Landscapes Beyond Belief: Geologic Treasures of our National Parks
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Presented by Lauren Becker, Field Organizer, Center For Inquiry
About the Speaker
Lauren Becker is a field organizer for the Center for Inquiry. After completing a degree in Geography, with coursework focusing on cultural landscapes, global perspectives, and the physical sciences of ecology, astronomy, forestry, and geology, Lauren went to work in a variety of fields: volunteering in the Canadian arctic, teaching night sky constellations in the Badlands of South Dakota, and guiding hikes in Crater Lake National Park.
When not playing with rocks, she could be found pushing science in public museums and planetariums, pushing drugs in retail pharmacies, and pushing educational children’s programming for public television. Known for her commentaries on Point of Inquiry, the radio show and pod cast of CFI, she is an experienced environmental activist and advocate for science literacy and education.
About the Event
Summary and Commentary for the 236th meeting of the Freethought Association / CFI- Michigan, held on August 22, 2007.
Last month a great Michigan- based humanistic leader died. Sherwin Wine, who led the Humanistic Judaism movement, died at age 79 in an automobile accident in Morocco, where he and his partner were vacationing. Rabbi Wine, who once gave a passionate and uplifting presentation to our organization based on his book Staying Sane in a Crazy World, was part of a worldwide Jewish movement that viewed the religion as a culture rather than a faith and founded the first congregation of Humanistic Judaism in suburban Detroit. He also founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism. Rabbi Wine was selected as the Humanist of the Year in 2003 by the American Humanist Association.
In his presentation to the Freethought Association, the natural, real existence that we find ourselves in was what he was referencing when speaking of the crazy world. Only in a crazy world would the insane, random things that befall us occur. Many turn to a Divine Power when the world is too incomprehensible and unjust seeming. That is their way of staying sane in the crazy world. For others, there are such people as Rabbi Wine who honored the courage of those who faced their own death at the end of a painful disease or a mind shattering loss or other burden, as godless and faith- free people of integrity and reason. Rabbi Wine explained to us, during his presentation, that he presides over a branch of religion that is bound together by commonality of background experiences, culture and traditions stretching back millennia, but which contains a large percentage of its people living as religious skeptics. For such people there are few to turn to in times of sorrow and crisis who both fully understand where you are coming from as a person born into Judaism (with its rich cultural traditions and historical depth) while subscribing to no belief in supernatural agency. But while the community he served was the Jewish one, his message extended to all people who face daunting challenges with courage and a clear- eyed vision of the Earthly realm and his or her fellow corporeal creatures; those who are living fully and with dignity in this one life that we are granted.
This last Sunday, the 19th, Freethought Association Advisory Board Member and retired behavioral psychologist, Dr. Robert Collins, gave a sermon at the Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids regarding the conflict between science and faith and the reason why he remains a faith- free person yet faithful member of the congregation of the Fountain Street Church. His presentation to the congregation was called Filling in the God Gaps.
TRANSITIONS: Our next meeting is a very momentous one as we officially become the Center For Inquiry- Michigan. On September 12, we are having our CFI- Michigan Inaugural Celebration, featuring author and program director of CFI, New York City, Susan Jacoby. Her presentation will be: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which is the same title as her book which examines more than two hundred years of secularist activism. Join us in celebrating the history of the secular movement and its contribution to the separation of church and state, abolitionism, suffrage, civil liberties, civil rights, the feminist movement and more. This special event is free and held at the Women’s City Club, 254 E. Fulton, Grand Rapids, MI; 7- 8:30 PM. For more information on this event, contact Assistant Director, Jennifer Beahan: or call: (616) 698- 2342. Sign up for e-mail updates or to be added to our mailing list at http://www.cfimichigan.org.
POTLUCK with the PARKS PROMOTER: Last evening there was a potluck meal at 736 Lockwood St., NE in the Freethought Commune from 6:30- 8:30PM where we met and socialized with tonight’s speaker, Lauren Becker.
THE TOPIC for this meeting’s presentation was Landscapes Beyond Belief: Geological Treasures of our National Parks. Our presenter was Lauren Becker, who is a field organizer for the Center For Inquiry. After completing a degree in geography, with coursework focusing on cultural landscapes, global perspectives, and the physical sciences of ecology, astronomy, forestry, and geology, Lauren went to work in a variety of fields: volunteering in the Canadian arctic, teaching night sky constellations in the Badlands of South Dakota, and guiding hikes in Crater Lake National Park.
ROCKS IN HER HANDS, NOT IN HER HEAD; THE SAGA OF A PUSHY WOMAN: When not playing with rocks, she could be found pushing science in public museums and planetariums, pushing drugs in retail pharmacies, and pushing educational children’s programming for public television. Known for her commentaries on Point of Inquiry, the radio show and pod cast of CFI, she is an experienced environmental activist and advocate for science literacy and education. She notes that for 135 years, national parks have protected America’s most amazing landscapes for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of current and future generations. But beyond the memories of family vacations and the tales of earlier pioneers, these special places also contain the memory of the planet and the story of life on Earth. This remarkable and exhilarating story is of no value for those who believe that the Earth was formed in six literal days, 6,000 years ago, with many geological features (including the Grand Canyon) formed by the Deluge of the Noah’s Ark fable.
