The Grand Canyon of Westbrook

The Grand Canyon of Westbrook is a large volume of negative space out behind the Travelodge (the landmark visible in the photo below, on the Canyon's north rim). I've been past it hundreds of times in my lifetime, but unless you walk out the railroad tracks to stand on the edge, it's easy to miss. The shopping centers and four-lane arterial roads that surround it do a remarkable job of obscuring the city's biggest hole in the ground.


Some online research reveals that the rock of the quarry is gneiss, rock that originally formed as marine clay and slate about 450 million years ago. It was the Ordovician Period, and the mud that would eventually become coastal Maine was accumulating in a shallow subtropical sea surrounding a chain of volcanic islands in the southern hemisphere.

450 million years is a long time. Enough time for seafloor mud to harden into slate, then for that slate to fold onto itself and plunge miles deep into the earth while brand-new Appalachian Mountains rise to the height of Himalayas near the equator, plus enough time for those Himalayan-sized mountains to wear away to White Mountain-sized nubs.

450 million years is nine million times longer than the amount of time it took Blue Rock Industries to make this hole. But now that we're thinking in terms of hundreds of millions of years, in terms of rocks that drifted halfway across the globe and sank four miles under long-gone mountains and resurfaced here, it doesn't seem like such a big hole any longer, in the grand scheme of things, does it?

Just a very temporary divot on a landscape even more temporarily known as "Westbrook," "Maine."

There it is, take it.

Out in Los Angeles they've been celebrating the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the audacious engineering project that drained the Owens Valley and transformed the San Fernando Valley from a landscape of orchards into a landscape of tract homes and gas stations.

It just so happens that this week I've also been plowing through the final chapters of John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, his consolidated narrative of a lifetime's worth of writing on North American geology. So far, my favorite part of that book has been the section on Wyoming, in which McPhee tails USGS geologist John Love on field excursions across the state. The chapters weave the sixty-million-year history of the Rocky Mountains with the hundred-year timescale of Love's family, from his mother's arrival, via stagecoach, in a gunslinging Old West of the early twentieth century to Love's atomic age discovery of uranium in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

"Love said that a part of his job was to find anything from oil to agates, and then, in effect, say 'Fly at it, folks,' to the people of the United States."

The geologic history of Wyoming spans relatively little time in the grand scheme of Earth's history. In the last sixty million years or so, roughly one percent of Earth's lifetime, the Rocky Mountains rose up, then sank under accumulations of sand and volcanic debris tens of thousands of feet deep, then, relatively recently, rose up again and shook off the sand in freshets of new mountain streams.

And then a new geological force arrives. Ranchers arrive in Wyoming, and their sons help open up its landscapes to strip mines and oil wells. The state digs beneath the ranchers'  thin Holocene topsoil to get at the more lucrative geology of the Mesozoic era. Open-pit uranium mines, oil and gas wells, and mountain-eating coal draglines rearrange the Rocky Mountain landscape and usher in the new Anthropocene era.

Photo: Jim Bridger coal mine, from the Casper Star-Tribune.

"Fly at it, folks." Love was talking about the bounty of Wyoming's mineral resources, but it's exactly the same sentiment expressed by William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works, when he opened the sluice gates of the new Aqueduct a hundred years ago and famously said, "there it is. Take it."

In the same momentous twentieth century of human history that rearranged Wyoming, Mulholland's power broker friends find cheap oil under Venice and the Baldwin Hills, and then they give the growing city a reason to burn it by moving the Owens River over mountains and irrigating the massive suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Gravel erosion from the Santa Monica Mountains, which had washed out into the Pacific for millennia and built the vast coastal plain of the Los Angeles basin, suddenly gets trapped behind foothill dams and begins to bury the mountain canyons. The basin itself acquires new sedimentary layers of asphalt and concrete. The sooty remnants of Carboniferous swamps fly into the troposphere through millions of exhaust pipes.

Geologic time and human history converge here, in the spectacular landscapes of the American west. But remember: geologic history is full of cataclysms.

Making the Geologic Now

I'm taking off on the bus for New York early tomorrow morning to visit some friends and stop by the launch party for Making the Geologic Now, the new book edited by Jaime Kruse and Elizabeth Elsworth of the Friends of the Pleistocene and smudge studio. 

