I’m a geologist by training and my early career was linked to mineral and oil exploration. This gave me a particular attitude to time and the sequencing of life on Earth. It gave me a long view of environments ever changing and the repeated building up and eroding down of even the most permanent seeming seas and mountains. So, things like global warming seem overall normal to me. But of course, the way we have speeded up geological time and processes, in just the last 200 years and even the last 50, shows that we still have an impact which will always be seen in the future geology of this planet.
This all came back to me one evening, sipping a whisky, as you do, by the fire of a winters evening, lost in contemplation, time travelling in my mind.
I’m staring at a rock, a sort of fossil you might say, which I keep on a table next to my chair in the front room; I often pick it up and look closely at it and put it down again, and give it a side glance even when I’m engrossed in something else or watching TV. At first it seems unremarkable to anyone holding it for the first time, unless they had a special interest, though it is rather beautiful, even at face value.
What is it and why am I so drawn to this rock, the size and thickness of an old fashioned 18th century brick? It is in fact a part of a two-inch-thick seam of Whitby jet, an unusually thick piece about six inches long. The shiny black jet, famed for its Victorian jewellery ware, is well formed and attractively tactile, and is sandwiched between two thin layers of shale. Part of the jet has crystallised and there have been small influxes of creamy white quartz adding interest. It’s a nice piece of jet I found once on a fossil hunting trip and then shoved in a drawer and forgot about, recently unearthed when house clearing and put to the side when I realised its significance.
It is the thin shale on either side of the jet that is most intriguing. It has the fossilised pattern of the bark of the monkey puzzle type tree the jet is made from. Miraculously the structure of the tree’s bark is well preserved and shows a series of circular and line shapes and the actual grain of the bark comparable to trees of today of the species. Now that, I think is remarkable.
It is a sort of magic that such a thing is conserved for our appreciation 190 million years after it was a living tree in a Jurassic swamp on a seaside lagoon. After falling into the water and being quickly covered by fine muds, it was transformed over millennia into the time tar we call jet.
What I find exciting, as I do with all fossils, from those of dragonflies to ammonites and dinosaurs, trilobites and plants, is the fact of their survival at all, and their transformation from organic entities to stone bodies, often in great detail, over immense time. You can understand how in the past people thought fossils had been created by the devil or gods to deceive us. It’s something we can’t just make ourselves, we can’t make a fossil, or even a rock, concrete doesn’t count.
Then there are the re-imaginings it brings when you handle and examine such specimens. Of an ancient but similar natural history down the ages, the continuity of form and life on this planet, constantly renewing itself in the same patterns and environs we ourselves recognise and inhabit today.
On Skye there is a beach where you can plainly see the large round footprints of sauropods, who for a 1000 years paddled in the waters of another Jurassic lagoon, creating as they did a special ‘dino-turbation’, a load of mangled up footprints and bedding disturbance across the area, a sort of ‘dinosaur twister game’, now well preserved and visible across this remote foreshore.
When I visited it was quite humbling and moving, to realise what the many lumps and bumps and round rock pools represent. In many you can even make out their toe shapes and claw marks. Isn’t that so remarkable?
I find myself often awestruck by this deep time ecology that surrounds us in the rocks and strata of our landscapes. What fulfils me most of all is the recognition in this that life on Earth is not an ephemeral thing, is not just about what we see today, but that we have a 3.6 billion-year legacy of life evolving and inhabiting every available niche on Earth, which is itself only about 4.5 billion years old.
For nearly 4 fifths of its existence, pretty much as quick as it cooled down enough, Earth has been a home to life. As far as we know it is the only place this has manifested in the universe. One life incubator of biodiversity from the ‘beginning of time’, to now. And we happen to be part of it, how lucky can we be! Even if we had evolved somewhere else it might not have been anything like as pretty, diverse and accommodating to us over time as it has turned out to be.
This fills me with a special sense of wonder, and with a certain responsibility to revere and look after every living thing, for it has a birth right to be here and is borne, like we are, from ancient lines, and in our case, relatively recent ones.
Isn’t it just brilliant and special that we and every living creature today on Earth, including and very obviously in Northumberland[‘s wild places, is connected through deep time to what went before? That we are probably part of something totally and uniquely alive that exists anywhere? Wow, we are so privileged to be a part of this life story.
We humans have a unique perspective on it all too. Hence my daydreaming over my piece of jet. We may have just appeared in the last few minutes of what might be seen as a 24-hour clock of life, but we are wise apes who, over about 6 million years only, have super adapted to the point where we can at times almost transcend our biology.
We can time travel, see backwards and forwards with our special minds, we can see the past in a rock or foreshore, learn from it, and we can see what the future might be like, based on interpretations of past environs. Thus, we can influence future ecologies.
What a rare and unique skill we have then, being part of nature and seeing beyond it at the same time. And yet, we have not acted mostly in nature or the planets favour it seems, forgotten we are part of it all. We now know and understand our negative impact and yet we dither and deny rather than commit to nature’s recovery, as if we will not be affected.
But there is a bigger picture. Earth, ‘Gaia’ if you prefer, will over geological time, reinvent itself, create new life and renew life as it has done for billions of years. Something about this planet makes life necessary and a critical part of its make-up, life in some form will endure, but maybe for a while at least, not in human shape and form, and maybe not at all in those we recognise today. This in itself is rather wonderful isn’t it?
We can’t just leave it to geology and time to reset our broken natural world. We exist in the here and now and near future. So, we do have to get on with saving the planet in a way that sustains us. But irrespective of that,life will live on here it seems indefinitely, whether we survive or not. This planet is programmed for life, not necessarily human life.
That is what makes all of nature fundamentally wonderful, the fact that ultimately, we are inconsequential, life of itself is the main story, not little us, whatever we might think and how we act in our egoic ways. It offers us a helpful perspective on our modern-day crises.
Maybe, in anther million years, a mere few minutes more in the 24-hour clock of life on Earth, we will have highly evolved into ‘Homo-superior’, as much techno as we are bio. We may excavate our recent fossiliferous past of the 20th century, a thin black line of plastic waste and chemical fall out, concrete and acidic marine deposits. These strata will not look anything like as beautiful perhaps as my piece of jet, though it does look a little like black shiny plastic; but those impressions of ancient bark, now that is incredible. Much more exciting than a cast of a plastic bottle might be.
By that time, we may live somewhere else and be visiting Earth as one of our colonies, perhaps one uniquely observed and revered for its abundant diversity of life, like nowhere else, with its fully restored natural processes and ecosystems. Perhaps it will be so revered no human is allowed to live there, and only visit under special circumstances?
Or perhaps we will be living there in tune with the nature we feel part of again. Or maybe we will not be there at all, long buried ourselves, as fossils in the forming rocks, just a strange phase in this long swam through and walked upon Earth; where now we too are buried deep and new species have arisen ,who have a more enduring positive intelligent relationship with the other life of this amazing planet. Time really will tell.
Every time you pick up a rock on the beach or gaze at a cliff or walk along the great Whin Sill, you are walking through deep time and can connect with our deep ecology we are one small part of. For sure there is a lot to wonder about in rocks and a lot to fill us with wonder.
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