Authors: Sarah Andrews
Dead Dry (5 page)
“Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic,” Reed said back to me, concentrating. “Basalt, andesite, rhyolite.”
“You’ve a quick memory! If the molten mass cools downstairs the freeze happens more slowly, and the atoms have time to sort themselves into larger crystals, big enough to see with the naked eye. Most of the time you have the right chemistry to form a type of rock called granite. Granites are rich in silica, which makes them lighter, both in color and density. Because they’re less dense than the basalts and even heavier, deeper rocks called peridotites, they want to rise up like marshmallows floating in your cocoa. Or course, that’s one horrendous oversimplification of the process—mountains rise for a number of interrelated reasons—but less dense stuff rising gives you a place to start thinking about it.”
Trevor Reed’s face actually relaxed enough to form a smile. “I’d prefer to have a more substantial image to hang on to than a marshmallow.”
“Okay. The Earth’s crust is solid, but it buckles up and down a lot and slides around on a thick, molten layer beneath it. You like that better?”
“That will have to do.”
I said, “The granites of the Rockies have been rising for hundreds of millions of years—in pulses—and as they rise they’re also being eroded down. The eroded rubble forms big aprons of sediment around the granite cores, and these sediments get cemented into sedimentary rocks like sandstones, shales, and conglomerates.”
Just then the turbulent air through which we were traveling gave the airplane a particularly dramatic bounce, but while our passenger braced himself, he did not stiffen as much as he had for lesser jolts earlier. Smiling wryly, he asked, “The granites rise in … what did you say? Pulses?”
“Yes. The granite that forms Pikes Peak and surrounding mountains, for instance, started cooling and rising about a billion years ago. About half a billion years ago, it stopped or maybe even sank for a while. Then around three hundred million years ago, it began to rise again, forming what we call the ancestral Rockies. About sixty-five million years ago the whole region started to rise a third time. It rose for about thirty million years and then stopped. Everything eroded down flat, but it didn’t sink; it just looked like Kansas for a while. Just smallish granite knobs sticking out of surrounding aprons of rubble eroded from the earlier peaks. Then ten million years ago the elevator started up a fourth time, and the rivers began to cut down again. They always want to cut things down toward sea level. So they eroded canyons through the rubble blanket and cut back into the granite core. Voilà, modern Rockies.”
I paused to see if Mr. Reed had questions. He asked, “What about the metamorphic rocks?”
I was impressed. He obviously had a mind built for ticking down lists, and I’d left one item on the list un-ticked. “They’re formed where other kinds of rocks are heated or squashed to the point where the minerals in the rock recrystallize and need to adjust to come into equilibrium with the new … ah, temperature and pressure regime. Here in the Rockies, metamorphic rocks have been formed as the hot igneous plutons intrude up into the sedimentary rocks, squeezing and cooking them into metamorphics like marble and gneiss. Then they catch a ride up to the surface with all those rising granites.”
Our passenger was smiling now, enjoying my story and all but ignoring the bumps. “You’ve told me about the mountains. Now tell me about the flat parts.”
“The eastern third of Colorado is made of sedimentary rocks, all in layers, like a cake. As the Rockies rose up—remember they shed sediments to both sides—they shed layers that became sandstones and conglomerates. From
times when the whole works was under water, so we also have shales and limestones.”
times when the whole works was under water, so we also have shales and limestones.”
“Colorado was under water? When was this?” He feigned alarm, as if there was an important memo that had not crossed his desk.
“Well, the last time Colorado was below sea level was about seventy million years ago, towards the end of Cretaceous time. The center of our continent kind of buckled, like the hood of your car during a huge fender-bender, except it went downward rather than up, and we had a shallow sea that stretched from Alaska clear down to the Gulf of Mexico.” I continued to smile, but now it was forced. Thinking about the Cretaceous seaway reminded me all too acutely of the tattooed map I had seen only a few hours before. I felt slightly faint.
He said, “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. I focused even harder on my storytelling, hurling myself into the task. “Imagine giant marine reptiles—mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs—swimming in a warm ocean. Imagine bony fish fifteen feet long, giant clams, and ammonites—squid-like creatures with spirally curled shells—the size of cartwheels. Where today we’d have pelicans, imagine pterosaurs—flying reptiles that survive on fish but don’t like to light on the water because they might in turn be dinner for a big, hungry mosasaur.” I held out my arms like the upper and lower jaws of that ancient behemoth, but they suddenly felt frail.
