Geologists’ efforts to retrace the past are sometimes like taking selfies on a precipice. You think you have a good picture in the making while you are dangerously close to a perilous plunge. And when you return to civilization with your picture, you are met with comments about you, rather than about the scenery in the background. “Yeah, you look nice. Weren’t you afraid of falling? No one’s going to get me that close to a cliff that might give way to gravity.” One more, “I don’t see what the big fuss is. They’re rocks. Who really cares?”
Aside from the general ignorance that everything we have originates in rocks and in the soils they make, there’s the general disinterest in how the surface of Earth acquired its present forms. Sure, everyone is now exposed to Plate Tectonics and seafloor spreading in elementary school texts, but generalized maps and videos of Pangaea’s breakup take us all to a time so far in the past we can’t comprehend its temporal distance and their relevance to our current lives. “What are you saying? Hundreds of millions of years? Geez, I have trouble picturing the temporal distance to 1975, even when I read the books and see the movies.” Disinterest in and ignorance of the past compounded by a weakness to understand the significance of the past make every generation vulnerable to thinking the configuration of the world is a product of the present.
You can imagine, then, the difficulty of getting anyone interested in digging deeper into Earth’s past, say into rocks that formed hundreds of millions of years earlier than those produced by the formation of Pangaea. Nevertheless, some geologists have taken that underappreciated selfie on the side of the Grand Canyon.* They were in search of an even more ancient past, one centered on the formation and breakup of Rodinia, a predecessor supercontinent, a landmass composed, like Pangaea, of “all lands.” Rodinia formed a little over a billion years ago. And its pieces, like Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, have become the petrologic diaspora now widely separated from their point of origin.
Again, for the geologically disinterested, the reaction might be “So what? Isn’t this just one of those subculture moments, like knowing the location where The Rocky Horror Picture Showwas shot?” (Bray Studios and Oakley Court, by the way; and in case you are unaware of the cult movie, it has nothing to do with rocks).
Okay, I won’t give the details beyond saying that connecting Tasmania and the Grand Canyon revamps older maps of Rodinia. But I’ll draw a parallel. It is very difficult to trace the origins of Earth’s surface forms because they have undergone numerous changes in shape over a very long time, and they have undergone many new relationships. In short, the character of the present rocks resulted from a complex history. And so have the attitudes and ideas of the current generation of humans. Take anti-Semitism and the October 2018 shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue as an example.
When you see definitive mapping by TV pundits or newspaper editorialists seeking “to explain” to the rest of us “nonspecialists” the causes of current behaviors in society, take a look to see whether they involve careful and thorough research that shows all the links that have come and gone. The current generation of humans did not form in a vacuum. Generations are not “self-contained”; they are the results of many interactions, and many of those are now either lost or hidden just like the relationship between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon.
Whatever motivated isolated individuals like Emanuel Samson,** Dylann Storm Roof,*** Devin Kelley,**** and Robert Bowers***** isn’t a simple matter. We can hold individuals responsible for their actions, but we need to recognize that those actions never occur in vacuums. The hate behind the individuals is rooted in the deep past. Think, for example, of the anti-Semitic violence during the First Crusade in 1096, the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 or the horrific Holocaust perpetrated by Hitler. Hate runs into the deep past. And in every resurfacing, those responsible rarely, if ever, see or understand that past. They merely walk over the “rocks” of their present time.
The rocks of Rodinia have undergone both burial and exposure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Though far less long-lived than those rocks, our own species has resurfacing emotions and attitudes that the uninformed exhibit. Just as the rocks of the Grand Canyon are unaware of their own origins and distant connections, so those who carry ancient hatreds seem to be unaware of why they believe and act as they do. They carry forward the hate that should have remained long buried in the rocks of ancient collisions that looked nothing like the current makeup of the world.
*You can see the pic (not exactly a “selfie” because someone else snapped it) at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-dataset-configuration-supercontinent-rodinia.html, and you can read the report by Steve Car of the University of New Mexico, October 29, 2018:
Dataset may resolve questions about the configuration of supercontinent Rodinia, based on Mulder, Jackob A., et al. Rodinian devil in disguise: Correlation of 1.25-1.10 Ga strata between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, Geology (2018). DOI: 10.1130/G45225.1.
