Do this: Stack some old towels, really old towels, maybe five of them. Then take off the top two towels. After that, place some new towels on the stack. You now have a stack of towels (who’da thunk it), very much representative of a geologic disconformity. You’ve just mimicked Mother Nature’s construction-destruction-construction process that is evident at certain gaps in the sedimentary rock record.
Sometimes, human history mimics that process. But first, a word from our writer:
Not Knowing Is Disadvantageous
I remember being ignorant about geology and its more specific sub-disciplines petrology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. Although during my youth I had been fascinated by rocks visible in road cuts and stones I found in streams and by fossils I saw in museums, I was ignorant of their formation and emplacement. Eventually, I acquired a bit of knowledge about rocks, enough to teach college students about them. In that acquisition, I realized that road cuts were even more fascinating than I had thought they were in my ignorant youth. Knowledge breeds fascination. It begs more understanding. And it provides insights and analogies applicable to history and mystery.
I realize that most people lack some basic geologic knowledge just as I lacked it in my youth. During a visit to Virginia Tech, I commented to one of the coaches recruiting my son that the school’s limestone buildings and gothic architecture were beautiful. He said, “Yes, they built the school from the rocks that were in the area just as they had originally come down from the sky.” Huh!
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although some limestone formed from chemical precipitation in shallow tropical seas and lakes, none had fallen like rain from the atmosphere unless they had been blasted skyward by some bolide impact, such as the celestial body that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, killing the dinos. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they are, however; not everyone cares to or wants to know information deemed irrelevant in a settled brain.
Many might even argue there’s no need for information about limestone or any other kind of rock. Well, that’s true with the exception of those who use anything produced from Earth’s materials—which, by the way, is everyone. One of my children asked me long ago why people should bother studying “rocks” or the earth sciences. My short answer: Earth is home, the only home we’ll likely ever know. Who objects to knowing the nature of the residence? Who doesn’t know where the rooms are, how to move from one to another, and what kinds of materials or furniture comprise the surroundings?
Unconformities
Without burdening your mind, let me make this quick: Sometimes the rocks have temporal gaps, that is, sometimes they house a boundary between layers far separated either by a period of non-formation or non-emplacement or by a period of erosion. That latter is the “destruction” phase in the “construction-destruction-construction” process I mentioned above.
The “gap” can lie between different types of rocks: Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Whenever the angular orientation is different between the rocks below and above the boundary gap, geologists call that dividing line an angular unconformity. When the gap separates parallel layers of rocks, it is a disconformity. There’s a famous unconformity in Scotland that led the Father of Geology, James Hutton, to recognize Earth’s geologic process were very old and rather the same in his time as they were millions of years ago. At Siccar Point, a tilted layer of sedimentary rocks underlies a more horizontally oriented sequence of sedimentary rocks. ** The rocks below the angular unconformity were originally emplaced as sediments that became layers of sedimentary rocks. Those rock layers were then tilted and eroded. Then after a long time, they were buried under new layers of sediments that also became lithified and eventually slightly tilted, followed by another period of erosion.
A Siccar Point about a Sicker History
Santayana’s famous statement about being condemned to repeat the history one doesn’t know applies to many American voters whose gaps in knowledge make them elect “more of the same” regardless of failed policies or of corrupt actions. * Consider, for example, that more than 6% of Biden supporters would have cast different ballots had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop.
I think a similar gap lies in the layers of American history centered on civil rights. Republicans long championed freeing the slave population, acted to free slaves, and supported the civil rights movement. Democrats long pushed to keep slavery, balked at supporting emancipation, and became the party of the Ku Klux Klan and segregation. Yet, the Black vote now traditionally goes to Democrat Party candidates. Can anyone say "gap in knowledge"?
And so it will be with almost any layer of American history. The scandals of the past, for example, will be eroded by time. The political house in which we all live has missing materials. We really don’t know as a general population the history essential to avoiding the mistakes and the corruption of our past.
So, as with previous scandals, today’s Biden scandals will be eroded away. Democrats will turn out to vote for Joe because of the gap. The Left-leaning Press had worked to erode the Biden scandals from public view, whereas it has worked to preserve any scandal—fictional or real—associated with Republicans. Some few news outlets try to keep the deposition of layers consist, but the major news outlets preserve the gap by one of two methods: 1) They do not bother to report Biden’s scandals, so it is never deposited in the minds of the audience and 2) They erode any trace of a scandal.
