slides and other types of large- scale slope failure are the single
most important mechanism of erosion, while rivers (previously
thought to be the prime movers) just tidy up after them in the
intervening decades to centuries.26
Earthquakes, of course, can trigger landslides, and while
they generally help construct mountains, the landslides they
unleash may, in certain cases— as in the tragic 2008 Wenchan
earthquake in China— actually negate the tectonic uplift they
cause.27 In other words, the creation and destruction of mon-
tane landscapes are intimately linked, and both may be dom-
inated less by long periods of uniformitarian boredom than
short periods of real- time terror.
There is geologic evidence for ancient slope failures that
are far larger in magnitude than any experienced in human
history— so extreme that they seem like implausible scenes in
a bad apocalyptic sci- fi film. For example, about 73,000 years
ago, the catastrophic collapse of the flank of a volcanic island
in the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa gen-
erated a tsunami that hurled 90 t (1 t = 1000 kg = 2200 lb)
boulders 180 m (600 ft) up the side of another island 50 km
(30 mi) away.28 And while most people are aware that Yellow-
stone lies above a sleeping supervolcano that has exploded
The pace of the earth 89
in unimaginably gigantic eruptions, a mountain just outside
the park records an ancient catastrophe that is even more ter-
rifying. Heart Mountain, Wyoming (the site of an Japanese-
American internment camp in World War II), is part of a
1.6- km (1- mi)- thick rock slab the size of Rhode Island that slid
more than 50 km (30 mi) across a surprisingly gentle slope
in 30 minutes— that is, at highway speeds— perhaps aided by
super heated gases at it base.29 These outsized events remind us
that our short window of observation has not exposed us to the
full range of Earth’s behavior and suggest that what we consider
“normal” landscape processes may actually be more like the
activity of a relief crew attempting to restore infrastructure after
a disaster. Charles Lyell would not like this idea.
U N C H A R T E D T E R R I T O R Y
Understanding the lingering effects of sudden topographic
change is important because we ourselves are now agents
of geomorphic catastrophe. The coal- mining practice of
“mountain top removal”— a deceptively surgical term— moves
volumes of rock that rival the largest natural disasters. In parts
of Appalachia, old topographic maps have simply become ir-
relevant. A 2016 study of the mutant landscape of southern
West Virginia determined that since the 1970s, some 6.4 km3
(1.5 mi3) of “overburden” waste rock has been moved from
mountain summits and dumped in the upper reaches of stream
valleys.30 That volume is on par with the amount of sediment
that the Ganges and Brahmaputra— two great rivers draining
the mightiest mountains on Earth— carry to the Bengal fan in
a decade. And this is in just southern West Virginia.
The effects of such massive derangement of the landscape
will be wide ranging and long lasting. Where trees once
90 Ch a pter 3
anchored soil on top of bedrock, piles of broken mine waste,
hundreds of feet thick, now mantle the slopes. In nature, rivers
shape hill slopes until they reach a stage of being graded— just
steep enough that their flow velocities can keep pace with the
sediment supplied by the valley. In the devastated valleys of
Appalachia, the small infilled upland streams will seek valiantly
to process the colossal volumes of waste rock. Estimating how
long this will take is difficult because there is almost no geo-
logic analog for such a profound state of disequilibrium, but
hundreds of thousands of years is probably a conservative es-
timate. Predictions about the short- and long- term effects on
surface and groundwater chemistry and the fate of native plants
and animals are equally sobering. And the psychological effects
on humans left in the shadow of the decapitated mountains is
beyond quantification.
