from seven metres of peat on Wedholme Flow.” And at Wedholme he has found a layer of marine sediment overlying the peat, further evidence of that dance between the sea and the land. I’m really surprised that opinion is so divided about the trees. Would there be any DNA remaining in preserved cells deep within the wood that would make the identification possible, or would it be too fragmented? Tollund Man’s brain is apparently sufficiently well-preserved, after 2500 years, to allow extraction of genetic material.

A couple of weeks after finding the Beckfoot forest, I went down to the shore again. It was during the final weekend of February, when the Gaels and Celts were struggling through blizzards but Cumbrians were enjoying clear blue days and views of snow-dusted Fells. The Silly Bitch (our “failed” working-dog, the border collie) was, as usual, running her clockwise circles on the sand as we walked towards Dubmill, and a group of seals had apparently gathered for a meeting on the shore; except that the circle of bodies, heads raised, had been carved from banks of peat that had been tilted and tumbled together in a hollow, about 5-6 metres below the level of the road. Pieces of branch or root were exposed at the edges of the blocks and I was thrilled to find a football-sized lump of green slippery clay lay nearby – presumably the boulder clay above which the trees had grown, torn up from deep beneath the peat – but, as usual, there was nobody nearby with whom to share this exciting find! There was no way to tell whether the trees had been drowned by sea or by peat all those thousands of years ago, but now the whole thick organic mass had been finally overwhelmed by the Solway tides. The forest floor on which the Silly Bitch and I were standing extended inland, a layer of trees preserved deep beneath the fields and dunes and mire. Next time we go back to Allonby, the remains may have been buried yet again, beneath the sand and gravel on the shore.

And incidentally, there is a bank of peat and wood on the Beckfoot shore that is riddled with tunnels from which the white shells of long-dead piddocks protrude. Piddocks are bivalve molluscs that normally burrow in rock; “ship-worms” are the bivalves that are supposed to burrow in wood. What on earth has been going on? The Solway’s submerged forests are certainly full of mysteries.

 

[Solway AONB is based at the Discovery Centre, Silloth, where there is an excellent exhibition about the area’s geology, history and wildlife; the centre also runs guided walks along the shore. Tel: 016973 33055 www.solwaycoastaonb.org.uk]

Ann is the author of several novels, the most recent of which is The Embalmer's Book of Recipes - I enjoyed it enormously and thoroughly recommend it. I posted a brief review on the Goodreads site:

 
I was surprised - read because I know the author, and a book that I would not necessarily select off a book store shelf. But I found it compelling, fascinating - and informative, not to mention beautifully written. A story of three very different women, set in the English Lake District farming and academic communities, Lingard weaves a seemingly unlikely tale of relationships, handicaps (physical and emotional), aspirations, agricultural challenge, and the arcane history of embalming and eugenics, into a haunting narrative. Humorous and human, full of insights - a thoroughly engaging read.

Visit Ann's website at http://www.annlingard.com/

Commercial break - Meet the Author

Once again I shall cast all modesty aside and insert a bit of advertising. Meet the Author is a great idea - writers record very short podcasts talking about their books; this is available on the net both in the US and the UK. I have to admit that I only became aware of it recently when I was asked to do one, but I now root around the site to see and listen to people whose books I have enjoyed - or wonder whether I might enjoy. So, if you are twiddling your thumbs and at a complete loss for something to do for three minutes, go to http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1888.html

And while I'm on the trumpet-blowing podium (the trumpet being an instrument that in reality I did, and occasionally still do, play), I just discovered that the North American edition of the book received the Honorable Mention in the Nature and Environment category of the National Outdoor Book Awards, for which I'm flattered and very gratified.

Manchester Science Festival

Next monday, the 26th, I'll be giving a talk at the Manchester Science Festival (Manchester UK, that is). A year or so ago, on British TV, there was a series of programmes with titles such as "Ten things you didn't know about volcanoes," "Ten things you didn't know about earthquakes," and so on. It seemed to me that not only were these titles rather patronising to the viewer, but that the programmes, although entertaining, failed to convey the excitement of science. After all, what keeps scientists enthusiastic, and what keeps science going, is what WE don't know. And there's an awful lot in that category.

