A Wilder Time Read online

  Praise for A Wilder Time

  “While conveying the geological hypotheses, techniques of data collection, and adventures of his expeditions to Greenland with his two Danish colleagues, William E. Glassley also brings startling sensory precision to his descriptions. The velvety feeling of moss, the taste of lichen, the alternating rhythms of terror and fluidity in schools of fish through which a predatory sculpin cruises—such experiences bring what might have seemed a stark world of rock and ice alive. This delicacy of perception is the vehicle through which not only the scientific quest but also the profound mystery of our living Earth saturates this memorable book.”

  —John Elder, coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing and author of Picking Up the Flute

  “A Wilder Time is a wonderful mix of science and poetry. It delves into the kind of spiritual effect that wilderness has on those privileged to work in it and how it changes the way we experience and understand our surroundings and our lives. The science, including the geological controversy at the heart of the book, is lucidly explained, and readers will be absorbed by the story Glassley tells as well as his many vividly described encounters with nature. Next time someone asks me why I am a geologist, I will just hand them this book.”

  —William L. Griffin, professor of geology at Macquarie University

  “While conducting research probing deep time and the origin of continents, Glassley discovered a further source of fascination: the Arctic wilderness of Greenland. In A Wilder Time, he shares his encounters with unvarnished nature still free—for now—from the corruptions and constructs of human settlement. With openness, clarity, and a keen eye for detail, he weaves adventure, research, astonished awe, and thoughtful reflection into an absorbing account of his sojourns.”

  —Martha Hickman Hild, author of Geology of Newfoundland: Field Guide

  “As geologists, we may be rational scientists, but expeditions to remote places touch something deep in us that moves us to also be poets. Glassley has turned his experiences in Greenland into searingly beautiful descriptions of a wild landscape and the ways in which that landscape moves and changes him. Every sentence is evocative, connoting curiosity, awe, and respect in equal measure. A Wilder Time is a paean on the importance of wilderness to the human spirit and a saddening reminder of what we lose when we divorce ourselves from contact with wild places. Glassley’s voice will stay with me the way the works of Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold have stayed with me over the decades.”

  —Jane Selverstone, professor emerita in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico

  John and Kai walking toward the ice edge

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2018 by William E. Glassley

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Glassley, William E.

  Title: A wilder time: notes from a geologist at the edge of the Greenland ice. / William E. Glassley.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017005087 (print) | LCCN 2017006260 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Geology—Greenland. | Geology—Research—Greenland. | Climatic changes—Research—Greenland. | Climatic changes—History. | Ice cores—Greenland.

  Classification: LCC QE70 .G53 2018 (print) | LCC QE70 (ebook) | DDC 559.8/2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005087

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-35-1

  To Kai Sørensen and John Korstgård,

  whose friendships, hearts, and souls

  made Team Alpha happen,

  and to Nina,

  who forced me to accept the moment

  Either everything’s sublime, or nothing is.

  —KATHERINE LARSON

  You didn’t come into this world.

  You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.

  You are not a stranger here.

  —ALAN WATTS

  Contents

  List of Maps and Figures

  Preface

  Introduction

  IMPRESSIONS I

  Fractionation

  Silence

  Mirage

  Breaking Stones

  Cladonia Rangiferina

  Falcon

  IMPRESSIONS II

  Consolidation

  The Sun Wall

  Bird Cries and Myths

  Ptarmigan

  Clear Water

  A River of Fish

  IMPRESSIONS III

  Emergence

  Tide

  Clockwork Pebbles

  Ice

  Seal

  Belonging

  IMPRESSIONS IV

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Quotation Source Notes

  List of Maps and Figures

  John and Kai heading toward the ice

  Greenland

  Research area

  Shear zones of Escher and Watterson

  Shear zone cross section

  View through a microscope

  Before the collision

  A new interpretation

  A time line

  Preface

  DESTINATIONS, WHETHER NEW OR OLD, are expectations shrouded in imagined landscapes. We set off with ideas for adventures that we hope might materialize and we imagine pathways to things we fear but secretly wish to confront. We think of our destination as an end point to a journey, but its reality is seldom that. Destinations may also evolve into portals that devour expectations, immersing us in the inconceivable. So it is for me when I travel into the Greenland wilderness.

  FOR A GEOLOGIST, GREENLAND IS A DREAM. The ice, receding faster than plants can take hold, exposes in its retreat the polished bedrock floor it has ridden on for millennia. Glistening in the sun, emphatic in its insistence for attention, an unexpected artistry offers itself for inspection.

