‘The four dimensional complexities of our happy little planet – “earth’s immeasurable

surprise” – are made elegantly accessible by Ted Nield in this truly exceptional book. At
least until the next major discovery it deserves to become the standard work, ideal for
students of the subject, and hugely enjoyable to those for whom the world remains an
unfathomable enigma’ Simon Winchester

‘Ted Nield tells the fascinating story of how the world has been made – and re-made –
through billions of years of geological time. Geology underpins everything, yet the history of
the continents on which we live has remained almost neglected. Nield has put this right with
his imaginative and dynamic account of the movements of plates, and the assembly of the
familiar world from an unfamiliar past’ Richard Fortey

‘As a geologist turned science journalist, editor and provocative blogger, Ted Nield has a
complex view of life and science. His skills as a writer successfully convey in Supercontinent
the recent exciting work in grand-scale geoscience … To handle it without oversimplification
or getting lost in a maze of detail is no small accomplishment. I know of no other attempt to
reduce the complexities of the relevant primary literature to the confines of a single popular-
science book’ Nature

‘Entrenched in daily life, we all crave a little perspective: in Supercontinent we find more
than a little, as Ted Nield takes us into the vistas of “deep time”’ Financial Times

‘Both informative and entertaining. He has thought well outside the academic box, touching
on a huge diversity of topics … lively and stimulating’ Science

SUPERCONTINENT
Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet

TED NIELD
 GRANTA
The mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

CONTENTS

Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Foreword – Big crunch

PART ONE – MOVING IN MYSTERY

1 Lost worlds
2 Ice at the Equator
3 Queens of Mu
4 Land of the Gonds
5 From out the azure main

PART TWO – EXISTENCE OF LAW

6 Wonderland
7 World wars
8 Wrong-way telescope
9 Motherland
10 Birth

Epilogue – Life, the universe and the puddle

Further reading
Index
About the Author
Copyright
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For particular help with this book and with previous writings of mine that have contributed to
it, I gladly acknowledge the following persons (who are, of course, in no way responsible for
remaining omissions and errors, for all of which responsibility rests with me).
Professor Philip Allen, Professor Mike Benton, Ms Vivianne Berg-Madsen, Professor
Kevin Burke, Dr Tony Cooper, Professor John C. W. Cope, Professor Charles Curtis,
Professor Ian Dalziel, Dr Wolfgang Eder, Professor Michael Ellis, Professor John
Grotzinger, Dr Gordon Herries-Davies, Professor Paul Hoffman, Mr Robert Howells, Dr
Patrick Wyse Jackson, Dr Werner Janoschek, Dr Sven Laufeld, Dr Roy Livermore, Dr
Bryan Lovell, Dr Joe McCall, Professor Mark McMenamin, Dr John Milsom, Professor
Eldridge Moores, Dr Bettina Reichenbacher, Professor John J. W. Rogers, Dr Mike
Romano, Professor Mike Russell, Dr Gaby Schneider, Professor Chris Scotese, Professor
Dick Selley, Professor Bruce Sellwood, Professor Dr Klaus Weber, Dr Jeffrey Huw
Williams, Mr Simon Winchester and Dr Rachel Wood. My special thanks go to those in this
list who critically read parts of the book in manuscript.
I should like to acknowledge the Geological Society of London for its enlightenment in
encouraging private enterprise among its employees; but I also owe an immense debt to the
Society as a Fellow. Fellowship has provided me with invaluable access to one of the great
geological libraries of the world; and to the services of my colleague, Wendy Cawthorne.
Wendy, like all the best Assistant Librarians, assists in finding the things readers ask for, but
then goes the extra mile to find the things they actually need.
The idea for this book came to me very early one happy summer morning in 2003, among
the chestnut trees of Vallée Française, Lozère, France. I made the first outline in a letter I
was writing to my dear friend since student days, Professor Mike Ellis, now at the US
National Science Foundation. Had he and I not been corresponding in this old-fashioned
way since he selfishly removed himself to the other side of the Atlantic, I might never have
begun this project. I also thank my editor, George Miller at Granta, who took me to lunch
and made editorial suggestions that greatly improved the text.
I should pay homage to the late and great Professors Janet Watson and Mike Coward of
Imperial College, London. They never taught me in the strict sense, but after reading their
work as a student I eventually met Janet and came to count Mike as a friend. In this group
must also be numbered Dr Rod Graham (still vigorously extant), who did teach me, but who
has since, I hope, forgiven me.
To all I owe my sense of awe at their achievements in untangling the rocks of the
Precambrian. I must also acknowledge two more of my personal giants, the late Professors
Derek Ager and Dick Owen, both of whom taught me by example that the most complicated
science ought to be explicable in language everyone can understand: a lesson that stood me
well in my subsequent career as a science journalist.
I hope that this book will be seen as one long homage to all those great geologists whom I
have met over the years and who have helped me. I lay no claim to having seen further, but in
the thirty years that have passed since I began studying Earth science, too many giants have
the thirty years that have passed since I began studying Earth science, too many giants have
offered me their shoulders as footstools for me to be able to acknowledge them all by name.
However, for the dedication of this book I would like to single out my fellow members of the
Management Team of the International Year of Planet Earth, with whom discussions on the
way that Earth sciences benefit society in general have played a major role in the
development of this book.
Most of all, my thanks go to my wife Fabienne, who has continued to provide that without
which nothing would be possible.
Ted Nield

FOREWORD

BIG CRUNCH

Different living is not living in different places

But making in the mind a map.
STEPHEN SPENDER

The drifting continents of the Earth are heading for collision. Two hundred and fifty million
years from now, all landmasses will come together in a single, gigantic supercontinent. It
already has a name (in fact, it has three) even though human eyes will, in all probability, never
see it.
That future supercontinent will not be the first to have formed on Earth, nor will it be the
last. The continents we know today – Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe and the
Antarctic – are fragments of the previous supercontinent Pangaea, which gave birth to
dinosaurs, and whose break-up was first understood barely a century ago, in 1912. Yet 750
million years before Pangaea formed, yet another one broke up; and before that another, and
so on and on, back into the almost indecipherable past. The Earth’s landmasses are locked
in a stately quadrille that geologists call the Supercontinent Cycle, the grandest of all the
patterns in nature.
Men and women have been imagining lost or undiscovered continents for centuries. For
early mapmakers they filled in gaps, forming a bridge from the uncertain to the unknown.
Nineteenth-century zoologists and botanists speculated about sunken lands to explain odd
distributions of animals and plants. Early evolutionists peopled their hypothetical lost lands
with the ancestors of mankind. Fringe religions adopted them and embattled minority cultures
latched on to them to bolster their myths. All had one thing in common: the basic human urge
to understand and make sense of the world.
Today geography has no room for lost continents. The world is ringed by satellites that
reveal no undiscovered country. But lost continents have found, at last, a true science of their
own. This book is about how that science emerged and how Earth scientists are using the
most modern techniques to wring as much information as they can out of the oldest rocks on
Earth and predict what the next supercontinent will look like.
Supercontinent Earths, salvaged from oblivion or projected into the future by today’s
geologists, share one thing with all the lost continents that were ever dreamt of, whether by
geologists, share one thing with all the lost continents that were ever dreamt of, whether by
other scientists, mystics or madmen. All lost lands truly exist only in one place: the human
mind, the only eye that can see through time.
But why should we care? We human latecomers evolved a mere six million years ago,
halfway through the present cycle, when today’s moving continents were barely a few
hundred kilometres from where they are now. And if what we understand of other species
can be applied to ours, there is very little chance that humans will survive the 250 million
years that will pass before a new supercontinent assembles.
Yet the supercontinents of modern geology are no exotic fruit from some esoteric branch
of science. Their discovery began with an innate urge to explore; it was boosted by the spur
of Empire in the nineteenth century as science reached out through the third dimension to
map the world and its living things. It continued as the patterns of today were seen to hold
meaning for their evolution through the fourth dimension, time. And as the human mind has
reached out it has also drawn together.
Without science the Earth could not sustain us in anything like our present numbers. Our
continued life on the planet that gave rise to us will depend upon our ability to use our science
to protect and feed ourselves in the face of what threatens us (chiefly ourselves).
Understanding the Supercontinent Cycle is nothing less than finally knowing how our planet
works. This can be to our benefit – we have, after all, made it thus far – or our detriment.
If scientific knowledge had been properly deployed many, perhaps most, of the quarter of
a million people who died around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 could have been
saved. The knowledge that makes that possible is the same knowledge that reconstructs
landscapes that washed into oblivion hundreds of millions of years before our species
existed.
London, 2006

PART ONE

MOVING IN MYSTERY

LOST WORLDS

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy
lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an
 lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue green planet …
DOUGLAS ADAMS