So I decided to talk about how even an apparently humble material has its mysteries, and illustrates a variety of areas of scientific enquiry. The talk is, of course, intended to entertain, and so I'll be stirring the occasional frivolity and magic trick into the mix, but think about it: granular physics, coastal and desert dynamics, meanders, meiofauna, Mars, Titan...... My challenge (as always) is what to leave out. The talk will be at Blackwells bookshop, 6.30 pm. And Jan Zalasiewicz, whose provocative book, The Earth After Us I've written about earlier, will be talking on tuesday evening. 

Stories in Stone - the Virtual Book Tour continues

 

A virtual conversation with David Williams, author of Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology

Since Through the Sandglass is one of David’s last stops on his whirlwind virtual book tour, Michael decided that it would make a change to have the questions presented by not by another geologist but by that elusive creature, “the interested general reader,” in this case MW’s wife.

Given that my inclinations are toward the literary rather than the scientific, a natural focus for my questions will be Chapter 3, “Poetry in Stone—Carmel Granite.” I can assure the geoblogosphere, though, that there’s a sturdy underpinning of hard geology, the “bones of the old mother” (Robinson Jeffers, quoted on p. 48), in this chapter, too.

Here goes.

I can see now that Robinson Jeffers could clearly be considered the patron poet of geologists, inspired by granite to create his legacy in both words and stone. Which drew you to him first, his poetry or Tor House and Hawk Tower?

The buildings came first; I have to admit I know little about poetry. My wife and I have regularly visited Carmel to see her grandparents and during one we saw Tor House and Hawk Tower. We later took a tour and I became completely captivated by the structures and how they seem to grow out of the land. My passion for them only grew more as I read Jeffers’ poetry and discovered his brilliance, particularly in his evocation of place. As I wrote, one can learn so much about the plants, animals, and geology of the Carmel region that it is almost as if he has written a field guide. One of my favorite lines of his geologic poetry is “Cataracts of rock/Rain down the mountain from cliff to cliff and torment the stream-bed.” The idea of water tormenting its own stream bed is perfect.

“My fingers had the art to make stone love stone” (Robinson Jeffers, p. 48). Are you familiar with the work of the New England dry stone craftsman (his modest word—I’d say genius) Dan Snow? Hawk Tower and Tor House may be mortared, but their deliberately rough exteriors evoke the elemental quality of Snow’s creations (which, sadly, I’ve only seen via DVD and photographs). He writes, in his book Listening to Stone, “The thinking that goes along with the placement of each stone incrementally adds to what is, ultimately, the wall conceptualized. The stones provoke the thoughts and the thoughts give birth to the form. A finished construction is a thought process petrified. Within a wall are all the moments that created it. They remain there like hidden messages slipped between the stones as they were placed. The finished wall’s character is defined by the spaces between the stones as much as it is by the stones themselves.” Your thoughts on spaces? And on anything else Snow says here as it relates to Jeffers?

I think that what both men show and say is that there is an essence to stone that directs their work. They cannot build or work with rock without considering the textures, colors, and shapes. And because they are working by hand, slowly and considerately, they are able to create an organic whole out of the individual stones they choose.

In regard to spaces, I cannot say anything more eloquent than Snow but I would like to comment on mortar. One aspect of Jeffers’ rock work I like is that you can still see his fingerprints in the mortar, what I called “trace fossils of a man and his passion.” They remind me of seeing the fingerprints in the ancient dwellings of the American Southwest or from a geologic point of view, seeing tracks or storm traces in sediments; they are single moments of time recorded and preserved. To me they are a way of connecting the human time scale and the geologic time scale.

I really like the way you allow other authorities and storytellers to speak in your book. Chapter 3, for example, features two geologists, Aaron Yoshinobu and Dave Barbeau. There must be some interesting back stories to at least a few of the friendships you struck up in the course of writing . . . .