  That rock can flow always astonishes, but revealed in those outcrops are patterns that imagination could never conjure, proving beyond doubt that the continental heart is barely less fluid than water. Layer upon layer, some a fraction of an inch thick, some thicker than houses, colored in a palette of earth tones and off-whites, greens and blue-blacks and reds, fold back on one another, pinch and swell, stretch to paper thinness, then thicken again, telling stories we ache to know but can barely read.

  I go to Greenland with two Danish geologists, Kai Sørensen and John Korstgård, to unravel these mysteries. For weeks at a time, camping in one of the world’s greatest untouched wilderness expanses, we wander through a
twenty-thousand-square-mile landscape, crawling over outcrops on hands and knees, struggling to piece together fragmented clues to what the story line may be. It is the ultimate in forensic science, cobbling from a hundred different techniques, technologies, and fragmented logical arguments a consistent tale that encompasses nearly the entire history of nonhuman Earth.

  Our research, and that of colleagues stretching back to the 1940s, has provided only the barest outline of that history. We have established little beyond that it is a mystery involving life and rock and the symbiosis they have woven. If a book were the analogy, the covers would be mainly complete but the ink of the chapters nearly faded.

  That so little has been accomplished should not be surprising. The region is above the Arctic Circle, so daylight and sufficiently warm temperatures to allow camping are available only a few months during the year. The remoteness of the area, requiring special arrangements for transportation into and out of the wilderness, challenges logistical efforts. It is a vast terrain of unexplored landscape; only a few details are well established.

  What has been exposed thus far is a tantalizing mystery. Preserved in the bedrock are vague suggestions that multiple mountain-building episodes occurred there sometime between two and three-and-a-half billion years ago. The most recent of those events may have been so massive, it would have foreshadowed the Himalayas. There is evidence of movement along enormous faults; of volcanic systems that would rival the Andes; of ocean basins the size of the Atlantic. All are now vanished, swallowed in the onward rush of Earth’s evolution. The observations supporting these notions are few, the data difficult to interpret.

  Compounding the challenge of this research has been uncertainty about the fundamental assumptions upon which the science is based. All geological studies dealing with present-day processes on Earth are grounded in plate tectonics. Plate tectonics defines the Earth as a dynamic planet in which heat from the deep interior powers the slow migration across the surface of twelve plates of ocean and continental crust. Mountains form where plates collide, and crust forms where plates separate—the consistency of the process of crust creation and destruction fulfills the requirements of a self-contained system, a zero-sum game. Recognized and accepted evidence for the persistent operation of this process extends 900 million years into the past. Beyond that time, the evidence is equivocal and energetically debated. Since the rocks in Greenland are much older than that, we are left uncertain as to how to interpret what we see and what the motivating forces would have been.

  The rocks we work on are from a transition period. Life, though soft-bellied and delicate, has been the most powerful chemical agent on Earth. The atmosphere of our planet is a product of its breathing, the composition of oceans and rivers a consequence of its metabolism. Even the continents are its product—over 3,800 million years ago, the remnant structures of photosynthesis, mixed into the mantle, encouraged melting that oozed from that deep interior, coalescing to become the landmasses we walk on.* Was that when plate tectonics began, or was plate tectonics some later phenomenon predated by an energetic process we do not know? The rocks we collect and study preserve the answer to that question.

  WE CONDUCT OUR STUDIES IN that little-known fringe of land that extends over a hundred miles west from the edge of the Greenland ice sheet. Although our scientific interests are purely academic, the experiences we have lived through are almost mystical. We camp for weeks at a time in one of the world’s largest unbroken wilderness realms. Utterly alone, voluntarily isolated from the rest of humanity, we walk and sail without resistance through a world that, for the most part, has never experienced the presence of a human being. We sample and photograph and measure the incomprehensibly old bedrock that preserves nearly the entire history of the planet. Although harsh and unforgiving, that wild surface is engulfed in beauty, revealing an exuberantly evolving world.

  Wandering and sailing from outcrop to outcrop, immersed in the grandeur of that wilderness forces daily life to become a practice in humility. Time fractures, languishing in some backwater of perception. Viewing ice, somnambulant fjord waters, rocky defiles, and tundra plains becomes a repeated experience of confronting the incomprehensible, each thing expressing a subtle essence of existence that can be known only by being present. The gulf that exists between the prejudiced expectations derived from urban life and the bedrock purity of that wild landscape is nearly unbridgeable. The feeling that I have become alienated from, and ignorant of, such purity is inescapable and devastating.

