Language of the Earth E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 946

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Man's complex relationship to planet Earth is explored in this second edition of the landmark anthology edited by Frank Rhodes and Bruce Malamud. This volume provides a portrait of the planet as experienced not just by scientists, but by artists, aviators, poets, philosophers, novelists, historians, and sociologists as well. * A unique collection that bridges the gap between science and humanities * Contains writings by scientists, artists, aviators, poets, philosophers, novelists, historians, and sociologists including Charles Darwin, Dane Picard, Rachel Carson, John Muir, Mark Twain and Archibald Geikie * Represents the human experience over the centuries, covering a span of 2,500 years * Reflects the planet's extraordinary physical diversity * The previous edition was voted one of the 25 'Great Books of Geology' by readers of the Journal of Geological Education "...this is a very worthwhile read, with something for everyone interested in geography, earth systems and geology, natural history or the general environment." Robert A. Francis, King's College London, Progress in Physical Geography

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Preface from the first edition

Acknowledgments from the first edition

PART 1: THE EARTH EXPERIENCED

1. Eyewitness Accounts of Earth Events

1-1 John McPhee: Los Angeles Against the Mountains

1-2 Gordon Gaskill: The Night the Mountain Fell

1-3 R.G. McConnell and R.W. Brock: The Turtle Mountain Slide

1-4 Voltaire: Candide

1-5 JamesR.Newman: The Lisbon Earthquake

1-6 Mary Austin: The Temblor

1-7 Jonathan Weiner: The Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake

1-8 FrancisP.Shepard: Tsunami

1-9 Haroun Tazieff: Not a Very Sensible Place for a Stroll

1-10 Fairfax Downey: Last Days of St Pierre

1-11 Hans Cloos: Beaconsonthe Passage Out

1-12 Jon Thorlakson: Eruption of the Öraefajökull, 1727

2. Exploration

2-1 Charles Darwin: The Voyageofthe Beagle

2-2 Simon Winchester: The Map that Changed the World

2-3 John Wesley Powell: The Exploration of the Colorado River

2-4 William H. Brewer: Mono Lake–Aurora–Sonora Pass

2-5 GeorgeF.Sternberg: Thrills in Fossil Hunting

2-6 JohnE.Pfeiffer: The Creative Explosion

2-7 George Gaylord Simpson: Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal

2-8 RobertD.Ballard: Explorations

2-9 LouiseB.Young: The Blue Planet

3. Geologists are also Human

3-1 Stephen Drury: Stepping Stones

3-2 Elizabeth O.B. Gordon: William Buckland

3-3 Hugh Miller: The Old Red Sandstone

3-4 Sir Archibald Geikie: A Long Life’s Work

3-5 Frank H.T. Rhodes: Life, Time, and Darwin

3-6 R.A. Bartlett: King’s Formative Years

3-7 M.E. David: With Shackleton in the Antarctic

3-8 William H. Goetzmann: The Great Diamond Hoax

3-9 Foreword by Luna B. Leopold, Paul D. Komar, and Vance Haynes: Sand, Wind, and War

3-10 Hans Cloos: Ship’s Wake

4. Celebrities

4-1 H. Stommel: Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream

4-2 Thomas Clements: Leonardo Da Vinci as a Geologist

4-3 R.Magnus: Mineralogy, Geology, Meteorology

4-4 E.T. Martin: Megalonyx, Mammoth, and Mother Earth

4-5 WilliamA.Stanley: Three Short, Happy Months

4-6 W.G. Collingwood: Mountain-Worship

4-7 Herbert C. Hoover: Stanford University, 1891–1895

PART 2: INTERPRETING THE EARTH

5. Philosophy

5-1 James Hutton: Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration and Stability

5-2 T.C. Chamberlin: The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses

5-3 George Gaylord Simpson: Historical Science

5-4 Stephen Jay Gould: What is a Species?

5-5 Christine Turner: Messages in Stone

5-6 Marcia G. Bjørnerud: Natural Science, Natural Resources, and the Nature of Nature

5-7 Ian Stewart: Does God Play Dice?

6. The Fossil Record

6-1 Frank H.T. Rhodes: Earth and Man

6-2 Donald Culross Peattie: Flowering Earth

6-3 Robert Claiborne: Habits and Habitats

6-4 James A. Michener: Diplodocus, The Dinosaur

6-5 Berton Roueché: A Window on the Oligocene

6-6 Samantha Weinberg: A Fish Caught in Time

6-7 Richard E. Leakey: Ape-like Ancestors

6-8 Loren Eiseley: The Relic Men

7. Geotectonics

7-1 James A. Michener: From the Boundless Deep & the Birth of the Rockies

7-2 Anna Grayson: When Pigs Ruled the Earth

7-3 David Attenborough: The Living Planet

7-4 William Glen: The Road to Jaramillo

7-5 J. Tuzo Wilson: Mao’s Almanac: 3,000 Years of Killer Earthquakes

7-6 Richard H. Jahns: Geologic Jeopardy

8. Controversies

8-1 William Irvine: Apes, Angels, and Victorians

8-2 William L. Straus, Jr: The Great Piltdown Hoax

8-3 Howard S. Miller: Fossils and Free Enterprisers

8-4 Charles Officer and Jake Page: The K-T Extinction

8-5 Sir Archibald Geikie: The Founders of Geology

8-6 Don E. Wilhelms: To a Rocky Moon

8-7 Edward Schreiber and Orson L. Anderson: Properties and Composition of Lunar Materials: Earth Analogies

