On Being an Amateur An amateur in the etymological sense is someone who loves that which is dear. By consensus the noun has been more closely defined to indicate an avocational interest in an area of study that others have made their specialty and career. (“Hobbyist” is a subset, but I have in mind a deeper and more vibrant relationship with that which is dear: an amateur geologist may be a lapidarist, but a lapidarist is not necessarily an amateur geologist.) I have spent my professional life in music, and my relationship to the sciences is decidedly amateurish. I find the sciences endlessly fascinating yet have no formal training in any of them; my scientific knowledge, such as it is, is a kind of patchwork. There’s a lot I still don’t and probably never will get about astrophysics and cosmology: I can’t begin to stretch my head around the Big Bang, the inflationary universe, string theory, dark matter or the weirdness of a black hole (especially of the sort that’s in the process of devouring its host galaxy). I rely on the most simplified of generalizations for my tenuous grasp of the basic concepts of that sort of science. If I look at an equation any more complicated than E=mc2 my brain seizes up. It’s only in the past decade or so that I’ve come to understand why the Moon is gravitationally locked to the Earth, so that we always see the same lunar face. It was only a couple of years ago that I figured out why we never see Venus or Mercury high in the sky (it’s because they’re closer to the sun than we are, so we always have to be looking toward the sun to see them, and therefore the only time we’ll ever see them is shortly after the sun sets or shortly before it rises – see, I can finally explain it!). For a professor, my learning curve is probably pretty shallow. But I really am starting to get geology. The only course I ever took in it was the basic course, and that was seven years ago when I was Director of Orchestras at the University of Arkansas: I had the offer of free tuition and decided to use the opportunity to learn something interesting. I’ve been thinking about that course material ever since, reviewing it and supplementing it with further reading: it’s stayed fresh, and I thus no doubt have what could be called a respectable layman’s knowledge of the field. I’ve done a fair amount of leisure-time reading in geology since then, and try always to take notice of what I’m driving through and correlate what I see with the geologic maps I’ve studied in advance of every trip I take. It seems to me that during the past year especially, I’ve come to be able to visualize plate tectonics in three dimensions and over vast expanses of time. This is very exciting to me because I’ve never quite been able to grasp anything like that on such a level. I can imagine pretty vividly the enormous convection cells, thousands of miles in diameter, that well up from the deep mantle, turn horizontal as they near the lithosphere and drag the plates with them, then dive again into the deep mantle to start the journey all over again, towing vast expanses of ocean floor toward the Earth’s molten outer core at subduction zones. I understand that this slowly roiling mantle is not liquid: it’s composed of something like peridotite in a plastic state. I understand that it takes any of those molecules making the journey a fairly large percentage of the Earth’s age to complete the cycle. I’ve started to get what happens when continents collide and am able to visualize all those interesting orogenic results in three dimensions – to imagine the terrain slowly rising at suture zones even as it’s being worn down by erosion: if the rise is more rapid than the erosion, glaciers will finally carve spectacular topographies in marine limestone, as in the Himalayas. I also get what happens in terms of isostatic adjustment when continents shed their Ice-Age overburden during such interglacials as the one we’re living in, and I often finding myself visualizing the continents in their true shapes – that is, out to the edge of their continental shelves. I understand why earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur where they do and not just any old place. I get mantle plumes. I can visualize the Hawaiian Islands (and their precursors – all those sea mounts that extend toward the northwest for thousands of miles) forming in sequence as the Pacific plate inches over that hot spot that’s been magmatizing the local upper mantle for a hundred million years. I can imagine the most recent eruption of Yellowstone blanketing half the North American continent in fine cinders (and can also envision the havoc such an eruption – apparently overdue – would wreak if it were to happen next week). And so forth. I could go on listing details for some time, but that wouldn’t explain the close kinship I’ve begun to feel for my subject matter. Even though I’m fascinated by things like botany and zoology and evolutionary biology and chemistry and what goes on in the cores of stars (and also carry with me a bunch of facts that I’ve memorized about them, as in geology), it’s geology where I’ve finally found myself feeling most at home, most like a citizen. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that I suck at math. I’m very grateful that, unlike the laws of physics, the laws that are unique to geology are not expressible as equations (they can, of course, no doubt be represented symbolically). That’s not to say that geologists don’t routinely use the laws of physics in their work. But the Law of Superposition, for instance, simply states that unless formations have been overturned by a tectonic event, the younger rocks will always lie above the older ones. It’s a sort of common-sense law, and I can get my head around common-sense laws. I find myself fascinated and endlessly entertained by those problems for which I don’t yet have solutions: why is it that the orogenic event that raised the Slick Hills – the westernmost expression of the Arbuckle Foldbelt, which lies north of the older Wichita Mountains – apparently had no effect on the Wichitas themselves (even though the plate-to-plate closure that raised the Arbuckle Foldbelt happened south of the Wichitas)? What is the story behind the calcite-cemented limestone conglomerate that I’ve found in both the Slick Hills and the Arbuckles? What is the nature of the relationship between the Ouachita orogeny and the rich sulfide deposits of the Tri-State mining district? And so forth – again, I could go on at length, for my list of unanswered questions is a long one and grows almost daily. I don’t necessarily want anyone to hand me the answers to such questions, by the way: I get far more joy from working them out myself, and then having my solutions corroborated (or my erroneous notions dispelled) by someone else whose