Novopangaea – a science fiction

A blue planet hangs in space. You have seen many planets as you have searched the cosmos
for signs of life far from your own small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. But
as you approach this one, something about it impresses and excites you. It’s the third planet
from an unremarkable star, and the largest of the rocky inner ones. But as you approach it
from below the plane of the ecliptic, it shines like an opal, streaked with white.
The galaxy is full of the common oxide of dihydrogen that appears to cover this planet, but
almost everywhere else it is a solid. Here it exists as a liquid and there are traces of its
vapour in the atmosphere. The liquid phase can only exist within a very small range of
temperatures; temperatures you, as a space explorer, expend a lot of energy maintaining
inside your craft. Yet here these equable conditions seem to cover the entire planet. There
isn’t even an icecap at the pole, where the temperatures should be at their lowest. It is almost
inconceivable that a planet’s temperature should be so constant over its entire surface. It
must be that the deep atmosphere is trapping the star’s heat, and then, with the help of the
ocean, spreading it around.
Above the glowing blue ocean, especially over its equator, are streaks of white. Cloudy
curlicues and spiralling weather systems track like miniature galaxies across the hemispheres.
At first it all looks chaotic, but on your long approach, heading towards the planet’s southern
pole, you have time to study time-lapse images. Suddenly the apparent chaos starts to make
sense. The clouds’ movements are indeed complex, but do describe a sort of ragged mirror
symmetry about the planet’s equator. What seemed like chaos now looks more like order:
the atmosphere is convecting in six great cells arranged symmetrically about the equator.
The planet’s moon is unusually large, though to an experienced space traveller little else is
unusual about this satellite. No heat regulation there; with no atmosphere to distribute energy,
temperatures can swing wildly through almost 300 degrees from sunlight to shade: quite
normal for a space rock struck by starlight. A satellite as big as that must set up a tidal bulge
in the ocean by the force of its gravity; you will be able to detect that once you are in orbit
and can train your altimeter on the ocean surface.
Already, using the spectrometer to analyse the light reflecting from the planet, you have
detected, amid the dominant nitrogen signature gases like carbon dioxide, and the gas phase
of dihydrogen oxide (which will also help to trap heat and keep the planet warm). Methane is
there too, and does the same job.
The unusually tall oxygen spike piques your interest, but just as you are thinking about that,
something momentous distracts you. Your ship is now pulling level with the planet’s equator.
Perhaps because the clouds had drawn all your attention you had missed it at first, but now
you see that this is not a liquid-covered world after all. There, below, is a single, gigantic
landmass. You can see it clearly, because the clouds obligingly part over it; few penetrate far
beyond its coastline. As the hours go by you watch the landmass unroll as you enter a fixed
equatorial orbit.
equatorial orbit.
It sits mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, covering perhaps 30 per cent of the planet’s
total surface area. It is dry. Immense white and beige deserts occupy nearly all of it. Three
ranges of mountains, low, desolate and worn down with age, stand out amid the dune seas
and endless dazzling playas. Dry, wiggling canyons feed the arid interior wastes, dying into
vast plains of white from which expanses of blown sand stretch far away beyond the
shimmering mirages of the horizon.
Most spectacular, apart from this terrifying barren waste, is the continent’s southern coast,
maybe twelve or fifteen thousand kilometres long. It lies at a slight angle to the equator and
crosses it near its southern end before taking a dogleg and heading back, reaching even
greater heights, to the north-west. This entire coast presents a cordillera of jagged peaks up
to eight thousand metres high (perhaps nearer ten thousand at its eastern end) punching into
the cold upper atmosphere and capped with white. These mountains are young, active, still
growing. There are volcanoes too. One of them is erupting now, its plume of ash sweeping
offshore like a thin veil, carried by the winds of the topmost atmosphere. This planet’s
surface is moving, geologically active; the planet is alive inside, powered by heat generated
continuously by radioactive elements, so that the whole crust seethes like the scum on a
boiling pot. As the largest of the rocky planets in this system, it is big enough not to have
cooled down and died like the others, even after nearly five thousand million years.
What excites you perhaps more than anything as a space explorer are the colours you can
see at the coast of the supercontinent, especially where those coasts cross the tropics. The
interior is parched; but the point at which the driest area comes closest to the ocean is behind
the range of towering mountains on the south-east coast. Here the weather systems that
sweep inshore stand little chance of breaching those massive battlements (even though some
of those systems are thousands of kilometres across, with wind speeds of over three hundred
kilometres per hour).
But on the diametrically opposite north-west coast things are different. Here, where
prevailing westerlies make landfall, streamers of cloud obscure the land for thousands of
kilometres. Beneath them, from time to time and around the edges of the cloud blanket, you
detect a livid green stain. Other, narrower areas on the supercontinent’s coasts are green
too, peeping out occasionally from the fringe of coastal clouds. This is the eureka moment.
The oxygen spike! That huge ocean, and those coastal regions where moisture falls as rain,
are teeming with living things.
You have just topped the greatest scientific discovery by any member of your species
since it first began to look up towards the stars. You have found another place in the universe
where matter lives. You knew it must be possible. Some said probable. Growing numbers
believed it inevitable. But would – indeed, could – anyone ever find such a place? Given the
distances of space, would it be possible to travel to such a world? And then even if,
somewhere else in that limitless abyss, matter had become imbued with life, would it
necessarily coincide with yours? For there was another abyss to consider: the abyss of time.
The universe is like a post-apocalyptic town: there appear to be other houses, but only
yours is currently inhabited. Maybe all those other living worlds were marooned not only by
impossible and untravellable distances, but also by duration; lost in time as well as space.
Now you have an answer. You have found a neighbour alive.
You learn as much as you can about this precious place from orbit, but the next thing on
your mission directive is to check if any among those living things down there is sentient. But
you already know the answer to this question. Sentient life becomes civilization in a
you already know the answer to this question. Sentient life becomes civilization in a
geological instant, and the chances of finding the first living planet at just that tiny moment
between the evolution of an intelligent being and its ability to build cities and get power from
atoms are too small to imagine. There are no satellites orbiting. There are no transmissions.
This planet hangs in space like a great unseeing eye. There is no civilization down there. The
creatures that may swim in its seas, or fly through its air, wander those forests or cling to its
fertile coasts are dreaming their innocent world, unaware of anything beyond it, or that over
them all, your shadow has now fallen. It is a kind of paradise. You envy it.
But hunches are not enough. Rules are rules and the manual says you have to check, run
tests, write reports. From your vantage point, with your instruments, you can now scan the
surface of this planet’s landmass in precise detail, centimetre by centimetre. If there is (or
was) a civilization down there, you will find it. Even if some extinct creature had built
something, or carved the sacred images of its great leaders into some granite mountain, you
will see it.
You begin the scans, which eventually will be assembled in a computer that will remove all
the obscuring clouds; but you know this is hopeless. If the absence of transmissions tells you
there’s nothing intelligent there now, the planet’s reflected light tells you there was probably
never anything there. Sentient life quickly learns the secrets of matter and makes power from
atoms. That process creates forms of matter that never exist in nature and which take
millennia to decay away to nothing. Even on an active planet like this one, with weathering
and erosion and deposition and a seething crust that renews and recycles itself, these
substances endure. They are the only truly lasting products of civilization.
You scan the arid surface of the supercontinent for radioactive isotopes of the most
insoluble elements with the longest half-lives. You find some: Thorium 232, and Uranium 235
and 238. But these all occur naturally. There is nothing more. If there ever had been an
advanced civilization on this planet it must have vanished more than 100,000 years ago,
though this does not yet depress your archaeologist, because the surface scans are not
finished.
Much of the land surface is dry. Physical traces of civilization might have survived for more
than 100,000 years, a great city perhaps, or some massive monument hewn from living rock,
whose outline would still be visible. But even after you have assembled in your memory
banks a complete inventory of every valley, mountain and hill on this supercontinent, the
archaeologist finally admits defeat. Now only the geologist is interested in the possibility. But
looking for fossils is something you cannot do from a spaceship.
As the weeks go by, you turn (with little real enthusiasm but because the mission directive
says you must) to the planet’s moon. You have seen so many other bodies like it, a dull,
cratered space rock, dry, dead, circling for ever, its inert surface open to space, almost
unchanging from its earliest violent days of heavy meteorite bombardment.
Yet here you are in for a surprise. Almost immediately your preliminary scans of the
surface turn up real and unequivocal evidence of advanced civilization. At six separate sites
you identify the remains of landing craft, transportation vehicles, transmitters, a seismic array.
Another enormously significant revelation for your mission. Not only is your home world no
longer the only living planet in the universe; you know now there have been other space
explorers; and what is more, they have passed this way.
Subsequent archaeological research on the lunar artefacts reveals the trail to be a little
cold, however. As the moon is clearly not itself a living planet, you can check out one of the
alien spacecraft. Landing some way off and approaching with care, you see it and, most
alien spacecraft. Landing some way off and approaching with care, you see it and, most
exciting of all, the footprints around it. They still look as though they arrived yesterday:
unequivocal evidence of alien beings with spaceflight capability. Your archaeologists take
samples of the spider-like landers, from each of which an escape module once blasted into
space. Clearly the six visitations to this moon were made by the same beings, at more or less
the same time. But when?
The answer is not long in coming; microscopic examination of the metal surfaces reveals
that they are pitted with billions of tiny micrometeorite impacts. From their density, and what
you know about the rate of influx of such tiny objects, you work out that these visitors –
whoever they were – must have left for the last time 200 million years ago. But there’s a
nagging question. Why would these travellers come to this moon, and not to the much more
interesting planet?
Perhaps, despite the lack of any trace of them there now, these beings had come from the
planet?
You ask your geologist, who has been studying the planet’s single continent and its
volcanic mountain chain. From what she now knows of the planet’s crust and how it moves,
even if some civilization of 200 million years ago had completely covered that same planet in
cities and then wiped itself out in some gigantic global nuclear holocaust, nothing – not even
the faintest trace of some unnatural radioisotope – would now remain on the surface. What is
more, if those vanished beings were to be brought back today, they wouldn’t recognize the
world below as theirs. At the speeds at which the planet’s crustal plates move, even with all
the land locked together in a great supercontinent, she can be certain that 200 million years
ago the planet looked nothing like this. Perhaps then there were once many smaller, separate
continents, all scattered about like islands in the ocean.
The geologists begin to write a research proposal to break the mission directive and visit a
living world for the first time, spurred on now by the possibility of finding fossils of a vanished
sentient race that may have developed space flight before vanishing completely. Now the
only trace of them and their culture could be six short visits they had made in their heyday to
their dead, unchanging moon, lasting in all not much more than 300 hours.
And who knows what they would find if they got permission? Maybe those alien explorers
are in for yet another shock. Perhaps those fossils that they discover of a small, forked
creature would look very familiar – just as the footprints on the moon had done. Perhaps the
space visitors from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse would find themselves meeting
their ancestors. Perhaps they would discover themselves to be one lost tribe within a galactic
diaspora that had saved the human species from inevitable extinction on a home world to
which it had now, for the first time, returned.

