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Annals of the Former World #2
In Suspect Terrain
From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others―a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age. The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics―here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, In Suspect Terrain is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
John McPhee
131Ìýbooks1,789ÌýfollowersJohn Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
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May 5, 2024
“Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.�
And so this wraps up my unexpectedly lovely experience with John McPhee’s a Pulitzer-winning geologically-themed Annals of the Former World. 4 books and a tiny add-on (Crossing the Craton, filling in the gap in McPhee’s crossing the US along the I-80, “in what he calls “the post-1800-million-year accretionary complex� and most people call Colorado�) and I’m in love with geology, US landscapes as described by McPhee and McPhee’s excellent writing.
McPhee’s accompanying geologist of choice this time is Anita Harris who escaped Brooklyn to pursue geology � the book was published in 1983 and apparently Brooklyn was a scary place then. , a bit of a skeptic about the universal application of the plate tectonics theory as the solution to everything in geology and another reminder of how relatively recent the entire plate tectonics theory actually is, developed dating of rocks through conodonts, tiny jawless wormlike creatures whose mouths were adorable teeth-filled nightmares:
Geology by McPhee gave me a good glimpse in how the US landmass came to be (and if there are newer theories, I’m unlikely to read them, in all honesty, unless they are McPhee-presented again) as well as an idea of awesome places I had no idea existed (looking at you, Delaware Water Gap). The entire Appalachian mountains I’ve never even seen felt alive through the immense stretches of geological time, with three ranges rising over time and folding again, and thrusting and folding, with glaciers bringing some fun into the process and the mountains throwing their debris and detritus over the huge parts of the continent. And if it doesn’t sound just lovely to you now, it will after you read this book.
In summary, four McPhee geology books in - so where do I pick up my brand-new geology diploma?
4 stars.
—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�
My reviews of McPhee’s Annals of the Former World:
- Basin and Range
- In Suspect Terrain
- Rising from the Plains
- Assembling California
—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”—â€�
Also posted on .
April 3, 2018
If a piece of country is possibly exotic and possibly not—if it is so enigmatic that no one can say whether it has come from near or far—it is known as suspect terrane.
I especially loved this, Book 2 of John McPhee’s geological saga Annals of the Former World, because of Anita Harris, the feisty, smart, and independent-minded pioneering field-geologist who accompanied McPhee from her childhood home in Brooklyn when Brooklyn was not cool, across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, smacking rocks with her sledge hammer, while opening up to our minds the lower realms of the world (its “terrane�) and the tales of its scientist-explorers and their evolving theories.
Pennsylvania is my home state and during the late 1980s for my job I drove all over the state on back roads, navigating with USGS (United States Geological Survey) “quad maps� � so it was utterly fascinating to learn about complex and convoluted deep terrane that lay beneath the surface terrain, and the various theories of how it had all come to be. The earth’s visual and conceptual poetry brought to light through John McPhee’s verbal artistry. There is a fair amount of technical detail in this volume, which I enjoyed.
Fascinating too were the scientist battles—very much tainted by nonscientific concerns. First, when a new explanatory theory dawned in the mind of a scientist, it would typically be ignored, or vehemently rejected and ridiculed by other scientists, no matter how much supporting evidence. But later, once a theory became accepted and established, Anita, always a skeptic, found that some scientists started taking it as doctrine and over-applying it, not bothering to check the evidence, or worse, making the evidence “fit� where the fit was questionable to say the least. How did the geologically jumbled, complex mountains of Pennsylvania arise? According to Anita, the evidence provides answers only up to a point, and after that, existing theories fail to explain what is actually there. We need to admit we don’t know. It is “suspect terrane.�
In Suspect Terrain was first published in 1983 and the revised five book compilation Annals of the Former World (the one I’m actually reading) came out in 1998. It seemed strange to read the book in 2018 that discussed at some length the glaciation and melting cycles of the earth without any mention of current climate change -- although he noted that for most of the earth’s history, there was not any ice at all � ice ages (such as the one we may be approaching the end of) are an anomaly. The scale of geologic time is so long that what’s going on now is only the tiniest blip. But the science, on the other hand, moves quickly—I’m already hoping that after I finish this series I’ll find a follow up by McPhee on new theories and insights since he wrote.
I especially loved this, Book 2 of John McPhee’s geological saga Annals of the Former World, because of Anita Harris, the feisty, smart, and independent-minded pioneering field-geologist who accompanied McPhee from her childhood home in Brooklyn when Brooklyn was not cool, across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, smacking rocks with her sledge hammer, while opening up to our minds the lower realms of the world (its “terrane�) and the tales of its scientist-explorers and their evolving theories.
Pennsylvania is my home state and during the late 1980s for my job I drove all over the state on back roads, navigating with USGS (United States Geological Survey) “quad maps� � so it was utterly fascinating to learn about complex and convoluted deep terrane that lay beneath the surface terrain, and the various theories of how it had all come to be. The earth’s visual and conceptual poetry brought to light through John McPhee’s verbal artistry. There is a fair amount of technical detail in this volume, which I enjoyed.
Fascinating too were the scientist battles—very much tainted by nonscientific concerns. First, when a new explanatory theory dawned in the mind of a scientist, it would typically be ignored, or vehemently rejected and ridiculed by other scientists, no matter how much supporting evidence. But later, once a theory became accepted and established, Anita, always a skeptic, found that some scientists started taking it as doctrine and over-applying it, not bothering to check the evidence, or worse, making the evidence “fit� where the fit was questionable to say the least. How did the geologically jumbled, complex mountains of Pennsylvania arise? According to Anita, the evidence provides answers only up to a point, and after that, existing theories fail to explain what is actually there. We need to admit we don’t know. It is “suspect terrane.�
In Suspect Terrain was first published in 1983 and the revised five book compilation Annals of the Former World (the one I’m actually reading) came out in 1998. It seemed strange to read the book in 2018 that discussed at some length the glaciation and melting cycles of the earth without any mention of current climate change -- although he noted that for most of the earth’s history, there was not any ice at all � ice ages (such as the one we may be approaching the end of) are an anomaly. The scale of geologic time is so long that what’s going on now is only the tiniest blip. But the science, on the other hand, moves quickly—I’m already hoping that after I finish this series I’ll find a follow up by McPhee on new theories and insights since he wrote.
November 19, 2020
Think about diamonds for a minute. So far as we know, there are only two places these occur in nature. One is in very widely-scattered sites on Earth, and the others are little microdiamonds that are sometimes found on meteors.
I think we all realize that enormous heat and pressure are required to form a diamond. So the inside of a volcano might be a good place, right? Uhhh, no. Not nearly enough pressure. Volcanoes are essentially weak points in the Earth's crust where lava can bubble out. No, to form a diamond, you need to go towards the middle of a tectonic plate, the most stable places on Earth, and go down. Way down. Sixty or seventy miles down. The center of the tectonic plates are the only places where the crust is this thick. Any carbon that finds its way down there will be converted to diamond.
Then the problem becomes getting it to the surface. How do diamonds move sixty miles upwards through solid, stable rock? And that's not all: If the diamonds were to migrate upwards at slow to moderate speeds into regions of lower pressure and lower temperature before reaching the surface, they would quickly revert to graphite, which is the most stable form of pure carbon. (Diamonds are emphatically not forever.) So they have to emerge from down there at high speed. In fact, they have to be blown out of the ground at twice the speed of sound in order to survive the trip, where they 'freeze' in their distinctive crystal structure. For reasons that nobody quite understands, every so often a 'diamond pipe' explodes out of the surface of the most stable regions of the earth. This has never happened in human history, but, as McPhee notes, one could pop up under Kansas City next week.
I strongly recommend reading this book. It's just full of stuff like this. So many fun things to learn!
(Nov. 17, 2020)
I'm so happy to be re-reading these books! One wonderful page after another.
I think we all realize that enormous heat and pressure are required to form a diamond. So the inside of a volcano might be a good place, right? Uhhh, no. Not nearly enough pressure. Volcanoes are essentially weak points in the Earth's crust where lava can bubble out. No, to form a diamond, you need to go towards the middle of a tectonic plate, the most stable places on Earth, and go down. Way down. Sixty or seventy miles down. The center of the tectonic plates are the only places where the crust is this thick. Any carbon that finds its way down there will be converted to diamond.