  I now understand that wilderness is as much story as it is place. Untouched lands provide inspiration and nourish our imagination with mysteries and connections impossible to conceive anywhere else. The depth of their richness, the complexity of their structure are beyond common experience. Wilderness is the primordial heart of what we conceive of as soul, and as a consequence, it must be accepted as a version of home. For me, Greenland has been the landscape that embodies that lesson. Ironically, perhaps, it was the pursuit of quantitative, objective observations that exposed the emotional truths contained in wild places.

  THE WORD wilderness derives from the Old English word wildēornes,* meaning “the place where only wild animals live.” Implicitly, that word also defines the place where human existence is inherently a struggle. It is the land in which it is not easy to settle, to farm, raise families, or enjoy an evening with friends. Wild places where only animals live are the frontiers, the lands through which humans may have wandered, but within which living is likely to fail. Wilderness is not welcoming. It is the place where humans may be prey.

  Once, wilderness was everywhere, an ambience for wandering humanity from the time of our origins. Many languages have no word for wilderness because it simply was the context of existence—naming it was unnecessary. Now, we are no longer wanderers—over the last thousand years we have started naming wilderness because it is almost gone. We have flowed over the surface of the planet like a massive tsunami, inundating the world with more and more beings while pushing to the fringes any possibility of the experience of deep wilderness. Within thirty-five years, the population of the planet will grow from over seven billion people to more than ten. As it does so, wilderness will passively retreat, taking with it the only opportunity we have to know our true origins. Without immediate contact with the offerings of wild lands, we lose the world that is the foil for humanity. Tragically, we barely notice, even when it is obvious. I give testimony to this fact—I was an unintentional witness to a relict of this loss.

  One evening, while Kai cooked and John refined his notes, I walked along the shore north of our little camp, seeking a quiet place to reflect on the day. I hiked over a low ridge and found an unexpected, modest bay. The tide was low; small waves lightly lapped far out at its mouth. I went down to the narrow beach, where the most minuscule of slow-moving ripples, descendants of the little waves farther out, migrated across the watery membrane that rested on the succulent bay muds. Icebergs floated in the fjord waters farther out. The pinkish gray light of the dappled cloud underbellies reflected off the water skin that barely submerged the sediments. What little drama there was, the mind created in imagined eyes and stalking creatures hidden in the black shadows cast by hundreds of boulders—a few inches to several feet in diameter—that were scattered on the exposed floor of the bay. For many long moments, I calmly drank in the lush scene. But slowly, something incongruous began to disturb the moment—something below the surface of what I chose to see. As I focused on the boulders, I saw one that, oddly, had a small tundra hummock, delicately balanced, resting on its top. The small layer, a few feet thick, flat-topped, with tall grasses growing from it, looked as though someone had delicately placed it there. Trying to make sense of it, I then noticed that every boulder above a certain size had an exact duplicate of that little tundra mound. The flat top of every tundra cap was at exactly the same elevation.

  Stunned, I realized each tuft was an erosional remnant of a tundra plain that had, in the very
recent past, reached as far out as the edge of the bay. But rising sea level had eaten away at the delicate vestiges of the plant remains and the boundary that once defined a land—tide harmony. The edge of wilderness, offering little resistance, was silently retreating into a new future we unknowingly are shaping.

  When wilderness is gone, even that which is responding naturally to climate change forces, all that will remain are memories and impressions of its textures and forms, its silences and screams, its smells and tastes. We will have lost the only reference point we have for the significance of mind in the universe.

  As days went by while I camped with John and Kai in the wilderness of West Greenland, the noise of cities receded into dim memories, and self became a part of the landscape. Boundaries dissolved between what is external and what is internal to the soul. Who and what we individually are became a shared question with how Earth had evolved. What we scientists went there to study and resolve melted into the background of an incandescent experience of place.

  *M. Rosing, et al. 2006. The rise of continents—an essay on the geologic consequences of photosynthesis. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 232:99–113.

  *The pronunciation of the word is unclear, given that the language has not been commonly spoken for nearly 900 years. It is believed by some that it would be recognizable if spoken to modern English speakers.

  Greenland, ice thickness and land areas (dark gray). The boxed region encloses our research area.

  Research area. The dashed line marks the edge of the inland ice sheet.

  Introduction

  ONE OF THE MOST EXTENSIVE, continuous wilderness regions on Earth, Greenland remains largely submerged by ice. In the area not ice-covered, the landscape materializes as experience, not place. Boundaries, whether real or imagined, named or anonymous, dissolve into opportunities. Senses become remarkably acute, sharpened by the raw purity of what it means to be wild. Greenland is a place of surfaces so rich with history that simply setting foot on them seems to clarify reality.