One of the great pleasures of writing this book was my interaction with the experts. So many people went out of their way to help me whether it was driving half way across Italy, opening up a closed quarry, reading chapters, or ferreting out manuscripts.

As I noted in the text, one of the people who went far beyond anything I expected was Ruby Wilde, who grew up in Lamar, Colorado, the home of the petrified wood gas station I write about. I forget how we connected but over a period of several months we exchanged numerous emails and calls. She even drove several hours from her home back to Lamar and spent hours combing through newspapers, talking to old friends, and searching official records. I think she became more obsessed with the station than I did. When she came to Seattle on visit we had a great discussion over beer.

Another person was Bob Thrasher, who had worked the Indiana mills in the 1950s. A great raconteur, he invited me into his home and regaled me with stories of the old days. He was clearly proud of the work he had done.

You mention that friends sent Jeffers rocks from all over the world to use in Carmel and that he returned the favor by taking specimens of his local granite to Ireland “to keep the balance of the world.” Thinking of the minerals and sand samples around our flat, I have to wonder about rocks chez Williams. Could you share some photos of your collection?

Of course, like any good geologist, I have a collection of rocks, most of which I found but a few exotics, such as ones from Antarctica, Africa, and the bottom of the Beaufort Sea, that friends sent. I also acquired rocks for each chapter I worked on. I even have a chunk of Carrara marble that used to be on the Amoco Building. I was always worried when traveling that the rocks would be confiscated at airports, particularly my chunk of Morton Gneiss, which has incredibly sharp edges.

Here are two shots of the rocks on my shelves. There’s rocks from New Zealand (from what became Mt. Doom in Lord of The Rings), Siberia, Mount St. Helens, the Devils’s Hole Pegmatite in Colorado, and Morocco. My wife and I also have a rock walkway and several areas lined with rock we have collected.

I was impressed by your responses to the photographs you were presented with on the Daily Dose of Architecture blog. Comments on Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, please?

Thanks. I had fun answering those questions. The Beinecke is a very cool building. I have been lucky enough to visit it. For those who don’t know, the walls are basically “windows,” but not ones made of glass. Each window is a 1.25-inch-thick marble panel, which allows filtered light to enter the library. This prevents any direct sunlight from hitting the rare books and manuscripts. From a less practical standpoint, the use of marble windows connects the building with the old books it houses; because the light within changes throughout the day, working in the Beinecke sort of feels like working in pre-electrical times, when one relied on natural light. As you hold a book from 1700s, it is easier to put yourself in the position of one reading that book when it was written.

At the end of Chapter 3, you write, “Tor House and Hawk Tower are the only structures [Robinson Jeffers] could have built for the site. How could I not love those buildings?” What other structures (with or without a ghost, “a dark one, deep in the granite” (RJ, p. 67)) have made you feel the same way?

I instantly liked the petrified wood gas station in Lamar. At sunset it looks like a little castle. You can see how each piece was chosen and placed precisely, what Dan Snow calls a petrified thought process. The travertine of the Getty enthralled me [image at the head of this post]. I specifically wrote “travertine of” because it is the stone I liked more than the buildings themselves. Another special building for me was the one in Brooklyn that had been restored with brownstone and not with  stucco. It was true to geologic essence and true to the historic  ways that people used brownstone.

 And finally, since this is after all Through the Sandglass, do you have any observations on matters arenaceous that you’d like to pass on?

Yes, as I wrote in chapter one, this book began with sand, when I “eroded” some from the brownstone base of Harvard Hall on the Harvard campus. As that sand rested in my hand I made the realization that the brownstone I had been seeing in my wanderings in Boston was the same material, a slightly rusted sandstone, that I had been living in and around in southeastern Utah. Brownstone and red rock are two names for the same species of rock. And it was out of this realization that I found stories of natural history that could sustain me in Boston away from the desert I had lived in for the past nine years. These stories provided the seed for my book.