Worldwide, humans now move more rock and sediment,
both intentionally through activities like mining, and unin-
tentionally by accelerating erosion through agriculture and
urbanization, than all of Earth’s rivers combined.31 It can no
longer be assumed that geographic features reflect the work of
geologic processes. In a matter of years, the Chinese govern-
ment has radically altered the map of the Spratly Archipelago
in the South China Sea by scraping coral reef material from the
seafloor to create new islands, in a dystopian counterpoint to
the formation of Surtsey. In southern England, rates of retreat
of the famous chalk cliffs have accelerated from inches per year
to feet per year as a result of human changes to the shoreline
combined with encroaching seas and increased storminess due
to climate change.32 The Nile Delta is sinking 2.5 to 5 cm (1 to
2 in.) per year as a result of being starved of sediment by the
Aswan and other dams.33 Coastal Louisiana is losing an acre
of land per hour as a result of a “perfect storm” of unintended
The pace of the earth 91
consequences: continent- scale engineering of the Mississippi
channel has dramatically reduced sediment supply at the
same time that oil and gas withdrawal has caused the land to
subside— all while the sea inexorably rises (an indirect result
of . . . oil and gas consumption).34 Meanwhile in Oklahoma, we
have reawakened long- dormant faults and induced earthquakes
through deep- subsurface injection of wastewater generated by
the practice of hydrofracturing for oil and gas extraction.35
The unprecedented scale of human changes to the planet’s
topography is one of the arguments for the concept of the An-
thropocene, a new division of the geologic timescale marked
by the emergence of humans as a global geologic force. We
are literally changing the configuration of the continents and
remaking the world map. But does this matter on a planet that
has seen so many geographies, constantly erasing old worlds
and replacing them with new ones? It doesn’t to the Earth it-
self, which will eventually remodel everything according to
its own preferences, either gradually or catastrophically. Over
human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will
haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea,
and mountain tops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won’t
be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in
motion a cascade of side effects— hydrologic, biological, social,
economic, and political— that will define the human agenda for
centuries. In other words, thoughtless disregard for the work
of the geologic past means we cede control of our own future.
In 1788, when James Hutton saw the unconformity at
wave- swept Siccar Point, he
imagined the eons it would take
to remove a mountain and concluded that geologic time was
infinite. More than 200 years later, we can clock the growth and
destruction of mountains. The famous unconformity, which
separates Silurian rocks from Devonian ones, represents not
92 Ch a pter 3
eternity but about 50 million years, which is plenty of time to
build and demolish a mountain belt— for continents to collide,
faults to creep and sometimes lurch, raindrops to sculpt, peaks
to crumble, mantle rock to flow. Today we can even observe
the workings of the solid Earth in real time. We find that the
planet’s natural pace is not so far outside our own experience,
and that in fact this old orb has a wide repertoire of tempos, in-
cluding some that are breathtakingly swift. Studying the habits
of the solid Earth teaches us to respect the power of both in-
cremental change and episodic catastrophe to transform the
face of the globe.
The lingering nineteenth- century belief that Earth changes
only slowly has lulled us into thinking that it is impassive
and eternal, that nothing we do could alter it significantly.
That notion has also caused us to view Earth’s intermittent
adjustments— the creation of a new volcanic island, a magni-
tude 9 earthquake— as aberrations, when in fact these events
are business as usual for the planet. We are big enough now to
scratch and dent the Earth, scar, and abrade it, but we ourselves
will have to live with the damage. Earth, meanwhile, will con-
tinue to make slow repairs, punctuated by sudden renovation
projects that will clear away our proudest constructions.
C H A P T E R 4
C H A N G E S I N
T H E A I R
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
“This is no flattery. These are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
— W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E , 1 5 9 9 .
A S Y O U L I K E I T , AC T 2 , S C E N E 1
C O L D C O M F O R T
Many of the geographic features in Svalbard had no formal
names until the late nineteenth century, and in the area where
I did my graduate- school fieldwork, some of them were chris-
tened in honor of geologists of the day. A lofty peak was named
for Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the “Father of Swedish Chemistry”
and a pioneering mineralogist. A relatively sheltered valley
with a half- dozen picturesque glaciers was dubbed Chamber-
lindalen, for T. C. Chamberlin, a Wisconsin geologist who first
mapped glacial deposits in the upper Great Lakes region. A
94 Ch a pter 4
windy point jutting into the Arctic Ocean is called Kapp (Cape)
Lyell for the great evangelist of uniformitarianism.
My own work in Svalbard in the 1980s was itself something of
a throwback to the nineteenth century: creating a geologic map
of the region by delineating unnamed rock units and charting
their extent, collecting samples for analysis, and making a pro-
visional interpretation of the area’s geologic history. This kind
of reconnaissance had been finished decades before in most of
the rest of the world.
The base maps on which we would plot our geologic ob-
servations were enlargements of beautiful hand- drawn charts
from the 1920s and ’30s. I loved their graceful, slanting fonts
and the way the lettering curved to conform to the arcs of
glaciers and coastlines. But the contour interval (the spacing
between lines of constant elevation) was a gap- toothed 50 m
(about 170 ft)— a very coarse sieve through which a consider-
able amount of topography could fall. So in the field we would
make notes on aerial photographs that the Norwegian Polar In-
stitute had taken in the 1930s and ’50s (interrupted by the des-
perate war years, when Norway was fighting for its existence,
and even remote Svalbard had U- boats lurking in the fjords).
