Place is a teacher with a complex lesson.
We’re a fortunate group. Those who came before us saw the indignities imposed on people by city squalor and gave us parks, national, state, and private, places where scenery, significance, and serenity prevail. The parks, as you know, range in range: Some are sprawling like Yellowstone; others, tiny like many neighborhood parks. Of course, in our inescapable marriage to entropy, we mar parks with subtle destructions like graffiti, Coke cans, and Burger King wrappers. But every park undergoes natural changes and has a lesson to teach about Earth, us, and our mutual relationship. I suppose you want an examples.
A tiny park near Saratoga Springs, NY, provides a lesson about time, life, and Earth’s dynamic nature. It’s Lester Park, so small that without its state marker it would be an unnoticeable patch of roadside rock, a wider berm along its namesake two-lane road. Lester Park, unlike those great national parks through which one can drive for miles, is a you-blink-you-miss-it drive-by. In short, it’s short. But it tells a long tale worth knowing.
People go to Lester Park to look down, not around or up. The park’s interest lies beneath one’s feet. People stand on it. Well, on “them.” The exposed rock on which one walks is a pavement of stromatolites, stony, concentrically built structures that are the fossilized ancient compositions of blue-green algae and fine sediment, both having once jointly been the floor of a shallow sea almost a half billion years old. The stromatolites of the park became fossils more than a quarter billion years before the first dinosaurs trod the land. Give or take a week, these ancient life-forms in the park are 490 million years old. That age puts them near the end of the Cambrian Period, an end associated with an extinction event of dubious nature. Was there a marine oxygen crisis, a period of glaciation, an outpouring of lavas and toxic gases on what is now present-day Australia? Whatever the cause of the larger extinction, it did not eliminate stromatolites as they still form today in other parts of the world.
About halfway around the world from Lester Park, you can visit living stromatolite structures in Shark Bay, Australia. Don’t have time for a long trip? There’s always Exuma Sound in the Bahamas, obviously much closer to those ancient microbial structures. The modern mushroom-shaped stromatolites forming today will give you a glimpse of the ancient environment of Lester Park. But other than an occasional storm and the daily ebb and flow of tides, not much occurs in an environment conducive to stromatolite growth. Grass grows faster. Snails are rockets by comparison. Bit by bit, the cells grow and encapsulate sediments. The consolation prize for human visitors is basking beneath a tropical sun and wading or swimming in warm turquoise waters in which the microbes grow in thin layers interlaced with sediment. But wait a moment! If they grow in shallow warm seas, what are those old stromatolites during just west of Saratoga Springs?
When the stromatolites of Lester Park were living masses of microbes, they weren’t located as they are today at more than 43 degrees north latitude. They were south of the Equator. And the North America that you know and on which those stromatolites now lie, was a number of islands, not a continuous mass that contains Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Remember those plate tectonics lessons? The sea in which the stromatolites formed was tropical; the sediments and life-forms in that sea became fossiliferous rock that moved as the various islands wandered with the wandering crustal plates and associated terranes; they smacked into one another, rose and fell in elevation at times, and became the continent you know today.
Did you hear me? New York used to be south of the Equator. North America didn’t always have the shape it has. Seas have come and gone. Landmasses have altered their shapes with collisions and divergences, the former making mountains, the latter, seas. And after a half billion years, those tiny fossilized life-forms and the environment in which they lived is mirrored in microbial mats and “mushroom-structures” in an Australian bay and a Bahamian sound.
Lester Park teaches us that life is an old Earth feature, that even though some of its forms die out, others persist after extinction events like the one that separated Cambrian and Ordovician periods, that the planet is still one dominated by microbes, that place changes nature and geographic position, and that the spatial and temporal scales of the planet stand in contrast to our daily lives. Even those who study stromatolites don’t stand around in shallow sea water patiently watching them grow by tenths of millimeters per year.
How does one get the brain to wrap around 490 million years? How does the imagination cover the inexorable movement of a tropical bay in the Southern Hemisphere to a continental landscape in the Northern Hemisphere? Or, maybe more to the immediate concern, how does anyone maintain an awareness of all the subtle changes that a dynamic planet makes even during a short lifetime?