[Many thanks to David and my wife, Carol, for this contribution to what has been a really interesting idea - a virtual book tour. I've already posted some comments on David's engrossing book, but I want to make sure that you visit his blog at http://stories-in-stone.blogspot.com/, where you'll find other reviews and events on the tour. All photos courtesy of David Williams, except for the Dan Snow book cover and the Beinecke Library, the latter from their website]

Intercalations and a virtual book tour

 

I've just finished reading David Williams' recently published book, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, a title following on from David's eponymous blog and website. It's a great read that satisfies the two primary criteria for non-fiction: informative and entertaining, and there will be more on the book later (see below). As I was reading it, I was struck by the echoes and relationships with my own book, and the archaic word intercalations for some reason struck me as appropriate. It's not archaic in the sense of being no longer in use, but its appearances tend to be rare and rarified - including in geology. I remember standing in front of outcrops and scribbling in my field notebook "blocky sandstones, 10-15 cms, occasional thin shale/siltstone intercalations." I could, in reality, just as well have written "interbeds," since all I was describing was regularly alternating layers of sandstone and shale; but "intercalations" lent gravitas to the description. It's an interesting word - the "inter" part is obvious, but it surprised me to discover that the "calation" is from the same Latin origin as "calendar," and, in turn, "call." The Latin verb intercalare meant to proclaim, and reflects the calling in of accounts on the first day of the month - calends - to be recorded in the calendar, or account book. Amongst other applications, the word has come to be used for inserting extra days into the calendar, as in "February has an intercalary day every four years." Various scientific disciplines have appropriated the word "intercalate" as an alternative for the more prosaic "insert" or "interleave" - molecules can be intercalated with each other, as can various biological items.

So, as I was reading David's book, the image came to me of the connections between Stories in Stone and Sand as interwoven, interleaved, intercalated. It's interesting to me that both of us regard story as critical, and David weaves fascinating stories around the variety of building stones that he has chosen (surely a difficult culling task). But furthermore, I suppose in part because I am attuned to any occurrence of the word "sand" - an obsession which, literally, is satisfied on a daily basis by even a cursory scan of the media, - I was conscious of the recurring role of sand in David's stories. Not just the obvious ones of sandstone as building material - the Brownstones of New York (which featured also in my book) - but in the sense that even the great limestone and marble building stones (including the Carrara), began life as sand banks of biogenic materials and ooliths in balmy tropical seas, that it's intercalated layers of storm-deposited sand that made the extraction of blocks of Florida's coquina stone easier, that, from ancient Egyptian to relatively recent times, sand has provided the abrasive for cutting even the toughest building stones, and that sand can be an unwelcome intruder, a spoiler of the finest quality slate. Geological tales - the discovery of dinosaur footprints by Pliny Moody in the Massachusetts sandstone that told the story of separating continents, James Hutton's revolutionary insights at Siccar Point - feature in both books: it just seems that there are some episodes, some stories, that provide unparalleled access to our understanding of our planet.

The stone stories of David's book will be further explored over the next few weeks by virtue of a blogging innovation - a virtual book tour. The schedule of events is listed at http://stories-in-stone.blogspot.com/2009/08/virtual-book-tour-of-stories-in-stone.html, starting with Brian and Clastic Detritus - http://clasticdetritus.com/2009/08/14/friday-field-foto-89-triassic-sandstones-in-brooklyn-ny/. I am very much looking forward to David's visit to Through the Sandglass at the end of this month.  

[California turbidites used in the image at the head of this blog courtesy Earth Science World Image Bank http://www.earthscienceworld.org/images, Copyright © Marli Miller, University of Oregon]

Fleeting Fame: "Sand" on "Fast Draw"

Amazon sales rankings are somewhat like Fermat's Last Theorem - what they're saying makes apparent sense, but discerning how they work is seemingly impossible. Nevertheless, the fact is that they are routinely (obsessively?) scrutinised by writers - and that includes me. At least, I tell myself, the relative movements of the ranking are indicative of something, even if they contain no absolute information. Earlier this year, Sand attained a heady rank in the 5000s of total book sales, an achievement that gave me some pleasure since I felt I could visualise a wall of shelves with 5000 books on them and, on the bottom shelf on the right, Sand. But most of the time the book inhabits the five-figure ranks, periodically wallowing in the quicksand of six figures.