Mr. Reed observed me with the practiced eye of one used to gauging his opponents across a boardroom table but continued to make small talk. “All that against a background of the Rocky Mountains? Beautiful. I’ll have my real-estate division start buying beachfront property.”
“No, the modern Rockies hadn’t risen yet. We’d had the ancestral Rockies, but they’d worn down. The place had been flat as Kansas for two hundred million years. The
pulse of mountain-building that formed the modern Rockies started to rise about the end of the Cretaceous—sixty-five million years ago. That’s when you wanted to buy your Denver real estate. It would have looked like parts of Florida: palm trees, gingers, ferns. But you wouldn’t have liked the mud flats; they would have stank.”
pulse of mountain-building that formed the modern Rockies started to rise about the end of the Cretaceous—sixty-five million years ago. That’s when you wanted to buy your Denver real estate. It would have looked like parts of Florida: palm trees, gingers, ferns. But you wouldn’t have liked the mud flats; they would have stank.”
Fritz said, “Is ‘stank’ correct? Or is it ‘stunk’?”
“You just fly the plane,” I told him, beginning to regain my edge. “We’re talking swamps and bogs here.”
The passenger laughed. “You two are quite a pair.”
Fritz grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at me, a sort of ‘how about it?’ dance.
I dove back into the story. “Of course, you might sell your Cretaceous Denver real estate as a theme park. Once that downwarp let go and the seaway drained away—”
“We sent the continent out to the body shop,” Mr. Reed said dryly.
“Yeah. Anyway, then there were dinosaurs by the peck and the bushel. Oh, and before the Cretaceous seaway, too. The Jurassic was their heyday.”
“Ah, dinosaurs,” said the passenger. “Now we’re talking. Big ones or the little chicken-sized ones I’ve read about?”
“Will
Tyrannosaurus rex
do? The first footprint of that fellah was found on the Colorado–New Mexico border by a geologist named Chuck Pilmore. And we’ve got
Triceratops
for you, curb weight five tons. Then there’s
Pachycephalosaurus,
the lizard with a head like a battering ram, and
Ankylosaurus,
which would have looked like a Hummer fringed with thorns, sporting a tail like a caveman’s club. They all left bones and footprints in the beaches and riverbeds.”
Tyrannosaurus rex
do? The first footprint of that fellah was found on the Colorado–New Mexico border by a geologist named Chuck Pilmore. And we’ve got
Triceratops
for you, curb weight five tons. Then there’s
Pachycephalosaurus,
the lizard with a head like a battering ram, and
Ankylosaurus,
which would have looked like a Hummer fringed with thorns, sporting a tail like a caveman’s club. They all left bones and footprints in the beaches and riverbeds.”
“The meat-eaters might make it tough to get insurance for that theme park,” Reed commented.
“No problem,” I said. “Sixty-five million years ago, insurance hadn’t been invented, which was a good thing because
if it had been, every insurance company on Earth would have gone bust when the asteroid hit.”
if it had been, every insurance company on Earth would have gone bust when the asteroid hit.”
He snorted. “Asteroid?”
“Yeah, that’s probably what killed the dinosaurs. Armageddon never had it so good. Imagine a chunk of rock the size of San Francisco hitting the Yucatan. That sucker blew a crater 125 miles in diameter. Everything inside the crater was atomized, and it set off tidal waves hundreds of feet high. The shock wave alone was a killer, but then the molten spherules of atomized rock rained down, and the Earth was encircled with fire and smoke. Forests clear on the other side of the world were incinerated. But somehow, just enough creatures survived to repopulate our world. In Colorado, these luckiest creatures were perhaps tucked in the lee of the growing mountain peaks, and before long Colorado was lush with forests and swamps and, after a while, rain forests.”
“Rain forests in Denver.”
“Hard to imagine, I know. Nowadays, Denver is semi-arid. What does it get, fourteen inches of rainfall a year?”
Mr. Reed shifted in his seat, his eyes on the mountaintops that were gliding by beneath us. “How do you know all this? Or is it really just speculation?”