PETRIFIED MEMORIES: Advances in biology and geology show us that, preserved within the rocks displayed so beautifully in our national parks, there is the memory of a planet and the memory of life on Earth. Every year over 100 million park visitors come to see the truth of what Darwin wrote at the end of his tome on speciation via natural selection: There is grandeur in this view of life. From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. End of quote.
RANGER BECKER’S INVITATION: The Center for Inquiry field organizer posed the question: Do our national parks contain evidence for Creationism or are they really some of the best science classrooms on the planet? She invited us on a tour through words and images of our wondrous national parks, to learn about geology through what the parks may teach us, and decide for ourselves, the answer to her question.
Becker’s tutorial on the history of Earth and the science of the various formations and features seen on our planet was delivered at a rapid pace, with enthusiasm and sprinkled with humor. She joked with us that during her time in Tennessee giving talks, the locals, noting her swift tongue, would drawl, with narrow, appraising eyes: So… Yer not frum arayound heah, ere ya? She also provided to us a very delightful series of teaching tools in the form of Hugs (the candy Kisses shot through with spiral lines), Oreo cookies and other such happily- received items to help us… digest… the concepts she gave us. And there was a display table set out for us of various types of rocks, with signs welcoming tactile as well as visual examination. There was also a book on the table that she highly recommended to us: Dr. Robert J. Lillie’s Parks and Plates Book, with the subtitle: The Geology of our National Parks, Monuments and Seashore. Together with the breathtaking Power Point visuals, all the senses were treated during Lauren’s presentation, where she stressed the human as well as natural resources of our parks.
Becker opened her presentation with an image of Crater Lake, which contains one of the world’s purest bodies of water. Those exploring it may fill their empty bottles in it for drinking. It is so clear, in fact, that a special disc used to determine water clarity went to 124 feet in depth before no longer being visible in the crystalline purity of the waters there. She delighted in showing the grandeur of such settings to those she guided into our national treasures, but then she began seeing the erosion of the pristine places that had nothing to do with natural weathering, but was due to cultural and political events. She realized that it was time to, as she said memorably, come down off the mountain and speak to others on behalf of our national parks and the importance of saving and preserving them for future generations to come. Indeed that is the very code entrusted to those in the service of our national parks. It was realized that the thermal activity, the heat system beneath the lake, could be tapped into for generating electricity, even though such harnessing of power from the underwater active vents would harm the system itself. Out west, policy changes have become out of control. One example of this was the mindless removal of stuff in forests (as the underbrush was thoughtlessly called) in order to reduce fires. The Bush administration is on record for calling for the removal of trees, in fact, to keep fires down! This simple-minded policy fails to take into account how trees actually protect the environment as they are fire resistant and hold in moisture. Naturally occurring fires are, indeed, beneficial to forests as some seeds cannot break out of their husks without fire, dead wood accumulates too much, blocking out the young growth, and the act of underbrush clearing by humans leaves only the trees themselves as fuel for the fires, so that they cannot recover naturally.
Coming down off the mountain, to the people, involved not only addressing such issues as acid rain, global warming and pollution, but the economic and political pressures behind poor policy decisions; ones that were fostered heedless of the long term consequences. The Center For Inquiry, for her, serves as a bridge between the environmentalist movement and the sciences, establishing connections to our past, where we come from, and our very selves. While our presenter did not pose it in this way, specifically, the grandeur in the view of life that Darwin wrote of was a fully natural one, one that did not put the wonders of nature into crediting some Superbeing somewhere out there, but instead refers to the environment and its actions and interactions going on all around us without the requirement of an unnecessary divine puppet master pulling any strings. Darwin’s view of life draws its power from its deep expanse of time and how everything is connected. Reducing the dizzying wonders of nature to a few thousand years in the making and all put into existence to somehow serve and be dominated and exploited by we johnny- come- latelys in evolutionary history, and to be given little consideration since our eyes and goals should be fixed upon an imaginary realm beyond the skies… makes for a paltry and impoverished version of nature, one that falls easy prey to misguided policies of plunder.
Lauren Becker referred to geology as the Goldilocks science; it was just right for human examination. Unlike astronomy, it does not necessitate powerful instruments to discern what it has to teach us. It is not like quantum mechanics, involving esoteric mathematics and out of sight theoretical constructs. Geology is tangible, available to us for hands on study, real and right there. We may begin to unlock the wonders of the rocks immediately and with just a cursory examination. However, that IS just the beginning. Just as probing deeper into space allows us to peer ever deeper into time and earlier stellar events and the very fabric of the universe; the deeper we examine geological phenomena, the further we plumb Earth history with its own deep time and major, powerful events causing it and all of its inhabitants to be as they are. Indeed, one may not fully comprehend the majestic power of evolutionary biology if one does not have some grasp of the geological time and processes involved in generating environments which served to prompt biological adaptation to those changing environments and therefore, evolutionary diversity.