Then the problem becomes getting it to the surface. How do diamonds move sixty miles upwards through solid, stable rock? And that's not all: If the diamonds were to migrate upwards at slow to moderate speeds into regions of lower pressure and lower temperature before reaching the surface, they would quickly revert to graphite, which is the most stable form of pure carbon. (Diamonds are emphatically not forever.) So they have to emerge from down there at high speed. In fact, they have to be blown out of the ground at twice the speed of sound in order to survive the trip, where they 'freeze' in their distinctive crystal structure. For reasons that nobody quite understands, every so often a 'diamond pipe' explodes out of the surface of the most stable regions of the earth. This has never happened in human history, but, as McPhee notes, one could pop up under Kansas City next week.
I strongly recommend reading this book. It's just full of stuff like this. So many fun things to learn!
(Nov. 17, 2020)
If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go way. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks on an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after a rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up -- his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.
I'm so happy to be re-reading these books! One wonderful page after another.
July 20, 2013
Who would think that the subject of geology could be vitally interesting? At Dartmouth College during Ordovician times, it was a dreary parade of synclines, geosynclines, and anticlines. Now it seems that the plate tectonics people has swept all that away. What does in his book is accompany geologist Anita Harris across the eastern United States, mostly in the Appalachians, and follow her arguments about the incredibly complex processes that have formed and re-formed the area over time.
Harris accepts the general notions of plate tectonics, but generally believes that many of its adherents practice a kind of top-down science, letting theories do all the heavy lifting, rather than going out with rock hammers and magnifiers to verify their theories. "While geologists argue, the rocks just sit there," Harris's late husband (also a geologist) remarked. "And sometimes they seem to smile."
McPhee's enthusiasm on the subject is infectious. While not absorbing all the details (there are so many), I felt myself swept along by his enthusiasm and that of Harris.
I don't read many books on the sciences, because I am repelled by their dryness. This and the other books in the series by McPhee are an exception.
Harris accepts the general notions of plate tectonics, but generally believes that many of its adherents practice a kind of top-down science, letting theories do all the heavy lifting, rather than going out with rock hammers and magnifiers to verify their theories. "While geologists argue, the rocks just sit there," Harris's late husband (also a geologist) remarked. "And sometimes they seem to smile."
McPhee's enthusiasm on the subject is infectious. While not absorbing all the details (there are so many), I felt myself swept along by his enthusiasm and that of Harris.
I don't read many books on the sciences, because I am repelled by their dryness. This and the other books in the series by McPhee are an exception.
March 12, 2019
Several years ago, I read John McPhee's BASIN AND RANGE, an offbeat choice for me, a book about geology and mountains and debris flows. It was so extraordinary that I read it again immediately after finishing it for the first time. McPhee's use of language, his eloquent flow and rhythm, made what in most hands would probably have been a dreary trudge into a poetic and moving adventure into the land and how it is shaped and how it moves. IN SUSPECT TERRAIN (which with BASIN AND RANGE and ASSEMBLING CALIFORNIA forms a single collection, ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD, which won for McPhee the Pulitzer Prize) is in part the story of how the (mostly) eastern land mass of North America came to be formed, how the Ice Age sculpted it, and how the pressures of the land and the expanses of time gave rise to fossil fuels. But it is also a profile of Anita Harris, a contrarian geologist who argues against the long-established theory of plate tectonics (at least in its details) and who conducts McPhee on a journey through the countryside in which are discovered and deciphered the story in rock of the birth and growth of a continent. IN SUSPECT TERRAIN is denser in its use of technical terms than BASIN AND RANGE, and therefore it is less comprehensible as a technical guide to the geology it discusses. But though it is not the extraordinary achievement the earlier book is, it is filled with McPhee's genius with words. If you only read one McPhee, read BASIN AND RANGE. If you feel, as I did, driven to read a second of his books, this is a good one, even if it's a little harder work.
January 5, 2020
John McPhee is terrific at communicating what interests others and making it readable for those who are not usually interested in such things. This book does a tremendous job of laying bare the geology of the world. and explaining what's known and unknown (as of the mid-'80s) about plate tectonics, glacier movement, and the formation of the world in general. He makes this analysis more palatable to the non-scientist by interspersing it with a picture of geologist Anita Harris, short views of the commercializing of the Delaware Water Gap, and assorted side issues indicated by the path of his travels: "Pittsburgh was built on such geometries, its streets and roads faithful to the schizophrenic streams [that formed its terrain], its hills separating its people into socio-racial, ethno-religious piles.... " So five stars and mighty praise for this book and its prose.
That said, my rating is how I felt about this book as an experience. It may be my mental limitations, or my complete ignorance of geology, or simply my personal interests, but I simply cannot follow the geology with any degree of accuracy. If Harris says it and McPhee relates it verbatim, I have no idea what it means. I can follow McPhee's similes and other images (very grateful to the carrot image), but I just get lost a lot. The diagrams in the back don't help me.
So, it's great, and not a favorite. I am unlikely to return to the whole book, but I definitely love certain passages. And who can tell how my brain will develop? [Insert joke about rocks in head here].
That said, my rating is how I felt about this book as an experience. It may be my mental limitations, or my complete ignorance of geology, or simply my personal interests, but I simply cannot follow the geology with any degree of accuracy. If Harris says it and McPhee relates it verbatim, I have no idea what it means. I can follow McPhee's similes and other images (very grateful to the carrot image), but I just get lost a lot. The diagrams in the back don't help me.
So, it's great, and not a favorite. I am unlikely to return to the whole book, but I definitely love certain passages. And who can tell how my brain will develop? [Insert joke about rocks in head here].
March 15, 2017
Suspect Terrain is as interesting for me in parts as other McPhee books were in the whole. It was interesting to be reminded of the way this country looked a gazillion years ago - something enchanting about a warm sea covering now dry land, a coral reef in Chicago. But I couldn't keep the geological terminology in my head - would have loved a glossary - and got overwhelmed due to my lack of basic knowledge. McPhee is such an excellent writer. I kept thinking how I would have loved to have had this as a reading assignment in my basic college geology class.
May 30, 2022
Review part 3
� Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.�
“Geologists who grow up with young rocks are likely to subscribe strongly to the doctrine of uniformitarianism, whereby the present is seen to be the key to the past. They discern a river sandbar in a wall of young rock; they see a sandbar in a living river; and they know that each is in the process of becoming the other, cyclically through time. Whatever is also was, and ever again shall be.�
Covering the Appalachians and glaciation, while playing devils advocate against plate tectonics, this book in the Annals of the Former World canon felt repetitive but I was able to absorb more on this reread, and the author really hit his stride on drawing parallels and connections which stretch my mind and imagination, such as the glaciers skipping the Yukon area but stretched into Illinois, and missed Pennsylvania. Glaciers deposited Long Island and Cape Cod. Canadian rock makes up the building materials of Indiana buildings. The southernmost point of one ice sheet released powerful rivers that carried sediments 600 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the writing of the book, perhaps not now with time and the ice caps melting, in past glaciations, there was the same amount of ice over North American as there is in Antarctica now. As the ice retreated, Walden Pond was made, a lake I have swam in and where Thoreau thought.
The stretch of time in my direction, to make a lake that still is a lake millions of years later, is mind boggling, and it makes it holy in a way to have experienced that water on my skin, even if the water may have been replaced a thousand, hundreds of thousands of times? The average drop of water takes about 173 years to pass through Lake Superior, so I imagine a smaller lake like Walden Pond might take 50 years? I desperately want it to be at least a human lifetime, can’t anything on our planet at least pretend to mimic the time we all draw breath? I live near a small man made lake, I am sure I have seen many generations of water there.
Listen to this : “a sixth of all the fresh water on earth is in Canadian ponds, Canadian stream rivers, Canadian lakes.� From ice ages or glaciations. 1/6. In one country. Facts like that make me marvel at the world we live in.
�If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies.�
Waxing poetic is a human yearning, per Diane Ackerman, and I don’t think McPhee has the reputation of being a poet, but read that paragraph again. Rachel Carson said that if there was poetry in her books about the sea, it was becaus the sea was filled with poetry. Same here. Geology, geopoetry, opens the doorways to imagination and wonder that stay with us when we are enlightened or converted. Still don’t believe me?
� In round numbers, then, the age of the river
was a hundred and fifty million years.
The age of the Water Gap rock was four hundred million years.
Another fifty million years before that,
the Taconic mountains appeared.
The river 150, the rock 400, the first ancestral mountains
450 million years before the present�
these dates are so unwieldy that
they might as well be off a Manchu calendar
unless you sense the pace of geologic change
and draw an analogy between, say,
a hundred million years of geology
and one human century, with its upward-fining sequences,
its laminations of events, its slow deteriorations
and instant catastrophes.
You see the rivers running east.
Then you see mountains rise.
Rivers run off them to the west.
Mountains come up like waves.
They crest, break, and spread themselves westward.
