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It is not inadmissible to think of an epoch . . . not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history.
—Mircea Eliade
The earthquake shook us awake at 4:31 in the morning. We hurried into a closet while, for fifteen seconds, it finished its business and the car alarms down on Third and California began their complaint. When we emerged, the night sky greeted us through a crack in the wall and chunks of plaster sat smack on the Apple keyboard. The cat had fled.
Out on the street, the hanging dust of rendered Sheetrock mixed with the scent of potted plants and, for those of us standing in our nightclothes, a dose of adrenaline improved the sense of awe. Suddenly the inhuman forces of the raw earth had struck us, forces that lift mountains and sink cities. And suddenly there was a rip in time, a twenty-heartbeat glimpse into the equally inhuman roll of ages where continents join and break apart.
Thirty miles north of our Santa Monica apartment, Oat Mountain had risen fifteen inches and moved six inches to one side. That mountain sits in southern California’s Transverse Ranges, which began their rise from the sea about 5 million years ago, having first been caught, some 15 million years earlier, between tectonic plates that spun them clockwise so they now sit at right angles to the coast. The geology of the Transverse Ranges consists largely of granite from the Mesozoic Era—66 to 252 million years ago—with some even earlier Precambrian material, at least 1.6 billion years old.
These are large numbers. They belong to the calculus of deep time as introduced to the world by British scientists in the mid-nineteenth century—namely, the preeminent geologist of the age, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, who borrowed Lyell’s unbounded temporality and used it to underpin his theory of evolution.
Long before he formulated that theory, Darwin himself had witnessed what he called “the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents.” The year was 1835 and Darwin was nearing the end of a five-year journey around the world aboard the British surveying ship the HMS Beagle. In Chile, he was onshore one February day taking a nap when the ground began to rock. The quake lasted two minutes; its only local effect was to make Darwin “almost giddy.”
Nearly two weeks later, he arrived in Concepción to find a completely ruined city. After offering an inventory of all that was lost, Darwin, ever the student geologist, noted that “the land round the Bay of Concepcion was upraised two or three feet” and that on the nearby island of Santa María they found “mussel-shells still adhering to the rocks, ten feet above high-water mark.” Later that month, Darwin climbed high into the Andes, where he found “shells which were once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now standing nearly 14,000 feet above its level.” It had taken about twenty-five million years for those shells to reach that height.
For several years now, I have been reading these early theorists, thinking that their vision of geological and evolutionary time might give me a context for understanding not just the age of mountains but something more current. It’s one thing to hear of the millions of years it took the Andes to rise; it’s quite another to hear that, in mere centuries, the oceans may reach levels of acidity not seen in 300 million years, or that the earth is the hottest it has been in the past 125,000 years. These days, geological forces, formerly the stuff of earthquakes and volcanoes, have escaped the confines of deep time to present themselves daily, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
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