8-8 Joel L. Swerdlow: CFCs

PART 3: LANGUAGEOFTHE EARTH

9. Prose

9-1 Isak Dinesen: Out of Africa

9-2 T.E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom

9-3 Ernest Hemingway: Green Hills of Africa

9-4 Antoine de Saint-Exupeéry: Wind, Sand and Stars

9-5 John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman

9-6 John Muir: Trip to the Middle and North Forks of San Joaquin River

9-7 Mark Twain: RoughingIt

9-8 Thomas Fairchild Sherman: A Place on the Glacial Till

9-9 John McPhee: Basin and Range

9-10 John Darnton: Neanderthal

9-11 Kim Stanley Robinson: Antarctica

9-12 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World

10. Poetry

10-1 Sir Archibald Geikie: Landscape and Literature

10-2 William Wordsworth: The Excursion

10-3 Voltaire: The Lisbon Earthquake

10-4 C.S. Rafinesque: The Fountains of the Earth

10-5 Timothy A. Conrad: To a Trilobite

10-6 A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad

10-7 Andrew C. Lawson: Mente et Malleo

10-8 John Stuart Blackie: Selected Poems

10-9 Kenneth Rexroth: Lyell’s Hypothesis Again

10-10 A.R. Ammons: Selected Poems

10-11 Charles Simic: Stone

10-12 J.T. Barbarese: Fossils

10-13 Jane Hirshfield: Rock

10-14 W. Scott McLean, Eldridge M. Moores, and David A. Robertson: Poetry Matters: Gary Snyder

10-15 The Book of Job: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

11. Art

11-1 Jacquetta Hawkes: A Land: Sculpture

11-2 Jack Burnham: Beyond Modern Sculpture

11-3 Elizabeth C. Childs: Time’s Profile: John Wesley Powell, Art, and Geology at the Grand Canyon

11-4 R.A. Bartlett: Thomas Moran: American Landscape Painter

11-5 Diane Ackerman: Earth Calling

PART 4: THE CROWDED PLANET

12. Human History

12-1 John D. Ridge: Minerals and World History

12-2 Jacquetta Hawkes: A Land: Architecture

12-3 Donald F. Eschman and Melvin G. Marcus: The Geologic and Topographic Setting of Cities

12-4 Douglas W. Johnson: Topography and Strategy in the War

12-5 John McPhee: Geology and Crime

12-6 Kenneth E.F. Watt: Tambora and Krakatau

12-7 Lord Ritchie-Calder: Mortgaging the Old Homestead

12-8 Harlow Shapley: Breathing the Future and the Past

13. Resources

13-1 Rachel L. Carson: Wealth from the Salt Seas

13-2 Charles F. Park, Jr: Minerals, People, and the Future

13-3 M. Dane Picard: The Bingham Canyon Pit

13-4 John G.C.M. Fuller: The Geological Attitude

13-5 Michel T. Halbouty: Geology – For Human Needs

14. Benevolent Planet

14-1 James Lovelock: Gaia

14-2 Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life

14-3 Charles Morgan: Remember the Land

14-4 Gabriele Kass-Simon: Rachel Carson: The Idea of Environment

14-5 Rachel L. Carson: Silent Spring

14-6 S.George Philander: Who is El Niño?

14-7 National Research Council: Essay on the Earth Sciences

14-8 Diane Ackerman: The Round Walls of Home

14-9 Ernest Zebrowski, Jr: The Butterfly Effect

14-10 Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot

Sources

Names index

Subject index

Editorial material and organization © 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing LtdFirst edition published by Pergamon Press 19811 2008

Language of the earth. – 2nd ed. / edited by Frank H.T. Rhodes, Richard O. Stone and Bruce D. Malamud.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-6067-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)1. Geology. 2. Geologists. I. Rhodes, Frank Harold Trevor. II. Stone, Richard O., 1920–1978.III. Malamud, B.D. (Bruce D.)

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Preface

Every life is a continuing encounter with Earth. Every breath is a transaction with our planet. Every meal is an assimilation of terrestrial products. Every item we use, touch, or manufacture is a piece of Earth. Every element in our bodies, atom for atom, comes from Earth’s crust. Every calorie of energy we use comes directly from Earth, and indirectly from Earth’s parent star, the Sun.

We are formed of the dust of the Earth, just as the ancient scripture affirms. But that dust is star dust. We are not only Earth’s children; we are the grandchildren of a star. “Dust we may be,” Maurice Boyd has remarked, “but the dust of a star, and troubled by dreams.” And in those dreams rest our greatness and our hope.

This is an anthology, a book of writings about our parent planet, Earth. It is not a book of science, though some writers are scientists. It is not didactic, though we hope it will be instructive. It is not comprehensive, though it covers an expansive range of topics. Our purpose in writing is to inspire interest, rather than to tell the whole story; to whet the appetite, rather than “provide all the data”; to ignite the imagination, rather than instruct in detail. Certainly we hope students of Earth science will find the book useful, whether as required supplementary reading in formal courses, or as a diversion from a surfeit of scientific literature. But our intended audience is wider: because we are all Earth’s children, we hope that these reports on the parent planet will be of interest to the general reader and will be read as letters from home. This is a book for browsing, for tasting, for reflecting.

These accounts of the home planet, their style and their viewpoints, are as varied as their authors. We hope that by using the form of an anthology, based as it is on the writings of authors of many backgrounds, periods and interests, we can capture a sense of the fascination and mystery of this ancient and beautiful, blue planet. We hope that the reader will catch a glimpse of its contradictory moods: its benevolence and its terror, its resilience and its fragility, its tranquility and its episodic violence, its regularity and its unpredictability.

In this respect, the emphasis of the present book differs from that of the first edition. That work was directed chiefly to students of Earth science; this volume, though retaining that goal, is consciously more general in its scope and more expansive in its range of topics. The first edition aimed to provide a context for that particular category of knowledge which we identify as Earth science, to show not only its range and scope, but also its flavor, style and implications; to show all knowledge as provisional, rather than infallible, as refinable rather than complete and finished.

Our purpose in the present volume is still to achieve those goals, but also something more. We hope to show not only the intimacy of science with other expression and study, but also to give a sense of the individuality, insight and intuition that underlie all encounters with our parent planet and all descriptions of it. For scientific knowledge is similar to all other knowledge; in spite of its public verifiability, it grows by private insight and personal intuition. “If you want to know the essence of scientific method,” Einstein is said to have remarked, “don’t listen to what a scientist may tell you. Watch what he does.” So this book is a window on the world of people “doing” – not just geologists, but sculptors and soldiers, artists and aviators, politicians and poets, prophets and prospectors, novelists and naturalists.