When they are spent, there is an interval of time,
and then again you see the rivers running eastward.
You look over the shoulder of the painter
and you see all that in the landscape.
You see it if first you have seen it in the rock.
The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts,
the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years. �
I can imagine, if I were a geology student, I would be studying a topic, say, the equator over millennia, and I would make a list of where it had wandered, or rather, where the land has wandered. For a poem, of course. I doubt they quiz geologists but it would a helpful way to think of time and climates of the time and link them all together. Google does not have this information, and there are bits and pieces scattered in the books. If you want to look at geological time by fixed point, like Denver, or London, check out these maps:
�The equator came in through the Big Bend country in Texas and ran up through the Oklahoma panhandle, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. If in late Cambrian time you had followed the present route of Interstate 80, you would have crossed the equator near Kearney, Nebraska. In difference being vegetation, of which there was virtually none in the early Silurian. Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian was jungle—a few degrees from the equator, like southern Indonesia and Guadalcanal. �
Last thought is the perfect way McPhee describes throughout the book what it means to be “tuned to the land.� It is perhaps a aboriginal or American Indian metaphor mixed with musical imagery, and maybe it is hubris and arrogance. The geologists in the books are not saints by any means, and perhaps not even a whiff spiritually inclined, but their view of Planet Earth is different than ours, and If anything can explain my geological obsession, it is that.
�The early Appalachian geologists, in their horse-drawn buggies, their suits and ties, developed a sense of physiography that tuned them to the land, and when they saw long sugarloaf hills they had learned to suspect that there was dolomite within, and when they looked up at coxcomb ridges they felt the presence of Cambrian sandstones, and of Cambrian shales in the valleys beyond while flourishing green lowlands with protruding ribs of rock would owe their shape and their fertility to limestones assembled in Ordovician seas.�
“Longfellow’s works of poetry include a birthday ballad in praise of Agassiz,: “Come wander with me,� she said, “Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.�
More gems:
The ice has come and gone at least a dozen times, in cycles that seem to require about a hundred thousand years, and, judging by other periods of glaciation in the earlier history of the earth, the contemporary cycles have only begun. About fifty more advances can be expected.
Also, the weathering of mountains, particularly their granites, brings on a chemical reaction that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the greenhouse effect and chilling the earth. Somewhere in such a list, which runs to many items, lie the simultaneous events that set the ice to growing. The change they bring is not at first dramatic. So critical is the earth’s temperature that a drop of just a few degrees will cause ice to form and spread. A cool summer. Unmelted snow. An early fall in some penarctic valley. An overlap of snow. A long winter. A new cool summer. An enlarged residue of snow. It compacts and recrystallizes into granules, into ice.
The continental ice sheet moves toward the equator and keeps on going until it cannot stand the heat. At the latitude of New York City, generally speaking, the ice melts as fast as it advances, and thus it goes no farther, and leaves on Staten Island its terminal moraine. Ocean temperatures will have dropped because of the cold, and therefore the oceans are providing less snow to feed the ice. On all fronts, the ice retreats—not necessarily to disappear. The climate warms. The oceans warm. The snow pack thickens in the Great North Woods. A glacier spreads again. Once the pattern is set, the rhythm is relatively steady. For us, the ice is due again in ninety thousand years. The Holocene appears to be nothing more than a relatively deglaciated interval. It will last until a glacier two miles thick plucks up Toronto and deposits it in Tennessee.
The most recent advance has been called the Wisconsinan ice sheet, because its effects are well displayed in Wisconsin. Its effects, for all that, are not unimpressive in New York. The glacier dumped Long Island where it is (nearly a hundred per cent of Long Island), and Nantucket, and Cape Cod, and all but the west end of Martha’s Vineyard.
One of the oddities of the modern episodes of glaciation is that while three-fifths of all the ice in the world covered North America and extended south of Springfield, Illinois, the valley of the Yukon River in and near Alaska was never glaciated, and as a result the gold in the Yukon drainage—the gold of the richest placer streams ever discovered in the world—was left where it lay, and was not plucked up and similarly scattered by overriding ice.
No one has ever drilled a hundred and twenty miles into the earth, or is likely to. Diamond pipes, meanwhile, have brought up samples of what is there. It is spewed all over the landscape, but it also remains stuck in the throat, like rich dense fruitcake. For the most part, it is peridotite, which is the lowest layer of the subcontinental package and is believed to be the essence of the mantle.
Because geology is sometimes intuitive even to the point of being subjective, the sort of field experience one happens to acquire may tend to influence one’s posture with regard to deep questions in the science.
When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned—the mark invisible at the end of a ruler.The slow steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes. And what we see in the geologic record are the catastrophes. Look at a graded sandstone and see the bedding go from fine to coarse. That’s a storm. The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood.
“Geology repeats itself,� Anita remarked, and she went on to say that anyone who could understand the view before us would have come to understand in a general way the Appalachians as a whole—that what we were looking at was the fragmental evidence and low remains of alpine massifs immeasurably high and wide, massifs which for the most part had stood behind us to the east, and were now largely disintegrated and recycled into younger rock that is tens of thousands of feet deep and wedges out to the west in ever-diminishing quantity until what covers Ohio is a thin veneer.
Figuring out the Appalachians was Problem 1 in American geology, and a difficult place to begin, for it was scarcely a matter of layer-cake legibility, like the time scale in the walls of the Grand Canyon. It was a compressed, chaotic, ropy enigma four thousand kilometres from end to apparent end, full of overturned strata and recycled rock, of steep faults and horizontal thrust sheets, of folds so tight that what had once stretched twenty miles might now fit into five.
At a given place—a given latitude and longitude—the appearance of the world will have changed too often to be recorded in a single picture, will have been, say, at one time below fresh water, at another under brine, will have been mountainous country, a quiet plain, equatorial desert, an arctic coast, a coal swamp, and a river delta, all in one Zip Code.
A subdued continent, consisting of what is now the basement rock of North America, stood low with quiet streams, collecting on its margins clean accumulations of sand. One can infer the flat landscape, the slow rivers, the white beaches, in the rock that remains from those Cambrian sands. Sea level, never constant, moved generally upward all through Cambrian time. The water advanced upon the continent at an average rate of ten miles every million years, spreading across the craton successive coastal sands.
There is a fixed amount of water in the world. It can rain and run, evaporate, freeze, sit in deep cold pools on abyssal plains, but it cannot leave the earth.
With dry land adrift and the earth prone to rolling, that Cambrian sea and New Jersey below it would have been about 20 degrees from the equator—the present latitude of Yucatan, where snorkelers kick along in transparent waters looking through their masks at limestones to be.
The equator came in through the Big Bend country in Texas and ran up through the Oklahoma panhandle, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. If in late Cambrian time you had followed the present route of Interstate 80, you would have crossed the equator near Kearney, Nebraska. In New Jersey, you would have been in water scarcely above your hips, wading among algal mounds and grazing gastropods.
Wyoming. Past Laramie, you would have come to a west-facing beach and, after it, tidal mudflats all the way to Utah. The waters of the shelf would now begin to deepen. A hundred miles into Nevada was the continental slope...
four hundred and sixty million years ago—the shelf edge would still have been near Elko, Nevada,clean-lime seafloor would have reached at least to Salt Lake
In western Nebraska, you would have crossed dry and barren Precambrian terrain and by Lincoln have reached another sea. In Ohio, the sea would have begun to cloud, increasingly so as you moved on east, silts slowly falling onto the lime. In Pennsylvania, as you approached the site of the future Delaware Water Gap, the bottom would have fallen away below you, and where it had earlier been close to the surface it would now be many tens of fathoms
The accumulation of the Martinsburg—the collapsing platform, the inpouring sediments—was the first great sign of a gathering storm. Geological revolution, crustal deformation, tectonic upheaval would follow. Waves of mountains would rise. Martinsburg time in earth history is analogous to the moment in human history when Henry Hudson, of the Dutch East India Company, sailed into the bay of the Lenape River.
Indians were in the Minisink when the vegetation was tundra. Ten thousand years ago, when the vegetation changed from tundra to forest, Indians in the Minisink experienced the change.The styles in which they fractured their flint—their jasper, chert, chalcedony—can be correlated to Anatolian, Sumerian, Mosaic, and Byzantine time.
“In those pebbles you can see a mountain storm. You can see the pebbles coming into a sandbar in a braided river. There is very little mud in this rock. The streams had a high enough gradient to be running fast and to carry the mud away. These sands and pebbles were coming off a mountain range, and it was young and high.�
To travel then along the present route of Interstate 80, you would have been in need of a seaworthy shallow-draft boat. The journey could have started in mountain rapids, for the future site of the George Washington Bridge was under thousands of feet of rock. Down the huge fans of boulders and gravel that leaned against the mountains, the west-running rivers raced toward the epicontinental sea.