In a recent book by E. O. Wilson: The Creation; An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (Norton and Co.), that I recently finished reading, the author tells of how little we actually have discovered of the diversity of life on our planet and how so much is being found that is new to science in our National Parks, but as places on Earth are destroyed for short term human gains, without further- reaching consideration of the disaster that such acts present to our descendants, countless species are being wiped out before they can even be documented. One example of the richness of diverse life to be found in our parks that he gives involves the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has yielded to science (from a short period between 1998 to 2004), some 3,314 species of all categories of organisms added to those previously recorded there and 516 species that were entirely new to science- never before seen anywhere in the world- not in the Amazon but right in our own country, a reasonably short drive for vast numbers from amongst our population. He writes of citizen science, where regular people who hold no scientific degree, may embark on adventures of discovery along with expert guides, armed with the education they get in the field or from their amateur interest and autodidactically gained knowledge, to make their own finds that add to the body of scientific knowledge of the Earth’s bounty and biota.
Geology is often pitted against technology in the minds of many, if not most, people. Becker opened our eyes to how young a science geology really is and how it actually developed in tandem with industry when idustry began to take off. With the might that machines put in our hands, humans could begin to carve into the earth, with our drilling and mining, pumping and road and canal cuts. So much that had been hidden, previously, became revealed to us about what lay beneath our feet. When one’s vantage point shifts dramatically, whole new vistas come into focus. The new perspectives we gain are not limited to the ones of spatial, modular and areal perspective, but cognitive ones as well; ones that bring with them a whole new way of looking at what was once familiar, with new realizations abounding. When we could first see the Earth from space, artificial boundaries vanished and a sense of oneness (that religion is so poor at bringing about but science generates as just one of its byproducts) comes into focus. Also, what seems to us on the ground as an endless sky, may be understood for how incredibly thin it really is, relative to the Earth, and how fragile and precious the atmosphere is that we pollute. We can see how our actions can set in motion disastrous effects since all is connected- all the systems and processes and interdependencies of our planet. Our perspective of the Earth was likewise altered when the enormity of geological time itself was revealed to us in solid rocky strata as it told us tales of Earth history more fabulous than any of the myths and folklore concocted by the human mind. But it also echoed our new view of the atmosphere. All that separates life from the cold clutches of infinite space is our oh- so- slim blanket of atmosphere. And all that we have built upon, drawn sustenance from and known of under our feet is also a very thin crust, and this, too, is fragile and vulnerable to irreparable damage (at least in spans of time felt by humankind; in geological time, all of human existence is scarcely an eye- blink of time.)
Becker spoke of the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726- 1797), who knew Adam Smith, Ben Franklin, and Hume among other luminaries. After forays into chemistry and the legal profession, Hutton’s attention turned to rocks, noting their different properties and some mysterious features of terrain such as shells that were distant and higher up from the closest then- current sources of water. Another Renaissance Man, Leonardo, also was surprised to discover a mountain of clam shells centuries before Hutton. Both intellectually curious men could not see how the biblical account of how the world came to be as it is squared with their observations. Hutton saw the results of the slow process of erosion as well, marking greater expanses of time passing than had previously been believed to have occurred. He originated the term uniformitarianism which accounts for the features of the Earth’s crust by means of natural explanation over geological time. Counter to this ran the concept of catastrophism which holds to biblical ideas as being perfectly reasonable explanations for how the Earth is. Stunning geological features such as what is seen at the Grand Canyon are explained by catastrophism as being caused by the Flood in the Noah tale. They believe that, rather than long stretches of geological time, the Earth’s crust was formed all at once and has changed little if at all since then. These notions are still used today by Young Earth Creationists and even in their museums- see Ken Ham’s in particular. Ham’s Answers in Genesis anti- evolution website does not disguise its intention. He describes it as a safe place for children, since there they may learn about the world around them, the truth of God’s word, and their need for the Savior.
Hutton did excellent research but his writings were difficult to follow for most people, so much of what is understood about his observations was brought to the public through the work of others, who untangled his challenging prose into more easily grasped writing. Becker displayed an example of his writing that demonstrated this. She talked about William Smith next, who earned the nickname: strata, after cutting into the country to build canals and noticing the different layers of exposed rock. He began making detailed maps of the strata and saw how when a fossil is found at one place, and then again at another, that they are connected in time as to when they were deposited. Each stratum, like the rings in trees, represent measurements of time. Catastrophists lamely account for this layering of fossilized beings as the result of Noah’s flood as well, childishly saying that the more complex beings were able to swim or dig or climb up further, leaving their less physically well endowed fellow creatures to fall below them. Strata are not always found in perfect linear sequences over stretches of terrain, however, even while the different parts of the broken strata are linked temporally; the reason, of course, being that sections broke apart and one was sometimes thrust above or even atop, in some cases, another; not from some mythic Deluge related to human sinfulness, but through geological, natural processes.
