In Search Of Deep Time
Midsummer thoughts on gold, geology, and the temporal sublime of redwood groves.
I’m in that exquisite period where I’m casting about for new ideas for the next book, getting a few tugs on the line, but also still happy to stay out on the lake a little longer. It’s the phase where you’re not yet actively forcing yourself to settle on a definitive project; instead, you’re just scouting for promising eddies of ideas, or maybe one of Darwin’s “warm little ponds.” There’s less pressure, and thus more freedom to follow your hunches, stumble into unplanned discoveries.
I’m mulling one of those serendipitous collisions right now, and thought I’d share it with you. It may end up as random debris for all I know, and you’ll never hear about it again. But here’s “the warm little pond” so far…
Sometime in the late spring I read H. W. Brands’ epic account of the California Gold Rush, The Age of Gold, published in 2002. I could easily spend the rest of this essay just recounting the greatest hits from it, but there was one mind-bending fact that has stuck with me since I finished the book. Because the Sierra Nevada—and the Basin and Range Province to the east of them (including Death Valley)—were such inhospitable environments for human passage, news of the discovery of gold in the western foothills of the Sierra reached Australia and China and Chile months before it reached the east coast of the United States. Without a railroad or a telegraph line to connect the United States from coast to coast, the maximum speed of information was gated by the maximum speed of ships, and sailing from San Francisco to the Atlantic Seaboard took months, if you made it at all. You either had to sail around the horn of South America—one of the deadliest seas in the world—or sail to Panama and then attempt the land crossing of the Panama isthmus, with hopes of connecting with a ship bound for New York or Boston at the other end. Either way, the information you carried moved at a snail’s pace compared to a Clipper ship riding the Pacific trade winds to Sydney. All of which meant there were Australian and Chinese prospectors arriving in the Sierra foothills before the President of the United States learned that gold had been discovered in California.
I love stories like this—all those Australians making it to California before New York and D.C. had even learned of the discovery at Sutter’s mill—in part because they remind us of how transformations in information networks influence the course of history. (Many years ago when I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on how the narratives of the 18th-century novel were made possible by the relatively sluggish speed of the postal system: major plot points often revolved around a message not arriving in time, or two messages crossing paths and thereby leading to some fertile misunderstanding; the plot-lines simply wouldn’t be possible in an age of text messages and cell phones.) But I also love this story because it makes explicit something that is always happening around us: the collision between different temporal scales. On the one hand, it’s a story about technological change, which progresses at the scale of decades and centuries. (If Sutter and Marshall had enjoyed access a Starlink subscription back in 1848, Washington would have been updated about the gold discovery within a matter of days, if not hours.) But it’s also a story about geological time: the physical barriers that plate tectonics tossed up between the east and west coasts over millions of years, that ultimately forced the news to follow such circuitous routes back to the eastern seaboard.
In The Age Of Gold, H. W. Brands has a wonderful line about this kind of collision, at the end of a long preamble about the physics and geology that led to both the creation of gold itself and its relative abundance in one small stretch of the Sierra range:
Time and again the riverbeds shifted; the caches of gold were entombed under tons of gravel and sand and mud. Forests grew atop the tombs, quiet and serene by the measure of biological time, amid a landscape that remained violently unsettled in geological time. Eventually those forests attracted an inquisitive species, a biped drawn to the forests for their timber, but possessing a peculiar penchant for shiny yellow metal. When this species began scratching about in one of the streams as yet unburied, biological time and geological time abruptly intersected, and entered historical time.
So good. The deep past of geological time isn’t dead. It’s not even past.