At the future site of the Water Gap, you would have shoved off the white beach and set a westerly course across the sea. In the Holocene epoch, the Andes would look like that, with immense fans of gravel coming off their eastern slopes—the essential difference being vegetation, of which there was virtually none in the early Silurian.
The equator had shifted some and was running in the direction that is now northeast-southwest, through Minneapolis and Denver. Twenty-five million years later, in all likelihood you would still have been riding the sparkling waves of the limestone-platform sea, From Wyoming toward the east, there seems to have existed a vastly extrapolated sea. The extrapolation stops in Chicago. You would have come upon a huge coral reef, which is still there, which grew in Silurian time, and did not grow in a desert. It was a wave-washed atoll then, a Kwajalein, an Eniwetok, (Marshall Islands) and in time it would become sugary blue dolomite packed with Silurian sand. You would have been bucking hot tropical trade winds then, blowing toward the equator, evaporating the knee-deep sea.
A little farther along the outcrop, the limestone was full of small round segments of the stems of sea lilies—tall, graceful animals with petalled heads that grew like plants on stems. “The sea lilies grew in clear, shallow water a little offshore,� Anita said. “It was a coast like Fiji’s, or the Philippines�, or Guatemala’s. The coral and the thick shells tell you the water was warm.
At Denver, the Rocky Mountains are up to their hips in their own waste. The sedimentary wedge that has come off the Rockies is thickest there by the mountain front, and gradually thins to the east. Kansas and Nebraska are like pieces cut from a wheel of cheese—lying on their sides, thick ends to the west. Altitude in itself suggests the volume of material. Kansas and Nebraska are three thousand feet higher in the west than in the east.
Another mountain wave would crest, break, and send its swash to westward. It was all very repetitive, to be sure—the great ranges rising, falling, rising, falling, covering and creating landscapes, as if successive commingling waters were to rush up a beach and freeze. But why? How? You see in rock that geology repeats itself, but you do not see what started the process. In the rivers in rock you find pieces of mountains, but you do not find out why the mountains were
The shores of the Red Sea look like that. On both sides are mountains, nine, ten, twelve thousand feet high. Extremely short steep rivers fall into the Red Sea.
Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian was jungle—a few degrees from the equator, like southern Indonesia and Guadalcanal. The freshwater swamp forests stood beside the nervously changing coastline of a saltwater bay, just as Sumatran swamps now stand beside the Straits of Malacca, and Bornean everglades beside the Java Sea.
The present sequence was built behind a coastline—as is happening now, for example, in the bayous of the Mississippi Delta—by rivers meandering to and fro, covering with sand the matted vegetation.
Charles Darwin hurried out into the countryside to see for himself if there were “marks left by extinct glaciers.� He wrote to a friend, “I assure you, an extinct volcano could hardly leave more evident traces of its activity and vast powers � . The valley about here and the site of the inn at which I am now writing must once have been covered by at least eight hundred or a thousand feet in thickness of solid ice! Eleven years ago I spent a whole day in the valley where yesterday everything but the ice of the glaciers was palpably clear to me, and I then saw nothing but plain water and bare rock.�
� Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.�
“Geologists who grow up with young rocks are likely to subscribe strongly to the doctrine of uniformitarianism, whereby the present is seen to be the key to the past. They discern a river sandbar in a wall of young rock; they see a sandbar in a living river; and they know that each is in the process of becoming the other, cyclically through time. Whatever is also was, and ever again shall be.�
Covering the Appalachians and glaciation, while playing devils advocate against plate tectonics, this book in the Annals of the Former World canon felt repetitive but I was able to absorb more on this reread, and the author really hit his stride on drawing parallels and connections which stretch my mind and imagination, such as the glaciers skipping the Yukon area but stretched into Illinois, and missed Pennsylvania. Glaciers deposited Long Island and Cape Cod. Canadian rock makes up the building materials of Indiana buildings. The southernmost point of one ice sheet released powerful rivers that carried sediments 600 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the writing of the book, perhaps not now with time and the ice caps melting, in past glaciations, there was the same amount of ice over North American as there is in Antarctica now. As the ice retreated, Walden Pond was made, a lake I have swam in and where Thoreau thought.
The stretch of time in my direction, to make a lake that still is a lake millions of years later, is mind boggling, and it makes it holy in a way to have experienced that water on my skin, even if the water may have been replaced a thousand, hundreds of thousands of times? The average drop of water takes about 173 years to pass through Lake Superior, so I imagine a smaller lake like Walden Pond might take 50 years? I desperately want it to be at least a human lifetime, can’t anything on our planet at least pretend to mimic the time we all draw breath? I live near a small man made lake, I am sure I have seen many generations of water there.
Listen to this : “a sixth of all the fresh water on earth is in Canadian ponds, Canadian stream rivers, Canadian lakes.� From ice ages or glaciations. 1/6. In one country. Facts like that make me marvel at the world we live in.
�If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies.�
Waxing poetic is a human yearning, per Diane Ackerman, and I don’t think McPhee has the reputation of being a poet, but read that paragraph again. Rachel Carson said that if there was poetry in her books about the sea, it was becaus the sea was filled with poetry. Same here. Geology, geopoetry, opens the doorways to imagination and wonder that stay with us when we are enlightened or converted. Still don’t believe me?
� In round numbers, then, the age of the river
was a hundred and fifty million years.
The age of the Water Gap rock was four hundred million years.
Another fifty million years before that,
the Taconic mountains appeared.
The river 150, the rock 400, the first ancestral mountains
450 million years before the present�
these dates are so unwieldy that
they might as well be off a Manchu calendar
unless you sense the pace of geologic change
and draw an analogy between, say,
a hundred million years of geology
and one human century, with its upward-fining sequences,
its laminations of events, its slow deteriorations
and instant catastrophes.
You see the rivers running east.
Then you see mountains rise.
Rivers run off them to the west.
Mountains come up like waves.
They crest, break, and spread themselves westward.
When they are spent, there is an interval of time,
and then again you see the rivers running eastward.
You look over the shoulder of the painter
and you see all that in the landscape.
You see it if first you have seen it in the rock.
The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts,
the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years. �
I can imagine, if I were a geology student, I would be studying a topic, say, the equator over millennia, and I would make a list of where it had wandered, or rather, where the land has wandered. For a poem, of course. I doubt they quiz geologists but it would a helpful way to think of time and climates of the time and link them all together. Google does not have this information, and there are bits and pieces scattered in the books. If you want to look at geological time by fixed point, like Denver, or London, check out these maps:
�The equator came in through the Big Bend country in Texas and ran up through the Oklahoma panhandle, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. If in late Cambrian time you had followed the present route of Interstate 80, you would have crossed the equator near Kearney, Nebraska. In difference being vegetation, of which there was virtually none in the early Silurian. Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian was jungle—a few degrees from the equator, like southern Indonesia and Guadalcanal. �
Last thought is the perfect way McPhee describes throughout the book what it means to be “tuned to the land.� It is perhaps a aboriginal or American Indian metaphor mixed with musical imagery, and maybe it is hubris and arrogance. The geologists in the books are not saints by any means, and perhaps not even a whiff spiritually inclined, but their view of Planet Earth is different than ours, and If anything can explain my geological obsession, it is that.
�The early Appalachian geologists, in their horse-drawn buggies, their suits and ties, developed a sense of physiography that tuned them to the land, and when they saw long sugarloaf hills they had learned to suspect that there was dolomite within, and when they looked up at coxcomb ridges they felt the presence of Cambrian sandstones, and of Cambrian shales in the valleys beyond while flourishing green lowlands with protruding ribs of rock would owe their shape and their fertility to limestones assembled in Ordovician seas.�
“Longfellow’s works of poetry include a birthday ballad in praise of Agassiz,: “Come wander with me,� she said, “Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.�
More gems:
The ice has come and gone at least a dozen times, in cycles that seem to require about a hundred thousand years, and, judging by other periods of glaciation in the earlier history of the earth, the contemporary cycles have only begun. About fifty more advances can be expected.
Also, the weathering of mountains, particularly their granites, brings on a chemical reaction that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the greenhouse effect and chilling the earth. Somewhere in such a list, which runs to many items, lie the simultaneous events that set the ice to growing. The change they bring is not at first dramatic. So critical is the earth’s temperature that a drop of just a few degrees will cause ice to form and spread. A cool summer. Unmelted snow. An early fall in some penarctic valley. An overlap of snow. A long winter. A new cool summer. An enlarged residue of snow. It compacts and recrystallizes into granules, into ice.