We have greatly expanded the extracts included in the present volume, retaining – we hope – the best of the first edition, but omitting twenty of the original authors, shortening some extracts, and adding another fifty-five. Though we have made a particular effort to include contemporary literature and topics of current interest, we have also tried to achieve a reasonable balance with the older literature. We have added Jane Hirshfield, John McPhee and Carl Sagan, for example, but we have kept William Wordsworth, Voltaire and James Hutton.

The thread that gives continuity is their common concern with the Earth. Nor is the span of time and place any less comprehensive than that of occupation. We have deliberately selected writings from the time of the fifth or sixth century BC when the book of Job was written, to the heyday of the Victorian era, when William Buckland fascinated and dominated the Oxford scene; from the medieval ages of wonder in the created universe, to the novels of John Fowles written in the 1970s, to books published in the new millennium. In the most literal sense our extracts involve the comprehension of the whole Earth. Our authors’ accounts range from dripping caves, deep below the Pyrenees, to the deserts of North Africa, from the Alps to the Andes, from mountain tops to the depths of the ocean, from the Antarctic ice sheet to the surface of the moon. Their writings concern both social and scientific topics, as well as personal interests and political goals. All reveal some aspect of our planet in the life of humankind.

We have arranged our selections in various categories, in order to give some structure and coherence to the book, and also to allow the reader to use it more selectively. These categories are generally self-evident, but a few articles could have fitted into some other category just as easily as the one in which they stand. Most of the articles that we include are fragments of much longer articles, essays, or books, and even the extracts themselves, we have generally abridged. We regret the need to make these abbreviations, and we have tried very carefully to preserve the sense and style of the original authors. Our reluctance to make the abridgement is exceeded only by our conviction that diversity and variety are of more importance than comprehensive quotation of a smaller number of authors. In the book as it now stands, our task of selection has been painfully difficult; we have collected many outstanding articles for which we have been unable to find space. With each extract, we have retained the essential footnotes and references, though we have shortened or deleted footnotes and references where these did not seem to us essential to the main argument. We hope that our readers will wish to explore the new worlds of information represented in some of the extracts that are included, just as we also hope that they may develop a sufficiently strong taste for some of the present authors to encourage them to explore their other writings.

The first edition of this book was planned with Richard Stone, Professor of Geology at the University of Southern California. He and the first editor, Frank Rhodes, worked together from 1972 to 1978, when Richard Stone died from a disease against which he had fought with great courage. Frank Rhodes finished work on the book, which was published in 1981.

Though the book had been out of print for almost a decade, the third editor, Bruce Malamud, while a PhD student at Cornell discussed the book and found that it occupied a respectable place on a list of the “Great Books of Geology” selected by the readers of the Journal of Geological Education [“Geologists Select Great Books of Geology”, 1993, vol. 41, p. 26]. It was this that led to his suggestion of a new edition and we are grateful for the decision of Ian Francis of Blackwell Publishing to publish it. Frank Rhodes rewrote and expanded all the introductions and we have worked together on the preparation of the book, supported and helped by several people whose efforts we are anxious to acknowledge: Joy Wagner, John Briggs, Joel Haenlein, and Helen Sullivan have helped us greatly with the typing and editorial work.

We are conscious that in aiming at a wider readership, we face a delicate task in balancing the technical and the nontechnical content. In this we have deliberately leaned towards general intelligibility, partly because we are persuaded that such broader contextual understanding and interest are beneficial to the specialist and partly because we believe the substance of this book is of vital concern and significance for the more general reader. If war is too important to be left to the generals, then the understanding and care of the Earth are far too important to be left to the Earth scientists.

For each of us – specialist or not – is a custodian of this beautiful planet, which is our home. That is why our response to the issues raised in this book is of more than casual importance. It is, of course, of vital concern as a basis for the vocational skills and technical knowledge required of those pursuing courses and careers in Earth science. But, in a far wider sense, it is an important component in adding to the richness and exuberance of life for all of us. We have attempted to use a concern with the Earth to introduce the reader to a growing range of experiences and involvements ranging from sculpture to literature, and from architecture to history. Through such interests, it is possible to develop a new perspective which enriches the quality of human experience.

Our response to the Earth is a factor of profound significance. We share our overcrowded, polluted, plundered planet with more than six billion other members of the human race, as well as a couple of million other species of animals and plants. The next 50 years will call for critical decisions in the problems of conservation, energy policy, urban development, transportation, mineral and water resources, land use, atmospheric protection and utilization of the oceans. The terms of our survival will depend in large part on our careful comprehension of the language of the Earth and our stewardship of this rare planet. Earth’s fitness as a home for humans and other species is the end product of its long and complex history. Soil, air, water, food, fuels, minerals, and microbes are the products of Earth processes acting over incalculable periods, and of the life, activity, and death of countless organisms that have gone before us. Each of us, in our own turn, absorbs, utilizes and recreates this sustaining environment.

“Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach thee,” Job was told 25 centuries ago. To those with the patience to master its language, the Earth still responds. To those with the insight to comprehend its moods and reflect on its mysteries, the Earth still teaches.

Frank H.T. Rhodes

Bruce D. Malamud

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

King’s College, London

Preface from the first edition

One of the problems with our conventional styles of teaching and conventional patterns of learning at the introductory undergraduate level is that the “subject” – whatever it may be – all too easily emerges as given, frozen, complete, canned. Add to this quizzes, multiple-choice exams, and a single textbook, and the pursuit of knowledge sometimes becomes a kind of catechism – the recital of prepared answers to a limited set of questions (“You lost one point because you missed the hardness of hornblende,” or some other equally inconsequential fragment of information). It is against such a limited view of knowledge that students so frequently react, and so they should.