We turned next to Charles Lyell, a geologist who was highly influential to Darwin. One of the books Darwin took aboard his voyage on the Beagle was Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830). Lyell’s observations on Mt. Etna and its volcanic eruptions forever shut down any notions he may have had about the veracity of catastrophist claims; these claims, Lyell said, only served to blunt curiosity and foster indolence. This is still a valid point today in reference to modern creationists, especially of the Young Earth stripe. The research done at their research centers is nonexistent; the discoveries made at the Discovery Institute have so far yet to be produced and the answers given in Answers in Genesis are dogmatic ones meant to quiet curiosity and any nascent intellectual quest. I copied a quote in this vein but neglected to give credit of authorship to it (sorry): Faith offers certainty without proof and science offers proof without certainty. The same author, I noted in my scribbling, also wrote of the importance of the search part of the word research.
Lyell also saw the layers of sea bedding between lava layers, and this layering was comparable to William Smith’s strata, all demonstrating processes taking place over vast sweeps of time and in a highly dynamic fashion and still ongoing via natural means, contrary to the static, all at once and only a few thousand years ago vision of the catastrophists. With a groan- evoking pun, the petite and enthusiastic dynamo, Becker, talked about the… wait for it… ground rules… found in the Principles of Geology. She noted that they are pretty common sense by today’s standards and are stated quite simply. Foundational principles are usually of this nature, however. Think of how the simple principle mechanism for descent with modification (biological evolution) may be stated plainly in a sentence yet represent a paradigm shift of awesome magnitude when it was first introduced. Or think of Einstein’s elegant mathematical phrase: E= mc squared and all the information and power to shift perception that this compact notation contains within it!
Anyway, on to the principles Becker outlined: Super position. This regards how we find older deposits and rocks in lower levels, progressing to newer ones as we go up toward the surface. Again, during upheavals and the collision of land masses, etc. sections may be shifted and even flipped but the basic idea of older formations being covered over by newer ones, which are then, themselves, covered by newer strata, etc., still holds. Another principle is that of Original Horizontality, which simply refers to how natural laws and physics predict that formations will tend to spread out horizontally. Cross Cut Relationship. This examines how some rocky material below another may be seen when it cuts through and the top is scraped away, rendering the lower level visible. Becker spoke of how canyons may be filled in over time but the sequence of temporal events are still discernible, since the surrounding area of the canyon may be measured and found to be older than the material that filled it in. This is what is thought about in the fourth principle: that of Inclusion. Lyell’s discoveries put him firmly in the uniformitarian camp.
Others have spoken about how Darwin’s job was not principally that of a naturalist on board the vessel; there was already someone filling that role. He was more the captain’s companion, being of the same social class as Captain Fitzroy, who was not to, in his Victorian class conscious time, mingle with the lower classes. So it was more the accident of birth into a prosperous physician’s family than any natural gifts Darwin showed that he possessed that allowed him to be on that fateful voyage of discovery. But what is not often heard is that Darwin was known more as a geologist at the time of his trip, than one who explored biological phenomena. In the five and a half years of his trip, he wrote mostly about rocks! And, as it was for Lyell and others mentioned, it was (then) what the rocks told him more than the fauna that shifted Darwin’s thinking away from catastrophism/ creationism. Darwin, in fact, had been preparing to be a clergyman who initially found favor in Rev. Paley’s notion (complex designs infer a complex and sentient Designer) which has evolved into the modern Intelligent Design Movement’s so- called theory today.
One thing he saw which shook him up, was, appropriately enough, the results of an Earthquake in South America, where the seabed had raised three feet. He wrote about how it appeared that the Earth’s thin crust moved as if upon a fluid beneath it! This was before continental drift theory and its more updated version: plate tectonics came into being. As with all true scientific theories, there is required a mechanism before it can be associated with the scientific endeavor. There was the idea of transmutation long before Darwin. Even in his own family, his grandfather Erasmus, understood this. But it was in want of a mechanism, which Charles Darwin produced in the form of natural (and sexual) selection. What Darwin wrote about as to crust movement was not originated by him but showed an openness to newer ideas and a keen intellectual curiosity. But this idea required the mechanism (a molten core, subduction zones, plates melting and reforming, moving the continents that rode along the plates) that was later to come in order to be testable, generate predictions, explain large amounts of data and connect the knowledge of different scientific fields together; a decent working definition of the word theory, in the scientific sense. This is why Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is a misnomer, since it fails in all these regards, and fails spectacularly.