The continental ice sheet moves toward the equator and keeps on going until it cannot stand the heat. At the latitude of New York City, generally speaking, the ice melts as fast as it advances, and thus it goes no farther, and leaves on Staten Island its terminal moraine. Ocean temperatures will have dropped because of the cold, and therefore the oceans are providing less snow to feed the ice. On all fronts, the ice retreats—not necessarily to disappear. The climate warms. The oceans warm. The snow pack thickens in the Great North Woods. A glacier spreads again. Once the pattern is set, the rhythm is relatively steady. For us, the ice is due again in ninety thousand years. The Holocene appears to be nothing more than a relatively deglaciated interval. It will last until a glacier two miles thick plucks up Toronto and deposits it in Tennessee.
The most recent advance has been called the Wisconsinan ice sheet, because its effects are well displayed in Wisconsin. Its effects, for all that, are not unimpressive in New York. The glacier dumped Long Island where it is (nearly a hundred per cent of Long Island), and Nantucket, and Cape Cod, and all but the west end of Martha’s Vineyard.
One of the oddities of the modern episodes of glaciation is that while three-fifths of all the ice in the world covered North America and extended south of Springfield, Illinois, the valley of the Yukon River in and near Alaska was never glaciated, and as a result the gold in the Yukon drainage—the gold of the richest placer streams ever discovered in the world—was left where it lay, and was not plucked up and similarly scattered by overriding ice.
No one has ever drilled a hundred and twenty miles into the earth, or is likely to. Diamond pipes, meanwhile, have brought up samples of what is there. It is spewed all over the landscape, but it also remains stuck in the throat, like rich dense fruitcake. For the most part, it is peridotite, which is the lowest layer of the subcontinental package and is believed to be the essence of the mantle.
Because geology is sometimes intuitive even to the point of being subjective, the sort of field experience one happens to acquire may tend to influence one’s posture with regard to deep questions in the science.
When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned—the mark invisible at the end of a ruler.The slow steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes. And what we see in the geologic record are the catastrophes. Look at a graded sandstone and see the bedding go from fine to coarse. That’s a storm. The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood.
“Geology repeats itself,� Anita remarked, and she went on to say that anyone who could understand the view before us would have come to understand in a general way the Appalachians as a whole—that what we were looking at was the fragmental evidence and low remains of alpine massifs immeasurably high and wide, massifs which for the most part had stood behind us to the east, and were now largely disintegrated and recycled into younger rock that is tens of thousands of feet deep and wedges out to the west in ever-diminishing quantity until what covers Ohio is a thin veneer.
Figuring out the Appalachians was Problem 1 in American geology, and a difficult place to begin, for it was scarcely a matter of layer-cake legibility, like the time scale in the walls of the Grand Canyon. It was a compressed, chaotic, ropy enigma four thousand kilometres from end to apparent end, full of overturned strata and recycled rock, of steep faults and horizontal thrust sheets, of folds so tight that what had once stretched twenty miles might now fit into five.
At a given place—a given latitude and longitude—the appearance of the world will have changed too often to be recorded in a single picture, will have been, say, at one time below fresh water, at another under brine, will have been mountainous country, a quiet plain, equatorial desert, an arctic coast, a coal swamp, and a river delta, all in one Zip Code.
A subdued continent, consisting of what is now the basement rock of North America, stood low with quiet streams, collecting on its margins clean accumulations of sand. One can infer the flat landscape, the slow rivers, the white beaches, in the rock that remains from those Cambrian sands. Sea level, never constant, moved generally upward all through Cambrian time. The water advanced upon the continent at an average rate of ten miles every million years, spreading across the craton successive coastal sands.
There is a fixed amount of water in the world. It can rain and run, evaporate, freeze, sit in deep cold pools on abyssal plains, but it cannot leave the earth.
With dry land adrift and the earth prone to rolling, that Cambrian sea and New Jersey below it would have been about 20 degrees from the equator—the present latitude of Yucatan, where snorkelers kick along in transparent waters looking through their masks at limestones to be.
The equator came in through the Big Bend country in Texas and ran up through the Oklahoma panhandle, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. If in late Cambrian time you had followed the present route of Interstate 80, you would have crossed the equator near Kearney, Nebraska. In New Jersey, you would have been in water scarcely above your hips, wading among algal mounds and grazing gastropods.
Wyoming. Past Laramie, you would have come to a west-facing beach and, after it, tidal mudflats all the way to Utah. The waters of the shelf would now begin to deepen. A hundred miles into Nevada was the continental slope...
four hundred and sixty million years ago—the shelf edge would still have been near Elko, Nevada,clean-lime seafloor would have reached at least to Salt Lake
In western Nebraska, you would have crossed dry and barren Precambrian terrain and by Lincoln have reached another sea. In Ohio, the sea would have begun to cloud, increasingly so as you moved on east, silts slowly falling onto the lime. In Pennsylvania, as you approached the site of the future Delaware Water Gap, the bottom would have fallen away below you, and where it had earlier been close to the surface it would now be many tens of fathoms
The accumulation of the Martinsburg—the collapsing platform, the inpouring sediments—was the first great sign of a gathering storm. Geological revolution, crustal deformation, tectonic upheaval would follow. Waves of mountains would rise. Martinsburg time in earth history is analogous to the moment in human history when Henry Hudson, of the Dutch East India Company, sailed into the bay of the Lenape River.
Indians were in the Minisink when the vegetation was tundra. Ten thousand years ago, when the vegetation changed from tundra to forest, Indians in the Minisink experienced the change.The styles in which they fractured their flint—their jasper, chert, chalcedony—can be correlated to Anatolian, Sumerian, Mosaic, and Byzantine time.
“In those pebbles you can see a mountain storm. You can see the pebbles coming into a sandbar in a braided river. There is very little mud in this rock. The streams had a high enough gradient to be running fast and to carry the mud away. These sands and pebbles were coming off a mountain range, and it was young and high.�
To travel then along the present route of Interstate 80, you would have been in need of a seaworthy shallow-draft boat. The journey could have started in mountain rapids, for the future site of the George Washington Bridge was under thousands of feet of rock. Down the huge fans of boulders and gravel that leaned against the mountains, the west-running rivers raced toward the epicontinental sea.
At the future site of the Water Gap, you would have shoved off the white beach and set a westerly course across the sea. In the Holocene epoch, the Andes would look like that, with immense fans of gravel coming off their eastern slopes—the essential difference being vegetation, of which there was virtually none in the early Silurian.
The equator had shifted some and was running in the direction that is now northeast-southwest, through Minneapolis and Denver. Twenty-five million years later, in all likelihood you would still have been riding the sparkling waves of the limestone-platform sea, From Wyoming toward the east, there seems to have existed a vastly extrapolated sea. The extrapolation stops in Chicago. You would have come upon a huge coral reef, which is still there, which grew in Silurian time, and did not grow in a desert. It was a wave-washed atoll then, a Kwajalein, an Eniwetok, (Marshall Islands) and in time it would become sugary blue dolomite packed with Silurian sand. You would have been bucking hot tropical trade winds then, blowing toward the equator, evaporating the knee-deep sea.
A little farther along the outcrop, the limestone was full of small round segments of the stems of sea lilies—tall, graceful animals with petalled heads that grew like plants on stems. “The sea lilies grew in clear, shallow water a little offshore,� Anita said. “It was a coast like Fiji’s, or the Philippines�, or Guatemala’s. The coral and the thick shells tell you the water was warm.
At Denver, the Rocky Mountains are up to their hips in their own waste. The sedimentary wedge that has come off the Rockies is thickest there by the mountain front, and gradually thins to the east. Kansas and Nebraska are like pieces cut from a wheel of cheese—lying on their sides, thick ends to the west. Altitude in itself suggests the volume of material. Kansas and Nebraska are three thousand feet higher in the west than in the east.
Another mountain wave would crest, break, and send its swash to westward. It was all very repetitive, to be sure—the great ranges rising, falling, rising, falling, covering and creating landscapes, as if successive commingling waters were to rush up a beach and freeze. But why? How? You see in rock that geology repeats itself, but you do not see what started the process. In the rivers in rock you find pieces of mountains, but you do not find out why the mountains were
The shores of the Red Sea look like that. On both sides are mountains, nine, ten, twelve thousand feet high. Extremely short steep rivers fall into the Red Sea.
Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvanian was jungle—a few degrees from the equator, like southern Indonesia and Guadalcanal. The freshwater swamp forests stood beside the nervously changing coastline of a saltwater bay, just as Sumatran swamps now stand beside the Straits of Malacca, and Bornean everglades beside the Java Sea.
The present sequence was built behind a coastline—as is happening now, for example, in the bayous of the Mississippi Delta—by rivers meandering to and fro, covering with sand the matted vegetation.
Charles Darwin hurried out into the countryside to see for himself if there were “marks left by extinct glaciers.� He wrote to a friend, “I assure you, an extinct volcano could hardly leave more evident traces of its activity and vast powers � . The valley about here and the site of the inn at which I am now writing must once have been covered by at least eight hundred or a thousand feet in thickness of solid ice! Eleven years ago I spent a whole day in the valley where yesterday everything but the ice of the glaciers was palpably clear to me, and I then saw nothing but plain water and bare rock.�
May 29, 2017
This is basically an explication of the geography of the Appalachian Mountains, with extended side discussions of glacial theory and plate tectonics. Very illuminating for us non-geologists....although a few passages are too overloaded with technical jargon which threw me.
As usual, McPhee frames his narrative as a journey and conversation with an expert, this time a geologist, Anita Harris. They begin their journey in New York City, and travel across Route 80, ending approximately on the border between Indiana and Illinois....although the discussion encompasses the entire Great Lake system.
The Appalachians, which form the heart of the story, are perplexing from a geological point of view. They are actually the THIRD set of mountains to arise in roughly this same spot, each worn down by erosion. The original set were higher than the Alps.
This means that Appalachia is not a simple up thrust of rocks. Rather, the rocks have thrust up, fallen over and folded in on themselves (like waves in the ocean), and then been superheated by the pressure of the next set of mountains to rise on top of them. This complex series of events means that there is virtually no oil in the Appalachians (oil burns away if temperatures get too hot), but the purest coal in the world...which requires heat and pressure in huge amounts to form.
The geology is further complicated by the fact that about 20,000 years ago, they were covered in a sheet of ice thousands of feet thick....yes, actually COVERED! This glacial ice extended as far south as New York City (where the outflow at th southern edge formed Long Island) and northern New Jersey (the Delaware Water Gap was partially shaped by ice).
The Appalachians also pose a problem for plate tectonics. Generally, huge mountain ranges are thought to arise when two plates crash together. But the Appalachians formed three times in the same place over 100's of millions of years. How could plates have crashed that slowly?
One final note: the last book I read, Reading the Forested Landscape, focused on unraveling the history of the forests in northern New England...and focused exclusively on the post-glacial period. The lesson of that book is that what we think of as virgin forest never existed, and forests are in a constant state of flux. This lesson is driven home many fold by In Suspect Terrain, which makes clear that the post-glacial period is a paper thin slice of the history of the region..so small, it would not be visible on a timeline.
As usual, McPhee frames his narrative as a journey and conversation with an expert, this time a geologist, Anita Harris. They begin their journey in New York City, and travel across Route 80, ending approximately on the border between Indiana and Illinois....although the discussion encompasses the entire Great Lake system.
The Appalachians, which form the heart of the story, are perplexing from a geological point of view. They are actually the THIRD set of mountains to arise in roughly this same spot, each worn down by erosion. The original set were higher than the Alps.
This means that Appalachia is not a simple up thrust of rocks. Rather, the rocks have thrust up, fallen over and folded in on themselves (like waves in the ocean), and then been superheated by the pressure of the next set of mountains to rise on top of them. This complex series of events means that there is virtually no oil in the Appalachians (oil burns away if temperatures get too hot), but the purest coal in the world...which requires heat and pressure in huge amounts to form.
The geology is further complicated by the fact that about 20,000 years ago, they were covered in a sheet of ice thousands of feet thick....yes, actually COVERED! This glacial ice extended as far south as New York City (where the outflow at th southern edge formed Long Island) and northern New Jersey (the Delaware Water Gap was partially shaped by ice).
The Appalachians also pose a problem for plate tectonics. Generally, huge mountain ranges are thought to arise when two plates crash together. But the Appalachians formed three times in the same place over 100's of millions of years. How could plates have crashed that slowly?
One final note: the last book I read, Reading the Forested Landscape, focused on unraveling the history of the forests in northern New England...and focused exclusively on the post-glacial period. The lesson of that book is that what we think of as virgin forest never existed, and forests are in a constant state of flux. This lesson is driven home many fold by In Suspect Terrain, which makes clear that the post-glacial period is a paper thin slice of the history of the region..so small, it would not be visible on a timeline.
November 13, 2024
I enjoyed so much that my reading momentum carried me right from that into (and through) this follow-on episode of , which centers on the rising and falling (times three) of the Appalachians as well as the glacial impacts of the last few ice ages on the geography of New York through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Author John McPhee accompanies geologist Anita Harris along I-80 through PA and OH, stopping along the way to hammer rocks from roadcuts and admire various geological sites such as the Delaware Water Gap. Interspersed are interesting asides, such as the forming of "Quake Lake" from a deadly earthquake/landslide combination near Yellowstone, and Anita's study of fossilized conodont organisms which can be used to identify possible oil-rich formations.
I found this a denser, more technical read, and I had some difficulty visualizing the chaotic folding, eroding, and splitting over a billion odd years of eastern North America. However, I found the sections on glaciers fascinating: apparently, Long Island (and Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard) were formed when ice sheets during the last Ice Age scraped the top layer off New England and deposited heaps of glacial till in the Atlantic before melting away. And in Ohio a glacier carved 400 foot long grooves into limestone 18,000 years ago which can still be seen today. I thought I might take a break from geology after this one, but I couldn't resist launching immediately into Annals #3, about the unique geography of Wyoming and how the Rockies came about.
I found this a denser, more technical read, and I had some difficulty visualizing the chaotic folding, eroding, and splitting over a billion odd years of eastern North America. However, I found the sections on glaciers fascinating: apparently, Long Island (and Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard) were formed when ice sheets during the last Ice Age scraped the top layer off New England and deposited heaps of glacial till in the Atlantic before melting away. And in Ohio a glacier carved 400 foot long grooves into limestone 18,000 years ago which can still be seen today. I thought I might take a break from geology after this one, but I couldn't resist launching immediately into Annals #3, about the unique geography of Wyoming and how the Rockies came about.
December 11, 2020
“When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned—the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up—his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.�
May 14, 2025
McPhee is an incredible author (Encounters with the Arch Druid was my first run in with him and I’m all the better for it) but this book was a slog to get through by the second half. In his typical tag-along observer style, he lets the rogue geologist Anita Harris tell the important parts of the story � that being the geological history of Brooklyn, the Delaware Water Gap, the Poconos and other areas I’ve been to myself. Glacial deposits and outwash plains actually come to life. Harris’s simultaneous critique of flashy, one-size-fits-all science, namely plate tectonics, is intriguing and pretty much gives the book its title.
But McPhee’s explanations run on and become muddled. He nails some incredible strings of sentences that tackle humanity’s ill perception of geological time and our place in it. The rest is just tiresome. But who knows? Maybe I just needed a degree in geology.
But McPhee’s explanations run on and become muddled. He nails some incredible strings of sentences that tackle humanity’s ill perception of geological time and our place in it. The rest is just tiresome. But who knows? Maybe I just needed a degree in geology.
Read
January 16, 2024Det här är andra boken som ingår i Annals of the Former World. McPhee är fenomenal men jag klarade inte att läsa mer om en paleontolog som tjata om fossil av KONODONTER. Konodonter var tydligen någon slags maskliknande fisk som tack och lov tycks ha dött ut under Trias. Fossil av konodonter används för att hitta oljefyndigheter. Jag läste inte klart sista 50 sidorna pga dem.
October 19, 2024
A fun road trip through the world of geology. It is not a textbook. It is not meant to prepare the reader for a test. It does allow anyone to enter into the world of hands on geology through the eyes geologists would use to look at those giant gashes in mountains and ridges that highways leave in the landscapes as well as those landscapes viewed off in the distance (distance from the window of the vehicle and distance from our present pint in geological time).
It creates, in the reader, an awe of the massive depth of scale we tread every day beneath our feet.
It creates, in the reader, an awe of the massive depth of scale we tread every day beneath our feet.
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January 16, 2025Very good! I thought it was very interesting and compelling. Occasionally I felt like there was too much jargon and geological terms thrown in that might not be familiar to a general audience. But at the same time the book remained very readable, and sometimes it's fun to just have the words flow through you, not having to understand every term or type of rock.
January 13, 2020
Glaciation, Pennsylvania coal, how oil forms and how we measure temperature discoloration in fossils to find it. The Delaware Water Gap, and how geologists buck each other’s trends. Some contemplations on the limitations of plate techtonics and the research to back them.