And then, on August 2, I was startled by a strangled cry from my wife on the computer downstairs - I rushed down, desperately trying to focus poorly formed recollections of how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver (or Manoeuvre - I couldn't even remember how to spell it), to find her transfixed, pointing with a shaking finger at the monitor. My Amazon ranking was 572! No, that's not a typo, I was rubbing spines with the stars - well, not, of course, the Harry Potters, but a shelf of five hundred or so books is simply a small section in a chain bookstore. The book was number one in various "natural resources" and geology categories.

This was a complete mystery - what could it mean? Had Amazon been attacked, had their famous software finally gone haywire? Or (my fondest aspiration) had some far-sighted educational institution seen the value of Sand as a text for a "rocks for jocks" or "Environmental Studies 101" course? The publishers at the University of California Press were equally bemused - pleased but bemused.

Now I know what happened. Some time ago, I'd been contacted by Josh Landis. Together with Mitch Butler, he is co-creator of CBS News’ "The Fast Draw," an animated news series appearing on a number of CBS News broadcasts, including CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and CBS News Sunday Morning. He had told me that they were preparing a short segment (all of their pieces are just a few minutes in length) on sand - he wasn't sure when it would be broadcast. Having heard no more, I had forgotten about it, but we've now discovered that it went out on yes, August 2, and included a reference to the book. Wow. Of course, I have no idea whatsoever how many actual books were sold as a result, but it must have been this that caused the uplift, the orogeny, in the Amazon numbers. The Fast Draw segment, titled "Lessons of Sand" can be viewed online here - it's entertaining and only three minutes long.

The Amazon ranking as I write this? 21,239. The UK Oxford University Press edition is officially published on Thursday. It has a slightly different title - but that's another story. Amazon UK ranking? 109,085 - but my fingers are crossed.

A different "beginning" - and a short, off-piste, rant

Sir Laurence Dudley Stamp (my previous post) must be turning in his grave. It's ironic that, shortly after my modest proposal on the inspirational potential of a book for young scientists, I came across a different kind of inspiration - and this book, sadly, is definitely in print. You would think that a browse of Amazon's list of bestsellers in the category Professional Sciences - Earth Science - Geology might be the place to discover some gems of geo-writing, suitable for inspiring young minds. And, even allowing for the mysteries and opacity of Amazon's ranking system, it is. But, high up there in the company of John McPhee, Steve Gould, Richard Fortey, and Simon Winchester is, incredibly, the book illustrated above, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, now in its eighth glorious edition. Walt Brown, Ph.D (in mechanical engineering) is the father of "hydroplate theory" - a lunatic explanation for everything, the main proposal being that monumental volumes of water erupted out of "the mid-ocean ridge" to form the earth as we know it today. And this happened - you've guessed - 6,000 years ago. Here's a graphic illustration of this event:

 

 New evidence shows that the earth has experienced a devastating, worldwide flood, whose waters violently burst forth from under the earth’s crust. Standard “textbook” explanations for many of earth’s major features are scientifically flawed. We can now explain, using well-understood phenomena, how this cataclysmic event rapidly formed so many features. These and other mysteries, listed below and briefly described in the next 11 pages, are best explained by an earthshaking event, far more catastrophic than almost anyone has imagined......

And here's the introduction to one chapter:

The Origin of Ocean Trenches and the Ring of Fire

SUMMARY: Deep folds, up to thousands of miles long and several miles deep, lie on the floor of the western Pacific Ocean, in an area centered directly opposite the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The plate tectonic theory claims that plates drifting on the earth’s surface dive into the earth and drag down the folds. Fifteen reasons will be given that show why this idea cannot be correct.

