Book Review: Annals of a Former World By John McPhee

 

A former English major decides to take some trips down Interstate 80 in the company of geologists.  I 80 runs from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco, a journey of 2901 miles.  Annals is a title borrowed from one of the founding documents of geology, by James Hutton:

“To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders undistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.”

McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World (p. 77). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Science is always a detective story, but in geology it finds its purest form. McPhee’s book is about the stories those rocks reveal and the geologists who read and tell them.  The interstate system, with its roadcuts slashing through and newly exposing layers of old rock is a geological dig on continental scale, so it is an immensely productive investigative site.  One of his protagonists calls it a geological bonanza but an ecological catastrophe.

Geology, it seems, is not just one thing after another but the same thing over and over.  In the last 500 million years the Appalachian Mountains have three times been raised up to mighty peaks and three times whittled down to the kinds of nubs that yet survive.  These mountain building episodes, or orogenies, must have produced mighty mountains because the alluvial fans of their decay are ten thousand feet thick and extend for hundreds of miles.

Annals is a compendium of four of the author’s previously published books, and as such, a long read of 716 pages and nearly half a million words.  His story is about old rocks but also about the men and women who love them.  They are a hardy lot, often walking thousands of miles and sleeping under the stars for months or even years while packing their geological hammers and picks, Brunton Compasses, Hasting’s triplets, a bit of hydrochloric acid, and heavy bags of rock samples. The story they have discovered is the large-scale history of the world, a history in which all of human existence is a fly speck and dinosaurs and even land plants are Johnny-come-latelies.

More than any other science geology has expanded our universe in time. Well into the eighteenth century most people including naturalists believed in a world that was only a few thousand years old.  Long before science had found methods of attaching precise ages of rocks, geological discoveries made it clear that the world must be many millions of years old, or perhaps eternal.

It’s a great read, and I found it compelling.