A Wilder Time Page 5

  Being the rigorous scientists they were, they framed the argument for our little expedition as a data-gathering effort to resolve the conflict. At the time they invited me, they had said the purpose of the expedition was to pursue unanswered questions. There was no doubt that was, in fact, the underlying justification for the work. But I also realized this was, in part, an expedition for their own vindication.

  THE MORNING WAS VERY STILL, befitting the first day of work after the previous night’s soul-rending honesty. Even though the sun blazed in a deep blue sky, the air temperature was close to freezing. Kai and I sat in the bow, huddled against the wind as the Zodiac sped down Arfersiorfik Fjord. I pulled the hood of my anorak over my head and put on gloves. Water splayed off to the sides in fragments of refracted sunlight, decorating the mirrorlike water surface. The outboard roared. John had the throttle wide open.

  We were headed for the northern boundary of the Nordre Strømfjord shear zone, which had been approximately mapped many years ago. Very little detailed work had been done there, mainly because it was so remote and difficult to get to. On our maps, the edge of the zone was confidently drawn in black ink, but we knew that no one had actually been there.

  We sought that tectonic landmark as a reference point, a location where the fabric and grain of the rock could be seen and felt. We were searching for something that could be quantified and analyzed, something that would establish metrics for later measurements and comparisons. In order to be able to recognize severely, as opposed to minimally, sheared rock, we needed a baseline.

  The three of us gazed down the fjord as we flew across the translucent water. Despite the roar of the outboard, we were enthralled by the beauty of the place—the hills rolling gently to the sea, the flower-chocked rivulets cascading down the bedrock, the stillness of the scenery. With some effort, we tried to focus our attention on the rock wall to our south, with its extensive exposure of folded and sheared gneisses.

  Unexpectedly, as we watched the steep walls of the southern fjord edge, something shifted far to the west, down the fjord and miles away. I turned my head to get a better look, but at first all I felt was confusion. Initially, I thought the distorted landscape I was seeing was due to my eyes watering in the cold wind, but after rubbing them I realized something extraordinary was dancing along the horizon.

  The land on the north side of the fjord was broad and rolling. Soft ridges sloped down to the water in a subtle cascade of rocky knolls and tundra pockets. It was a landscape that invited daydreaming. In the early-morning sun, the scene looked almost pastoral.

  But farther down the fjord, a thick horizontal blade of sharp turquoise blue cut across the land, as though a giant painter had saturated a brush and slashed the ground with it. The blue was brilliant and intense, a pure distillation of color. It seemed to stretch hundreds of feet into the air and was painted across the land for miles. Within that absolutely horizontal turquoise stripe floated vertical columns of white, gray, tan, and green, looking for all the world like skyscrapers in a city miles away—a shimmering blue Oz resting on the frigid waters of the fjord. Toward the north and east, the blue trailed out into a needle-thin line that vanished at a piercing point sharper than the edge of a razor blade, ending in the middle of the rolling hills.

  We all saw it. As we cruised, we watched immense rock masses from the rolling land split off and drift into the blue blade, becoming the skyscrapers that floated in the air. The size of the masses was staggering, seemingly miles wide and hundreds of feet high. As they drifted slowly out into the fjord, they changed form, shifting from angular columns to smoothed elongations filled with textures and patterns, never resolving into a constant shape, and then slowly vanished—evaporating as though consisting of nothing more than mist. Eventually, the effect was too stupefying. John throttled down the motor, the bow dropped, the roar of the engine stopped, and we drifted with the tide.

  We sat silently for minutes, watching the fata morgana while the Zodiac slowly turned and drifted in the gentle current.

  A nearby island only a few hundred yards away subtly entered the scene. The knob was a small rocky knoll, covered with mosses, shrubs, and lichen. On our maps, it was an ink dot so tiny, it wouldn’t be noticed unless one were looking for it. As our line of sight shifted to the point where the small island came between us and the mirage, regret began to well up at the thought of losing that magnificent show.