**Burnette Chapel Church shooting in 2017 in Antioch, Tennessee.
***Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina.
****First Baptist Church shooting in 2917 in Southerland Springs, Texas.
*****Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Aside from the general ignorance that everything we have originates in rocks and in the soils they make, there’s the general disinterest in how the surface of Earth acquired its present forms. Sure, everyone is now exposed to Plate Tectonics and seafloor spreading in elementary school texts, but generalized maps and videos of Pangaea’s breakup take us all to a time so far in the past we can’t comprehend its temporal distance and their relevance to our current lives. “What are you saying? Hundreds of millions of years? Geez, I have trouble picturing the temporal distance to 1975, even when I read the books and see the movies.” Disinterest in and ignorance of the past compounded by a weakness to understand the significance of the past make every generation vulnerable to thinking the configuration of the world is a product of the present.
You can imagine, then, the difficulty of getting anyone interested in digging deeper into Earth’s past, say into rocks that formed hundreds of millions of years earlier than those produced by the formation of Pangaea. Nevertheless, some geologists have taken that underappreciated selfie on the side of the Grand Canyon.* They were in search of an even more ancient past, one centered on the formation and breakup of Rodinia, a predecessor supercontinent, a landmass composed, like Pangaea, of “all lands.” Rodinia formed a little over a billion years ago. And its pieces, like Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, have become the petrologic diaspora now widely separated from their point of origin.
Again, for the geologically disinterested, the reaction might be “So what? Isn’t this just one of those subculture moments, like knowing the location where The Rocky Horror Picture Showwas shot?” (Bray Studios and Oakley Court, by the way; and in case you are unaware of the cult movie, it has nothing to do with rocks).
Okay, I won’t give the details beyond saying that connecting Tasmania and the Grand Canyon revamps older maps of Rodinia. But I’ll draw a parallel. It is very difficult to trace the origins of Earth’s surface forms because they have undergone numerous changes in shape over a very long time, and they have undergone many new relationships. In short, the character of the present rocks resulted from a complex history. And so have the attitudes and ideas of the current generation of humans. Take anti-Semitism and the October 2018 shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue as an example.
When you see definitive mapping by TV pundits or newspaper editorialists seeking “to explain” to the rest of us “nonspecialists” the causes of current behaviors in society, take a look to see whether they involve careful and thorough research that shows all the links that have come and gone. The current generation of humans did not form in a vacuum. Generations are not “self-contained”; they are the results of many interactions, and many of those are now either lost or hidden just like the relationship between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon.
Whatever motivated isolated individuals like Emanuel Samson,** Dylann Storm Roof,*** Devin Kelley,**** and Robert Bowers***** isn’t a simple matter. We can hold individuals responsible for their actions, but we need to recognize that those actions never occur in vacuums. The hate behind the individuals is rooted in the deep past. Think, for example, of the anti-Semitic violence during the First Crusade in 1096, the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 or the horrific Holocaust perpetrated by Hitler. Hate runs into the deep past. And in every resurfacing, those responsible rarely, if ever, see or understand that past. They merely walk over the “rocks” of their present time.
The rocks of Rodinia have undergone both burial and exposure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Though far less long-lived than those rocks, our own species has resurfacing emotions and attitudes that the uninformed exhibit. Just as the rocks of the Grand Canyon are unaware of their own origins and distant connections, so those who carry ancient hatreds seem to be unaware of why they believe and act as they do. They carry forward the hate that should have remained long buried in the rocks of ancient collisions that looked nothing like the current makeup of the world.
*You can see the pic (not exactly a “selfie” because someone else snapped it) at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-dataset-configuration-supercontinent-rodinia.html, and you can read the report by Steve Car of the University of New Mexico, October 29, 2018:
Dataset may resolve questions about the configuration of supercontinent Rodinia, based on Mulder, Jackob A., et al. Rodinian devil in disguise: Correlation of 1.25-1.10 Ga strata between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, Geology (2018). DOI: 10.1130/G45225.1.
**Burnette Chapel Church shooting in 2017 in Antioch, Tennessee.
***Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina.
****First Baptist Church shooting in 2917 in Southerland Springs, Texas.
*****Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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