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The Geological Sublime

harpers.org

75 pointsprismatic30 comments

One of the wildest parts of geology from a "meta" level is that plate tectonics as a theory wasn't fully accepted until the 1960s!

"Plate tectonics came to be accepted by geoscientists after seafloor spreading was validated in the mid-to-late 1960s." (from the Plate Tectonics Wikipedia page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics

The idea that the surface of the earth consists of a bunch of rock "rafts" floating around on a hidden mantle, occasionally running into each other -- with some falling and others rising -- seems rather crazy. It took a lot of data to convince folks it was real.

Still, the 1960s feels very late for something that has become so foundational to our understanding of geology. One obvious analogy is the Copernican revolution where the crazy idea that the entire Earth is spinning on a daily basis was recognized centuries ago.

With plate tectonics there was the major clue with how the outline of South America fits so neatly into Africa, and I assume that it was known that the rocks were similar on each side of the ocean.

Nevertheless, if the idea remained speculative till the sea-floor spreading was observed then I suppose it had to wait till we had robust enough subs to get down there to see it.

> Still, the 1960s feels very late for something that has become so foundational to our understanding of geology. One obvious analogy is the Copernican revolution where the crazy idea that the entire Earth is spinning on a daily basis was recognized centuries ago.

The Gregorian calendar is really the problem because it amplifies relative numbers. The agricultural evolution that started modern humans as a culture was 10,000 years ago. If we think of the current year as 12,025 ME and Copperncian revolution as 11,514 ME I think it puts in a proper scope as all relatively recent and contemporary event.

Gregorian calendar is like standing too close to a Monet or pointillist painting, you lose the scope of the big picture.

Plate tectonics created a serious rift in the Geology community, with both supporters and detractors citing serious faults.

Well that was anticline-matic.

Yes, it was ground-breaking (too easy)

Geology jokes are beneath me.

That's a strike against your character but I'll let it slip.

John McPhee's wonderful and Pulitzer-winning non-fiction natural history The Annals of the Former World about geology—specifically North American geology as exposed in highway road cuts!

This title which was collects a series of books originally published in series and only collected in a single volume subsequently,

happened to have been written over the years during which plate tectonic theory was still being fiercely debated, indeed some of the characters contested it.

By that happy accident the book is thus simultaneously several things:

- a marvelous natural history of the United States revealed through characteristically engaging and evocative personal narratives

- a look at North American geology which over the course of the books collected is increasingly revealed

- a very effective communication of what geological _deep time_ really means, and

- a fascinating look into the inner workings of scientific inquiry and discourse: messy, passionate, exquisite, invaluable

Of particular local interest is the must-read Assembling California, the final book collected, which contains a duly famous second by second account of how the Loma Prieta earthquake went down.

A nice introduction:

https://californiacurated.com/2024/09/06/looking-back-john-m...

Love John McPhee and have read a lot of his books so will have to check out your recommendation.

His book The Survival of the Bark Canoe led directly to me learning about crooked knives and then starting https://crookedknives.com

All of his books are phenomenal.

And yet the continents look like a jigsaw puzzle to any schoolchild.

This reminded me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, once you start seeing the world on the time and spatial scales of trees, everything shifts. Human timelines feel like flickers. It’s not just a change in perspective; it’s a change in what even counts as meaningful.

This story was so unexpectedly emotional. I'd never read a book where I so palpably felt that the main characters were in fact the non-conscious ones.

Google Earth Timelapse is a great tool to visualize our world in different scales of space and time: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/

Somebody told me that in the Tibetan culture, partly because of the centrality of belief in reincarnation, they often think on timescales of thousands of years

And then there is the timescales of mountains, rivers, and oceans.

  > As for the amber stream pouring into my gas tank as I stand at the self-service pump on my way to Walden, I now take it and all the other plant-based fossil fuels to be an infinity of petrified sunlight, best understood through the compound lens of the Lyell-Darwin eye.

This is the most nihilistic essay I've read in a long time. It contemplates climate change and the extinction of humanity with a lyrical nonchalance that is misanthropic at best. Keep pumping that liquid sunshine, Lewis.

Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up. The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us. If we want to survive as a species, we can't bask in decadence and romanticize the decline.

There is also a sort of blindness to the same sort of processes Hyde is quite reasonably (and evocatively) gobsmacked by: if Darwin could be said to have invented a sort of integral Calculus to grapple with deep time, a differential version is just as needed to look at changes in the rate at which the rate at which changes are changing, and perhaps on to even higher derivatives.

Too many of these melancholy (or as you say, nihilistic) takes are rooted in a model of the form "we are here, now, and if things go on as they have been will inevitably wind up there, by then" and fail to acknowledge that things are not going to "go on like they have been". Things are changing, but the rate, manner and even direction of changes are also changing, and we need to recognize that as well.

> The author is right that the planet itself will be fine without us.

Who would have thought geology would cause people to think they should just go kill themselves to make the world a better place. I mean, I know people are messed up (including first person pronoun) - but we are seriously far gone if we can't imagine people somehow, some way making the world a better place.