Voting by Extrapolating the Missing Units
At angular unconformity and disconformity boundaries, geologists do not know the sequence of rock units that might have been eroded away unless they find some remnant rocks they can associate with the gap. Given that discovery, they can piece together what might have lain in the gap.
But finding related rocks requires extensive search and some luck. Mother Nature, for example, has eroded away tens to hundreds of millions of years of rock history. You can see such long gaps in depositional history in places like Alexandria Bay in New York, where along Route 12 a road cut reveals a 600 million year gap between a Precambrian gneiss and an overlying Potsdam Sandstone. ***
No doubt those who vote for Biden will forget the Afghanistan debacle, the closure of the Keystone Pipeline, and the lost funds that were supposed to be spent in COVID relief; they will forget the high inflation, the high gas prices, the overbearing restrictions on fossil fuels, and the push to make everything climate related. Want an example? Biden recently spoke to a gathering of union representatives who applauded him because he said he was “pro-union.” They have already forgotten his elimination of 11,000 union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline he cancelled his first day in office.
Those gaps in knowledge will persist through the next election, just as the gap in knowledge about the tens of millions of people killed under socialism in the last century keeps American youth (and college professors) from recognizing the evils layered on people by the likes of Soviet Union and current Russian leaders, Castro, and Mao. Those layers have been either effectively eroded away or never deposited in a free press.
The Great Disconformity
The gaps make Americans perfect examples of Santayana’s aphorism. We repeat past mistakes because we are missing parts of our history. Because so many partisans work to remove layers of the American past, the only way to vote intelligently is either by extrapolating the historical truths or by discovering by chance or search those units of time. Without that knowledge, the layers of America’s future will parallel the layers of its past, and no one will know why. ****
*“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
—Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 284.
**See photos at. https://www.shutterstock.com/search/siccar
***See picture by Chris Murray at https://tilife.org/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/615/Thousand-Islands-Rocks.html The photo marks the gap as a red line.
****No greater example of a "gap" exists than the admission of Mueller, who was responsible for discovering the truth about the Russian collusion hoax, that he did not know about Fusion GPS, a major player in the hoax.
Sometimes, human history mimics that process. But first, a word from our writer:
Not Knowing Is Disadvantageous
I remember being ignorant about geology and its more specific sub-disciplines petrology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. Although during my youth I had been fascinated by rocks visible in road cuts and stones I found in streams and by fossils I saw in museums, I was ignorant of their formation and emplacement. Eventually, I acquired a bit of knowledge about rocks, enough to teach college students about them. In that acquisition, I realized that road cuts were even more fascinating than I had thought they were in my ignorant youth. Knowledge breeds fascination. It begs more understanding. And it provides insights and analogies applicable to history and mystery.
I realize that most people lack some basic geologic knowledge just as I lacked it in my youth. During a visit to Virginia Tech, I commented to one of the coaches recruiting my son that the school’s limestone buildings and gothic architecture were beautiful. He said, “Yes, they built the school from the rocks that were in the area just as they had originally come down from the sky.” Huh!
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although some limestone formed from chemical precipitation in shallow tropical seas and lakes, none had fallen like rain from the atmosphere unless they had been blasted skyward by some bolide impact, such as the celestial body that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, killing the dinos. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they are, however; not everyone cares to or wants to know information deemed irrelevant in a settled brain.
Many might even argue there’s no need for information about limestone or any other kind of rock. Well, that’s true with the exception of those who use anything produced from Earth’s materials—which, by the way, is everyone. One of my children asked me long ago why people should bother studying “rocks” or the earth sciences. My short answer: Earth is home, the only home we’ll likely ever know. Who objects to knowing the nature of the residence? Who doesn’t know where the rooms are, how to move from one to another, and what kinds of materials or furniture comprise the surroundings?
Unconformities
Without burdening your mind, let me make this quick: Sometimes the rocks have temporal gaps, that is, sometimes they house a boundary between layers far separated either by a period of non-formation or non-emplacement or by a period of erosion. That latter is the “destruction” phase in the “construction-destruction-construction” process I mentioned above.