But it need not be so. In every department there are still successful teachers who can win the interest and enthusiasm of once uninterested and unenthusiastic students. They do so partly by the example of their own commitment to learning, and partiy by revealing knowledge as a continuing personal quest. For no knowledge, and least of all scientific knowledge, exists as a finished corpus of categorized facts. Knowledge exists because there are people; it is the accumulated personal experience of our race. It becomes meaningful, useful and intelligible as we grasp, not only its content, but also its basis, its implications, its relationship and its limitations. Its coherence and significance lie in its relatedness to the whole of the rest of our human experience.

The aim of this book is to provide such a context for the particular category of knowledge which we identify as earth science. Our intention is not didactic. We make no attempt to cover the ground in the sense of describing the current content of each area of earth science. Our aim is to illustrate the scope and range of the science and to convey its flavor and style, rather than catalog its contents; to display all our knowledge as provisional rather than infallible, as refinable rather than complete and finished; to show the inspiration and sweeping implications of earth science, rather than representing it as an isolated area of study.

We hope that by using the form of an anthology, based as it is on the writings of authors representing many countries, periods and viewpoints, we can show something of the individuality which lies at the heart of science. The categorization of science as less humane than other areas of human knowledge and as dehumanizing in its effects is a verdict reached too readily by many of our contemporaries. For scientific knowledge, in spite of its public verifiability, grows by private insight and personal intuition. “If you want to know the essence of scientific method,” Einstein is said to have remarked, “don’t listen to what a scientist may tell you. Watch what he does.” So this book is a window on the world of people “doing” – not just geologists – but sculptors and soldiers, artists and aviators, politicians and poets, prophets and prospectors, novelists and naturalists.

The thread that gives continuity is their common concern with the Earth. Nor is the span of time and place any less comprehensive than that of occupation. We have deliberately selected writings from the time of the 5th or 6th century BC, when the book of Job was written, to the heyday of the Victorian era, when William Buckland fascinated and dominated the Oxford scene; from the medieval ages of wonder in the created universe, to the novels of John Fowles written in the 1970s. In the most literal sense, geology involves the comprehension of the whole Earth. Our authors’ accounts range from dripping caves, deep below the Pyrenees, to the deserts of North Africa, from the Alps to the Andes, from mountain tops to the depths of the ocean, from the Antarctic ice sheet to the surface of the moon. Their writings concern both social and scientific topics, as well as personal and political goals. All reveal some aspect of geology in the life of mankind.

We have arranged our selections in various categories, in order to give some structure and coherence to the book, and also to allow the reader to use it more selectively. These categories are generally self-evident, but a few articles could have fitted into some other category just as easily as the one in which they stand. Most of the articles that we include are mere fragments of much longer articles, essays, or books, and even the extracts themselves, we have generally abridged. We regret the need to make these abbreviations, and we have tried very carefully to preserve the sense and style of the original authors. Our reluctance to make the abridgement is exceeded only by our conviction that diversity and variety are of more importance than comprehensive quotation of a smaller number of authors. In the book as it now stands, our task of selection has been painfully difficult; we have collected many outstanding articles for which we have been unable to find space. With each extract, we have retained the essential footnotes and references, though we have shortened or deleted footnotes and references where these were not essential to the main argument. We hope that our readers will wish to explore the new worlds of information represented in some of the references that are quoted, just as we also hope that they may develop a sufficiently strong taste for some of the present authors to encourage them to explore their other writings.

We hope that the book will provide useful supplementary reading for those who are enrolled in introductory earth science courses. We see it – not merely as a collection of required readings – but as an anthology for browsing. We hope that the book might even stand by itself, and have some interest for those who, though having no formal concern with courses or teaching in earth science, possess a curiosity about the planet which is our home, and about our varying responses to it. This response is of more than casual importance. It is, of course, of vital concern as a basis for the vocational skills and technical knowledge required of those pursuing courses in earth science. But, in the far wider sense, it is an important component in adding to the richness and exuberance of life. We have attempted to use a concern with the Earth to introduce the reader to a growing range of experiences and involvements ranging from sculpture to literature, and from architecture to history. Through such interests, it is possible to develop a new perspective which enriches the quality of human experience.

Our response to the Earth is a factor of profound significance. We share our overcrowded, polluted, plundered planet with 3.5 billion other members of our race. The next 30 years will call for critical decisions in the problems of conservation, energy supplies, mineral and water resources, land use, atmospheric protection and utilization of the oceans. The terms of our survival will depend in large part on our careful comprehension of the language of the earth and our stewardship of this rare planet. Earth’s fitness as a home for humans is the end product of its long and elaborate history. Soil, air, and water, food and fuels, minerals and microbes are the products of earth processes acting over incalculable periods, and of the life, activity, and death of countless organisms. Each of us, in his own turn, absorbs, utilizes and recreates this sustaining environment.

“Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach thee,” Job was told 25 centuries ago. To those with the patience to master its language, the Earth still responds. To those with the insight to comprehend its moods and reflect on its mysteries, the Earth still teaches.

Dick Stone and I began work on this book in 1972. We worked steadily at it, fitting it in as best we could between other pressing commitments. Most of the writing and selection of materials was finished by 1976.

Because of increasing publishing costs, we were then faced with the need to reduce the length of the book. This took much longer than either of us had anticipated. Dick Stone became ill with a disease against which he fought with courage and hope, but from which he died on July 23, 1978. I have completed the book, but its essential form and much of its content are as we both planned it.

Frank H.T. Rhodes

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Acknowledgments from the first edition

I am most grateful to several individuals whose willing cooperation and enthusiastic interest have contributed significantly to the completion of this book. My greatest debt is to my late colleague, Dick Stone, who derived great pleasure from the selection and preparation of material for the book. The breadth of the topics we cover in the book reflects the scope and quality of his own interests.

To those authors and publishers who have given permission to reproduce their work, to extract from it and otherwise abridge it, I have a particular debt of gratitude. In some cases, this permission was given without the requirement of payment of copyright fees. All the original sources of information are fully acknowledged.

Mrs. Jean Schleede and Mrs. Margaret Gihingham typed earlier versions of the manuscript, while Mrs. Marcia Parks, Mrs. Clara Pierson and Mrs. Joy Wagner assisted in its final preparation. Their careful typing, checking and verification of sources have been especially important, and I am most grateful for their help.

