A college basketball player in one of my geology classes made the comment that the mountains of Pennsylvania were “wimpy.” She was a scholarship player from British Columbia, and the Canadian Rockies were her benchmark for “mountains.” Her comment was definitely understandable in the context of her personal experience. The Rockies have elevations twice the height of the Appalachians.
Mountains, like people, vary in age. The Appalachians formed before the Canadian Rockies and once had elevations that matched and even exceeded the current mountains of western Canada. The mountain-building on the eastern side of North America ended more than 200 million years ago, whereas most of it on the western side largely ended about 60 million years ago. More time, more erosion. More erosion, lower elevations.
Where did the ancient Appalachians go? Eroded, they became sediments washed into low-lying basins, shallow inland seas, and the westernmost section of a widening Atlantic. In short, their rocks on lofty heights were distributed down their slopes by gravity, ice, wind, and water, making deposits that are as deep as the mountains were once high. The Canadian Rockies are undergoing the same process today, but have had less time to wear down, less time to redistribute what they are. Geologists know that previous mountain systems lie as layers of sediment miles thick. They also know that such layers of sediment, turned to sedimentary rock, can be uplifted into new mountains. It’s an old and repeated story: Uplift, erosion, deposition, lithification, and new uplift to make mountains from the redistributed materials of old mountains. What now seems to be a “wimpy” Appalachian mountain system was majestic.
Seems that mountains can play analog to human experience. Mountain-building can take hundreds of millions of years, but let’s just say it takes a long time. In relative terms, acquiring wisdom also takes a long time, and although humans haven’t been around as long as mountains, the species has had a considerable acquisition of wisdom, now compiled in a “mountain” of books, some very old by human standards.
There’s no way any of us can individually explore all the mountains, and there’s no way any of us can read through all that accumulated wisdom that previous generations have shed like sediments. But in our youth, we fail to realize that achieving great heights largely depends on the distribution of knowledge accumulated and piled high as older “mountains” of wisdom. Mark Twain captured the idea: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Ignore chronology and realize that most of us are attitudinally “fourteen” at one time or another. On our way to becoming mountains of wisdom, we see only the erosional remnants of the wisdom acquired in previous generations. And in the ages of industry and technology, we might have a tendency to say our “mountains” are mighty compared to wimpy “old” mountains. While we are familiar with the landscape rising to new elevations around us, we are simultaneously largely unfamiliar with the former elevations of those who went through their mountain-building stage and have attempted to redistribute themselves through their books.
By today’s standards, becoming knowledgeable might be a matter of mastering new industry and technology and a matter of discovery and invention, but becoming wise is partly a matter of rediscovering the views from those older lofty heights.
Mountains, like people, vary in age. The Appalachians formed before the Canadian Rockies and once had elevations that matched and even exceeded the current mountains of western Canada. The mountain-building on the eastern side of North America ended more than 200 million years ago, whereas most of it on the western side largely ended about 60 million years ago. More time, more erosion. More erosion, lower elevations.
Where did the ancient Appalachians go? Eroded, they became sediments washed into low-lying basins, shallow inland seas, and the westernmost section of a widening Atlantic. In short, their rocks on lofty heights were distributed down their slopes by gravity, ice, wind, and water, making deposits that are as deep as the mountains were once high. The Canadian Rockies are undergoing the same process today, but have had less time to wear down, less time to redistribute what they are. Geologists know that previous mountain systems lie as layers of sediment miles thick. They also know that such layers of sediment, turned to sedimentary rock, can be uplifted into new mountains. It’s an old and repeated story: Uplift, erosion, deposition, lithification, and new uplift to make mountains from the redistributed materials of old mountains. What now seems to be a “wimpy” Appalachian mountain system was majestic.
Seems that mountains can play analog to human experience. Mountain-building can take hundreds of millions of years, but let’s just say it takes a long time. In relative terms, acquiring wisdom also takes a long time, and although humans haven’t been around as long as mountains, the species has had a considerable acquisition of wisdom, now compiled in a “mountain” of books, some very old by human standards.
There’s no way any of us can individually explore all the mountains, and there’s no way any of us can read through all that accumulated wisdom that previous generations have shed like sediments. But in our youth, we fail to realize that achieving great heights largely depends on the distribution of knowledge accumulated and piled high as older “mountains” of wisdom. Mark Twain captured the idea: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Ignore chronology and realize that most of us are attitudinally “fourteen” at one time or another. On our way to becoming mountains of wisdom, we see only the erosional remnants of the wisdom acquired in previous generations. And in the ages of industry and technology, we might have a tendency to say our “mountains” are mighty compared to wimpy “old” mountains. While we are familiar with the landscape rising to new elevations around us, we are simultaneously largely unfamiliar with the former elevations of those who went through their mountain-building stage and have attempted to redistribute themselves through their books.
By today’s standards, becoming knowledgeable might be a matter of mastering new industry and technology and a matter of discovery and invention, but becoming wise is partly a matter of rediscovering the views from those older lofty heights.
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