We’d then transfer the information to the maps each evening,
by the light of the midnight sun. Air photos like these— now
largely superseded by satellite imagery— came in overlapping
pairs, which when viewed with stereoscopic glasses would
make topographic features pop out in exaggerated 3- D, like
tableaus seen through an old “Viewmaster” toy. (Some sea-
soned field geologists could achieve the same effect by relaxing
and slightly crossing their eyes, though I never did acquire this
skill). We quickly learned that we needed to be careful when
plotting our locations on the air photos, because the positions
of glacier margins were commonly farther up- valley than they
Changes in the air 95
were on the old images. These were the first hints that time
was coming to “timeless” Svalbard.
In subsequent years, I was lucky to do geologic work in
stunning glacial landscapes elsewhere in Svalbard, as well as
the Canadian arctic, but I didn’t revisit Kapp Lyell until 2007,
exactly 20 years since I had last seen it. Returning to a place that
I had studied with such intensity at an earlier time in my life
threw into stereoscopic relief how much I had changed in that
time, having experienced marriage, an academic career, the
birth of three sons, the death of a spouse. However, I expected
the landscape whose contours I remembered so well to be more
or less the same. It was eerie to find our old campsite, with boul-
ders we had used to anchor the cook tent, exactly where we had
left them. But almost everything else was dramatically altered.
Our group had been able to arrive by boat before the middle of
June— weeks earlier than was possible in the 1980s— because
the sea ice had not even reached the southern part of Sval-
bard that year. (In fact it was the first time in history that the
fabled Northwest Passage was also ice- free). This meant that
polar bears, which used to spend summers idly drifting with
the ice floes and dining on seals, and had never given us much
trouble before, were walking around on land, hungrily eyeing
up geologists. Even more disturbingly, all the familiar Cham-
berlindalen glaciers, once white and plump, had become sickly
gray ghosts of themselves, shrunken far up into their mountain
headwalls . For almost two decades, I had been presenting the
evidence for climate change in my university classes and had
facts and talking points I could recite in my sleep. But seeing
the shocking alteration of a place that I knew so intimately was
like arriving at what one expects will be a joyful reunion of old
friends—
and finding them all deathly ill. The name Kapp Lyell
now seemed a mocking irony; this was not uniformitarianism.
96 Ch a pter 4
Time, which had for so long left Svalbard in its Ice Age slumber,
was returning with a vengeance.
A I R O F M Y S T E R Y
The changes in Svalbard’s glaciers make clear that even a re-
mote place near the top of the globe is connected to the rest
of world through the atmosphere. The concentric layers of
the Earth scale remarkably well to the parts of a peach: the
iron core corresponds to the pit, the rocky mantle to the flesh
of the fruit, the crust to the skin. The atmosphere, in turn, is
proportionally as thick as the exterior fuzz, extending 480 km
(300 mi) above the surface, though most of its mass is concen-
trated in the lowest 16 km (10 mi). Ubiquitous but mostly invis-
ible, the atmosphere is one of the great amenities provided by
this accommodating planet. In contrast to the carbon dioxide-
dominated atmospheres of Venus and Mars, which are little
more than stagnant volcanic exhalations (crushingly heavy on
Venus, mostly lost to space on Mars), Earth’s mix of nitrogen
and oxygen with just trace amounts of CO2 is anomalous and
marvelous. Understanding its deep history can help put mod-
ern rates of atmospheric and climate change into some kind
of perspective. The story of the atmosphere is bound up in-
extricably with the story of life; life itself crafted the modern
atmosphere— in a sense, wrote its own chemical constitution.
Life has governed stably for much of the geologic past, but
occasionally, even a sophisticated system of biogeochemical
checks and balances has not been enough to prevent atmo-
spheric revolution and ecological catastrophe.
How do we know anything about ancient air? For the past
700,000 years, we have a direct record of its composition from
gas bubbles trapped in ancient snow and then preserved as
Changes in the air 97
polar ice (more about that in the next chapter). But where can
we look for information about something so evanescent over
longer timescales? Counterintuitively, rocks— the antithesis of
all that is airy— have much to tell us about the atmosphere. In
particular, they reveal that the modern atmosphere is at least
the fourth major version of Earth’s rarefied outermost layer.
Contrary to Hutton’s and Lyell’s views of an Earth in a state
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