May 4, 2022
This is the second book in this series, it is just as enjoyable as the first. Very powerful information on geology. Great lessons like diamonds turn into graphite if the are not kept under pressure long enough. Really neat stuff that I never learned from elsewhere. Great book.
May 3, 2022
Is this the best book I’ve ever read? Quite possibly yes. This book touched my heart in more ways that I can say. When good rocks with good words combine I’m a happy gal!!!!!!!!!!!
August 12, 2023
This would make me want to be a Geologist. The conspiracy of plate tectonics.
November 17, 2017
As a geologist and an Ohio Boy, this work of John McPhee is something special for me.
McPhee, a non-geologist, is a great teacher of geology. In Suspect Terrain, McPhee gives an account of a geologic road trip he took with the legendary geologist Anita Harris from Ohio to Brooklyn, NY. The road trip was part of a continuing effort of McPhee to learn the geologic history of the North American Continent. This book covers just one segment of that effort that covers the eastern midwest to the Appalachians. His presentation of the geology is artful and complete.
What I find so valuable in this book is his presentation of Anita Harris. Like too many great women of science, Dr. Harris has not received the public attention and recognition she deserves. There is so much to admire about this remarkable person. She was a poor kid in NYC and recognized geology as a way to intellectually and physically escape from the confines of poverty and the urban wasteland. She started this effort as a child, by taking long bus rides alone out to Coney Island with a window screen in her lap - which she used at the beach to sift sand for treasures - both material and geologic. Dr. Harris had a keen and honest intellect that allowed her to question everything, including herself, with a razor sharp honesty. She also thought about fundamental questions. She retained her child-like curiosity throughout her life and applied it to practical, scientific use. As a result, she made one of the most important and useful discoveries in the history of the science of geology.
Dr. Harris is also important to me as she roamed the same hallways and library stacks as I did in Orton Hall at The Ohio State University. Although I was a highly engaged student who revealed in the history of the Geology Department and who worked in micropaleontology, as did Anita Harris, I never once heard her name at the University. She had taken her PhD there in 1970 and I was an undergrad from 77 to 85.
McPhees work are referred to as “Geo-Poetry�. This soggy term is not accurate. I would call his work “comprehendible and artful. I frequently listen to his series of books on Audio to refresh my grasp of North American geology.
I passionately recommend this book to anyone who wonders "how did this all get here?".
McPhee, a non-geologist, is a great teacher of geology. In Suspect Terrain, McPhee gives an account of a geologic road trip he took with the legendary geologist Anita Harris from Ohio to Brooklyn, NY. The road trip was part of a continuing effort of McPhee to learn the geologic history of the North American Continent. This book covers just one segment of that effort that covers the eastern midwest to the Appalachians. His presentation of the geology is artful and complete.
What I find so valuable in this book is his presentation of Anita Harris. Like too many great women of science, Dr. Harris has not received the public attention and recognition she deserves. There is so much to admire about this remarkable person. She was a poor kid in NYC and recognized geology as a way to intellectually and physically escape from the confines of poverty and the urban wasteland. She started this effort as a child, by taking long bus rides alone out to Coney Island with a window screen in her lap - which she used at the beach to sift sand for treasures - both material and geologic. Dr. Harris had a keen and honest intellect that allowed her to question everything, including herself, with a razor sharp honesty. She also thought about fundamental questions. She retained her child-like curiosity throughout her life and applied it to practical, scientific use. As a result, she made one of the most important and useful discoveries in the history of the science of geology.
Dr. Harris is also important to me as she roamed the same hallways and library stacks as I did in Orton Hall at The Ohio State University. Although I was a highly engaged student who revealed in the history of the Geology Department and who worked in micropaleontology, as did Anita Harris, I never once heard her name at the University. She had taken her PhD there in 1970 and I was an undergrad from 77 to 85.
McPhees work are referred to as “Geo-Poetry�. This soggy term is not accurate. I would call his work “comprehendible and artful. I frequently listen to his series of books on Audio to refresh my grasp of North American geology.
I passionately recommend this book to anyone who wonders "how did this all get here?".
April 2, 2012
Not my favorite McPhee by far, but still a strong work. There are parts when he gets a little lost in the weeds or conodonts of time, but still, I'm glad enough to have read it. Unfortunately for me, I started with Book 2 of the four major books that make up McPhee's pulitzer prize winning opus . Still to go: Book 1: ; Book 3: ; Book 4: .
If you haven't read McPhee before, I'd suggest starting with , , or before busting into his geology books.
If you haven't read McPhee before, I'd suggest starting with , , or before busting into his geology books.
February 2, 2018
I sometimes find it hard to follow the thread of these Annals of the Former World books. As opposed to Basin and Range, this seems to have a single "perspective geologist", Anita Harris, and focuses almost entirely on her work. One thing I don't totally understand is whether Harris believes something fundamentally different from the plate tectonics people or whether she just thinks that plate tectonics people have a hammer and see everything as a nail. McPhee talks at great length about how Harris disagrees with the plate tectonics orthodoxy in some ways, and has many specific examples, but I didn't get a great sense of what the precise disagreement is and what the consequences of one or the other framework would be on one's geophysical worldview.
June 29, 2017
I do so love John McPhee and his writings. I think he is so lyrical. Maybe it's just that he takes science out of the realm of math!
I also wonder how the geology in the book has stood the test of time, but most of what's there is likely still accurate. We just learn what we didn't know and which suppositions were wrong as time passes.
I have to remember and use the phrase 'in suspect terrain.'
He has written on such a variety of topics, that I think everyone should read a book by him...
I also wonder how the geology in the book has stood the test of time, but most of what's there is likely still accurate. We just learn what we didn't know and which suppositions were wrong as time passes.
I have to remember and use the phrase 'in suspect terrain.'
He has written on such a variety of topics, that I think everyone should read a book by him...
October 14, 2017
Didn't enjoy this one as much as Basin & Range - may have to do with the territory - ie: eastern US.
September 12, 2021
In Suspect Terrain is book two in John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. He continues his drive along I-80 to explore the geological forces that shaped America.
This time he is accompanied by a geologist named Anita Harris. She pioneered using conodonts, which are toothlike fossils to help determine the age of rocks, and are very useful to the petroleum industry. A large portion of the book is dedicated to her life and work. She also doesn’t believe all the hype about the new (at the time) seafloor spreading theory and shares her concerns with McPhee.
Like Basin and Range, we get explanations of how America’s geology came to be. We learn why the tallest skyscrapers in New York City are clustered in certain areas of Manhattan. There is also a fascinating summary of how diamonds are created.
Another major topic of the book is glaciers. The part of the country McPhee is exploring (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) was largely shaped by the effects of glaciation.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s not as good as Basin and Range, but it’s still good. I read both Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain in a week, which was a lot of geology to digest. I will be taking a few weeks off before I read the third book in the series.
Do I recommend it?
Like Basin and Range, you don’t have to be a geologist to appreciate this book. But it still might be an acquired taste. You should know McPhee is exceptional at writing about geology. His writing is interesting and engaging, and never dull, which can be hard to do with a work of science.
This was originally posted on my website
This time he is accompanied by a geologist named Anita Harris. She pioneered using conodonts, which are toothlike fossils to help determine the age of rocks, and are very useful to the petroleum industry. A large portion of the book is dedicated to her life and work. She also doesn’t believe all the hype about the new (at the time) seafloor spreading theory and shares her concerns with McPhee.
Like Basin and Range, we get explanations of how America’s geology came to be. We learn why the tallest skyscrapers in New York City are clustered in certain areas of Manhattan. There is also a fascinating summary of how diamonds are created.
Another major topic of the book is glaciers. The part of the country McPhee is exploring (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) was largely shaped by the effects of glaciation.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s not as good as Basin and Range, but it’s still good. I read both Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain in a week, which was a lot of geology to digest. I will be taking a few weeks off before I read the third book in the series.
Do I recommend it?
Like Basin and Range, you don’t have to be a geologist to appreciate this book. But it still might be an acquired taste. You should know McPhee is exceptional at writing about geology. His writing is interesting and engaging, and never dull, which can be hard to do with a work of science.
This was originally posted on my website
November 3, 2024
When he came up with the idea of writing a huge book on the geology of the United States, John McPhee realized that it would take him longer to write it than he felt comfortable dedicating to a single book. So he hit upon a brilliant solution—break it up into four smaller ones, and space them out. This is the second of his Annals of the Former World, and it displays all of the characteristics that make McPhee a legend of the literary world.