The book includes an essay on the Bayside Glacier contributed by yours truly. I'm really proud to be part of this project, among many writers and bloggers whom I've long admired. I've had a chance to see parts of it already, and it looks fantastic.

After tomorrow's launch party, you'll be able to download a free e-book at Punctum Books’ website, or browse an interactive web version at www.geologicnow.com. Pre-orders of the print version, which should ship in December, will also be available soon through Punctum’s website.

Image: the Sable Oaks glacier, a municipal snow dump located in the flight path of the Portland International Jetport.

From Skid Row to Starbucks

The alleged etymological origins of the term "skid row" are in the Pacific Northwest, in districts where lumbermen "skidded" logs down towards mills and ships lining the waterfront, and where disreputable trades served lumbermen who were eager to spend their earnings on vices after long and sober months in the woods.

One of the most famous skid rows is in the neighborhood around Seattle's Pioneer Square, centered around Henry Yesler's sawmill. The neighborhood followed a familiar skid row trajectory: first, the waterfront industry moved away. Then, urban renewal projects manifested the city's disrespect for the neighborhood by demolishing lots of buildings and leaving the rest to wither in the shadows of ugly, soot-soaked freeway viaducts. Under the traffic, intentionally hidden from view, strip clubs, drug vendors, and homeless agencies flourished.

And then, when developers realized how close these skid rows were to downtown, and how cheap the real estate still was, the skid rows quickly flipped into yuppie pleasure districts, from New York's Bowery to San Francisco's Tenderloin District. And Pioneer Square attained the ideal embodiment of this post-industrial destiny when Starbucks built its complex of corporate headquarters offices in the neighborhood.

By the time crews started excavating for the 4-level underground parking garage, they confirmed that the old age of logging was dead and buried. Literally.

Photo by Scott Durham, of centraldistrictnews.com

Instead of digging down into post-glacial gravel, backhoes found a morass of rotting timber instead: the discarded slash from the old mills, the century-old pilings of old wharves and railroads, and the miscellaneous debris that nineteenth-century land developers had tossed into the city's marshy waterfront to transform wetlands into dry quays above sea level.

This item came to my attention via hugeasscity, which noted that the city's plan to renovate the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct (the concrete urban renewal scar visible in the background of the photo above) calls for putting the freeway underground. Which sounds like a neat-o plan for a Tomorrowland version of Seattle, until you consider that the whole gleaming, modern Seattle waterfront district is actually built atop an unstable, sinking pile of wood. Plus an active fault line.

In the end, it doesn't matter how many lattes and condos you sell above ground: the roots of the city will always be in Skid Row.

PS- the bike tour to Walden post I'd promised yesterday is still coming - check back tomorrow! I'm going on a blogging tear this week to make up for lost time.

"This Is Not A Place of Honor"

This week I'm reading About a Mountain by John D'Agata, a long-form essay about Las Vegas, suicide, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

One of the fascinating paradoxes that the book delves into is the idea that the radioactive waste stored in Yucca Mountain is going to be deadly for tens of thousands of years - and so, if the species that has made itself capable of destroying itself actually manages to survive for ten millennia or more, into a future where the United States and the English language will both have been long forgotten and Yucca Mountain itself could be oceanfront property, how should we warn our distant descendants not to explore inside?

Yucca Mountain (source: Wikipedia)

The government convened a team of materials scientists, linguists, anthropologists, graphic artists, and others to come up with a warning sign or message that civilizations 10,000 years from now would still be able to understand in order to stay away from the mountain and its deadly tunnels. This is their rough draft for the ideas that that message should convey:

"This is not a place of honor. No esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is buried here. This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention. We are serious. Sending this message was significant for us. Ours was considered an important culture."

Even in the doubtful scenario that this message could last, and there's anyone around able to understand it in ten thousand years, I doubt this message would serve its purpose.