Future worlds

Scientists are already trying to predict what this supercontinent of the distant future will look
like, and the version I have just described is based on the work of a British scientist who
divides his time between the chilly waters of the South Atlantic and the British Antarctic
Survey’s headquarters in Cambridge. Roy Livermore is a marine geophysicist. He is
interested in computer-modelling the way the plates of the Earth’s crust move, and his main
interested in computer-modelling the way the plates of the Earth’s crust move, and his main
research area is the stretch of ocean floor between the tip of South America and the
Antarctic Peninsula. As Roy pointed out to me these two eastward-sweeping points of land,
Graham Land and Tierra del Fuego, they reminded me of a section through a piece of
armour plating pierced by a high-velocity round. The hole through which the bullet appears to
have passed is known as Drake Passage.
 Drake Passage, between the southern tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Knowledge about how the Earth’s tectonic plates have moved since Drake Passage
opened up thirty million years ago has many uses. Oil companies are interested in how
continents break up and move because fertile environments for oil formation are created at
the continental margins. Climate modellers are interested in the Drake Passage because its
opening contributed to a climate switch some thirty million years ago from the warm
‘greenhouse’ Earth to the cool ‘icehouse’world we live in today. But Roy’s theoretical
interest in computer-modelling plate motions has recently enjoyed a more unusual
application. For Roy Livermore created the future world of Novopangaea (the name he
chose for it reflects the return of a condition that prevailed 250 million years ago), when all
the present continents were last assembled into a single landmass, known to geologists as
‘Pangaea’ (‘All land’).
His vision of the deep future was the setting for a TV documentary series about the likely
course of animal and plant evolution. Its producer, John Adams, wanted to show what the
Earth might be like five, 100 and 200 million years from now, and particularly how the
animals and plants of that world might look. The focus of the series was principally the
animated living forms; but on what kind of a world would these CGI creations disport
themselves?
Adams began by asking geologists what the world would look like in the future. Livermore
had to create a set of credible plate-tectonic forward projections or ‘preconstructions’ of our
future Earth. In other words, he had to put the continents into the positions they would
occupy in five, 100 and 200 million years from now. Climate experts then took his maps and
predicted how the atmosphere and oceans would behave given those arrangements of land
and sea, and so deduce what conditions could be expected. The resulting future world could
then be populated with appropriate fauna (including ‘flish’, flying fish, and a rather attractive
hopping snail) dreamt up by evolutionary biologists.
‘It really grew out of work I did with Professor Alan Smith in the Department of Earth
Sciences here in Cambridge, back in the eighties. I have been interested in preconstruction
and thinking about the future for maybe fifteen years,’ he told me, producing three Lambert
projections of the globe, the land in green, ocean in light blue and shelf seas in a darker
shade.
So how did he arrive at Novopangaea? Is it simply a matter of knowing how the
continents are moving now and winding the clock forward on a computer? ‘Well, first of all
this exercise isn’t driven simply by scientific curiosity,’ he explains. ‘There were other
considerations like, from my point of view, the desire to illustrate a range of geological
processes.’ In other words, in making his preconstruction, scientific constraints were mingled
with the need to arrive at an interesting outcome for the programme makers. This means
there has to be a point when forward projection ceases to be mechanistic and objective;
when the experimenter must intervene. (As we shall see later, the imaginative ambitions of all
those who have ever dreamt about supercontinents, past or future, have rarely been
unmixed.)
Livermore took me through the process. ‘We start with the present day, when we know
 Livermore took me through the process. ‘We start with the present day, when we know
how the plates are moving, and extrapolate a few million years into the future. The five-
million-year projection is quite tightly constrained. It’s what you get if you just wind
everything forward a bit.’ Because of that, the outcome is not terribly exciting; nothing seems
to have changed very much. ‘No, nothing terribly exciting happens until we get to 100 million
years. But whenever you go that far, there inevitably comes a point where you have to make
a decision.’ This is where the model operator plays God. The planet is not a simple
perpetual-motion machine that cycles for ever in the same old way. From time to time unique
events happen that alter the outcome of the process, like a massive meteorite strike, or
super-volcanic eruption. These events are often unpredictable, but the Earth carries their
consequences for all time. Understanding this has been a major breakthrough in our thinking
about the Earth in the past 200 years.
‘The biggest “decision” I made,’ Livermore told me, ‘was that the Atlantic Ocean would
continue to open and the Pacific would continue to shrink.’