McPhee is a writer very preoccupied with form. Most nonfiction authors break their subject into logical chunks, first into chapters, then paragraphs, and finally sentences, allowing them to get from A to Z. But McPhee prefers more organic structures. His two most common devices are to use voyages and biographies (often both) as a framework from which to hang the rest of his material. In this book, his chosen person is Anita Harris, and the trip is from Brooklyn to Indiana.
I must admit that both Harris and the trip were fairly uninspiring. Harris is not a particularly colorful figure—her primary distinguishing characteristic being a skepticism towards plate tectonic theory (which seemed rather silly nowadays)—and the voyage consisted of examining the exposed layers of earth in roadcuts. But he manages to hang many interesting vestments from this lackluster mannequin. The two primary threads of the story are the geology of petroleum and of glaciation (though the connecting notion that burning petroleum would cause glaciers to melt was still in the future).
For me, McPhee is a writer who has a peculiar rhythm, and it takes me some time to tap along to his beat. Now, in the second book of this series, I am adapting, and enjoying myself quite a bit.
McPhee is a writer very preoccupied with form. Most nonfiction authors break their subject into logical chunks, first into chapters, then paragraphs, and finally sentences, allowing them to get from A to Z. But McPhee prefers more organic structures. His two most common devices are to use voyages and biographies (often both) as a framework from which to hang the rest of his material. In this book, his chosen person is Anita Harris, and the trip is from Brooklyn to Indiana.
I must admit that both Harris and the trip were fairly uninspiring. Harris is not a particularly colorful figure—her primary distinguishing characteristic being a skepticism towards plate tectonic theory (which seemed rather silly nowadays)—and the voyage consisted of examining the exposed layers of earth in roadcuts. But he manages to hang many interesting vestments from this lackluster mannequin. The two primary threads of the story are the geology of petroleum and of glaciation (though the connecting notion that burning petroleum would cause glaciers to melt was still in the future).
For me, McPhee is a writer who has a peculiar rhythm, and it takes me some time to tap along to his beat. Now, in the second book of this series, I am adapting, and enjoying myself quite a bit.
November 24, 2021
The title In Suspect Terrain, it seems, has several meanings. Geologist Anita G. Harris travels to observe, sample, and study rock. Her hands on approach tells her that, while plate-tectonics is helpful, it does not explain everything it attempts to. It is excessively applied. "The plate-tectonics people have certain set patters that they expect to see. They kind of lock themselves in. If something doesn't fit the theory, they'll find some sort of reason...they just make things fit...It's what you do when you don't want to think" (John McPhee quoting Harris, p. 121-122). Making plate-tectonics fit is suspect terrain.
Experiencing the 1959 earthquake near Hebgen Lake taught her that changes on the earth do not always come in "a slow steady march, as we were taught...The steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes" (page 43). To think otherwise is suspect terrain.
Then there are the geological abnormalities, exotic terrains, the atypical rock they cannot explain and, thus call, "suspect terrain".
Finally, for John McPhee to think he can explain geology, and the rocks and landscape he saw and touched as he traveled with Harris may also be suspect terrain. But for me at least, he did so. And I have only read one or two other books on geology, and never taken a class on the subject.
Experiencing the 1959 earthquake near Hebgen Lake taught her that changes on the earth do not always come in "a slow steady march, as we were taught...The steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes" (page 43). To think otherwise is suspect terrain.
Then there are the geological abnormalities, exotic terrains, the atypical rock they cannot explain and, thus call, "suspect terrain".
Finally, for John McPhee to think he can explain geology, and the rocks and landscape he saw and touched as he traveled with Harris may also be suspect terrain. But for me at least, he did so. And I have only read one or two other books on geology, and never taken a class on the subject.
October 20, 2024
My second read by John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain weaves together the debate between some field geologists and plate tectonics proponents circa the 1980s, with a personal travelogue and mini-biography of geologist Anita Harris. I quite enjoyed Harris' dry wit and reading about her successful career as a female in a male dominated field. Her contributions were unique, albeit directly serving the cause of petroleum companies seeking to discover oil.
The then raging debate between "plate tectonics boys", as Harris calls them, and field geologists like herself was intriguing, with the field based folks continually proving key facets of tectonics theories wrong, and the tectonics proponents continually moving goalposts in response. It's a classic case of field observations vs. computer based models agreeing in some areas and never coming together in others. Reviewing some contemporary analysis, I still see couching language like, "it is not theorized", and "according to the plate tectonic model". With thousands of millions of Earth history completely inaccessible, and even relatively contemporary & accessible geology causing intense debate, there's a lot left uncertain. It's still awe inspiring to think of our planet in geologic time; how our time here as humans is a sliver of a moment. We should be thankful to exist in this goldilocks moment.
The then raging debate between "plate tectonics boys", as Harris calls them, and field geologists like herself was intriguing, with the field based folks continually proving key facets of tectonics theories wrong, and the tectonics proponents continually moving goalposts in response. It's a classic case of field observations vs. computer based models agreeing in some areas and never coming together in others. Reviewing some contemporary analysis, I still see couching language like, "it is not theorized", and "according to the plate tectonic model". With thousands of millions of Earth history completely inaccessible, and even relatively contemporary & accessible geology causing intense debate, there's a lot left uncertain. It's still awe inspiring to think of our planet in geologic time; how our time here as humans is a sliver of a moment. We should be thankful to exist in this goldilocks moment.
June 10, 2020
This is the third McPhee geologic book of his that I have read and they have served to fill me in on what I was not taught when I graduated with a Geologic degree in 1956. Specifically regarding the drifting continents we were informed about Wegener's crazy ideas but that's all. In fact shortly after I graduated his ideas took hold and I had to fill myself in on what I was not taught. The accumulated island arcs and the plate boundary mountain ranges plus the mineralogy at those dispersion centers answered a lot of questions that have always troubled me. The basin and range book was especially enlightening in describing fault block mountain building and doing so with just enough facts to capture the idea. He solved the Appalachian mountain problem for me even though his attending geologist/paleontologist wasn't that enamored over plate tectonics, I found that amusing. I always liked mineralogy and his description of where minerals such as Gabbro and Olovine formed and what they meant was interesting. This not to mention the geologists who accompanied him and their brief bios; it was as if I visited careers that I missed as a field geologist.
October 17, 2023
A geologic history of eastern North America exemplified by a journey across Interstate 80 from New York to Chicago.
The author chronicles the time spent with Anita Harris exploring the geology present across areas of Interstate 80 with special emphasis and focus on Manhattan Island, the Delaware Water Gap, and the orogeny of Pennsylvania. The author interlaces the narrative of this trip with the story of Harris' life and her work in geology as a way of highlighting her expertise and to explain the development of the geologic consensus over time.
Whereas in Reassembling California the author is speaking with an architect of plate tectonic theory, In Suspect Terrain we find Harris as a plate tectonic skeptic - not entirely dismissing the idea, but wondering if the attempt is being made to explain more than can really be explained by the theory.
In the book you read of the effects of glaciation, how retreating glaciers left all kinds of deposits across the north, and why northeastern Indiana has some elevation to it. One learns of the geologic situation of Manhattan Island and what it would have been like eons ago. Most of the narrative involves the successive rise and fall of three mountain ranges of which the Appalachians are the most recent, and how much of the eastern United States is the result of the detritus from those mountains filling in what had been shallow seas. The journey ends at the Indiana Dunes, the boundary of glacial Lake Chicago.
An entertaining read explaining how the Eastern United States came to be.
The author chronicles the time spent with Anita Harris exploring the geology present across areas of Interstate 80 with special emphasis and focus on Manhattan Island, the Delaware Water Gap, and the orogeny of Pennsylvania. The author interlaces the narrative of this trip with the story of Harris' life and her work in geology as a way of highlighting her expertise and to explain the development of the geologic consensus over time.
Whereas in Reassembling California the author is speaking with an architect of plate tectonic theory, In Suspect Terrain we find Harris as a plate tectonic skeptic - not entirely dismissing the idea, but wondering if the attempt is being made to explain more than can really be explained by the theory.
In the book you read of the effects of glaciation, how retreating glaciers left all kinds of deposits across the north, and why northeastern Indiana has some elevation to it. One learns of the geologic situation of Manhattan Island and what it would have been like eons ago. Most of the narrative involves the successive rise and fall of three mountain ranges of which the Appalachians are the most recent, and how much of the eastern United States is the result of the detritus from those mountains filling in what had been shallow seas. The journey ends at the Indiana Dunes, the boundary of glacial Lake Chicago.
An entertaining read explaining how the Eastern United States came to be.
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