Have you witnessed change? We might be in the midst of a grand extinction event that began with our changing environments and killing off species over the last 200 to 300 millennia. Did we have a role in eliminating mastodon and mammoth, sabre-toothed smilodon and short-faced bear? “But that was long ago,” you say. “Don’t blame me that there are no more elephant birds or Dodos. Okay, I eat a lot of fish, but aren’t they ‘farmed’ somewhere?”
If you are living in the midst of a grand extinction event that coincides with the rise of our species, can you grasp it? Think of standing on those stromatolites at Lester Park. Unaware as microorganisms are, they lived at a time of extinction. They moved on crustal plates as you move today. Lester Park gives us our drive-by fleeting look at processes and events that might take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The seafloor spreading that moves plates and changes the shapes of continents ranges from about 1 centimeter per year to 15 centimeters/yr. At the fastest rate, those Lester Park stromatolites have had enough time to circle the planet. You are currently traveling, dependent upon your location, on a plate with a slower rate. Where you now live, that place that seems to have undergone so little change during your lifetime, will be somewhere else, different by about almost a mile in 10 to 20 millennia. Try to imagine 10,000 years against a backdrop of Lester Park’s 490 million years.
While we partake in a grand extinction, we pay homage to extinct life. Museums are testimony to our fascination with life gone by. Parks also testify to our ambivalence. We might by our individual actions contribute to habitat destruction and associated dire effects on various species, but we take the time to note life’s historical context. In 1999, the state of New York had a rededication ceremony for Lester Park, which it had received in 1914 by a farsighted individual. From the Renaissance on, a growing number of people became interested in fossils and what they represented. After Darwin published his findings in 1859, that interest increased, and by the early twentieth century, a number of people dedicated themselves to paleontology and micropaleontology. Think of it as a form of Ancestry.com. Related to all life, we humans want to know how we got to be what we are and how the place we call home differed and will differ.
Lester Park in New York is a good place for such contemplation. But, then, so is the place where you are right now.
We’re a fortunate group. Those who came before us saw the indignities imposed on people by city squalor and gave us parks, national, state, and private, places where scenery, significance, and serenity prevail. The parks, as you know, range in range: Some are sprawling like Yellowstone; others, tiny like many neighborhood parks. Of course, in our inescapable marriage to entropy, we mar parks with subtle destructions like graffiti, Coke cans, and Burger King wrappers. But every park undergoes natural changes and has a lesson to teach about Earth, us, and our mutual relationship. I suppose you want an examples.
A tiny park near Saratoga Springs, NY, provides a lesson about time, life, and Earth’s dynamic nature. It’s Lester Park, so small that without its state marker it would be an unnoticeable patch of roadside rock, a wider berm along its namesake two-lane road. Lester Park, unlike those great national parks through which one can drive for miles, is a you-blink-you-miss-it drive-by. In short, it’s short. But it tells a long tale worth knowing.
People go to Lester Park to look down, not around or up. The park’s interest lies beneath one’s feet. People stand on it. Well, on “them.” The exposed rock on which one walks is a pavement of stromatolites, stony, concentrically built structures that are the fossilized ancient compositions of blue-green algae and fine sediment, both having once jointly been the floor of a shallow sea almost a half billion years old. The stromatolites of the park became fossils more than a quarter billion years before the first dinosaurs trod the land. Give or take a week, these ancient life-forms in the park are 490 million years old. That age puts them near the end of the Cambrian Period, an end associated with an extinction event of dubious nature. Was there a marine oxygen crisis, a period of glaciation, an outpouring of lavas and toxic gases on what is now present-day Australia? Whatever the cause of the larger extinction, it did not eliminate stromatolites as they still form today in other parts of the world.