Now this is unfortunate, since supporters, wanting to have their cake and eat it , have latched on to recent reports in the scientific literature that de-watering of subducted material leads to large volumes of hydrated mantle to interpret this as evidence of subterranean oceans and thus proving hydroplate theory; they are clearly unaware of what hydrated minerals are - there is, after all, a lot of water in gypsum, but gypsum sure as hell (oops) is not water. 

There are, of course, many well-considered detailed refutations on the web of hydroplate theory - let's face it, it's not tough. I will simply leave this by saying that I have no objection to anyone self-publishing complete rubbish, but this stuff should never be listed under "science" of any kind unless it's a subcategory titled "fantasy." I'll leave you, without comment, with the words of one "editorial review" of this fine book, and I promise to return calmly to my usual theme in the next post.

The single most useful resource I know of on origins, bar none .... If I had to send my child off with only two books, they would be the Bible and In the Beginning. (Dr. Kent Davey, Senior Research Scientist, The Center for Electromechanics, University of Texas).

[p.s., the subtitle of this post derives from my wife's habit of going on a random walk in a supermarket - she describes herself as going "off-piste" and her husband as becoming "piste-off"]

Inspiration - the beginnings of a geologist

 

The question asked for this month's Accretionary Wedge collection resonated immediately with me. A while ago I wrote a short piece for Geoscientist, the magazine of the Geological Society here in London, reflecting on my own beginnings and seeking ideas on ways in which potential young geologists of today might be inspired. And recently I have been thinking about reworking the piece for Through the Sandglass, so this month's blogfest has prompted me into action.

What was the origin of our enthusiasm, what inspired our curiosity – what “turned us on”? These are probably not questions that we often ask ourselves, and it was only in some moments of retrospection during the writing of my book that any real focus came into my mind. I was in some ways lucky - after the usual young male aspirations of fighter pilot and then architect, I settled on geology early on; but then I thought that my luck had run out, for I was informed that to be a geologist required skills in physics, chemistry, and maths - at the time my three worst subjects at school. Then I got lucky again .... but I'm jumping the gun here.

My early interest was aroused through family holidays, particularly in the southwest of England – Cheddar Gorge (our Grand Canyon in a kid's eyes), the beach at Charmouth (now part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site), recently flood-devastated Lynmouth and the thrill of the venerable but valiant family car attempting the daunting gradient of Porlock Hill (my father all the while declaring that “it’s better to travel hopefully than arrive”). Such adventures offered treasured opportunities for satisfying a child’s love of finding things and (prevailing on indulgent parents) collecting stuff. And boy did I collect stuff - my father always enjoyed recounting how a heavy box, shipped back from holiday, was lugged to our front door by the mailman (or postman) who asked, indignantly, "Wot you got in 'ere, then, rocks?" The affirmative reply was greeted with a look that clearly defined us as demented. And then, perhaps in the hope of imposing some focus and coherence on my collecting activities, I acquired some geology books. British readers will remember the Observers series, pocket-sized answers to everything that could be observed and the one on geology became a treasure. There were others - one titled Pebbles on the Beach, which I thought was fascinating (I appreciate now that it was a sort of introduction to sediment provenance) but seems to have sunk without trace; another was by H.H. Swinnerton, Professor of Geology at the university in the town where I was born and began growing up, Nottingham. Swinnerton's book was Solving Earth's Mysteries, or, Geology for Girls and Boys, and the pictures were fantastic - I still get strange flashbacks flipping through it today.

But there was one book in particular that I now appreciate was the book, the one that was truly inspirational and turned me on to geology, and my copy, “slightly foxed” through my devoted attentions, has now regained its place on my bookshelves. The book was by L. Dudley Stamp (Sir Laurence as he was to become), an economic geographer at the London School of Economics, who strode the fertile lands between geography and geology for much of the twentieth century. Among his many achievements, he commandeered schoolchildren and vicars across the country to compile the first comprehensive land use survey of the country, which allowed crucial agricultural and urban planning during the Second World War that otherwise would not have been possible.