Frank H.T. Rhodes

Part 1

The Earth Experienced

To live is to experience the Earth, for we are Earth’s children. Every atom of our bodies comes from the Earth. Every breath we take inhales and modifies Earth’s fragile atmospheric envelope.

The food and water by which our life is sustained are Earth’s products. Every object we touch, the clothes we wear, the cities we build, the houses where we live, the vehicles that we drive, the energy on which we depend – every substance we use and enjoy, everything from computer chips to cathedrals, comes from Earth’s materials. The light by which we see, the energy source for all the teeming world of plants on which all other life depends, radiates from our grandparent: Earth’s parent star, the Sun.

And we are children who never grow up, who remain lifelong dependents, who never leave home, who – like it or not – never escape our parent’s apron strings. How remarkable, then, that most of us give our parent so little attention, with scarcely a passing thought for Earth’s continuing support and well-being. How strange that we know and care so little for our family history.

The following section (Part 1) gives a parental portrait: the Earth experienced in its changing moods, its spasmodic violence, and its secret places. Reporters, historians, explorers, Earth scientists, and those better known for other achievements, provide us with a series of letters from home, reminding us of the old homestead, the place where we grew up and where – though sometimes forgetful of it – we still live.

1

Eyewitness Accounts of Earth Events

Science, it is generally asserted, is concerned with facts. But ultimately there is nothing in Nature labeled “fact.” Facts represent human abstractions, and our recognition and understanding of facts are based upon individual perception and experience. To this extent geology includes both contrived encounters, which we call experiments, which are based on studies such as those in the laboratory where conditions and materials are carefully controlled, and also other encounters and experiences that can be gained only by firsthand contact with the Earth as it is, which generally means the rocks of the Earth’s crust. In this sense, the work of the field geologist provides the basic link between our knowledge and the materials and processes on which it is based.

The role of experiment on Earth science is limited by the problems of scaling down the Earth to appropriate models, the problem of physical states existing in the Earth but unattainable in the laboratory, and the time element, which is rarely attainable under laboratory conditions. For these and other reasons, laboratory experimentation plays a lesser role in geology than in most other sciences, although there is a rather different kind of “experimentation” which is also possible in the field, especially with such natural geological phenomena as the various agents of erosion and deposition, hot springs, geysers, and volcanoes, to take some obvious examples.

Geology has a twofold concern. It is concerned first with the present configuration and composition of the Earth, and second with the interpretation of the past history of the Earth. Field observations are of critical importance, because the recognition of earlier events in the history of the Earth depends heavily on an analysis of present composition and configuration of Earth materials, and the identification of the action of processes and laws observable in our existing environment. Here, again, time and scale are important elements. Catastrophes do indeed take place, but most processes that influence the crust of the Earth act almost imperceptibly. Unfortunately, nearly all the processes that we can observe (as opposed to those we can infer) are rapid ones, which play only a local or limited role in the overall development of the Earth’s crust. In spite of this limitation, such events and processes are still of great significance because they allow us to observe and compare multiple sequences of events in which various components and conditions may be analyzed, and in which a measure of prediction and experimentation is possible. Even the speed and extent of these processes have great significance.

Because most centers of population are deliberately established in areas remote from scenes of frequent terrestrial violence and instability, field observation frequently takes the geologist into distant and isolated areas. The areas included in the present accounts range from the Sahara Desert to the Antarctic, and the accounts themselves present fascinating differences in character and style.

1-1 Los Angeles Against the Mountains – John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton in 1931, educated at Deerfield, Princeton and Cambridge and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for forty years, as well as teaching a popular writing class at Princeton. The range of McPhee’s books and other writing is extraordinary: basketball, tennis, prep school, orange farming, environmental activism, nuclear terrorism, Alaska and, most notably, a series of four books – Basin and Range (1986), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993) – which, through detailed discussion of road cuts on Interstate 80, geologists in the field and the emergence of plate tectonics theory, give an account of the shaping and character of the North American continent. These four books, compiled in a single volume Annals of the Former World (1998), led to the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The present extract, taken from the book The Control of Nature (1989), describes the devastating effects of a torrential debris flow in Shields Creek on the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains.

In Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains, it is not always clear which side is losing. For example, the Genofiles, Bob and Jackie, can claim to have lost and won. They live on an acre of ground so high that they look across their pool and past the trunks of big pines at an aerial view over Glendale and across Los Angeles to the Pacific bays. The setting, in cool dry air, is serene and Mediterranean. It has not been everlastingly serene.

On a February night some years ago, the Genofiles were awakened by a crash of thunder – lightning striking the mountain front. Ordinarily, in their quiet neighborhood, only the creek beside them was likely to make much sound, dropping steeply out of Shields Canyon on its way to the Los Angeles River. The creek, like every component of all the river systems across the city from mountains to ocean, had not been left to nature. Its banks were concrete. Its bed was concrete. When boulders were running there, they sounded like a rolling freight. On a night like this, the boulders should have been running. The creek should have been a torrent. Its unnatural sound was unnaturally absent. There was, and had been, a lot of rain.

The Genofiles had two teen-age children, whose rooms were on the uphill side of the one-story house. The window in Scott’s room looked straight up Pine Cone Road, a cul-de-sac, which, with hundreds like it, defined the northern limit of the city, the confrontation of the urban and the wild. Los Angeles is overmatched on one side by the Pacific Ocean and on the other by very high mountains. With respect to these principal boundaries, Los Angeles is done sprawling. The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city. Shedding, spalling, self-destructing, they are disintegrating at a rate that is also among the fastest in the world. The phalanxed communities of Los Angeles have pushed themselves hard against these mountains, an aggression that requires a deep defense budget to contend with the results. Kimberlee Genofile called to her mother, who joined her in Scott’s room as they looked up the street. From its high turnaround, Pine Cone Road plunges downhill like a ski run, bending left and then right and then left and then right in steep christiania turns for half a mile above a three-hundred-foot straightaway that aims directly at the Genofiles’ house. Not far below the turnaround, Shields Creek passes under the street, and there a kink in its concrete profile had been plugged by a six-foot boulder. Hence the silence of the creek. The water was now spreading over the street. It descended in heavy sheets. As the young Genofiles and their mother glimpsed it in the all but total darkness, the scene was suddenly illuminated by a blue electrical flash. In the blue light they saw a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood. In Jackie’s words, “It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling with a lot of water in front of it, pushing the water, this big black thing. It was just one big black hill coming toward us.”