All land

The continents of today’s Earth are the wreckage of that single supercontinent, Pangaea,
which began to break up about 250 million years ago. The name was given to the last
supercontinent to have formed on Earth by German geophysicist Alfred Lothar Wegener. It
first occurs in the third edition of his great book The Origin of Continents and Oceans.
When it first appeared, in 1915, it was the first serious attempt by a modern Earth scientist to
convince the world that continents drift.
As we shall see, for any imaginary supercontinent to catch the imagination of scientists and
public, its most important asset is its name. However brilliant, instinctive and insightful
Wegener was as a geophysicist, he understood and cared little for public relations. This was
a shame, because had he understood and cared about PR a little more, his theory might well
have fared a lot better than it did, especially in America.
Today, when Pangaea ranks as high on the romance scale as such exotic names as
Ushuaia or Zanzibar, it is amazing that Wegener should have introduced it so casually in the
final chapter of his third edition. While writing about the single landmass he believed brought
all today’s continents together, he simply says, ‘This Pangaea …’ inserting it as a synonym
for the long-winded explanation in the sentence before – a synonym he clearly expects his
readers to have enough Greek to understand.
The third edition of Wegener’s book was the first to find an English publisher (Methuen &
Co. of London). They engaged one John George Anthony Skerl as its translator, and he
changed the Germanic spelling Pangäa to Pangæa, so must therefore be credited with
bringing the word into the English language, in 1924. English palates soon found it easier to
pronounce it ‘panjeea’, because the same Greek root – Ge, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘land’ – also
gives us ‘geology’. Finally the Americans, dispensing with the archaic ligature æ, decided to
spell it ‘Pangea’.
Clinching evidence that Wegener cared next to nothing about his new term is provided in
the fourth (and last) edition of his magnum opus, published in 1929. This edition had to wait
thirty-seven years before being translated into English and published in the USA. In this
edition, however, there is no ‘Pangaea’ in the index; nor in the speculative chapter on the
edition, however, there is no ‘Pangaea’ in the index; nor in the speculative chapter on the
forces that might cause continents to drift; nor anywhere. Wegener just left it out.
Pangaea consisted of two smaller supercontinents joined at the hip in the region of the
Equator: Laurasia in the Northern Hemisphere (North America, Greenland, Europe and
much of what is now Asia) and Gondwanaland in the Southern Hemisphere, comprising
South America, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica. The world we see today is no more
than Pangaea’s smashed remains, the fragments of the dinner plate that dropped on the floor.
The main event in this slowest of all unfolding dramas was the opening of the Atlantic
Ocean, which split North America from Asia and South America from Africa; though there
were many other splits too. India emerged like a slice of pie from where it had lain wedged
between Africa, Antarctica and Australia for the best part of 500 million years, drifted
northwards across the Southern Ocean and smashed into Asia to make the Himalayas.
Australia rifted from Antarctica, taking the Great Australian Bight out of its southern coast,
and headed off for South-East Asia. Africa moved north and collided with Europe, a
continuing process that will one day close up the Mediterranean.
These created a whole set of young oceans whose floors are nowhere older than about
250 million years: the date when Pangaea’s rifting began. These ocean floors are forming
along spreading centres like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, scars that mark the original junction
between rifted continental fragments, either side of which the ocean floor spreads away,
carrying the increasingly distant landmasses with it at about the same speed your fingernails
grow. Because the Earth is not getting bigger, one ocean expanding means another is
shrinking. This is why, all around the Pacific, the ocean floor is being sucked back down into
the planet in a process called subduction.
That, in essence, is plate tectonics. Because we now know the age of nearly every bit of
ocean floor all over the world, it is relatively easy to see how the split took place. The ocean
floor is, in effect, a road map showing how the continents have moved into their present
positions, like the concentric ridges on the growing plates of a turtle shell.
If you feed all this information on continental trajectory and speeds of motion and rotation
into a computer program like Atlas, the package Roy Livermore helped develop with Alan
Smith and others at Cambridge University, you can animate the whole process and watch it
unfold before your eyes. It is then relatively easy to run the program forward a little. That is
why Livermore can be fairly certain about the way the Earth will look in five million years, the
near future to a geologist. It is as objective as a computer model can be. The Atlantic will be
a little wider, and Africa will be closer to Europe and Japan to North America.
But in order to look further and see how the drifting continents, riding the backs of
convection currents flowing in the hot rocks of the Earth’s mantle beneath them, will one day
recombine, this is not enough. Sooner or later even plate-tectonic motions, so seemingly
inexorable, must take a step change. The geologist has to intervene in the model with some
educated guesses about these crucial turning points.
Roy’s decision that the Americas will go on heading west, eating up the Pacific as they go,
and crash into the amalgam of Asia and Australia, follows one interpretation of how
supercontinents can form. Because it involves all the fragments of a previous supercontinent
flying away from one another until they meet again on the other side of the globe (turning the
previous supercontinent inside out), this process is called extroversion.
On the other hand, another process might apply. The old scars of the Earth’s continents
are lines of weakness, and for that reason history along them tends to repeat itself. The
Atlantic is not the first ocean to have opened between the old continental kernels at the heart
Atlantic is not the first ocean to have opened between the old continental kernels at the heart
of Europe and North America. Several hundred million years ago North America was
separated from northern Europe by a wide ocean, much as it is now. This seaway eventually
closed to form mountains that were probably as tall as the Himalayas of today. On this side
of the present Atlantic we see their eroded remains in Wales, Scotland and Scandinavia.
Take away the present Atlantic and this old chain marries up to another old mountain chain in
the eastern US. It was split in two when the Atlantic opened through it, roughly (not
perfectly) along the same line. It was such geological evidence as this that helped the early
proponents of continental drift demonstrate that their impossible-sounding theory might have
some truth in it.
In other words, oceans can open and close, like a carpenter’s vice, more than once.
Imagine that you open a vice, put the carpenter’s lunch (cold lasagne) into it and squeeze it
tight. The lunch will ooze out and up, forming a mountain chain, which we shall call the
Lasagnides. You then leave it until the lasagne has gone hard before opening the vice again.
By now agents of erosion – mice – have scoured the once mighty Lasagnides back to bench
level; but their roots, within the vice itself, remain. If you now reopen the vice to start the
process again, some of those old Lasagnide remnants will stick to one jaw and some to the
other; but the vice reopens along the same basic line. That is how you get some parts of the
same mountain chain in Europe and others in America.
This is the second way to form a supercontinent; one that splits the landmass only to
replace the pieces roughly where they were before. Supercontinent theorists call this
introversion. Any would-be modeller of the next supercontinent faces this crucial question:
will the Atlantic go on expanding and become a new ‘world ocean’ through extroversion, or
will it eventually, like some tail-eating Leviathan, destroy itself by introversion? Roy sees no
reason why the Atlantic should not continue to open; though other ‘preconstructions’ beg to
differ, and for them the next supercontinent looks quite different from Novopangaea.
One preconstruction of the next supercontinent, created by Professor Chris Scotese of the
University of Texas at Arlington, assumes that the Atlantic will one day close again. I put this
idea to Roy Livermore. ‘What Scotese is saying is that subduction is starting up in the
Caribbean and the trenches of the Scotia Sea, and that these will propagate.’ It is true;
although the western half of the Atlantic Ocean’s floor is welded tight to the eastern
seaboards of North and South America, there are some places (in the Caribbean and
between South America and Antarctica) where there is subduction. Livermore’s research
centres on the Scotia Sea area, however, and he doesn’t see subduction there propagating
up the eastern coast of South America. ‘There is rapid subduction in these places, but it is
tending to propagate eastwards,’ he says. In fact, that eastward propagation is what makes
Drake Passage resemble the pierced armour plating. What has passed between the two
headlands is a narrow slice of ocean floor.
‘Plus, it’s still a moot point in geophysics as to how you start subduction off. How you do
this at a passive margin, where the ocean crust is welded to the continent edge, is really not
clear. Around the Pacific you already have well-established subduction zones that have been
going on since the Permian. Why would they turn off ?’
Livermore shifts his attention to the preconstruction he made for 100 million years hence,
halfway to Novopangaea. ‘To show how continents can rift,’ he says, ‘I have taken the
liberty of opening up a new rift in here …’ and his pen follows a new seaway connecting the
Indian Ocean with the North Atlantic. ‘We know the East African Rift is active, so we
Indian Ocean with the North Atlantic. ‘We know the East African Rift is active, so we
propagate that into the future by opening a small ocean. East Africa and Madagascar have
moved across the Indian Ocean to collide with Asia; Australia has already collided with
South-East Asia.’ South of what is now India a mountain chain has arisen along a new
subduction zone. And just south of it lies a familiar landmass, in an unfamiliar position. It is
Antarctica. ‘I don’t believe Antarctica is going to stay at the pole,’ he says. ‘I want it to
come north. Every other fragment of Gondwana has done that, piece by piece, and in the
future Antarctica will; but only if it’s dragged north by a subduction zone.’
Meanwhile the Pacific continues to shrink. North America and South America begin to
wrap around the coasts of Asia. Australia has already collided with Japan and stuck. North
America collides first, and South America sweeps around to consume the last vestiges of the
Pacific and finally form Novopangaea.

Tales of Hoffman

Livermore is only the latest of a number of distinguished geologists to speculate about how
today’s continents might eventually recombine. The first to do so was Paul Hoffman. He
called his future supercontinent, an amalgam of America and Asia, Amasia.
Much has been written about Paul Hoffman, and such accounts usually begin by remarking
that he was the first on the scene. Writer and palaeontologist Richard Fortey has written: ‘If
expertise is defined as knowing more and more about less and less, I am at a loss to describe
what it is to know more and more about more and more, but that is the Hoffman condition.’
One of the leading geologists of our age, Paul Hoffman is a man of whom stories are told.
With his tanned, ascetic head, flashing eyes, mane of white hair and flailing, wiry arms, he has
never been known to take prisoners. One geologist who has worked with him put it to me
succinctly when he said, with a smile and a shake of the head: ‘Paul is one hell of a scary
dude.’
Hoffman is now Sturgis Hooper Professor of Earth Sciences at Harvard University. Much
of his career, however, was spent at the Geological Survey of Canada. As one of the
foremost thinkers on how plate-tectonic processes form supercontinents, and on how it might
be possible to reconstruct supercontinents before Pangaea, Hoffman was also the first to
write about the supercontinents of the future.
He, like Roy Livermore, thought that the Atlantic could well continue to expand and that
we might be now in the middle of a process of continental extroversion (turning Pangaea
inside out). He presented his idea at the 1992 Spring Meeting of the Geological Society of
America in Montreal. ‘The Americas are swinging clockwise about a pivot in NE Siberia,’ he
wrote in his abstract. ‘They seem destined to fuse with the eastern margin of a coalesced
Africa+Eurasia+Australasia, instituting the future supercontinent “Amasia”.’
Hoffman used this pioneering preconstruction as a means of explaining something he
believed about how supercontinents had formed and broken up in the deep past: the process
of extroversion, turning old supercontinents inside out. He never published a map of Amasia,
though in essence it might have looked something like Livermore’s Novopangaea. However,
he did give it a name, and a good one.
Amasia is often referred to by Earth scientists as shorthand for an extroverted resolution to
the current pattern of Pangaea’s break-up; but the concept received relatively little media
the current pattern of Pangaea’s break-up; but the concept received relatively little media
coverage and so never really escaped into the wider world. Not so, however, Chris
Scotese’s projection, based on the opposite assumption, that the Atlantic will one day close
back on itself. This creature definitely got out. And like all supercontinents whose names run
amok, it has attracted the attentions of some strange and mystical colonizers.
Pangea Ultima’s creator, Professor Chris Scotese, is a bear of a man with a big beard and
a big smile. He has been involved for much of his career in reconstructing the continental
positions in the past – a subject called palaeogeographic reconstruction – and in the
Paleomap Project, an amiable, eccentric, homespun (and award-winning) website,
[Link].
Scotese has produced a series of palaeogeographic atlases since he was an undergraduate
at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His first were published as miniature ‘flip books’ in the
1970s and computer animations in the 1970s and 1980s. While a graduate student in the
University of Chicago and the Paleomagnetic Laboratory at the University of Michigan, he
and his supervisors published a series of maps that uniquely combined plate tectonics,
palaeomagnetism and palaeogeography. These early publications of the Paleogeographic
Atlas Project were the first to illustrate, through the emerging understanding of plate
tectonics, how ocean basins and continents have evolved over the past 542 million years of
Earth history.
Scotese’s work did not hit the media, however, until 2000, when the NASA publicity
machine published an interview with him about his work on the Paleomap Project. Attention
focused on his ideas about the next supercontinent.
‘We don’t really know the future, obviously,’ he told NASA science writer Patrick Barry
at the time.
All we can do is make predictions of how plate motions will continue, what new things might happen,
and where it will all end up. The difficult part is the uncertainty in new behaviours. If you’re travelling
on the highway, you can predict where you’re going to be in an hour; but if there’s an accident or you
have to exit, you’re going to change direction. And we have to try to understand what causes those
changes. That’s where we have to make some guesses about the far future 150 to 250 million years from
now.

Among those predictions: Africa is likely to continue its northern migration, pinching the
Mediterranean closed and driving up a Himalayan-scale mountain range in southern Europe.
Of that everyone seems certain. Australia is also likely to merge with the Eurasian continent.
‘Australia is moving north, and is already colliding with the southern islands of South-East
Asia. If we project that motion, the left shoulder of Australia gets caught, and then Australia
rotates and collides against Borneo and south China – much as India did 50 million years ago
– and gets added to Asia.’
So far Scotese’s vision works out very similar to Livermore’s and Hoffman’s. But his
Pangea Ultima forms differently from Amasia or Novopangaea. Scotese believes subduction
will start up on the west side of the Atlantic. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is then eventually pulled
into the Earth. The widening stops and the Atlantic begins to shrink.