If there's any human characteristic will last for 10,000 years, it will be the capacity to identify bullshit. If you can imagine a future in which, even though your "important" culture has been long forgotten, some vestigial scrap of humanity that has anything in common with your own still exists - and if your own civilization has the hubris to believe that it can communicate across those millennia, that your message will last and be remembered - well, the assertion that that message is hiding "nothing of value" and "no esteemed deed" kind of rings hollow.

It's like if Homer decided to write the Illiad not as a parable of honor and duty, but as a long poem about how, while Homer considered the idea of the Illiad to be very serious and important, the actual historical details of the Trojan War are not worth knowing or investigating at all - and in fact, if you read between the lines, trying to learn the details of the plot will actually give you a nasty case of thyroid cancer.

Would that poem last? And if by some miracle it did, would anyone take it seriously?

John D'Agata is a great essayist. But his book and its themes also remind me of another favorite author of mine, the novelist Cormac McCarthy. Yucca Mountain, both as a stark desert landscape and as the repository for the waste of civilization's self-destructive technologies, seems like an ideal subject for one of McCarthy's novels. I'm reminded of the interview he did with the Wall Street Journal last year, and this brief discussion of the end-of-the-world scenario in his novel The Road:

But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

Personally, I'll not be taking that problem to bed with me tonight. But maybe Yucca Mountain's sign makers should take it up - communicating with the cyborgs of the 22nd century should be a manageable first step towards communicating with whatever alien descendants might still be around in the 121st century.

The 2,053 Nuclear Explosions of the 20th Century

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created this video timeline that shows the dates and locations of each of the 20th century's 2,053 nuclear explosions, 2,051 of which were detonated during "peacetime" as weapons tests.

When I was a college dilettante, I spent a semester's worth of evenings in training to become a NRC-certified operator of the chemistry department's research reactor. I dropped out of the effort when my economics coursework led me to balance the benefits of the effort - namely bragging rights - against the costs. It is justifiably difficult to pass the NRC's operator exam. But I did get a chance to power up the reactor under supervision in the control room, and it was a pretty great extracurricular lesson in nuclear physics and chemistry.

This video reminded me of one of the fascinating things I learned from that experience. All over the globe, undisturbed layers of topsoil that date from the early 1950s (when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapons and set off a rapid acceleration of tests worldwide) to October 1963 (when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect and sent subsequent tests underground) are substantially more radioactive than surrounding layers of soil - and will remain so for thousands of years.

The 20th century's close brush with self-annihilation is therefore a part of the geologic record. Future archaeologists, if there are any, will find it just beneath the chemical traces of the global suicide pact we're writing now - the rapid spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Red States and Red Clay

Thanks for all of the links and compliments on the Black Belt post. It's been really gratifying to watch all of the pings come in from blogs all over the world, and with such kind compliments, too. I certainly thought it was neat, and I'm glad so many others agreed.

To those of you who are new visitors, my goal with this blog is to discover and write about the complex relationships between ecology and society. The maps of black belt soils and voting patterns were a particularly elegant and striking example of the sort of geographic connections I'm fascinated by. If you liked that post, you should also check out Portlandhenge, the Downtown Portland Glacier, From Swimming Pools to Vernal Pools, and The ExxonMobil Arena/Disaster Shelter.

Red soil in red counties: Commenter Michael, in the Black Belt post below, pointed out that "as you travel into the politically red areas, it's also literally red, as river sediments give way to red clay. My guess is that the red dirt isn't nearly as good for farming."

I did some background research on this and found that it's true. Actually, the black belt itself features a good deal of red clay, but it's underneath a surface layer of rich, black and loamy topsoil. The photo at right shows a sample of "Bama soil," the official state soil of Alabama. Note the thinner layer of black soil on top of a thicker layer of red, iron-rich clay.

Clay soils are typically the remnants of ancient marine sedimentary deposits, so naturally, there's a lot of clay in the Black Belt and just to its south. But this essay from the Alabama Dept. of Conservation explains that black belt soils have a thicker layer of black, more fertile topsoil because of its chalk content. The chalk fostered prairie grasses, which, over millions of years, accumulated into a dark, nutrient-rich topsoil. South of the Black Belt, where the Cretaceous seas were deeper, there's less chalk. Which means less fertile soil. Which means they supported fewer antebellum slave plantations. Which means more Republicans live there today.