All the new geological discoveries being made represented philosophical earthquakes of a magnitude to rival the ones from plate tectonics. Some people truly needed the stability of a settled, unchanging world formed by the caring hands of a Creator. In addition to curiosities like shells from sea inhabitants atop mountains and high hills, there was evidence of glaciation in Australia to contend with and account for. But if Australia was not always situated in its current place of balmy climes… We came to realize, however, that the fixed landmass ideas of the catastrophists had nothing to offer in solving the puzzle. In fact puzzle (especially puzzle pieces) is not a bad analogy: when looking at a map of the world one sees what appears to be an exploded puzzle, with the coastal line of one continent seeming to fit quite nicely against another one. Once they all, indeed, did fit together as the mega continent sometimes referred to as Pangaea. But in addition to separation, there was a coming together of continental masses as well. These stupendous collisions are what caused the violent upheavals of land forming mountain ranges. We were able to examine the types of rock that are to be found along one continental edge and compare it with one that fits snugly into it that is now distant; and what we found were good matches indicating their former coexistence.
The ocean floor itself was mapped and several large plates were discovered that the continents were situated upon. We knew, by this time, that the landmasses rode on these plates but what was the mechanism for their drift? Beneath the ocean floor it is molten and fluid; the edges of some plates are subsumed beneath the edges of others while new edges are formed, cooling into solidity in the ocean depths. The early quest for understanding the topography of the ocean floor was not fueled primarily by pure scientific curiosity, but once again, by industry and technology needs. The transatlantic cable snapped, there were now submersible war vessels and other activities we were introducing into the waters. Mapping the submariner terrain was becoming essential. The process was a somewhat tedious one at first of dropping markers and seeing what the depths achieved were, indicating rises and declensions. Point by point, row by row this was done. Ypsilanti, Michigan- born geologist and ocean cartographer, Marie Tharp developed this technique over 30 years and her findings tested out correctly, once better equipment was developed to check her mapping results. Together with Bruce Heezen, she discovered the Mid- Oceanic Ridge, which is a line of undersea mountains that runs through Earth’s oceans. The discovery of this spectacular ridge helped pave the way for general acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift. Earthquakes were noted to be centered at the edges of ridges. Core samples were taken of the boundaries of the plates and the ages of the rocks were determined, showing how the mechanism mentioned above worked, with old rock subsumed and new rocky edges generated, causing continental plate movement.
Magnetic particles caught in magnetic fields were captured in the cooling lava and these could be seen becoming older as one explores outward from the ridges. Magnetic north has been in flux over geological time and these changing indicators have also been preserved in cooled lava. Even this discovery powerfully demonstrates the validity of the uniformitarian view of a dynamically changing world, the activity of which is ongoing (the plates are moving at a rate of 5 cm per year) and has been occurring for a long, long time; as soon as there were solid masses amongst the molten globe. Life itself seems to have occurred at the earliest possible moment the Earth could allow for it; the creationists have it completely backward- it was never a planet that was formed with anything like us in mind, or where our sinfulness or potential for salvation had any influence on the pageantry of life. Lines of species that formed and died and body plans that came to be in a glorious explosion were hundreds of millions of years before more complex life, let alone mammals- let ALONE brainy primates that could make up creation stories- sprang up. As one often- repeated analogy has it, if all of life were indicated by the distance between the fingertips of our outstretched hands, the hominids would be represented in that timeframe as the last, most terminal fingernail fragment.
A cross section of the Earth’s sphere would reveal a molten liquid iron core, a hard lower mantle, or mesosphere, then a soft, but not liquid asthenosphere, then a lithosphere and finally the crust. The upper part of the asthenosphere is where the rigid and brittle lithospheric plates of the Earth’s crust moves about. While the asthenosphere was suspected to exist earlier, the great Chilean earthquake of 1960 confirmed it. Differing pressures and temperatures create the different qualities of these regions. The rock cycle that Becker mentioned happens due to movement, heat, pressure and composition. The compositions come in millions of varieties but what the rocks are composed of is relatively limited: oxygen, aluminum, calcium, sodium, silicon, iron, magnesium and potassium. Also, there are just three basic types, with their names referring to what happens to the rocks. These are igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. The igneous rocks are formed from molten materials that have cooled and solidified. Sedimentary rocks form from the cementing together of, or compacting of, sediments, or the re- crystallization of new mineral grains. Metamorphic rocks form from heat and pressure, which changes the original, or parent rock into a completely new rock. The rock cycle can be shown as a diagram depicting the three basic types with arrows of interaction between them, with sedimentary rock forming into metamorphic via heat and pressure just as igneous will, while metamorphic will alter into igneous when it become molten and then solidifies. Igneous can become sedimentary through weathering. Igneous rocks usually sport holes in it from the gas bubbles that boiled out of it during its molten phase.