Great identification of a problem, big miss on identification of a solution.

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water” - and a renewable resource too if we don’t screw things up.

I share your worries though.

I think humans have a coping mechanism to find some beauty in things they're forced to participate in, good or bad.

Maybe there's some small edge of anti-fragility in that -- we seem more willing to confront beauty and inspect its contours

> the planet itself will be fine without us.

Define "fine". For whom ? Climate change can alter a planet dramatically.

"Fine" in the sense that life will probably go on in some form or another. The planet's climate has whipsawed countless times, causing many mass extinctions. My point is: when people talk about "saving the planet," what they really mean is protecting the ecosystems that we've grown accustomed to. I think words matter. The planet is not in danger. We are.

> Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up.

And how do you plan to achieve that ? The denial of reality of human psychology and politics is one of the reasons denial of climate change is still rampant. Yelling at people with urgency only works that much, and it also amplifies resistance.

In the end, everyone needs to wake the fuck up implies a sheer resolution of the need for change, and you won't bring that by schooling people, yelling at them or even violence. The inevitable is there, do what you think is best, tell what you think is best and you'll probably have maximized your contribution already.

Contemplating how things plays out in the end is not nihilistic, it's a form of acceptance of the real hard truth about the grip we have, as individuals, on the mater.

I guess you're right—if people are not resolved in the need for change now, they never will be. Are you willing to just say our extinction is "inevitable" and face it with "acceptance?"

Donald Trump was on the UK national TV news yesterday, at his golf course in Scotland[1] and the reporter said that he was still complaining about 'windmills'[2] spoiling the view and vowing never to allow any to be built in the USA.

Sorry to make everything about Donald Trump, but in the face of the most powerful country on earth voting a climate change denying party into power where they are happy to shut down green movements for personal reasons, and promised to "drill, baby, drill" what do you, turnsout, think it matters whether we HN peanut gallery "accept" that our extinction is "inevitable" or not? It sure seems inevitable no matter what I do or don't accept and I assume that's the case for most people reading your comment.

[1] where he was caught on camera cheating at golf

[2] off-shore wind turbines visible from his golf course, which he tried to get stopped years ago, and lost, and is now holding a grudge about it.

If we feel hopeless, that works well for Donald Trump. "There's nothing an individual can do" is just a story—a narrative. As an example, the Target boycott had a real impact on Target's revenue. Who knows if that may eventually lead to a change in their policies.

I'm not saying every person in the world needs to become Greta Thunberg, but perpetuating the narrative that we're powerless just makes the narrative stronger. We all have to do what's workable and feasible for ourselves, but let's not treat our extinction with the same "gee, shucks" resigned fatalism that we treat our elections. The stakes are slightly higher.

afaict, the situation can be roughly summarized as :

  - global climate is warming by around +0.3C per decade
  - its caused mainly by humans burning carbon chains for energy, emitting CO2
  - we are currently sailing thru +1.5C above pre-industrial mean temp
  - Methane CH4 is also a strong warming agent, around 20x more potent than CO2, on decade timescales
  - humans are emitting all time high levels of C02, around 40Gtonnes / yr
  - Carbon capture / CCS / DAC need to be millions of times more efficient to be significant
  - we dont have enough room or time to plant trees to remove the CO2
  - net-zero when we reach it, corresponds to max-Co2 which means peak-heat
  - net-zero aka peak-heat might occur bu 2060, by which time we'll be near +2.5C
  - extreme events are not linear in increase in temp [ think of shifting the mean of a bell curve ]

Even if we do a great job of electrifying everything, moving away from fossil/carbon fuels by 2060, we still have a heat problem to deal with - will we be able to grow our normal crops under +2.5C, and deal with extreme heatwaves, floods, storms ?

It seems we will need Solar Radiation Management Geo-engineering "SRM" in order to survive that peak-heat and buy us a few decades in which to slowly remove CO2 [ even as we move full steam ahead to de-carbonize our energy system with wind, solar, battery packs, hydro, fission, geothermal and hopefully fusion power ]

Particulates from volcanoes are well known to cause a cooling effect, and its now becoming more obvious that particulates in pollution in Asia, and sulphur impurities in shipping fuels were having a measurable cooling effect - we seem to be warming faster now that Asia and shipping fuels are not producing as much particulate pollution [ thus less cooling effect ]

It seems to me the only "Hail Mary" we have to address the heat problem, is to use SRM to exert a cooling effect - we humans geo-engineered a warm planet over 150 years of burning carbon fuels, and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of this mess.

tldr : Abundant clean energy is needed, but we also have to address the heat problem - with SRM geo-engineering

Alas, net zero carbon is not peak heat. It’s peak carbon dioxide. It’s peak rate of temperature change due to greenhouse gases. Global average temperatures will continue to rise past 2060 (or whenever we get net zero). I’m not sure what the models predict. Perhaps the total temperature rise could be 3.5 degrees by 2100.

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