In geology, it would be known as a debris flow. Debris flows amass in stream valleys and more or less resemble fresh concrete. They consist of water mixed with a good deal of solid material, most of which is above sand size. Some of it is Chevrolet size. Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows. The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked up cars from driveways and the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles’ house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall. We’re going to go, Jackie thought. Oh, my God, what a hell of a way for the four of us to die together.

The parents’ bedroom was on the far side of the house. Bob Genofile was in there kicking through white satin draperies at the panelled glass, smashing it to provide an outlet for water, when the three others ran in to join him. The walls of the house neither moved nor shook. As a general contractor, Bob had built dams, department stores, hospitals, six schools, seven churches, and this house. It was made of concrete block with steel reinforcement, sixteen inches on center. His wife had said it was stronger than any dam in California. His crew had called it “the fort.” In those days, twenty years before, the Genofiles’ acre was close by the edge of the mountain brush, but a developer had come along since then and knocked down thousands of trees and put Pine Cone Road up the slope. Now Bob Genofile was thinking, I hope the roof holds. I hope the roof is strong enough to hold. Debris was flowing over it. He told Scott to shut the bedroom door. No sooner was the door closed than it was battered down and fell into the room. Mud, rock, water poured in. It pushed everybody against the far wall. “Jump on the bed,” Bob said. The bed began to rise. Kneeling on it – on a gold velvet spread – they could soon press their palms against the ceiling. The bed also moved toward the glass wall. The two teen-agers got off, to try to control the motion, and were pinned between the bed’s brass railing and the wall. Boulders went up against the railing, pressed it into their legs, and held them fast. Bob dived into the muck to try to move the boulders, but he failed. The debris flow, entering through windows as well as doors, continued to rise. Escape was still possible for the parents but not for the children. The parents looked at each other and did not stir. Each reached for and held one of the children. Their mother felt suddenly resigned, sure that her son and daughter would die and she and her husband would quickly follow. The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking. The house had filled up in six minutes, and the mud stopped rising near the children’s chins.

1-2 The Night the Mountain Fell – Gordon Gaskill

This report by Gordon Gaskill of the 1963 dam failure at the Vajont Dam in the Italian Alps, describes one of the most terrible disasters of modern times. Some three years before the disaster, a great dam, 858 feet high, had been built across the narrow valley to impound a deep reservoir. Repeated, but very small Earth movements were recorded in the ensuing period, but on the night of October 9, after torrential rains, a rockslide of some 600 million tons occurred high in the valley above the reservoir and threw a huge volume of rock material into the reservoir, creating a great surge of water that rose 300 feet above the top of the dam. As it swept through the valley below, some 2,000 people lost their lives. Even in the absence of the reservoir, the rock fall was of such proportions that it would probably have caused considerable damage, but the rock fall itself was facilitated by the construction of the dam. The bedrock consisted of interbedded limestones and clays, which had been weakened by deformation, and further weakened by water percolating through it from the reservoir. This extract is from an article which appeared in Readers Digest (1965).

They say the animals knew. In that last peaceful twilight – Wednesday, October 9, 1963 – hares grew suddenly bold and, oblivious of passing men and automobiles, raced silently, intently, down the paved road – away from the lake. As darkness gathered, cows milled uneasily in their stalls, dogs whimpered, chickens stirred in their pens, unwilling to sleep. A couple watching television was irritated by the unnatural, noisy fluttering of their caged canary. Then the fluttering abruptly stopped: in its strange panic the bird had caught its head in the cage bars and strangled to death. Husband stared at wife: “Something’s going to happen! The dam …?”

Life or death this night in the small town of Longarone, in northeast Italy, would turn on a simple, single fact: how high up the hillsides of the river valley below the Vajont Dam you happened to be. All but those in the highest parts would soon die.

An engaged couple, due to marry in six days, had a slight difference of opinion. Giovanna wanted to go to the movies at Belluno, the provincial capital about 12 miles away, but her fiancé, Antonio, felt too tired and begged off. They separated for the night, he to his higher home, she to a lower one. Next morning he would be digging in the muddy waste where Giovanna, her family and home had disappeared, repeating endlessly, “If only I had taken her to the movies…. If only I had taken her to the movies.”

A teen-age boy astride his motorbike fidgeted with embarrassment as, from a window, his mother tried to talk him out of riding off to another village to see a girl. But from inside the house his father, remembering his own salad days, called out indulgently, “Oh, let him go!” The mother sighed, gave in and the boy rode off to safety – never to see home or parents again.

Visiting Longarone were three Americans of Italian descent, all staying in a low-lying little hotel. One of them, John De Bona, of Riverside, Calif. retired to his room – and never would be seen again. Two others, Mr. and Mrs. Robert De Lazzero, of Scarsdale, N.Y. had panted uphill nearly 150 steps to have dinner with his great-aunt Elisabetta, and two cousins. Shortly before ten, dinner over, they were about to walk back down to the hotel when Aunt Elisabetta said, “Don’t go yet. See, I’ve saved a special bottle of wine for you.” Somewhat reluctantly, they stayed on a little longer. They were lucky.

For the clocks of Longarone would never strike 11 on this night. Just before that hour Longarone and the hamlets clustering near it would be erased from the earth, and more than 2000 people would die in perhaps the world’s most tragic dam disaster.