Sedimentary and metamorphic rocks in Arizona were broken into sediments and carried away, leaving the Grand Canyon behind.
The amount of silica determines the features of igneous rock in its molten form. The more there is, the more goopy (oatmeal- like) and explosive it becomes, while less produces a heavier flowy substance. Different amounts of silica produce either fine grained volcanic rock or more coarse grained plutonic rock. In the Hawaii National Park one sees how the movement of the plate over the hot spot punches up the land, creating a volcano. When this is not over a hot spot, the volcano is dead. Becker discussed calderas with us. One active caldera area is in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Calderas are formed from the largest and most explosive volcanic eruptions, where a tremendous quantity of magma is ejected onto the Earth’s surface, after which the ground subsides or collapses into the emptied space. This depression is the caldera. Common to calderas are earthquakes, ground cracks, uplift or subsidence of the ground and thermal activity such as hot springs, geysers and boiling mud pots. This is due to the complex interactions among magma stored beneath a caldera, ground water and the regional buildup of stress in the large plates of the Earth’s crust. Becker told us that the caldera at Yellowstone National Park is 42 miles across!
Lauren shared with us what happens at divergent plate boundaries. One such place where it can be well observed is where the Arabian and African plates are separating in a great rift, which formed the Red Sea. Hot blobs of mantle slowly move upward along a conveyor belt- like convection current. Convection currents diverge where they approach the surface, forming ridges or caterpillar like ripples along the surface of the land. Basaltic rock can occur from rift spread which may result in black sandy beaches. Columnar basalt structures may be seen in Yellowstone. While this activity can be found in other places in our country; closer to home, in the U. P. of Michigan it is evident in the Isle Royale National Park. Here in the Great Lakes State, in fact, we learn young about how the moving glaciers formed the Great Lakes. Another interesting point, from a geological perspective, about glaciation is that it stripped away what was formed on the surface for billions of years, so that we may see what was below.
The mark of a good teacher is that she gives enough information to satisfy and educate but inspires one to do one’s own research in learning more about what was referenced. Becker is the epitome of the good teacher in this regard. Much of what preceded and what follows is synthesized from various sources in my own investigation as well as what our presenter provided. She spoke of Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon National Parks. Collectively these are known as the Grand Staircase and as the Southwest’s Grand Circle of National Parks because of its richness of monuments and historical and recreational areas. As to the staircase moniker: the Grand Canyon is the deepest and just as one probes deeper into the cosmos to perceive deeper time, when one peers deeper into the Earth, one sees ever more ancient time revealing itself as well. The Grand Canyon’s top layer (youngest) is Kaibab limestone and is Zion National Park’s oldest layer, and its top layer is the oldest of Bryce Park’s strata. The staircase was formed from millions of years of uplift, tilting and erosion of the Earth’s upper crust rock layers. These processes have left us with a dazzling array of colorful cliffs and other geological formations and features. Roughly one- third of the Earth’s age is displayed in the Grand Canyon; its rock sequence is primarily precambrian and paleozoic and covers about two billion years!
Zion National Park boasts the world’s largest natural arch, the Kolob Arch, spanning some 310 feet. Also its sandstone cliffs are among the highest in the world. Zion N. Park also contains the richest diversity of plants and animals in Utah, with almost 800 native species. The amazing variety of landform shapes one may witness in Zion are the result of a combination of factors in including resistant (sandstone) and non- resistant (shale) types of bedrock that have been weathered away, creating strange effects such as joints, bedding planes and faults of curved, horizontal or vertical orientation.
Becker mentioned that while there is Young Earth creationist literature to be found in the bookstores of these wondrous national treasures / parks, these are shunted away to the sections containing Native American folklore and other non- scientific tales. If I were a believer in a supreme being, such an entity would never be jammed into the confining space of creating all that exists only a few thousand years ago and all at once. How pathetic and abysmal. Isn’t a creator that sets in motion billions of years of unfolding (cosmic and biological evolution) a far more interesting and awe inspiring being to believe in? Yet infinitely more fascinating for me is that all this has come about via wholly natural (not holy supernatural) means, and the natural story is magnitudes more wondrous than any human- fabricated mythic creation fable. One other example, this time using life forms, of the deep time we are witnessing when we examine the canyon areas in these national parks is that in one place limestone is 700 feet deep. So? Well, limestone is composed of extremely tiny organisms in water… it takes a mind- reeling amount of time to pass for 700 feet of limestone to form.