Probably the best-known of Stamp's books is Britain’s Structure and Scenery, but for me the true treasure, the book which I now appreciate fired my fascination with geology, was The Earth’s Crust—A New Approach to Physical Geography and Geology. Published in 1951, it was called “a new approach” because Stamp commissioned huge, detailed models of different landscapes—and what lies beneath them—to be made in exquisite detail by Tom Bayley, a lecturer in sculpture, and photographed in colour for the book.

For me, this was magic. I was captivated by the illustrations, several of which I've reproduced here. I scrutinised the models in detail and even tried, messily, to make some myself. They opened my eyes to how landscapes and their foundations worked, I could look around me on those summer holidays with a different understanding—I could visualise things. And, best of all, some of the models depicted change: for example, the appearance of a glaciated valley when it was still filled with ice and after it had melted (good for Welsh or Scottish holidays!). My curiosity about the world around me was aroused. I was alerted to geology.

The book is, sadly, long out of print and difficult to find, but for me, to open it up today is a deeply evocative and sentimental experience.

After my piece came out in the Geoscientist, the theme was continued by Jon Noad, who began with the following:

Michael Welland recently described how a treasured geological book "fired his fascination" with geology. I too had such a book (The Age of Reptiles by Zallinger), but of even greater significance were those people who fostered my love of geology.

And, of course, he's right - people are potentially more important than any book in firing up young minds. But to find the right people is arguably a matter of good fortune - which is where my getting lucky again comes in. My battle for comprehension, never mind mastery, of maths and the sciences, would have been inevitably lost had it not been for one teacher in high school - he performed miracles. And yes, there were many other people who were key to my evolution into a geologist. But I guess that my point is that every kid deserves that lucky break where the right person shows up in his or her life to inspire them - but until that happens, there are other things that can be done if we learn from our own experiences - and books like The Earth's Crust have an intangible, academically unconventional, something that we might learn from.

The Urban Stratum

The Urban Stratum is the provocative stratigraphic name that Jan Zalasiewicz gives to our remains in The Earth After Us - What legacy will humans leave in the rocks? Perhaps reflecting the current global issues that cause us to contemplate our mortality and vulnerability as a species, there are several books around (Year Million, The World Without Us) that focus on the post-human earth. However, this one is written by a geologist, a paleontologist and stratigrapher, and it perhaps addresses the question I raised in the earlier post on science writing by professional geologists (December 29). His perspective is from 100 million years hence - without doubt long post-human. The structure is from the point of view of future geologists/archeologists/anthropologists - re-evolved editions of ourselves or alien, it doesn't matter - attempting to discern and reconstruct the nature of the species which dominated the planet for a brief time in the distant past. Along the way, there is a highly readable narrative of the methodologies and the trials and tribulations of stratigraphy and paleontology.

To geologists, the fact that this account is a humbling one will come as no surprise, but the poverty of our legacy, thoroughly thought through and documented in the book, is, nevertheless, exactly that. While, in this year of Darwin festivities, the imagery of the "tree of life" is under profound revision, our view of our superiority and dominance at the head of that tree is enduring, the arrogance of our species seemingly in-built (if cockroaches were to construct their tree of life, guess who would be perched at the top). Zalasiewicz cleverly examines our understanding of life 100 million years in the past - and its many limitations - to shed light on how thin, paltry, discontinuous and incomplete the "Urban Stratum" will be. Even if we assume, heroically, that our species will accomplish more than few thousand years on the planet, how thick will the stratum representing that period be in the stratigraphic section of 100 million years hence?

Essentially none of our infrastructure, creations, and artifacts will survive 100 million years of erosion, burial, diagenesis, and tectonics in their original compositional and structural form, and we ourselves, inhabiting the erosional land rather than the depositional marine realms are poor fossil candidates - think of the extent (or lack of it) of the record of our ancestors in the African Rift Valleys. And, given that the final circumstances of personkind may well have led to the mass evacuation of cities, there will be relatively few of us potentially preserved in the arguably more durable cellars, basements, and subways of today's subsurface levels. And direct evidence of our social structures, our thinking, our arts will be entirely lacking - what, after all, do we really know of the daily life of a dinosaur family? Furthermore, as Zalasiewicz points out, while we may regard the mighty dinosaurs as icons of the Jurassic, there was much more to life at that time and perhaps the future investigators will take a similar view: "They may well regard the myriad tiny invertebrates, or the bacteria of the world as much more important to that (in planetary terms) rare phenomenon, a stable, functional, complex ecosystem. ... Take away humans, and the present world would also function quite happily ... Take away worms and insects, and things would start seriously to fall apart. Take away bacteria and their yet more ancient cousins, the archaea, and the viruses too, and the world would die." 

