The Earth: An Intimate History
This ebook edition does not include illustrations.‘The Earth is a true delight: full of awe-inspiring details… it blends travel, history, reportage and science to creat an unforgettable picture of our ancient earth.’ Sunday TimesThe face of the Earth, criss-crossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds has changed constantly over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us.In this book, Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how everything – human culture, natural history, even the shape of cities – roots back to a deeper geological truth. Far from being the driest of sciences, he proves that geology informs all our lives in the most intimate way.Nothing in this book seems to be at rest. The surface of the Earth dilates and collapses; seas and mountains rise and fall; continents move. We climb the Alps, wallow in Icelandic hot springs, dive down to the ocean floor; we explore the barren rocks of Newfoundland, walk through the lush ecosystems of Hawaii, cross the salt flats of Oman and saunter along the San Andreas Fault. And Fortey is the ideal guide, his descriptions of natural beauty as memorable as the best travel-writers, his prose as gripping as the best novelist, his crystal-clear scientific explanations fascinating and often surprising.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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The Earth
An Intimate History
Richard Fortey
For Jules, with my love
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot Little Gidding
Table of Contents
For some years I have been thinking about how best to describe the way in which plate tectonics has changed our perception of the Earth. The world is so vast and so various that it is evidently impossible to encompass it all within one book. Yet geology underlies everything: it founds the landscape, dictates the agriculture, determines the character of villages. Geology acts as a kind of collective unconscious for the world, a deep control beneath the oceans and continents. For the general reader, the most compelling part of geological enlightenment is discovering what geology does, how it interacts with natural history, or the story of our own culture. Most of us engage with the landscape at this intimate level. Many scientists, by contrast, are propelled by the search for the inclusive model, a general theory that will change the perception of the workings of the world. In most scientific papers, the intimacies of plants or places are hardly given a second glance. Plate tectonics has transformed the way we understand the landscape, for the world alters at the bidding of the plates, but much of the transformation has been expressed in the cool prose of the scientific treatise. The problem is how we can marry these two contrasting modes of perception â the intelligent naturalistâs sensitive view of the details of the land with the geologistâs abstract models of its genesis and transformation. My solution has been to visit particular places, to explore their natural and human history in an intimate way, thence to move to the deeper motor of the Earth â to show how the lie of the land responds to a deeper beat, a slow and fundamental pulse. I have chosen my examples with some care, for they are all places that have figured in unscrambling this complex and richly patterned planet of ours. I have visited them all, so that the reader will also have this particular guideâs reactions to the sights, sounds, smells and ambience of the critical localities. At the same time, I have endeavoured to show how knowledge of the deeper tectonic reality has changed over the last century or so. Great minds have pondered the shape of the world, and have purveyed âtheories of everythingâ that have come and gone. Many past theories have been founded on good reasoning for their time and place, and it would be a complacent scientist today who would claim that present knowledge is as far as it goes. Understanding advances by building upon, and criticising the work of those who went before. It is a messy and complicated business, in which the human heart has as much a part to play as human intellect. This, too, is an ingredient in my story. The most difficult decisions I faced were not what to include, but what to leave out. I am acutely aware that there are areas of science that are merely sketched herein, any one of which would merit a book of its own. Geochemical cycles and their role in Earth systems are a case in point. The intercedence of extraterrestrial events in our history is another, fascinating field in which many recent advances have been made. The omission of such things in the interest of a coherent narrative was a painful necessity. What my story lacks in omniscience I hope it makes up for in coherence and accessibility.
It should be difficult to lose a mountain, but it happens all the time around the Bay of Naples. Mount Vesuvius slips in and out of view, sometimes looming, at other times barely visible above the lemon groves. In parts of Naples, all you see are lines of washing draped from the balconies of peeling tenements or hastily-constructed apartment blocks: the mountain has apparently vanished. You can understand how it might be possible to live life in that city only half aware of the volcano on whose slopes your home is constructed, and whose whim might control your continued existence.
As you drive eastwards from the centre of the city the packed streets give way to a chaotic patchwork of anonymous buildings, small factories, and ugly housing on three or four floors. The road traffic is relentless. Yet between the buildings there are tended fields, and shaded greenhouses. In early March the almonds are in flower, delicately pink, and there are washes of bright daffodils beneath the orchard trees; you can see women gathering them for market. In the greenhouses exotic flowers such as canna lilies can be glimpsed, or ranks of potted plants destined for the supermarket trade. Oranges and lemons are everywhere. Even the meanest corner will have one or two citrus trees, fenced in and padlocked against thieves. The lemons hang down heavily, as if they were too great a burden for the thin twigs that carry them. The soil is marvellously rich: with enough water, crops would grow and grow.