more informed researches have led to the same (or different) conclusions. If this kind of fascination – and it’s not hyperbole to call it love – for geology had been awakened in me 45 years ago, there’s no doubt that I would have found a career in the field. And I can very well imagine myself enjoying such a career far more than I have enjoyed my career in music. If only I had had a teacher in high school who understood the first thing about geology or how to teach it, and if only I hadn’t been born into a weird fundamentalist cult in which it was known on the most authoritative of evidence (a word that admits of a wide range of meaning, apparently!) that the Earth is about 6,000 years old and where any questioning of that venerable, salvific fact was strictly forbidden. If a tone of resentment has seeped into these lines, it should come as no surprise. I’ve looked pretty carefully at the fossil record and what’s understood of the evolutionary saga, correlating it as closely as I can with what is known about conditions at the Earth’s surface or in its shallow seas at any given time in the sequence. The atmospheric and oceanic chemistry at each of those times is significant, as is the dispersal of plants and animals over dry land, so I have made it a point to cultivate at least a nodding acquaintance with all three. I am simultaneously fascinated and haunted by the great close-Permian dying and have spent quite a lot of time trying to understand the confluence of misfortunes that hit this planet all at once – a “perfect-storm” pairing of disasters either of which would have been sufficient to drive a mass extinction and both of which in tandem came as close to putting an end to the whole experiment of life on Earth as anything ever has this side of the Great Bombardment that ended 3.8 billion years ago. (I’ll have you know there’s not a single grammatical error in the foregoing five-line sentence: I’m nothing if not a pedant.) The description that follows is one crafted by an amateur. It no doubt contains some unpardonable generalizations, but amateurs tend to do that. One of the things that caused the Great Dying was that the crust opened up in what is now Siberia and vomited Cthulhu knows how many thousands of cubic miles of basalt onto the surface: not in volcanic eruptions, but out of fissures hundreds of miles long. A more hellish scene can hardly be imagined. Along with all that molten rock there boiled up prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases and corrosive acids, and once the feedback loops were cranked up the atmosphere and oceans both went haywire more or less simultaneously. When you suddenly get an ocean so acidic that diatoms can no longer build their calcite shells, you get death at the very base of the food chain. When the base of the food chain dies, everything above it collapses. This is to say nothing of the great, highly-flammable methane plumes disgorged from continental margins – the ugliest aspect of one of those feedback loops – which, touched off by lightning, very likely immolated everything over thousands of square miles (I’m thinking of something far more widespread and dramatic than the forest/grass fires that scorched much of Texas a couple of summers ago). And then there’s the other calamity – a supercontinent appropriately named Pangaea. Even the most cursory glance at the present-day continents reveals a couple of things about them, which also happen to be true of the oceans. In terms of biodiversity, the near-ocean/near-shore environments are the richest of all habitats: this is true at all times. There is a kind of converse that is equally true: the far interiors of both continents and oceans are the most unlivable places on Earth. The only things that can survive there are the most badass organisms of all: one might well call them “extremophiles,” whether they’re basking in the convivial sulfuric glow of superheated water jetting out of mid-ocean vents or scurrying around on eight legs in the middle of the Gobi Desert. (The same sort of thing is true of human cultures as well, by the way.) The foregoing being the case, one can understand what a disaster for the planet Pangaea must have been. Worldwide shoreline would surely have to have been reduced by – what? two thirds? 75 percent? Remember, certain things that are true of the continents are also true of the oceans: if there is only one continent, there is only one ocean, and most of their respective areas would have been de facto desert. Life would have been driven to the margins in any event, even if the upper mantle hadn’t also puked black lava all over Siberia. A healthy person has a far better chance of surviving a gunshot wound than a person who has the flu. In the assemblage known as Pangaea, the Earth already had a pretty serious case of the flu. Whenever I think of the great close-Permian dying, I’m overwhelmed with the sense of how contingent and precious life is, and how unlikely it is that any one of us – which is also to say any one of the extant species including our own – should ever have existed. Like the art I love best, the Earth invites and richly rewards analytical scrutiny. Lately I’ve done a lot of fossil hunting, since I happen to live not too far from some very productive roadcuts. I think the thing I enjoy most about that activity is thinking about the kind of world those animals inhabited, knowing full well that I could not have survived during e.g. the Silurian Period (oxygen levels were too low to sustain large, energetic, air-breathing, warm-blooded critters like yours truly), trying always to inform my imagination with a growing awareness of atmospheric chemistry and other conditions during the periods whose representative fossils I happen to be collecting. These musings have gradually built in me a kind of long-focus awareness that I’ve come to value deeply – an awareness of being embedded in deep time as part and parcel of the greatest saga of all. It is an awareness that is much grander and also more serene than my typical workaday state of mind. It has the pellucid and calming qualities of deep meditation. All it takes for me to awaken that agreeable awareness is to spend a few hours collecting fossils in a roadcut, or cleaning and sorting them afterwards. At such moments I understand that I truly am a part of things: as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “We are in the universe, and the universe is in us.” I cannot imagine a more inclusive, integrative awareness, and to possess it is the sweetest possible reward for having made the effort to become an informed human being. Surely that is the most precious of all gifts that the sciences have bestowed upon amateurs like me.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 21:49:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015