But their gardens are probably lousy.

The Black Belt: How Soil Types Determined the 2008 Election in the Deep South

Edit: credit for the original insight on the cotton-electoral connection seems to belong to Allen Gathman, a biology professor at SE Missouri State University. The Pin-the-Tail blog referenced previously seems to have picked it up later and failed to attribute the source; the post below has been corrected accordingly.

This is not a political blog. However, this is a story I couldn't pass up: the story of how voting patterns in the 2008 election were essentially determined 85 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period. It's also a story about how soil science relates to political science, by way of historical chance.

It's also a story best told with maps, beginning with this one:


This is the map showing county-level election results in the southeastern USA, courtesy of the New York Times website. Most of these are "red" states, but the county-level detail shows an interesting phenomenon: a crescent of blue that runs in an arc from the Mississippi River floodplain to central North Carolina. This had struck me as curious when I saw it after the election, but I regret that I didn't investigate it further until the story was explained over the weekend on the Strange Maps blog.

Allen Gathman, a biology professor in Missouri, had also seen the pattern and recognized it as a function of land use in the deep South. He posted the electoral map above alongside a map of cotton production in 1860: sure enough, the "blue" counties correlated with cotton production in the slavery era. Here's a mash-up of the two maps from Strange Maps contributor Mark Root-Willey:

Each dot in the overlay map represents 2,000 bales of cotton production in 1860. Recall from your American history class that cotton production, a high-value but labor-intensive industry, was one of the prime economic reasons why Southern states chose to maintain the institution of slavery instead of maintaining the Union.

Fascinating stuff, but these maps reminded me that I had seen a similar pattern before, in satellite maps like this one:


View Larger Map

There's that crescent again. A closer look reveals that the lighter-colored band in the satellite image consists mostly of agricultural fields. Here's a detail of Noxubee County, one of the blue counties in eastern Mississippi that's located in the middle of the crescent:


View Larger Map

It turns out that this crescent actually has a name: the "Black Belt," a name that refers both to the area's racial demographics and to the rich, loamy soils that were ideal for cotton crops.

Allen Tullos of Emory University has an excellent essay on the Black Belt that's available online from the Southern Spaces journal. His article observes that

Half of Alabama's enslaved population was concentrated within ten Black Belt counties where the exploitation of their labor made this one of the richest regions in the antebellum United States.

Tullos's essay also includes a quote from Booker T. Washington, who gave this assessment of the Black Belt in 1901:

"I have often been asked to define the term 'Black Belt.' So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturaly rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense - that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.

A hundred years later, the "black belt" still contains a high concentration of African Americans, who, as a demographic group, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Barack Obama.

To review so far: the blue counties can be explained by the black population, whose ancestors were brought there because of white supremacy, and black soil.

But how did the soil get there, and why is it in this unusual crescent-shaped band? In an essay on the area's ecology, Joe MacGown, Richard Brown, and JoVonn Hill of the Mississippi Entomological Museum write that "the entire region is underlain by Selma Chalk formed from Upper Cretaceous marine deposits. Depending on the exact consistency of the parent material, the chalk weathers into a variety of soil types which supports a mosaic of habitats ranging from prairie to forest." Here's their map of this geological formation - look familiar?



One last map to bring it full circle, from blue counties, to ancient blue seas. Below are two maps of North America in the late Cretaceous Period, made by Professor of Geology Ron Blakey at the University of Northern Arizona. The map on the left shows the South during the early Cretaceous, about 115 million years ago, and the map on the right shows the South during the Late Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago. These shallow, tropical seas, teeming with marine life, laid the deposits that would eventually become the rich "black belt" soils. Note how the crescent of cotton farms in 1860, and of Democratic-voting counties in 2008, also follows the crescent of these ancient shorelines:



For further reading:
Allen Tullos, "The Black Belt." From Southern Spaces, April 2004.

Joe MacGown, Richard Brown, and JoVonn Hill, "The Black Belt in Mississippi." From the Mississippi Entomological Museum.

Ron Blakey, "Paleogeography and Geologic Evolution of North America: Images that track the ancient landscapes of North America"