Late Permian, 258 Ma

 Paleogeographic maps by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project, University of Texas at Arlington
([Link])

Eocene, 50 Ma
 Scotese told reporters in 2000: ‘Tens of millions of years later, the Americas would come
smashing into the merged Euro-African continent, pushing up a new ridge of Himalaya-like
mountains along the boundary. At that point, most of the world’s landmass would be joined.’
The result, however, is very different from Hoffman’s Amasia or Livermore’s Novopangaea.
It looks like what it is: Pangaea reformed.

Modern World

Late Permian, Eocene and today’s world maps, showing the break-up of Pangaea according to modern research. ©
2002, C. R. Scotese, Paleomap Project.
As a result of the news coverage generated by the NASA story, the name Pangea Ultima
is now out there in the wider world in a way that Amasia never was. But there is something
slightly wrong with its name. Scotese has called it ‘ultima’ because, as his website proclaims,
‘it will be the last supercontinent to form’. But in reality the next supercontinent is just that.
Whether Pangea Ultima, Amasia or Novopangaea, the next supercontinent will break up in
turn and many other supercontinents will form again before the Earth is destroyed. Perhaps a
better name might have been Pangaea Proxima.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away

On a planet like ours, orbiting a sun that itself will one day die and bring geological time to an
On a planet like ours, orbiting a sun that itself will one day die and bring geological time to an
end, nothing is for ever. The deep time with which geologists conjure every day will – as our
space explorer from Betelgeuse discovered – wipe away all traces of everything, including
us. And when geological time does come to an end, the even deeper time of the cosmologist
will erase all traces of everything.
Since the universe began, 13.7 billion years ago (plus or minus 0.2 billion), stars like our
sun have been forming, burning and blowing up, their nuclear fusion furnaces making
progressively heavier elements out of hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant atom. We
and our rocky planet are made from substances composed of those heavy elements (carbon,
oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, iron, silicon) thanks to long-vanished stars. So even the immense
lifespan of the Earth has a context in which it seems small. At this scale everything must go.
Think about what this means. Perhaps once, orbiting those lost stars that made the
immortal atoms that build your body, there may have been some planets, perhaps like ours,
on which there may have been life; life that may have become sentient, and that may have
developed civilizations far beyond ours. We cannot possibly know this for sure; but there has
been time, since the universe came into being, for it all to have come and gone – more than
once. The only traces now left of those possible worlds may be those atoms in you, formed
in the stellar explosions that banished whole histories to oblivion and wiped the slate clean.
And one day, when there are no more days, that will be precisely all that’s left of us too.
But not yet. Although Earth is about 4700 million years old at the moment, it is actually a
galactic youngster. The universe was already 9000 million years old when the Earth started
to form from cosmic dust and debris. Earth’s lifespan is determined by the Sun, which will
engulf our world in its death throes. So not only do we know how old Earth actually is, we
also know (because we understand how long it will take the Sun to exhaust its fuel) how old
the Earth will get. From this we can say that our planet has passed her middle age but still has
a way to go: perhaps five or six times longer than the entire period that complex life has lived
on her surface.
We began with a glimpse just a little way into our planet’s (and perhaps our species’)
future, a mere 200 million years or so, by which time the next supercontinent will have
formed. Apart from giving some sense of the immensity of the time with which we will be
dealing, I hope it illustrates another central point of the supercontinent story; and that is how
building imaginary worlds stirs passions.
Imagined worlds, both past and future, embody assumptions that affect our vision of
ourselves, our past and future, our identity, our prospects. As human beings, our own
species and what might happen to it lies at the heart of most of our thinking. The unsettling
thing about the universe is the fact that within it our existence has no importance; and the
unsettling thing about science is that it reflects that. The effect has come to be called the
‘progressive dethronement’ of Man. Science attempts to find out how things really are, rather
than (for example) to frame myths to explain things away while at the same time flattering our
vanity by putting humans at the centre of everything. When geology rebuilds the lost worlds
of nature, the assumptions it employs put no weight upon human beings’ mental comfort.
Building lost worlds, now scientifically the domain of geologists, has been with us a lot
longer than geology, which as a scientific discipline is barely two centuries old. Lost worlds
as an idea reach back to the earliest of our planet’s explorers, who speculated about
continents that may have once existed, or might still exist, somewhere, beyond or under the
sea. Wondering what lies over the horizons of the deep oceans and deep time is no dry
pursuit, through the centuries it has held the power to embody dreams, hopes and fears – of
pursuit, through the centuries it has held the power to embody dreams, hopes and fears – of
idyllic pasts and futures, of nationhood, myth and legend – even of God and divine purpose.
And in the mêlée of history the two have often become confused as scientific ideas about
possible ‘lost worlds’ have escaped the domain of science and taken on new life as myth.

Here be parrots

After 1492, travellers’ tales began to feed rumours of lost continents. The great world map
Typus Orbis Terrarum, published in Antwerp in 1570 by Abraham Ortelius (1527–98),
fossilized many of these ideas into a kind of reality. As well as a host of fictitious islands in the
South and North Atlantic, Ortelius depicted massive unknown continents covering the (then
unvisited) North and South Poles. These were the first lost continents to be endorsed by
something we might recognize as ‘science’. And you can’t miss them.
Ortelius was the son of an Antwerp merchant and started illustrating maps at the age of
twenty. He was no traveller himself; he preferred the information to come to him. Dictionaries
of scientific biography have traditionally been rather sniffy about the ‘uncritical’ Ortelius,
because he collected all the information available to him about what people thought the world
was like, and naturally much of it was wrong. Now, this fusion of the known with the
asserted, the rumoured and the traditional, is precisely what is most fascinating about his
‘theatre of the world’.
‘Terra septemtrionalis incognita’ (‘Unknown northern land’) it says across the top of
the map, and ‘Terra australis nondum cognita’ (‘Southern land not yet known’) across the
bottom. These unknown polar lands, especially the southern one, almost dwarf the known
continents of the world. Although Terra australis occupies the site of the then undiscovered
continent of Antarctica, it is very much larger. Even though it is incognita, Ortelius does
record a few details. Facing the Cape of Good Hope, for example, he writes ‘Psittacorum
regio’, and goes on to explain how, ‘according to the Portuguese’, this great southern
continent is inhabited by giant parrots.
At one point, in a strange coincidence with geological reality, the parrot-infested Terra
australis reaches out to touch South America at Tierra del Fuego. Antarctica was indeed
once joined to South America across Drake Passage, the region of ocean floor studied by
Roy Livermore. Antarctica only became today’s frozen continent about thirty million years
ago when that link was broken and the circumpolar current (which isolates Antarctica from
the heat of the world ocean) finally shut the freezer door.
Ortelius did not invent these continents from nothing. The idea of a great southern
continent began life as an ancient Greek notion of a ‘counter-Earth’ ‘balancing’ the known
continents of the Northern Hemisphere, and named by Hipparchos of Rhodes (190–125
BC), who coined the term ‘Antichthon’ for it. Hipparchos even speculated that Sri Lanka
might represent this southern continent’s northernmost extremity, thus joining a long line of
writers, from ancient Tamil poets to modern geologists, to embroil the southern extremities of
the Indian subcontinent in stories of lost lands: real, imaginary and somewhere in between.
Ortelius’s great map, and the Thesaurus Geographicus that he published six years later,
start us off on the story of vanished supercontinents. It is barely ten years, in fact, since
historians realized that Ortelius was also the first to speculate, from the fit of the opposing
historians realized that Ortelius was also the first to speculate, from the fit of the opposing
shores of the Atlantic, that this ocean may have arisen by the horizontal displacement of its
bordering continents. Supercontinents and continental drift were born twins.
Not until 1994, in a paper in the British scientific journal Nature by a US historian of
science, James Romm, did Ortelius finally get the credit he deserved. In the 1596 edition of
his Thesaurus Geographicus Ortelius speculated about Plato’s allegorical ‘lost world’ of
Atlantis, which by that time was widely regarded as a piece of true history. He went on to
make two scientific breakthroughs. He noted how the opposing shores of the Atlantic were
congruent, and he then speculated about how some catastrophe might have separated them.
He concluded that if Plato was to be regarded as accurate history, then his work should be
reinterpreted in terms of lateral dislocation of the opposing continents, rather than
subsidence.
They say the best place to hide information is in a library, and of all the books in a library
the most secure are encyclopaedias. So it was that Ortelius’s insight lay buried for four
centuries as a single entry in a huge, outdated and unread work of reference.

ICE AT THE EQUATOR

History warns us … that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as
superstitions.
THOMAS HUXLEY, 1878

Bouverie Street is a short and rather drab offshoot of Fleet Street in London. Number
twenty-seven, which later was to become the office of a newspaper and of its editor, Charles
Dickens, was originally built by William Blanford to house a small manufacturing business as
well as himself and his wife. She bore him two sons, William Thomas and Henry Francis
Blanford. Both became geologists and, like many others of their generation, pursued their
life’s work in India, work that would lead them to make the wild surmise that Southern
Hemisphere continents were once united.
William, born in 1832, was the elder by two years. He would live twelve years longer than
his younger brother, dying in 1905 covered with scientific glory: Fellow of the Royal Society
and President of the Geological Society of London. And in a world obsessed with priority, it
is William who is generally credited with being the first to notice the striking geological
similarities between rocks of the now widely separated southern continents and draw
attention to a conundrum that would puzzle geologists and biologists for the best part of a
hundred years.
As red spread over the world map, sons of England sought their fortunes – financial,
military and scientific – among the Empire’s furthest reaches. And as geologists were off
studying the rocks of these distant lands, a new species of biologist (the biogeographer)
began mapping the distribution of animals and plants across the known world. It was not long
before scientific London began to receive reports of some odd patterns that demanded
before scientific London began to receive reports of some odd patterns that demanded
explanation.
These patterns, in the distribution of rock types, in the fossils they yielded to the hammer,
and in the living things that grew above them, boiled down to two basic and very puzzling
facts. Some things that were very similar to one another were being found much farther apart
than their similarity would suggest possible; while other things, utterly different in character,
often cropped up much closer together than their dissimilarity should demand. Every scientist
who added another fact to this mounting body of evidence instinctively knew that this was
important. But what was it telling them?