I thought for a moment before I answered. “
I
don’t know all of this, not really. As a scientist, I rely on the collected knowledge of a great many people. Tens of thousands of geologists and as many climatologists, botanists, and paleontologists … and physicists, chemists, astrophysicists … you get the picture.”
I
don’t know all of this, not really. As a scientist, I rely on the collected knowledge of a great many people. Tens of thousands of geologists and as many climatologists, botanists, and paleontologists … and physicists, chemists, astrophysicists … you get the picture.”
“No, I don’t, in fact. I’ve never understood how you arrive at your conclusions.”
I began to wonder what philosophical tradition my listener was coming from. Was he a religious fundamentalist? “Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to presume. Do you adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible?”
“No, but what would that be?”
“That the Earth is only a little over six thousand years old.”
Mr. Reed smiled in a friendly way. “Six thousand? I have no idea how old it is. I’ve never studied these things.”
“What have you studied?”
“I’m an investment banker.”
“Then you studied finance?”
“I have a bachelor’s degree in finance, yes, and an MBA in financial management.”
“Then you know numbers.”
“Yes.”
“Do you trust them?”
“Yes. As long as I trust the people who gave them to me.”
“Well, I trust my scientific colleagues. But like you, I put limits on how well I trust them. Science is designed to be questioned; that’s what the scientific method is, a system of questioning. As our knowledge grows, some of our earlier assumptions and interpretations prove false, or too limited. Others hold. Scientists are hard-wired to question findings, especially our own, and we are not shy about challenging our colleagues. In this way, we build our knowledge as a community.”
Mr. Reed folded his arms and leaned back in his seat with his jaw tilted up, indicating a challenge. “Put numbers to that.”
I grinned. “Hmm … geology doesn’t quantify easily, but I’ll try. There are about one hundred fifty thousand geologists working in the United States, and each works two thousand hours a year. In reality, we work more—in fact, we never stop working because we never stop observing the world around us, but using the standard forty-hour week, fifty-week year builds some conservatism into this estimate. That’s three hundred million man-hours per year in the United States alone. Now, to be equally conservative, let’s multiply that number by two to get the number of man-hours for geologists worldwide, although a factor of
three would probably be more accurate. That gives us six hundred million hours per year dedicated to understanding the Earth.
three would probably be more accurate. That gives us six hundred million hours per year dedicated to understanding the Earth.
“Now let’s factor that over the number of years geology has formally been a science. It’s just a baby; let’s call it 150 years. We didn’t start out with half a million geologists, so let’s just cut that number by two-thirds, to again build in some conservatism, and we get thirty billion man-hours. That’s a three with ten zeros after it. Thirty billion man-hours it’s taken to develop the understanding of the history and dynamics of the Earth, from which I just abstracted that story of the Colorado Rockies. Now, if you add in those physicists, geophysicists, chemists, geochemists, botanists, paleoecologists …”
“I get your point. Your billions quickly become trillions. But do you trust these people? And if so, how far?”
I smiled. “Some of us are brighter than others, and the occasional jackass or congenital idiot or pathological liar sneaks in and drives everyone nuts. But the thing I trust is this: On the whole, scientists prefer knowledge over ignorance. If they preferred lies, they could have saved themselves all those years in school, eating mac and cheese out of a box and living in crummy apartments.”
Reed’s eyes narrowed with thought. “Don’t you ever get someone who tries to cover up the facts?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Surely there are practitioners of your art who find themselves in a conflict of interest.”
“Ah, you mean like someone who’s trying to sell a prospect. A gold property or a place to drill for oil or gas.” I laughed. “Yeah, sometimes a con artist gets into the game, but usually it’s more a matter of optimism. To explore, you have to be optimistic.”
“Are you an optimist?”
“No, I’m more of a pessimist. When I worked in oil and gas, I specialized in maximizing the production of known
reserves. I was always pissing management off by showing that there was less oil in place than they had hoped.”
reserves. I was always pissing management off by showing that there was less oil in place than they had hoped.”
Mr. Reed laughed. “I could use someone like you on my assessments staff.”
“Well, Mr. Reed, I—”
“You can call me Trevor.”
Fritz raised an eyebrow. He had his back to the client, but I saw it.
“That goes for you, too, Fritz,” Trevor said, as if he had seen.
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