  Without preamble, and with extraordinary understatement, the distant blue line slowly sliced across the small island. The effect played out with such surgical precision that the inconsistencies between expectations and experience took a moment to register. Emphatically, right in front of us, the little island was divided into an upper and lower half, sandwiching a thin brilliant turquoise layer.

  I struggled to accept what my eyes were seeing. The implication was obvious and inescapable: What had seemed so immense and distant, miles down the fjord, was little more than a pencil-thin, trivial mirage barely an arm’s reach away, hovering in the air like a butterfly before my nose, somewhere between our little rubber boat and the small rocky knob of an island.

  In that moment, what we knew to be true because we had seen it in the company of others, suddenly became unequivocally false, for all of us. But we did not have the luxury of time to resolve the contradiction. A distant destination waited, offering an opportunity to collect desperately needed data, and the afternoon winds would surely come up, making it difficult to get back to camp. Without discussion, John started the outboard and we continued on.

  As our vantage point changed and we rounded the little island, the mirage returned, immense, awe-inspiring, silent. It stayed with us for ten minutes more, then slowly melted away into the thin air.

  COLD DENSE AIR, CHILLED BY the frigid fjord water, had refracted light, bending it into a vision. Light is a malleable thing, warped and distorted by well-known effects, conditioned by a broad range of circumstances. What we are able to sense, which is less than one billionth of a billionth of the electromagnetic spectrum, is affected by the sensitivities of the organs our bodies use to detect it, and the narrow range of physical conditions within which we wander. Despite the richness and beauty of the things we can perceive, we remain profoundly impoverished by the limitations of our genetically constrained bodies and the space through which they move. What we see of the world is our own manufactured carnival—the mysterious unknown within which that carnival resides beckons through mirages, silences, and misunderstood truths, forever beyond our grasp.

  What I did not realize at the time was that mirages are visual earthquakes, sometimes of great magnitude. Such ruptures arrive with a low rumble a few moments before the ground shaking starts. If one is aware, attuned to such powers and their potential for wreaking havoc, the direction the rumble comes from can be perceived and a quick adjustment may be possible in order to brace for the impact. But I was not aware and did not recognize the implications. What was to follow over the weeks and months in that wild place was the ground shaking of self.

  We did find the northern edge of the zone that day, but it was not where we had expected it to be. The black-inked line that marked the edge on our preliminary maps was off by miles. We also discovered types of rocks we had not expected. What all this meant was not at all apparent; it led to many arguments that resolved nothing.

  It was, too, a subtle warning. Lines on maps suggest boundaries, and boundaries shape expectations and provide limits; they simplify and categorize, making it easier to react without thought. The natural world, though, is flow and process, not limits. What we place on a map is an approximation, at best, a way of saying that things here differ from things over there. If we were to truly understand the place we wandered through, sampling and measuring and recording, we needed to respect the implication that boundaries are simply another form of illusion.

  *F. Kalsbeek, R.T. Pidgeon, and P.N. Taylor. 1987. Nagssugtoqidian mobile belt of West Greenland: a cryptic 1850 Ma suture between
two Archaean continets—chemical and isotopic evidence. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 85:365–385.

  Breaking Stones

  THE QUESTION OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED within the Nordre Strømfjord shear zone nearly two billion years ago danced through every waking moment. Was there a place, somewhere along the ground we walked, that was the first point of contact where continents had collided? What would be the sign? Or was the vision of entangled landmasses a flawed story, a misinterpretation of history? Regardless, how did the shear zones or straight belts fit either tale? The trip to the northern edge of the shear zone had added more observations and hard data but lacked sufficient context to inspire imagining.

  For relief from the wondering, we would occasionally take a short stroll together around the hillocks and along the beaches near camp. These were casual and slow hikes, a chance to talk and look at things in an unhurried way. Anything we found could easily be revisited, so we took with us only hammers and hand lenses and notebooks, the minimum equipment necessary to descend below the surface if that seemed necessary.