Quite a bit of this same deep-time magic exists in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, which I also read rapturously—though in small doses, usually right before bed—this spring. It’s a beautiful physical object, that book, but also beautifully hard to place as a genre: it’s some strange hybrid of memoir, regional history, geological survey, and backpacking how-to guide. Near the beginning, Robinson announces that he is going to adopt a perspective he calls “psychogeology,” a kind of split focus that tracks both the deep-time geological forces that transform the landscape and the ways in which that landscape influences (and inspires) the human mind. Robinson is so rhapsodic about his lifelong experiences backpacking in the High Sierra that I found myself on the verge of planning my own trip into the wild (which, if you know me, is an absolutely preposterous idea.) And what captivates him, more than anything else, is the topography of the place, in particular the high basins that are the Sierra’s most distinguishing characteristic. “Compared to the Swiss Alps,” he writes, “the Sierras are actually a kind of high plateau, lightly etched by ice. In fact, although a few peaks in the Alps stand a bit higher than Mount Whitney, the Sierras have much more land over 10,000 feet than the Alps do—4,700 square kilometers in the Sierra compared to 1,900 square kilometers in the Alps.”
The Alps have more visual drama, with all the deep incisions carved between the legendary “horns.” (They were the poster art for the Romantic “sublime” for a reason.) But the High Sierra is walkable. You can walk—or at least scramble—a continuous line for 200 miles across the Sierra crest and barely ever dip below 10,000 feet above sea level. The land is high, but not as extreme as the Alps. And because the Sierras happen to reside at the far edge of a Mediterranean climate, characterized by a pronounced rainy season, water abounds in those high basins, released slowly through the summer as the snow melts, captured in ponds, streams, lakes. “Everywhere water is in visible motion,” Robinson writes. “In the summers you almost can’t camp in a place where the sound of moving water won’t be part of your lullaby that night."
Robinson goes on to explain how this magical landscape emerged, attributing it to a rare “goldilocks” zone of moderate glaciation that creates the high basins:
[One] range that helps us understand the effects of glaciation lies just to the east of the Sierra, in the White Mountains that straddle the California-Nevada border. In a rough way this range can serve to show what the Sierras might have looked like before the glaciers did their work. Existing in the Sierra’s rain shadow, the White Mountains never had many glaciers, and so are still basically a line of gigantic rounded hills. The Alps then illustrate the other end of the process, having lived under so much ice that the basins got ground away. These are the “too little” and “too much” examples… [The ideal is] glaciation, but not too much of it: and this particular ice history is somewhat rare in the world. Which makes sense, given that the Sierra Nevada is unusual in its combination of a Mediterranean climate and great height… The rare combination of height and climate needed to create high basins means there are only a few mountain ranges on Earth that have them. And basins are the golden zone for walkers. This is psychogeological, yes, but I’m convinced it’s quite real as an explanation for the Sierra’s particular joy.
For me, the joy also comes from a new way of seeing the mountains, a kind of cognitive time-lapse where you simultaneously see them in their current shape but also imagine the ancient glacial and tectonic forces that slowly brought that shape into being. Apparently, some geologists have pointed out that the difference between the Alps and the Sierras may also be attributable to the fact that the Alps are largely composed of sedimentary rocks that are more prone to erosion than the sturdy batholith of the Sierras. But whatever the ultimate explanation is, there is majesty in experiencing the natural world across deep time like this. It’s a sort of temporal version of the Romantic sublime, I suppose, where you catch glimpses of the distant past embedded in the present landscape that surrounds you.
Redwood forests are another environment that triggers the temporal sublime, not just because the trees themselves are ancient, but because the whole ecosystem of an old-growth redwood forest conjures up the deep past of the planet. The sequoia and redwood family were the dominant trees in Europe and North American during the Jurassic and Cretaceous period, and the fossil record shows that the ancestors of today’s redwoods grew all across the globe: in China, Japan, even Australia. Today their footprint has contracted to a small stretch of the California and Oregon coastline, and the southern Sierra. For that reason, walking through an extant old-growth grove—magical enough in its own right—is the most immersive and realistic time capsule of what Earth must have felt like during the age of the dinosaurs.