About halfway around the world from Lester Park, you can visit living stromatolite structures in Shark Bay, Australia. Don’t have time for a long trip? There’s always Exuma Sound in the Bahamas, obviously much closer to those ancient microbial structures. The modern mushroom-shaped stromatolites forming today will give you a glimpse of the ancient environment of Lester Park. But other than an occasional storm and the daily ebb and flow of tides, not much occurs in an environment conducive to stromatolite growth. Grass grows faster. Snails are rockets by comparison. Bit by bit, the cells grow and encapsulate sediments. The consolation prize for human visitors is basking beneath a tropical sun and wading or swimming in warm turquoise waters in which the microbes grow in thin layers interlaced with sediment. But wait a moment! If they grow in shallow warm seas, what are those old stromatolites during just west of Saratoga Springs?
When the stromatolites of Lester Park were living masses of microbes, they weren’t located as they are today at more than 43 degrees north latitude. They were south of the Equator. And the North America that you know and on which those stromatolites now lie, was a number of islands, not a continuous mass that contains Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Remember those plate tectonics lessons? The sea in which the stromatolites formed was tropical; the sediments and life-forms in that sea became fossiliferous rock that moved as the various islands wandered with the wandering crustal plates and associated terranes; they smacked into one another, rose and fell in elevation at times, and became the continent you know today.
Did you hear me? New York used to be south of the Equator. North America didn’t always have the shape it has. Seas have come and gone. Landmasses have altered their shapes with collisions and divergences, the former making mountains, the latter, seas. And after a half billion years, those tiny fossilized life-forms and the environment in which they lived is mirrored in microbial mats and “mushroom-structures” in an Australian bay and a Bahamian sound.
Lester Park teaches us that life is an old Earth feature, that even though some of its forms die out, others persist after extinction events like the one that separated Cambrian and Ordovician periods, that the planet is still one dominated by microbes, that place changes nature and geographic position, and that the spatial and temporal scales of the planet stand in contrast to our daily lives. Even those who study stromatolites don’t stand around in shallow sea water patiently watching them grow by tenths of millimeters per year.
How does one get the brain to wrap around 490 million years? How does the imagination cover the inexorable movement of a tropical bay in the Southern Hemisphere to a continental landscape in the Northern Hemisphere? Or, maybe more to the immediate concern, how does anyone maintain an awareness of all the subtle changes that a dynamic planet makes even during a short lifetime?
Have you witnessed change? We might be in the midst of a grand extinction event that began with our changing environments and killing off species over the last 200 to 300 millennia. Did we have a role in eliminating mastodon and mammoth, sabre-toothed smilodon and short-faced bear? “But that was long ago,” you say. “Don’t blame me that there are no more elephant birds or Dodos. Okay, I eat a lot of fish, but aren’t they ‘farmed’ somewhere?”
If you are living in the midst of a grand extinction event that coincides with the rise of our species, can you grasp it? Think of standing on those stromatolites at Lester Park. Unaware as microorganisms are, they lived at a time of extinction. They moved on crustal plates as you move today. Lester Park gives us our drive-by fleeting look at processes and events that might take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The seafloor spreading that moves plates and changes the shapes of continents ranges from about 1 centimeter per year to 15 centimeters/yr. At the fastest rate, those Lester Park stromatolites have had enough time to circle the planet. You are currently traveling, dependent upon your location, on a plate with a slower rate. Where you now live, that place that seems to have undergone so little change during your lifetime, will be somewhere else, different by about almost a mile in 10 to 20 millennia. Try to imagine 10,000 years against a backdrop of Lester Park’s 490 million years.
While we partake in a grand extinction, we pay homage to extinct life. Museums are testimony to our fascination with life gone by. Parks also testify to our ambivalence. We might by our individual actions contribute to habitat destruction and associated dire effects on various species, but we take the time to note life’s historical context. In 1999, the state of New York had a rededication ceremony for Lester Park, which it had received in 1914 by a farsighted individual. From the Renaissance on, a growing number of people became interested in fossils and what they represented. After Darwin published his findings in 1859, that interest increased, and by the early twentieth century, a number of people dedicated themselves to paleontology and micropaleontology. Think of it as a form of Ancestry.com. Related to all life, we humans want to know how we got to be what we are and how the place we call home differed and will differ.
Lester Park in New York is a good place for such contemplation. But, then, so is the place where you are right now.
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