Another Good Writer In The Geology Blogosphere

Dana Hunter is good, but we have another writer in the geoblogosphere:

On a corner in the road, at the entrance to the small village of Churchill in the English Cotswold Hills, is a small monument that seems out of place in its sleepy, pastoral surroundings. It is made from a rough-hewn, locally quarried limestone, which succumbs to the gentle Oxfordshire climate by a modest growth of encrustations of lichen and moss. Turning the corner, one sees an impressive gothic church set within a neat low stone wall, with its steeples reaching skywards, in perfect architectural proportions to itself, but oversized relative to the settlement that it serves, as if history had abandoned it, consigned it as a picturesque relic. There must be many stories to be told about this small village. Only one of them is that an inconspicuous child was born here of a blacksmith father in 1769. His name was William Smith; he is known as the ‘Father of English Geology’ and he drew the ‘Map that Changed the World’[1].

That was Prof. Philip Allen who writes Earth-Literally blog. He comments on a meeting he recently attended on the theme of Strata and Time and where the discussions ranged from stratigraphic completeness to cyclicity to sediment budget and fluxes..

 Enjoyable and educational.

The Ganges Delta And The Hungry Tide

Amitav Ghosh is his book The Hungry Tide  evocatively describes the Ganges -Brahmaputra delta, the place where these mighty rivers change form as in from a one major active meandering channel into many entangled entities:

In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga's descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed here torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in a certain way: as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water, unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to the tale becomes apparent only in the final stages of the river's journey - and this part of the story always comes as a surprise, because it is never told and thus never imagined. It is this : there is a point at which the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva's matted hair is washed apart into a vast  knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds, maybe thousands of tangled strands.

Until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago, stretching for almost three hundred kilometers, from the Hoogly River in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh. 

The islands are the trailing threads of India's fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the achol that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands; some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers channels are spread across the land like a fine mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable.

The delta and its front end - the sediment fan -  that is present below sea level in the Bay of Bengal is essentially made up of Himalayan sediment worn down by the many rivers and redeposited in the Bay. A pile of sediment more than 10 km thick have accumulated since the early Cenozoic.  Image below shows the Ganges Brahmaputra delta and the region called the Sunderbans named for the mangrove forests that grow on the thousands of sandbars and islands.

Imagining The Atlantic Ocean

A passage from Simon Winchester's - Atlantic: A Vast Ocean Of A Million Stories

The Atlantic is in most places not at all like the Pacific or the Indian oceans - it is not dominated by the color blue, nor is it overwhelmingly fringed with leaning palm trees and coral reefs. It is a grey and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind's eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down  through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing though the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power, and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution and fear. 

The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings, an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below. It is also an entity that seems to be somehow interminable. Year in and year out, night and day, warm and cold, century after century, the ocean is always there, an eternal presence in the collective minds of those who live beside it.

As with many of his other books there is a lot of geology in this one too, but it is evocative passages like these that I enjoy the most.

Darwin On Earthquakes

Just a follow up to my previous post on Darwin's observations of the Chilean earthquake.

I came across this passage from the Voyage of the Beagle:

A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid;—one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.

His prose occasionally leaves a feeling of Victorian tediousness to modern readers but this is beautifully expressed. He scores high on the poignancy scale.

Geopoetry Over At The Yucca Mountain

Yucca mountain, Nevada - the plan to use it as a long term storage of America's nuclear waste has been indefinitely nixed. Creative writing professor John D'Agata has written a book about it called About a Mountain and he reads a passage from it on Talk Of The Nation:

Beyond the trees, the haze of heat listed over desert. Fifty wavy miles, then highway strip, then miles. Then black encrusted ridges bumping silently from earth. So, Josh said, what do you think? Of what, I asked? Of Yucca, he said. Where? Straight ahead. Where? That low range. Really, I asked?

Yucca Mountain isn't pretty. And it also isn't large. From far away, the mountains just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth. The Shoshone say that Yucca is the carcass of a snake, a giant desert creature that was trying to find a drink collapsed there in exhaustion, rotted as it died. Better a cruel truth, Edward Abbey once wrote, than a comfortable delusion.

So we climbed the mountain higher and the spruce begin to wither and the bristlecones to gather, and the pitch of trail sharpened, and the edge of ridge straightened, and the soil whisked off limestone sheets and loosened them to shingles. Joshua pulled my mother quickly in front of him and said, watch it here, the path is narrow, as the path ahead began to fade and then it disappeared.

A proposed nuclear waste site can also inspire...geo-lit?