  One particular day, not long after setting up camp, we headed west along the shoreline in the late afternoon. There was a mile of land we had not seen, and we thought this would be a good way to familiarize ourselves with details and patterns.

  Almost immediately, John discovered a spectacular example of what we came to call “pencil gneiss.” The rock was the same type of igneous rock that had inspired Kalsbeek and his coworkers to propose the idea of a collision zone, or “suture,” between continents, but there, where John stood, the delicate textures that form in slowly cooling magmatic bodies had been smeared into pencil-like forms, stretched and elongated. Individual crystals that normally were equant and half an inch in size had been strung out like taut pieces of string into thin lines several feet long, each precisely parallel to all those around it—a metaphorical pencil in the gneiss. That was graphic proof of extreme shearing. We took pictures, made notes, and placed another imagined factual stake in the ground. The immediate question now became whether or not such features were throughout the shear zone, or simply local and thus not of regional significance. We walked on, amazed, wondering what would be around the next headland.

  A few hundred yards farther along the shore, we came upon a bizarre little cliff face. Hazy, dark lines patterned the surface, looking much like a pile of slightly deflated and sagging soccer balls stacked one upon another. We pored over every inch of the outcrop, struggling to piece together a picture of what we could not quite make sense of. We debated options and argued, running through every idea we could dredge from our experiences. What repeatedly came to mind was a jumble of tears, caught in the instant they were shed, as though Earth had wept from some unseen eye.

  Grudgingly, we agreed the most likely answer was that we were looking at a deformed slice, perhaps 150 feet long and 50 feet wide, of a type of volcanic rock called pillow basalt, which forms when lava erupts under the oceans. Unlike the rocks surrounding them, which preserved evidence of complex histories with multiple episodes of folding and shearing, the pillow basalts had a very simple history: They had erupted onto the floor of some ancient sea and then been metamorphosed and simply folded once. That slice of rock was a lens encased in the much more intensely deformed shear zone gneisses and schists. The contrast with the surrounding rocks was dramatically obvious.

  If that interpretation were true, the implications were staggering. Ocean basins the size of the Mediterranean or Atlantic commonly separate continents. If the continents are approaching each other, the ocean floor between them is consumed along the boundary that will eventually become the collision zone when the continents run into each other. Such collisions grind on for tens of millions of years, slowly exuding sheared, twisted, and recrystallized rock that had once been the sediments and volcanic pillow basalts of the seabed. It is from such “root” zones that Alpine-like mountain systems emerge. If that folded pile of pillow basalts we had just found was, indeed, all that was left of some long-vanished ocean basin, we had found the suture. That thin remnant slice was all that remained of what once had been a sea probably thousands of miles wide. Could it possibly be that we had stumbled upon the long-sought ocean that, fifteen years earlier, Kalsbeek and his colleagues had postulated might have existed there?

  The excitement over that discovery was tempered by a healthy skepticism. Each of us had the experience of interpreting a fact or observation as evidence for some grandiose concept, only to see it crushed under the weight of more data and observations. We held little confidence that one outcrop would be the cornerstone piece of evidence supporting the ocean-floor idea, but neither did we dismiss it as meaningless.

  Several days later, along the same trend and a mile west, we came upon another small slice of rock that showed exactly the same simple history preserved in the pillow basalts. It was a different rock type, though, called peridotite. Peridotites are the source rocks from which basaltic lavas are generated, and the rock type we were seeing was precisely what geologists associate with lavas erupted on the ocean floor.

  Although it was seeming to be more likely that we had stumbled upon the true collision zone, two outcroppings of rocks are insufficient evidence to allow much certainty for such an imaginative leap. The history of a mountain system is a long story, told in many chapters. An outcrop is, at best, a paragraph in a chapter. We were historians, trying to read ancient texts written in a language we barely knew. But something was being revealed that had not been seen before. There had been tremendous deformation and movement within this zone, part of it involving the consumption of an entire ocean basin. And yet no one had suspected the existence of the collision zone there. It now seemed, between the pencil gneisses and these two new outcrops, that John and Kai would be vindicated.