There’s a personal side of this story for me. Proximity to redwoods is very high on our list of why we spend so much of our time in this part of Northern California. Just a few years ago we discovered two young redwoods had taken root amid the small stand of oaks that abuts our property; they are now conspicuously taller than any other tree around them, and they are still in the toddler stage, as redwoods go. (I’ve been taking snapshots of them from the same angle over the past five years at the end of the summer; someday it will be a helluva time lapse.) I devoured Richard Preston’s classic The Wild Trees—all about climbers attempting to summit the giant redwoods a few hundred miles north of us up the coast—when it was first published; my oldest friend and his now-wife gave the book out as a gift to all the attendees of their wedding, which was conducted in a Sonoma redwood forest. Old-growth groves are the closest thing I have to a sacred space.
As it happens, I just started reading Ferris Jabr’s new book Becoming Earth—highly recommended, like everything Jabr writes—and near the beginning he notes that James Lovelock often drew on redwoods as a metaphor to help people understand his once (and maybe still) controversial “Gaia hypothesis”: the idea that the earth itself can be understood as a self-regulating organism. In one piece written in the late 1980s, Lovelock offered this redwood-themed explanation:
Let us imagine that you are in a grove of giant redwood trees on the coast of California and that you are standing on the stump of a tree that has just been felled. When standing it was a vast tree weighing over 2,000 tons and over 100 meters tall, a spire of lignin and cellulose, a tree that started life over 2,000 years ago.
A strange thing about this tree is that during its life nearly all of it was dead wood. As a tree grows there is just a thin skin of living tissue around the circumference; the wood inside is dead, as is the bark that protects the delicate tissue. More than 97% of the tree we stand on was dead before it was cut down.
Now in this way a tree is very like the Earth itself. Around the circumference on the surface of the Earth is a thin skin of living tissue of which both the trees and we humans are a part. The rocks beneath our feet are like the wood, and the air above is like the bark. Both are dead matter, but the air and rocks, like the wood and the bark, are either the direct products of life or have been greatly modified by its presence. Is it possible that the Earth is alive like the tree?
Preston might have mentioned this intellectual history in The Wild Trees, but if he did, I’d long forgotten it. How fitting that redwoods should play a role in helping to give root to such a fertile and provocative idea, one that itself forces you to think across temporal scales. To see the earth as a kind of organism, Lovelock had to think about why its atmosphere had been stable for so many millions of years with such an unusual “far-from-equilibrium” mix of gases (most crucially for us aerobic creatures, a disproportionate amount of oxygen.) Thinking about the earth as a self-regulating organism demanded an understanding of the earth’s current atmospheric chemistry, but it also required some way of tracking the long-term trends as well.
One last link in the chain: Reading Jabr on Lovelock reminded me that I had written about some of these ideas many years ago in my 2008 book The Invention of Air, which is ostensibly a biography of the chemist and theologian Joseph Priestley, but which also features some deep time explorations of its own. In one chapter—the “intermezzo” of the book, as I called it—a story that has up to now been set in the 1760s suddenly winds the clock back a hundred million years or so, before zipping back to the 1770s and the scientific discoveries of Priestley and his sometime collaborator Benjamin Franklin. It has a whole riff on the oversized forms that life took on Earth during Cretaceous, including the redwood trees. I hadn’t actually sat down to read this chapter for at least ten years, and I’d remembered as a transitional bridge—very much embedded in the context of that specific story—but re-reading the intermezzo this summer made me think that it actually works remarkably well as a standalone essay. So I’m going to do a light edit and bring in a bit of the backstory from the book, and share it here at Adjacent Possible in the next week or two, the way I have done with a few other excerpts from the back catalog. Stay tuned for that…
When I’m trying to spark inspiration for my next work, I read Steven Johnson.
Just returned from a trip to North Queensland, think Jurassic Park minus the dinosaurs but with plenty of crocs to remind one of prehistoric species. The post, classic Johnson, reminds me of the geohistorical analysis that Tomas Pueyo does.