King coal

The annus mirabilis for the Blanford brothers was 1856. David Livingstone was returning
triumphantly to Britain after his coast-to-coast exploration of the ‘dark continent’ of Africa.
In Germany’s Neander Valley the first fossils of another species of human being, Homo
neanderthalensis, were being unearthed. And in India the Blanfords were surveying coal-
bearing rocks in the eastern state of Orissa.
The brothers had arrived in India after being offered posts at the country’s nascent
Geological Survey by its Superintendent, Dr Thomas Oldham. Unfortunately, Oldham had
neglected to tell anyone about either appointment, so, when the Blanfords landed in the late
summer of 1855, nobody in Calcutta was expecting them. Oldham was away in the field.
The Survey had no offices. They were stranded.
By one of those absurd pieces of chance that sometimes attend the fortunate traveller,
amid the hurly-burly of one of the biggest cities on the planet, the hapless brothers ran into a
fellow staff member of the Survey, William Theobald. There were no telegraphs and the
posts were very slow, so it was December before they finally met their new boss on his
return.
The Blanfords had not wasted their time, filling the intervening months with excursions to
the Raniganj coalfield and the study of Hindustani. And less than another month elapsed
before Oldham dispatched them, with Theobald, on their first proper job. They were sent to
examine and report on a coalfield near Talchir (Talcher), some sixty miles north-west of
Cuttack, an important provincial town in Orissa.
The Talcher coalfield, today part of a company called Mahanadi Coalfields, still boasts
reserves of 35.78 billion tonnes. It feeds several local power plants operated by India’s
National Thermal Power Corporation, the country’s biggest generating company. What the
Blanfords found, as well as coal, was evidence that before it had been deposited, in what
they presumed to be lush, steaming tropical swamps, India had apparently suffered a massive
Ice Age.
The telltale deposits lay at the base of a two-kilometre-thick series of sedimentary rocks
rich in coals and plant fossils. Underneath these coal-bearing rocks lay another unit, the
Talchir Formation. This consisted mostly of sandstones and shales; but at its very base, lying
on top of an eroded and grooved ancient land surface, was a highly unusual deposit. Many
boulders, some larger than a man, lay embedded in a matrix of fine mudstone. The curious
thing about this was the coincidence of huge boulders with fine mud. No beach, river or
thing about this was the coincidence of huge boulders with fine mud. No beach, river or
seabed accumulates a deposit like that. Apart from volcanic mudflows (which this was not,
though many in years to come would claim it was) only one known natural agent was
powerful enough to have moved the boulders and yet also was capable of depositing them
together with fine mud: a glacier.
Glaciers are extremely powerful erosive agents, gouging out their U-shaped valleys and
breaking up the rock walls into debris of all sizes from boulders as big as buses to rock dust
as fine as flour. And when glaciers melt and retreat, all the material carried by the slowly
moving river of ice is dumped together. The result is called, appropriately, boulder clay, or
sometimes till. And a fossilized till, one turned into rock by age and pressure, is a tillite.
Looking more closely at the boulders, it is possible to see scratches that also betray the
action of ice, which grinds each piece of debris over its neighbour with huge force. It is also
likely that many of the boulders have travelled hundreds (even thousands) of kilometres, and
a careful comparison with a geological map can help you work out the direction in which the
ice moved.
But, as we shall see many times in the story of reconstructing supercontinents, it is not
always easy to admit what the rocks are telling you when your mind refuses to believe it. This
is what makes the Blanfords’ conjecture so amazing today. The two young men returned to
Calcutta and submitted their first report to their boss. In it they said they had discovered
unequivocal evidence that ice sheets once covered what is now tropical India. The intellectual
toughness that this betrays is matched only by the fact that their boss appears to have
believed them.
By no means everyone was convinced. It simply seemed impossible. Even as late as 1877
the recorded discussions of a paper given to the Geological Society of London by the
younger Blanford are full of disbelief. But by that time the same boulder bed had been traced
beyond Talchir throughout a wide area of Bengal and the Central Provinces. By 1886, when
the elder Blanford read another paper at the Society, boulders bearing those unequivocal
scratches had been found. There was no longer any room for serious doubt. The Blanfords
had been right all along. Somehow, all those millions of years ago, there had indeed been
sea-level ice at twenty degrees of latitude.
Explaining how this could be so became no easier in the decades following the discovery.
A similar boulder bed (now named the Dwyka Formation) had been discovered at the
bottom of a similar succession of rocks bearing similar fossils in South Africa. Henry
Blanford had already suggested that these were the same as the glacial deposits he and his
brother had first seen in India. Moreover, as early as 1861, the frequently absent Mr Oldham
had tentatively correlated the Talchir boulder bed with one he had seen on a visit to
Australia. These, too, had cropped up all over the country, from Queensland in the north
through Sydney to Wollongong in the south, and in the Blue Mountains in the west. This
troublesome glaciation, which seemed impossible enough even when confined to India, now
appeared to have spanned the Equator and covered half the globe.
Further investigations were throwing up bigger questions than they were answering. Could
the Earth perhaps even have tilted on its axis, as Oldham had suggested? And what was the
precise age of the glaciation? The fossils of Southern Hemisphere rocks were being
described bit by bit; but they were very different from the better-known fossils of the
Northern Hemisphere. It was like trying to navigate by the southern stars knowing only the
boreal constellations. Maybe this glaciation had coincided with one of the mass extinctions
that had already been recognized in the fossil record. Was there a connection? Nobody
that had already been recognized in the fossil record. Was there a connection? Nobody
could be sure, but everyone had an opinion about why so many similar rocks, with their
identical fossils, were found so widely scattered across the continents of the Southern
Hemisphere, and how a glaciation could occur at the Equator.
Looking back at the lives of geologists from these heroic days makes one doubt that
Victorians were made from the same stuff as we are. William Blanford worked for twenty-
seven years in the Indian Survey, during which time he travelled and mapped widely, not only
within the subcontinent but through Afghanistan and what was then Abyssinia and Persia. He
retired from the Geological Survey at fifty and bought a house in Kensington. He married,
settled into London’s scientific scene and began his second career.
W. T. Blanford had already been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1874. Before
him now lay many years of office-bearing, not only at the Geological Society of London but
also at the Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society of London. During his
travels Blanford had noticed many things that puzzled him about the living world, and his
retirement offered him the chance to complement his geological work by researching more
fully the distribution of species across the subcontinent that had been the main interest of his
life.
In 1890 Blanford wrote the following words, which have since turned out to be even truer
than he knew: ‘all who recognise how intimately the story of the Earth is bound up with that
of its inhabitants will have little doubt that the present distribution of animals and plants is of
the highest geological importance, and that the existence of particular forms of living beings in
continents and islands is the result and the record of the history of those areas and of their
connexions with each other [italics added].’
Presidential addresses to the Geological Society have often been long, but few rival the
fifty-four pages of the Society’s Quarterly Journal that are occupied by Blanford’s second;
and few Presidents (even including that of zoological luminary Thomas Henry Huxley, exactly
twenty years before) had quite the nerve to deliver one so completely non-geological. But
this was probably deliberate. Geologists had to be made to take biogeography seriously.

Grand tours

Biogeography had come into its own as the great trading empires of the West had fanned out
across the globe, taking their naturalists with them. A small army of botanizers and hunters,
including many eminent scientists, set off to find, draw, paint, capture, skin, stuff and in some
cases send back their captives alive for the fascination of the London public. They also
returned home with new ideas, ideas that would break first on London and quickly
overwhelm the world with their significance.
Charles Darwin had his eyes opened as the gentleman-naturalist companion to the captain
of the Beagle. For the man who would be his champion, the less genteel Thomas Henry
Huxley, the experience was to be a spell in Her Majesty’s Navy aboard a leaky frigate called
HMS Rattlesnake. As the young ship’s surgeon on his first job, Huxley was forced to
inhabit a cramped berth, frequently awash, and to watch his shipmates die of injuries and
fevers he had no medicine to cure. Science was feeling the spur of Empire.
Another of the great biogeographers of the nineteenth century, Philip Lutley Sclater
 Another of the great biogeographers of the nineteenth century, Philip Lutley Sclater
(1829–1913), sailed for the Americas in 1856. In the course of his travels over the next
decades he was not only to cover most of the USA but also many of the continents linked
geologically by those boulder beds and plant fossils (including Argentina, Australia and India)
and, crucially, the lands of the Malay Archipelago. He was also the first modern scientist not
only to propose but also to name a hypothetical vanished supercontinent.
After he returned to London, Sclater’s career was worthy and long. For forty-four years
he held the influential post of Secretary to the Zoological Society of London. But he made his
mark as an original thinker just two years after leaving on his first great trip, by triumphantly
dividing the living world into six great realms defined by distinctive assemblages of animals,
realms that are still recognized today. As an ornithologist first and foremost, Sclater began
with the birds, Class Aves as zoologists have it.
His paper to the Linnean Society on birds’ global geographical distribution became an
instant classic. He soon began to incorporate other animals into his scheme, and twenty years
later wrote a review in the popular and influential monthly periodical Nineteenth Century in
which he recounted the curious distribution patterns of the lemur.
Lemurs are primates, grouped together broadly as Lemuriformes. They are less closely
related to humans than monkeys or apes are, and much more ancient in evolutionary terms.
As defined today, they are limited to Madagascar and the Comores, where they have
diversified into fifty-five species and subspecies, including the mouse and dwarf lemurs, the
true lemurs, sportive lemurs, the woolly lemurs and the ghostly aye-aye, the nocturnal grub-
eater with one modified long finger that it uses to winkle its prey out of wood.
At the time Sclater was writing he used a broader classification of lemurs than our modern
one, including similar, related primate groups found in southern India and Sri Lanka and the
scattered islands of South-East Asia. The pattern he found recalled the one geologists were
puzzling over with their boulder beds and plant fossils. Lemur-like primates had a scattered
distribution that didn’t make sense. One could believe, for example, that lemurs might cross
the strait between Africa and Madagascar on rafts. But was it likely that these little creatures
(or their common ancestors) could cross all the way to Sri Lanka and the Malay
Archipelago, traversing the Equator and thousands of miles of ocean, or float there on rafts
washed from distant shores?
It was 1864 when Sclater first published his proposed solution to the problem, in a paper
called ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in the Quarterly Journal of Science. He wrote:
The anomalies of the Mammal fauna of Madagascar can best be explained by supposing that … a large
continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans … that this continent was broken up into
islands, of which some have become amalgamated with … Africa, some … with what is now Asia; and
that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which
… I should propose the name Lemuria!