Zalasiewicz entertainingly explores the idea that trace fossils, the evidence of creatures' activities rather than the creatures themselves, will be potentially preservable and informative. The remains of an interstate highway might be fragmented and discontinuous in a future outcrop, but they will have stories to tell. And, an intriguing idea: perhaps the most durable trace fossils will be the thousands of deep oil and gas wells, lined with corrosion-resistant steel and penetrating deep into the geology - equivalents of fodinichnia or domichnia? Trace fossils fall into various classifications, depending on whether they represent tracks, burrows, feeding paths and so on, but all reflect the Greek for a track or a trail, ikhnos. Zalasiewicz proposes a new class: frivolichnia, pleasure traces of movie theatres, baseball diamonds and cricket grounds, museums, libraries, all of which might be completely inexplicable to our future investigators. Given that this blog is primarily about sandy topics, what might be made of the traces of a golf course? Strange, isolated bodies of sand distributed unnaturally in a soil horizon. And I must point out, as the book does, that, while much of our concrete will physically and chemically disintegrate over a hundred million years, the quartz sand grains will endure - because quartz sand grains, more often than not, do.

Overall, it's a great, beautifully written and thought-provoking book, but, while each chapter is introduced by a fragment from the reports of our future investigators, I found myself wishing that it had concluded with an outright foray into science fiction - a longer selection from those journals, illustrating the challenges and pitfalls involved in the reconstruction of things long gone. What if, for example, the most likely survivors of our artistic efforts would be stone statues (made, as they are, from already long-lasting geological materials)? What if, as a result of differential preservation and the general serendipity of discovery, rather than an idealized human form from classical Greece, our future investigators excavated one of the figures below? How would this influence their other interpretations? Or what if they unearthed a Henry Moore or Salvador Dali statue?

 

Now that we are firmly in the realm of science fiction, here's another thought experiment, an opportunity for geological speculation. Plate tectonics will grind to a halt, probably not in the next hundred million years, but eventually. The earth's engine will seize up, for any number of reasons. Internal radioactive heating will diminish, thickening and immobilising the lithosphere. Or, changes to the atmosphere and the sun's thermal activity will drive off all water from the planet and the lubrication of plate tectonics will be gone. Or, plate tectonics may cause its own demise, adding sufficient new continental crust that, eventually, there will be no more room for manoeuvre. Or, as Ray Siever pointed out in his book on sand, atmospheric toxicity will kill off land plants, the continents will be rapidly eroded, the oceans will fill up with sand and ..... Or, any conspiracy of the above.

So, here's the question, given that our appreciation of plate tectonic processes was a long time coming, difficult, and highly controversial even while their work was going on all around us, in a post plate tectonics world, how would we discern that those processes had ever happened? What would be the evidence revealed to and by geologists of the future that plate motions and plate margin dynamics had sculpted the appearance of our planet? Something to think about as we gaze more closely at other planets?

[images of the Venus of Willendorf and the Easter Island Moais reproduced under creative commons license, thanks to  Matthias Kabel and Paweł Drozd. Ray Siever's Sand, published by the Scientific American Library in 1988, is unfortunately no longer in print. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth is another good read on this entertaining topic.]

Science writing - continued

Having mentioned John  McPhee and Eldridge Moores in my previous post, here they are, thanks to Callan Bentley, talking at UC Davis. Great stuff - and McPhee reading from Annals of the Former World is wonderful.

http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/12/john-mcphee-interview-on-youtube.html