Our presenter also spoke of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. This park is 100 miles long and 50 miles wide and comes about rather suddenly after traveling through gently rolling grasslands. All of the sudden one is confronted with towering rocky features. The name badlands is derived from a couple of sources. The French- Canadians when first encountering this region called it les mauvaises terres a traverser (bad lands to traverse), and the Sioux called it mako sica (bad lands) because of its eerie shapes and the extreme arid quality of the area. The badlands are of keen interest to those who study ancient life as it is host to rich fossil beds showing the evolution of certain prairie mammals in particular. The badlands are cut from deep alluvial and volcanic ash deposits. Eighty million years ago the bottom shale layer was laid down by a great inland sea. 35 million years ago, rivers and streams running downhill from the Black Hills spread sand, mud and gravel on the area. Volcanic activity from the Rocky Mountains to the west poured a vast quantity of wind- borne ash on the South Dakota plains. For millions of years land built up faster than it could be eroded away. Then the balance changed and wind and water created the fantastic landscapes we may see now. One of the must- see spots in this national park is The Wall which was created by water and sandblasted by grit and dust- laden winds. Its natural erosion is occurring at the hare’s pace (relative to geological time frames) of an inch or more annually. The sedimentary rock found in the middle of the badlands, producing the incongruity of topography one sees there, is a result, Becker told us, of the shifting plateaus.
Becker also spoke of clastic sedimentary rocks, or sedimentary rocks formed of broken pieces or clasts of weathered and eroded rocks. They are classified by grain size, clast and cementing material (or matrix) and texture. The grain size determines the name of the clastic sedimentary rock: clay in shales; silt in siltstone; sand in sandstones (see! This IS easier to conceptualize than, say, quantum mechanics and its terminology!); and gravel, cobble and even boulder- sized pieces in breccias. Breccias are named by what factors introduced the various angular fragments into the matrix to form each type of breccia. These include the just- discussed sedimentary breccias, as well as tectonic, igneous, impact and hydrothermal varieties.
In addition to divergent plate boundaries previously discussed, we examined its opposite: convergent plate boundaries. By the way, for those who- like me- are more biologically- minded, convergent and divergent evolution is an area of study that is endlessly fascinating: where beings that are genotypically similar diverge phenotypically from each other after they have occupied very different environmental niches over a sufficient time period; or, conversely, when more disparate creatures (regarding genetic relationship and history of descent)) converge upon the same sort of morphological appearance and function after occupying and exploiting the same environmental niche together. Back to geology: One result of a convergent boundary was the formation of the Appalachian Mountains 600 million years ago (yes, 600,000,000 years ago, not 6,000- with apologies to the confusion this gives to YECs [Young Earth Creationists]) upon the tremendous uplift caused by the collision of landmasses. On a map showing the present location of continents we may see how the pieces once fit together (as previously discussed) but some features seem out of place, too. One of these is in our country: Florida sticks out oddly and this was explained by the field organizer for the CFI by the fact that it was once part of the African continent before it jammed together with ours, leaving what is now Florida stuck onto our continent.
Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of VA and the Great Smokey Mountains host rougher rocky mountains due to age and erosion. Glacier National Park in Montana still contains over 50 glaciers today within its 1.4 million acres and has 200 lakes and streams. The huge glaciers that carved out its landscape, however, were from 200,000 years ago. We heard about the features in Mount Shasta, California; a mountain consisting of four overlapping volcanic cones, and about the Cascade Range, which is a string of volcanic centers extending from Northern CA into Southern British Columbia, Canada. In Oregon, the Cascades include Crater Lake, discussed earlier in Becker’s presentation, as well as Mount Thielson, The Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood. The biggest eruption occurred at Crater Lake, however. It began 500,000 years ago as Mount Mazama, a progressively building volcanic cone along the Cascade Range. The eruptions were 42 times greater than what occurred at Mount St. Helens! This massive eruption spewed volcanic ash over 5,000 square miles. As mentioned earlier, its collapse following the titanic eruption caused the formation of a very large caldera, This was eruption- free for the next 4,000 years allowing a lake to form: Crater Lake. This lake, as stated earlier, is very clear but it is also the deepest one in the US; its deepest part being 1,932 feet, with a general depth of 1,500.
Aniakchak, Alaska has a caldera about 6.2 miles across and with large pyroclastic flows surrounding the mountain. It is still active and the last eruption from this asymmetrical cone was in 1931. It has an elevation of 4,400 feet. Mount Ranier and Mt. St. Helens are examples of stratovolcanoes. Becker used the candy Hugs to show their structure. Stratovolcanoes (also referred to as composite volcanoes) are composed of many layers of hardened lava, tephra and volcanic ash and are typically steep in profile and known for periodic, explosive eruptions. These are common along subduction zones (where plates submerge beneath others, melting and releasing thermal activity, causing the formation of batholiths and volcanoes. Mount Ranier is the highest and third most voluminous volcano of the Cascade Range. The main core of this stratovolcano has formed since 730,000 years ago. It is the most potentially dangerous of active volcanoes in the Cascade Range because of its steepness, large amount of snow and ice and being near a large population.