Lemurs could not have swum between these far-distant places – they must have walked – so
there must have been land.
Sclater was not the first scientist to suggest a lost southern continent to explain biological
(or geological) anomalies. Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772–1844), a French natural historian, had
suggested one in the 1840s, having also noticed the peculiarities and Indian affinities of
Madagascar’s animals. What Sclater did, however, was give his creation life by naming it.
This enabled his ‘Lemuria’ to escape from the world of science and enter common
knowledge. Lemuria, a place that never really existed, began to rise to the status of an
Atlantis, to enter into myth and inhabit that same strange hinterland of half-truth. By the
Atlantis, to enter into myth and inhabit that same strange hinterland of half-truth. By the
1880s the idea of Lemuria had become well entrenched in the literature. The ghost had
entered the machine.

Toeing the line

Another travelling naturalist whose story intersects with ours at this point was Alfred Russel
Wallace (1823–1913). Though later critical of invoking sunken continents as a way of
explaining biogeographic provinces, at first he eagerly adopted Sclater’s Lemuria in his
writings, believing that the giant vanished continent must have extended from ‘West Africa to
Burma … South China and the Celebes’.
Wallace is mainly remembered today for hitting upon natural selection as the driving force
of evolution independently of Darwin. This is the great Welsh naturalist’s other great claim to
fame. Unlike Sclater and the geologists (who noticed things that were too far apart to be so
similar), Wallace’s breakthrough came when he began to notice certain animal species that
were too different to be so close together.
As you sit in a small beachside café in Padangbai, Bali, waiting for the Lombok ferry to
arrive at the jetty on the southern headland, you look out at the palm-covered arms of land
that enclose the bay, the fishing canoes drawn up on the sand, their great outriggers and
prows painted like crocodile jaws, and you can make out your destination quite easily.
Mysterious Lombok stands, densely wooded, against a pale horizon. Its classic cone shape
tells you that you are looking at Mount Rinjani, Lombok’s 3727-metre volcano. In fact,
though, you are looking only at its top half, and missing completely all of the southern, low-
lying part of the island. It lies below the horizon, hidden by the curvature of the Earth.
The guidebook you are reading will tell you how different Lombok will feel from
easygoing, relatively well-to-do Bali, with its colourful animistic religion, its devotion to
flowers, its picturesque processions, representational art, rich music and dance culture and
toleration of alcohol. For a start Lombok is much poorer. Even quite recently people have
died of starvation there after bad harvests. And despite pockets of Balinese influence in the
west, a form of Islam dominates the island.
It is tempting to draw a parallel between these cultural divides and the next thing your
guidebook will tell you, which is that the short twenty-five kilometres of water you will soon
be crossing separate two completely different animal realms: one Australasian, the other
Eurasian. And you will be told that the divide is named after Alfred Russel Wallace, co-
founder of evolution theory.
Wallace spent much of his life in or around this archipelago (some of it engaged in catching
a live bird of paradise for Philip Sclater at the Zoological Society of London). The ‘line’ he
set out bisected the archipelago, running south of Mindanao, between Borneo and Sulawesi
to the north of where you sit in Padangbai, and threading, like cotton through a needle’s eye,
along the Lombok Strait. Like Sclater and his great realms, Wallace based his first
observations primarily on bird species (mainly parrots, though not giant ones).
The Lombok Strait, your guidebook might also say, is a 300-metredeep channel with
some of the strongest currents in the world, which is why the ferry takes four hours. But
despite this fact, the Wallace line is not actually as sharp as they would have you believe.
despite this fact, the Wallace line is not actually as sharp as they would have you believe.
Depending on which animals you look at, you can draw many different lines through the
scattered islands of the region. Sclater, for example, working with his son William, defined a
different line much further to the East, dividing Celebes and Timor from Western New
Guinea.
There are many other, less famous dividing lines, and even two ‘Wallace lines’, for the
great man allowed himself second thoughts in 1910. Weber’s line (1904) is based on the
distribution of freshwater fish, and farthest east of all lies Lydekker’s line (1896), hugging the
edge of the Australian coastal shelf. It all depends on which animal you take as your most
important marker. Different species have different abilities when it comes to dispersing
themselves. Certain birds, for example, are more able to cross deep salt-water straits with
strong currents than amphibians or freshwater fish.
Wallace never truly understood what his faunal break meant nor why it was so abrupt on a
global scale; but part of the answer lies in the depth of the channels that separate the islands.
Even during the last Ice Age global falls in sea level never much exceeded 125 metres and so
never exposed the bottom of the Lombok Strait. A land bridge was never established. But if
the seas around Bali had been shallower,
or the last Ice Age more severe, the whole modern pattern of animal distribution would
have been radically different. Today, instead of choosing any particular line, biogeographers
acknowledge a zone – the region between Wallace’s line in the west and Lydekker’s line in
the east – and have dubbed it Wallacea: a broad buffer between two of Philip Sclater’s great
faunal realms.
Until geologists found a mechanism that could make neighbours of such different animal
assemblages with such different evolutionary histories, the origins of Wallacea would remain
another mystery. And, unlike those animal assemblages that were too far apart to be so
similar, it could not be explained by suggesting that large tracts of ancient continent had
disappeared under the waves, stranding the lemurs and all their friends on now-distant
shores.

Weird science

The ring-tailed lemur was first described and named scientifically in 1758 as Lemur catta by
the father of classification, Carl von Linné (or Carolus Linnaeus, to use his Latinized name),
the Swedish taxonomist (1707–78) who gave his name to the Linnean Society of London,
where Darwin and Wallace’s joint paper on natural selection was first presented in July
1858. All Linnaeus knew about these nocturnal primates was that they had ghostly faces,
trimmed with haloes of white fur, big, forward-pointing, cat-like reflective eyes (that stared
unnervingly at you out of the jungle) and that they made ghostly cries in the night that chilled
the blood. He may also have known that local legends held lemurs to be the souls of
ancestors. And so he chose a name that seemed appropriate, deriving it from lemures, the
name used by the Romans for ancestral ghosts. (In pagan Rome these household ghosts had
their special days (9, 11 and 13 May of the Julian calendar), days that became known as
Lemuria.)
So when Philip Sclater brought the word ‘Lemuria’ back from the dead to denote a
ghostly, vanished continent he unwittingly linked it to the occult. The circularity of this
ghostly, vanished continent he unwittingly linked it to the occult. The circularity of this
etymological accident may seem poetically satisfying and appropriate, but the name does
almost seem to have brought a curse. Mythical lands attract strange settlers.
The astronomer Percival Lowell filled his fanciful reconstructions of the surface of Mars
(1896) with cities and irrigation canals, yet he still forms part of the history of legitimate
astronomy. But, in the days before people invented myths about aliens from other planets,
they invented races that peopled long-vanished terrestrial continents. In the same way the
fantasies of mystics and the age-old notion of foundering continents grade imperceptibly with
the early science of the supercontinent story and prevailing theories about how the crust of
the Earth actually moves.
The energetic and wildly enthusiastic German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) got
hold of the idea of Lemuria and suggested that Sclater’s continent had also been the cradle of
human evolution. In the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte of 1868 (translated into English
as The History of Creation, 1876) he published a map showing the radiation of humans
across the entire globe, with all the myriad branches converging on the hypothetical lost
continent.
This immediately raised the political stakes, as anthropology always does, because it
closely affects people’s assumptions about themselves. The origin of humans is a charged
science, and more interesting to most people than the origin of lemurs. Sure enough, it
brought Lemuria to a wider audience, especially as Haeckel specifically linked the place to
myth by subtitling the continent, in brackets, ‘Paradies’ (Paradise).
Here are two widely separated examples of how Lemuria caught on. In 1876, the year
Haeckel’s English translation was published, Lemuria made an appearance in Friedrich
Engels’s The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. On his opening
page Engels wrote: ‘Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch … which
geologists call the Tertiary … a particularly highly-developed species of anthropoid apes
lived somewhere in the tropical zone – probably on a great continent that has now sunk to
the bottom of the Indian Ocean.’ Even H. G. Wells included a reference to Lemuria in his
Outline of History (1919), airily speculating that the ‘nursery’ of humankind ‘may have been
where now the Indian Ocean stands’. Lemuria thus became a textbook fact and, in the way
of such things, remained so many years after most legitimate science had abandoned the
whole idea.
Crucially for what followed, Lemuria also became a textbook fact in India, through some
ancillary work carried out by the Blanford brothers. In 1873 Henry Blanford wrote a
schoolbook of physical geography in which he told his Indian readers that their continent had
once been linked to Africa and that this link had been sundered by enormous outbursts of
volcanic activity. Six years later William Blanford’s Indian Geological Survey published its
Manual, describing the country’s geology. Here the case for a former geological link
between India and southern Africa was clearly made. These scientific pronouncements found
particular resonance among certain peoples in south-eastern India, the Tamils.