Four years later the great new Vajont Dam had been both the pride and the fear of people living around Longarone, a sub-Alpine town not far south of the Austrian border. Flung across the nearby Vajont gorge – so deep and narrow that sunlight touched its bottom only fleetingly at noon – the dam was the highest arch dam in all the world, a showpiece for visiting foreign engineers, a magnet for tourists. Its graceful curving wall of tapered concrete rose 858 feet above its base – nearly five times as high as Niagara Falls, 132 feet higher than America’s highest dam, Hoover. Its impounded lake, not yet full, would provide enormous amounts of electricity to bring industry, jobs and prosperity to mountain folk for miles around.

Still, many feared it.

Ever since 1959 a swelling chorus of protest had demanded that the dam be stopped or that absolute assurance be given that it was safe. But the site had been approved and all work had been carefully supervised by some of Italy’s most respected geologists and engineers. Chief among them was the very father of the Vajont project, Dr. Carlo Semenza, an internationally known engineer who had built dams in several countries. He and others concluded that there might be a little minor land slippage at first – as with nearly all artificial lakes – but nothing to worry about.

People living nearby weren’t so sure. Above all, they distrusted the stability of Monte Toc, which anchored the dam’s left shoulder and hung nearly 4000 feet above the new lake. They gave it an ominous nickname, la montagna che cammina – “the mountain that walks.” The village of Erto, just above the lake, felt itself especially menaced and made most of the early protests.

With construction having begun in 1956, all was ready for a partial test-filling of the lake by March 1960. The results were worrisome. Even modest amounts of water produced, on November 4, 1960, an alarming crack in the earth high up on Monte Toc – a gaping split more than a foot wide and about 8000 feet long. At the same time, a half-million tons of earth and rock slipped into the still-small lake, churning up waves six feet high.

Disappointed, Societaà Adriatica di Elettricitaà (SADE), the power company building the dam, lowered the lake and, its timetable wrecked, turned to two years of expensive testing. Also, it performed extensive remedial work: strengthening the dam, digging a large bypass tunnel, sealing suspected rock fractures with pressurized concrete.

But, less than six months after the warning slide, Dr. Semenza himself began to lose hope. In an April 1961 letter, not divulged until after the disaster, he wrote to an engineering friend: “The problems are probably too big for us, and there are no practical remedies to take.” He died six months afterward. Yet neither he nor others sharing his worries ever dreamed of any serious danger to human life. They feared only that landslides might so clog the basin as to make it useless for water storage.

One test (No. 19) on SADE’s elaborate scale model (1/200 actual size) of the entire dam and basin was to have especially disastrous consequences. The formal report on this test said that if the lake’s level was 75 feet below maximum, this would be “absolutely safe, even in the face of the most catastrophic landslide that can be foreseen.” Such a fantastic slide, said the test, would churn up dangerous waves about 80 feet high on the lake.

The safety measures to counteract this seemed obvious: if a slide seemed imminent, (a) get the lake down at least 75 feet below maximum, and (b) evacuate everybody from the shoreline belt so that the expected waves could spend their rage harmlessly. As for people in Longarone, 1½ miles below the dam, there was no reason to worry. With the lake down to this “safety level,” only about five feet of water, a harmless trickle, could possibly go over the dam.

In April 1963 the situation seemed ripe for a new test-raising of the water. By now a new factor had entered the picture. SADE and many other private power companies had been forcibly nationalized under a new state power board, ENEL (Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettricaà). The exit valves were closed, and the water started up again.

As the waters crept higher, the old disheartening signals appeared. Another long, frightening crack split the earth high on Monte Toc. From July to September, small earth tremors shook the area. Strange rumbling came from deep in the earth; the lake water “boiled up” ominously.

SADE earlier had implanted dozens of sentinel bench marks on the mountain’s flank. These, watched regularly by optical instruments so sensitive that they noted even a hairbreadth of movement, would signal any tendency of the earth to slip downward. And signal they did. Quiet for months, they suddenly began reporting an ever-rising tendency of Monte Toc’s earthen flank to slip … 6 … 8 … 12 … 22 millimeters per 24 hours – edging up toward the highest “danger reading” of 40, registered three years earlier at the time of the first slide.

Perturbed, ENEL–SADE halted the test-raising with the waters still 41 feet below maximum, hoping that the earth would settle down to a new stability. Unfortunately, it did not. And, to make matters worse, thrice-normal rains, the heaviest in 20 years, had made the earth unusually sodden.

Nino A. Biadene, ENEL–SADE deputy director-general for technical matters, from the head office in Venice, now declared that there would be no question of letting the water go any higher, even though it was authorized. On the contrary, he would order the water lowered if the alarm signals continued.

They did continue – and got worse. Thus, on September 26 – with disaster 13 days away – Biadene gave the emergency order: “Take the water down!” Instantly, the great exit valves were opened, and water began rushing out. But not too fast, for this would too quickly remove the water-cushion supporting Monte Toc’s soaked earth and make it even more unstable….

Next day was golden and merry in Longarone. Most of the harvesting had been done. The year’s business had been good: new factories had been coming in; ever more tourists had come to visit the dam; everybody had jobs and fatter paychecks. Best of all, Longarone’s famed ice-cream makers, who fanned out over Europe every March to make and sell their delicacy, were now streaming home to spend the winter with their families. It was a gay time of homecoming, of matchmaking and marrying, of meeting old friends in the many bar-cafés which served as clubs, of swapping stories of the season’s business over a glass of vino.

True, the great dam above cast a certain shadow on the merriment. Word had leaked out that the slippage rate was high today. A truck driver named Antonio Savi said that he had driven over the paved road on Monte Toc and that it was buckling so much he refused to go there again. But this seemed familiar stuff somehow.

Hundreds of men stayed at the bar-cafés later than usual that evening. They were ardent soccer fans, and at 9:55 began a television relay from Madrid of an important game between the Spanish Real Madrid team and the Scottish Glasgow Rangers. Most would never live to know who won the game (the Spaniards, 6-0), and later it was bitterly cursed for luring so many to death. In fact it probably made little difference in the final death toll; it doomed some, but saved others.