The “gap” can lie between different types of rocks: Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Whenever the angular orientation is different between the rocks below and above the boundary gap, geologists call that dividing line an angular unconformity. When the gap separates parallel layers of rocks, it is a disconformity. There’s a famous unconformity in Scotland that led the Father of Geology, James Hutton, to recognize Earth’s geologic process were very old and rather the same in his time as they were millions of years ago. At Siccar Point, a tilted layer of sedimentary rocks underlies a more horizontally oriented sequence of sedimentary rocks. ** The rocks below the angular unconformity were originally emplaced as sediments that became layers of sedimentary rocks. Those rock layers were then tilted and eroded. Then after a long time, they were buried under new layers of sediments that also became lithified and eventually slightly tilted, followed by another period of erosion.
A Siccar Point about a Sicker History
Santayana’s famous statement about being condemned to repeat the history one doesn’t know applies to many American voters whose gaps in knowledge make them elect “more of the same” regardless of failed policies or of corrupt actions. * Consider, for example, that more than 6% of Biden supporters would have cast different ballots had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop.
I think a similar gap lies in the layers of American history centered on civil rights. Republicans long championed freeing the slave population, acted to free slaves, and supported the civil rights movement. Democrats long pushed to keep slavery, balked at supporting emancipation, and became the party of the Ku Klux Klan and segregation. Yet, the Black vote now traditionally goes to Democrat Party candidates. Can anyone say "gap in knowledge"?
And so it will be with almost any layer of American history. The scandals of the past, for example, will be eroded by time. The political house in which we all live has missing materials. We really don’t know as a general population the history essential to avoiding the mistakes and the corruption of our past.
So, as with previous scandals, today’s Biden scandals will be eroded away. Democrats will turn out to vote for Joe because of the gap. The Left-leaning Press had worked to erode the Biden scandals from public view, whereas it has worked to preserve any scandal—fictional or real—associated with Republicans. Some few news outlets try to keep the deposition of layers consist, but the major news outlets preserve the gap by one of two methods: 1) They do not bother to report Biden’s scandals, so it is never deposited in the minds of the audience and 2) They erode any trace of a scandal.
Voting by Extrapolating the Missing Units
At angular unconformity and disconformity boundaries, geologists do not know the sequence of rock units that might have been eroded away unless they find some remnant rocks they can associate with the gap. Given that discovery, they can piece together what might have lain in the gap.
But finding related rocks requires extensive search and some luck. Mother Nature, for example, has eroded away tens to hundreds of millions of years of rock history. You can see such long gaps in depositional history in places like Alexandria Bay in New York, where along Route 12 a road cut reveals a 600 million year gap between a Precambrian gneiss and an overlying Potsdam Sandstone. ***
No doubt those who vote for Biden will forget the Afghanistan debacle, the closure of the Keystone Pipeline, and the lost funds that were supposed to be spent in COVID relief; they will forget the high inflation, the high gas prices, the overbearing restrictions on fossil fuels, and the push to make everything climate related. Want an example? Biden recently spoke to a gathering of union representatives who applauded him because he said he was “pro-union.” They have already forgotten his elimination of 11,000 union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline he cancelled his first day in office.
Those gaps in knowledge will persist through the next election, just as the gap in knowledge about the tens of millions of people killed under socialism in the last century keeps American youth (and college professors) from recognizing the evils layered on people by the likes of Soviet Union and current Russian leaders, Castro, and Mao. Those layers have been either effectively eroded away or never deposited in a free press.
The Great Disconformity
The gaps make Americans perfect examples of Santayana’s aphorism. We repeat past mistakes because we are missing parts of our history. Because so many partisans work to remove layers of the American past, the only way to vote intelligently is either by extrapolating the historical truths or by discovering by chance or search those units of time. Without that knowledge, the layers of America’s future will parallel the layers of its past, and no one will know why. ****
*“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
—Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 284.
**See photos at. https://www.shutterstock.com/search/siccar
***See picture by Chris Murray at https://tilife.org/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/615/Thousand-Islands-Rocks.html The photo marks the gap as a red line.
****No greater example of a "gap" exists than the admission of Mueller, who was responsible for discovering the truth about the Russian collusion hoax, that he did not know about Fusion GPS, a major player in the hoax.
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