  The satisfaction Kai and John felt was obvious but muted. They remained thoughtful in how they analyzed everything we observed, but the edge was off. We found many more examples of the pencil gneisses along the trace of where the shear zone should be, providing irrefutable proof that intense deformation was distributed all along it. But the two slices of what might be ocean floor within the same belt of rocks made the story much more complex. We had not anticipated the finds suggesting ocean crust might be actually within the shear zone, implying the shear zone itself was the suture.

  IF THOSE DISCOVERIES OF PUTATIVE ocean-floor basalts had tectonic significance, there had to be something more to that story hidden in other sites where contemporaneous rocks were outcropping. So we moved our tents to a location miles west of the pillow basalts, establishing a base camp along the same trend of rocks in Ataneq Fjord in a place for which no data existed.

  On a day when a soft breeze blew over the sea and the sky was radiant, we headed out in the Zodiac to a place near the head of the fjord, miles east of the campsite. There was a freshness in the air that inspired a sense of lighthearted expectation that we would find something significant. We cruised smoothly over the clear water, watching the serene tundra-laced ridges and valleys and the low, rolling hillocks glide past.

  We sailed for some miles, then landed on the north shore to walk the exposed outcrops. The tide was ebbing, revealing a pebbled sandy beach. John swung the bow around, cut the motor, and we slid up on the sand. I jumped out and tied the line to some boulders. We grabbed our rock hammers and backpacks and began walking east. Soon, I was distracted by some unusual rocks riddled by small veins of once-molten magma. I stopped to look and sample. Neither Kai nor John had much interest in what I was pursuing, so I told them to go on ahead and I would catch up.

  I stayed there for perhaps ten minutes, then continued along the shore, enjoying the solitary stroll in the late-morning sun. Little waves lapped at the shore to my left. A light breeze blew, making mosquito netting unnecessary. It was almost warm enough to take off my anorak, but not quite.

  After a short hike, I came upon a glittering bluff that stood like a white wall against the edge of the pebbled beach
. The rocky surface was covered with fine, thin threads of white sillimanite crystals, barely discernible to the naked eye, all aligned in a flowing arrangement of undulating near-parallel fibers. Densely scattered within that white fabric were deep red garnets the size of golf balls. Pale mica and black graphite flakes glittered in the sunlight, disseminated within that wavelike surface, giving the outcrop the feel of a moving, rippled skin. For a moment, I felt as though I were in an art museum, gazing at a masterpiece that had been conceived and executed by some transcendent soul dedicated to making things of beauty. I walked over to the wall and reverently ran my hands over it, the garnet lumps bumping against my fingertips—all the while feeling as though my touch were a desecration.

  A sense of irony then slowly took shape around the garnet clusters, the shimmering white crystalline threads, and my invasive fingers. Where I stood, an extraordinarily beautiful collection of shapes, forms, and crystals rested in the warming sun, exposed for view in the middle of a wilderness landscape so vast that there was little chance they would ever again be touched and seen. And yet, the seeming reality of the place was that the glittering wall was nothing more than the mundane solidity of a bedrock outcrop. How odd it seemed that only the thoughts conceived in a feeble brain, guiding the movement of dirty fingers, made that bare stone wall so beautiful.

  The minerals sparkled in the sunlight, their shimmering, stunning patterns irrelevant to the lapping waves and gentle breeze. I took my camera from my backpack to photograph it but then decided against it and put it away. What would be the point? The reality worth capturing was the feeling of the place, the tender passion of awe-thrilled connection to an exquisite rock wall forged in the deep earth aeons ago. It then occurred to me that all was equal here: An absence of hierarchy reigned, everything was beautiful and not. Value relies on scarcity and a desire for difference, neither of which had meaning here.