Batholiths parallel past and present subduction zones and other heat sources for hundreds of kilometers. Batholith comes from the Greek for depth (bathos) and rock (lithos) and it is formed from the emplacement of igneous intrusive (plutonic) rock that forms from cooled magma deep in the Earth’s crust. Batholiths are almost always composed of intermediate types of rocks. Plutonic refers to the plutons or multiple masses that make up batholiths, formed when many plutons converge together to form a huge granatic rock. The Half Dome in Yosemite Valley is a famous example of the fairly clean and rounded rock faces occurring when thin sheets of rocks slough off the exposed surfaces of batholiths due to the pressure differences occurring from the deepest depths in the crust to the outer surface and the expansion that takes place upon this release in upper levels. Pluton gets its name from the God of the underworld, so it is a somewhat fitting designation.
The National Parks Service, Becker told us, began in 1916, being established in the west. The west was not yet developed or bought out from private ownership, making it cheaper. It was viewed as merely rocks, so there was not a great deal of interest in development (as mentioned, in the case of the badlands, the region was difficult to travel through or establish developments in anyway.) National Parks are located, however, where very interesting things are happening and have occurred over millions or even billions of years and are a veritable bonanza for the budding- to- expert geologist as well as the casual seeker of incredible beauty. The parks were established to preserve the natural treasures they contain for future generations to enjoy and experience.
It is hard, she confessed, to guide those through these magnificent landscapes when they are still stuck in biblical notions of how the Earth formed. Some of what she has heard are laughable but also sorrow evoking. One person stated that the 300,000,000 year old rocks she was being shown were created by God 6,000 years ago… after all He could create Adam as a full grown adult male in an instant. How do you argue with logic like that? The naturalistic accounts of park rangers has been called blasphemy by some fundamentalists and sometimes parents have seen fit to cover the ears of their children so as not to expose their tender ears to this evil information.
At this time in her presentation, Becker discussed the various epochs and their names and the means by which we date rocks and establish relationships between different sites. She spoke of continental shelves where the central portions are preserved and how we can get good dating from the cratons (from the Greek kratos, for strength), which is part of the old stable continental crust that has been merging and splitting continents and supercontinents for at least 500 million years and some are over 2 billion years old. They are generally composed of ancient crystalline basement crust of lightweight felsic igneous rock such as granite. They have extremely deep crusts extending down into the mantle to depths of 200 miles. The Earth’s age has been established to be about 4.6 billion years old. The oldest rock dated has been between 3.2 and 3.4 billion years. The discrepancy is a result of how the early Earth was a molten, liquid sphere with no solid rocks in which to be preserved and dated. This is the same sort of problem as is experienced in paleobiology where beings preserved before the advent of hard body parts are much more difficult to find preserved as fossils for study. But we are able, nonetheless, to get the Earth’s age figure from examination of meteorites that have fallen back to Earth after being spit into space in a molten state. These solid rocky objects are vulnerable to dating and are found to be between 4.2 and 4.6 billion years old.
During the Q&A portion, we talked about the strong push for privatization of everything now. In the past, the national parks were fairly immune to creationist intrusion but if this thrust of privatization continues into the park services, those who pay the money will be free to teach whatever they wish to, no matter how unfounded and absurd. There is an effort, too, to replace the mandate of preserving the parks for future generations to one of resource management and extraction, putatively for research but really for means to exploit the land for economic reasons and destroy that which has been millions or billions of years in the making, in mere decades. The forest service has typically been more vulnerable to trees being cut down than the parks service for resource extraction intrusion. Becker made the analogy of using our protected areas for energy extraction as being like burning our furniture for heat. It is a temporary and wasteful practice that provides short term gains while erasing the chance for future use and appreciation and edification. Again, fossil fuels and the formation of earthly features that took millions to billions of years cannot be replaced within our tenure on Earth and are gone forever. The encroachment of the commercial into the once pristine natural regions is a bad thing, she asserted, since commercialization brings with it more waste, paving over, pollution and other scars upon the land. We are ignoring science still too much now, she noted.
As mentioned earlier, naturally occurring forest fires are necessary to the cycle of growth of forests but those who see trees as dollar signs cannot face having their investment burn down, so they seek to suppress fires, damaging the whole natural system in the long run.. again, so much focus these days is on short term profit at the expense of the future. In this ecological vein we also talked of Yucca Mountain being used for nuclear waste disposal within the canyon system. There is a confluence of ideas based ultimately on how we are going to live our lives and the consequences of our actions relative to what gains may be made and how sustainable these gains may be. This is where science comes in. Although science has been used and abused for ideological purposes, in its pure form, it presents a neutral endeavor that provides real information that allows us to determine the best course of action to take and what the true cost / benefit ratio is of our actions. In this way the CFI is not just about pure science by itself, but is involved in the arena of morality, values and the ways and means of making better decisions using scientific data. What do we value and how do we rank our values and resources? Indeed these are the questions we all must face no matter where we stand on the spectrum of religion/ secularism or political ideology, as citizens of our natural Earth.
Synthesized by Charles LaRue.