Meanwhile, up on Monte Toc the sentinel bench marks had gone wild. Far in the past was the old danger-reading of 40. Now the signals were reading 190 … 200!

Just before 9 p.m. – with disaster barely 100 minutes away – Biadene in Venice decided that it would be wise to institute below the dam and around Longarone some of the same precautions already in force up around the lake itself. By phone he ordered a subordinate engineer in Belluno to have police bar all traffic on the below-dam roads in and around Longarone. And from the dam went out a series of phone calls to people and establishments down by the Piave – to the sawmill, the spinning mill, the quarry, a tavern – passing on the message: “Maybe a little water over the dam tonight … nothing to get alarmed about.”

At 10:39 the mountain fell. Not all of it, but a greater single mass than has fallen in Europe since prehistoric times – with a shock so great that it simulated genuine earthquake effects on seismographs in five countries. About 600 million tons came down – roughly equivalent to a football field piled with earth and rock to a height of 40 miles. It didn’t fall slowly, by inches, as predicted, disintegrating as it went. Instead, the mountain split away cleanly, as if cut by a knife, and fell straight into the lake.

Don Carlo Onorini, parish priest of Casso village perched high on a mountain just across the lake, happened to be watching. In the bright glare of the floodlights he saw the mountainside suddenly slip loose “with a sound as if the end of the earth had come.” A muddy flood leaped up toward him and he saw, just below him, the mountainside clawed away, a church and some lower houses vanish, before the flood fell back into the valley. An enormous blue-white flash filled the sky as the great 20,000-volt high-tension lines shorted, fused and broke, plunging the valley into darkness.

All around the lakeshore the tormented water raced – not 80 feet high, but in places, clawing up to 800 feet above lake level. It thundered at the dam – and the dam held. But the water went over the dam not five feet high but up to 300 feet high, and smashed to the bottom of the gorge 800 feet below. There it was constricted as in a deadly funnel, and its speed fearfully increased. It shot out of the short gorge as from a gun barrel and spurted across the wide Piave riverbed, scooping up millions of deadly stones. Ahead of it raced a strange icy wind and a storm of fragmented water, like rain, but flying upward. By now it was more than a wave, more than a flood. It was a tornado of water and mud and rocks, tumbling hundreds of feet high in the pale moonlight, leaping straight at Longarone.

In the next minutes – about six – it thundered far up the hillside where Longarone stood, then recoiled into the Piave Valley with a fearful sucking noise, as if a mile-wide sink were emptying. In those six minutes Longarone vanished from the earth.

Almost none of the survivors – even those watching from so high up that they were never in danger – could give any coherent account of what they saw. One man remembers “a great milky cloud settling over our town.” Another, “a huge grayish-silverish mass that seemed so big it hardly seemed to move at all. Then I saw things swirling in the mass – bodies, lumber, automobiles.” Most remember the strangely cold wind and the horrible noise “like a thousand express trains rushing on us … a noise so great the ears refused to hear it.”

At one bar, somebody yelled, “The dam’s broken! Run for your lives!” Those spry enough made it; those too old or too dazed died. In another bar, those who jumped out uphill windows made it; those who went out the front door did not.

A girl of 22, Maria Teresa Galli, was just closing her balcony shutters when she felt a great cold wind, and somehow the house seemed to dissolve around her. Some great force, part wind, part water, picked her up and whirled her along as she thought dazedly: “I’m flying … walking … swimming!” Two hundred yards away, an old couple Arduino Burrigana and his wife Gianna, watched from the top floor as the flood invaded the ground floor – and dropped some dark bundle which emitted a groan. It was Maria Teresa Galli, fainting with shock, bruised, but little harmed.

A paralyzed man, helpless in his chair, called out in panic to his wife, “What is it? What is it?” She stepped out on the balcony to look. He felt the house tremble to some great shock, and called out, “Where are you?” She never answered. A passing edge of the wave had flicked her away.

The visiting American couple from Scarsdale had nearly finished the special bottle of wine when the roar came. One of the cousins pulled open the door, stared out, slammed it shut again and cried, “We’re all dead!” Water poured over them, and the man remembers dazed thoughts passing through his mind like, “What’s the use … with a thousand feet of water over us?” Yet in a moment, miraculously, the water retreated. He was safe, and so were his wife and cousins – except for fractures – but it had been too much for Aunt Elisabetta. She lay dead.

It took some time before the outer world learned how enormous the tragedy had been. The flood had isolated Longarone in a sea of mud. The first reporter waded in about 2:30 a.m., and well before dawn in came 1000 of Italy’s famed mountain troops, the Alpini, the vanguard of nearly 10,000 rescue workers – soldiers, police, firemen, Red Cross, Boy Scouts, volunteers of all kinds….

The great flood of death was matched by an equal flood of compassion and help from all Italy. While no single Italian admitted to any blame for the disaster, somehow all Italy felt responsible….

All around the world the news produced horror and help. From Australia to Canada, many Italian communities – often led by local Italian-language newspapers – gave money. James Bez, 58, an unemployed worker in Stamford, Conn., who had been born in Longarone and lost nearly all his family there, personally collected $350 in cash plus 40 boxes of clothing, which a Greek ship carried to Italy free.

One day recently, along with an engineer who had no connection with the dam, I climbed a narrow, muddy road, still being rebuilt, up to the village of Casso – where, on that terrible night, the parish priest had looked across to see the mountain fall. Here, 800 feet above the lake, the whole scene lay clear before us.

Below us, to the right stood the great dam, still intact save for a few minor bruises at the top. Directly below us lay the huge mass of the slide, looking as if it had been there forever, its trees and bushes still growing, already being called Monte Nuovo – “the new mountain.” It nudges up against the dam and is, in effect, a new natural dam about 1½ miles thick with earth and rock, towering nearly 300 feet higher than the man-made dam, now forever useless.

The lake has shrunk to about half its former size. But Italy will soon need all the electric power it can get, and there is an unspoken hope that later, when fear and feeling have cooled, some absolutely safe way may be found to go on using what is left of the lake for precious water storage.