Lemuria and Katalakōl

In 1974 Léopold-Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), poet and founding President of Senegal

In 1974 Léopold-Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), poet and founding President of Senegal
from 1960 to 1980, addressed the International Institute of Tamil Studies in Madras. He
mentioned ‘the cradle of mankind’ and located it in the Indian Ocean just as H. G. Wells had
done. He then went on to bring the date of its destruction under the waters of the Indian
Ocean forward to the New Stone Age and suggested that those places traditionally thought
of in the West as ‘cradles of civilization’, Egypt and Mesopotamia, derived their knowledge
from the peoples who had fled this cataclysm. Archaeologists, he said, should have the
chance to explore the depths of the seas, ‘to discover old lithic industries or human skeleton
fossils in the area stretching from East Africa to Southern India’. Senghor was a member of
the Académie Française and the author of many books of poetry and political philosophy;
but from a scientific point of view this was a very odd thing to believe in 1974.
In 1981, as part of the Fifth International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madurai, a
documentary film was screened. Made with the personal backing of Chief Minister M. G.
Ramachandran and paid for by the government of Tamilnadu, this curious film traced the
origin of Tamil language and literature to its most distant past on Kumarikkantam, a mythical
lost homeland, redolent in Tamil mythology.
Tamilnadu, the Indian state that stretches from the southern tip of India at Kanyakumari to
Tiruvallur on the Bay of Bengal, is home to some fifty-six million people who speak Tamil,
one of twenty-six languages spoken mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka and collectively
called Dravidian. While many show varying degrees of Sanskrit influence, Tamil is the purest
of all.
Tamil has a rich ancient literature and, crucially for this story, one myth in particular that
cites a terrible flood that catastrophically swallowed up the Tamils’ formerly much more
extensive homeland, destroying much ancient lore, civilization and majesty, and leaving the
people with that small remnant of peninsular India which they now inhabit. Tamil literature
refers to this inundation as Katalakōl.
The scholar Sumathi Ramaswamy dates the appearance of Sclater’s Lemuria in modern
Tamil writings to the late 1890s, when Tamil authors first made the connection between it
and the mythic homeland, of Kumarikkantam, sometimes even referring to this lost continent
as ‘Ilemuriakkantam’. Modern science was being called upon to lend a picturesque Tamil
myth the aura of literal truth.
The result of this process (which continues to this day) has been to set up a curious
dichotomy. While academic historians in Tamilnadu do not necessarily believe in the literal
truth of Katalakōl any more than their geologists might, among ordinary folk in Tamilnadu
there is a commonly held belief that Western science ‘backs up’ the claims of their
mythology. This continues to be implied, more or less overtly, in Tamil Studies.
Citing Sclater, Blanford and Haeckel, Tamil ‘devotees’ (as Ramaswamy terms them) thus
imply (and in many cases openly claim) that the Tamil people are the ancestors of humanity
and that their language is not only more ancient than Sanskrit (which is true), but is also the
mother of all Dravidian tongues and even the oldest language of mankind. To put this into a
more familiar English context, this is rather as if students of English were taught Arthurian
texts with the clear implication that all that ‘sword and sorcery’ really happened. As
Ramaswamy writes, this belief serves a political purpose: ‘The collective yearning for an
unreclaimable past plenitude holds together a people in exile otherwise riven apart by caste,
class and religious differences.’
However, there is a fly in the soothing ointment. The lost supercontinent of Lemuria never
existed. The claim that it affirms the literal truth of the Tamil flood myth, via outmoded
existed. The claim that it affirms the literal truth of the Tamil flood myth, via outmoded
Western science, is an empty one. Science has moved on. By tying themselves to an
unsustainable insistence on literal truth, Tamil’s devotees align themselves with outdated
science, while at the same time depriving themselves of a more positive (overtly
acknowledged) mythology. Myths, after all, can contain truths other than literal ones, truths
that can be more fruitful. As Ramaswamy writes: ‘A mongrel formation, neither pure fantasy
nor respectable history, Tamil labours of loss are vulnerable to disavowal and dismissal both
as fantasy and as history.’
Those familiar with the argumentation of so-called ‘creation science’ will find this
philosophical bind oddly familiar. By insisting on the literal truth of the creation myth told in
the Old Testament and by vainly looking for evidence of the supernatural among the things of
this world, young-Earth creationists saddle themselves with a similarly impoverished mix.
What they espouse is both bad science and bad religion, demonstrating nothing more than
ignorance on the one hand and lack of faith on the other.
In Tamilnadu the conflict between modern science and an ancient myth propped up by the
trappings of science (variously outmoded, selectively quoted or fraudulently misrepresented)
rarely becomes apparent. One senses that those who know of the conflict (rather than
purported accord) between myth and modern science see little purpose in challenging a
widely believed misconception that does little practical harm.
However, every now and then political pronouncements can force the issue. In 1971 the
Tamilnadu government decided to assemble a panel of scholars to ‘write the history of
Tamilakam from ancient times to the present’. The education minister, R. Nedunceliyan,
observed at the time: ‘When we say history, we mean from … the time of Lemuria that was
seized by the ocean.’ That sort of thing can (and does) make scholars uncomfortable.
As Ramaswamy notes, this Tamil belief remains ‘eccentric’ within the culture of
Tamilnadu. The spurious linkage of myth to science is confined to courses about Tamil,
taught through the medium of Tamil, using textbooks produced by local publishers and the
government-run textbook society, and catering predominantly for those (mainly less
advantaged) people attending state schools. And so the belief persists, a hand-me-down
textbook fact, immortal but (mostly) invisible.

Wave of death

Facing Sri Lanka across Palk Bay is the tip of India. Once dubbed Cape Comorin, it is now
known by its original name of Kanyakumari. In the 1950s it became the subject of a
concerted political effort to ensure that it was incorporated into the emergent Tamil state,
which took its present form under the Madras presidency in 1969. ‘Kumari’ is a powerful
name in Tamil. It is the name of the mythical lost continent itself. It is also the name of one of
its supposed mountains, and also of a major river that supposedly crossed it. Kanyakumari is
the only surviving real place still to bear this heavily loaded name; a last bastion against the
cruel sea that tore the Tamil homeland from its people in Katalakōl. It plays the role of ‘a
vestige of the vanished’.
Just a few hundred metres offshore is a tiny islet on which the Vivekananda Memorial now
stands. It is composed of a rock called charnockite, a rock first identified in the tombstone of
stands. It is composed of a rock called charnockite, a rock first identified in the tombstone of
the first governor of Calcutta, Job Charnock (d. 1693), which was formed deep in the
Earth’s crust 550 million years ago as two continental masses fused together. Geology does
not admit to having sacred sites, but if it did, this would be one of them. For reasons that we
shall explore later, geologists refer to this island as ‘Gondwana Junction’.
Like many of the world’s sacred sites, the islet is sacred to more than one group. On 26
December 2004, at nine o’clock in the morning, about five hundred pilgrims, mostly Indian,
crowded on to the rock to stand at the Vivekananda Memorial and see the sun rise.
Although they would not number among them, before that day was out, over 200,000
people all around the Indian Ocean would be dead. Many had already died; waves of
destruction and death were spreading outwards, triggered by the biggest earthquake for fifty
years, caused by the very processes that are forming the next supercontinent. An event that
has certainly happened before, and will just as certainly happen again, was about to
overwhelm Tamilnadu.
Before Boxing Day 2004 the most recent Global Geophysical Event, which by definition
affects (in some way) people on every continent, had been the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.
The Tsunami likewise had the effect of drawing the world together, but it also united Earth
scientists in frustration that their knowledge had not been used to full effect, for example, to
set up early-warning systems that had existed in the Pacific since the end of the Second
World War. It also explained two things. It explained why Tamil people have an embedded
myth of a dangerous and land-hungry sea that snatches life away in a catastrophic Katalakōl.
And for me it explained why the seemingly abstruse subject of the Earth’s Supercontinent
Cycle matters to everyone, everywhere.
But now is not the moment.

QUEENS OF MU

‘Some kind of legend from way back, which no one seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth.’
DOUGLAS ADAMS, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

Philip Sclater’s hypothetical lost supercontinent, invoked to explain the scattered distribution
of lemurs, was haunted right from the outset. But of all the strange settlers Lemuria attracted,
none was stranger (or had wider influence) than Helena Petrovna Hahn.
Hahn (1831–91) was born in the southern Ukrainian city now known as Dnipropetrovsk
but which was then known as Ekaterinoslav; she was the daughter of Pyotr Alexeyevich von
Hahn, an army colonel, and his novelist wife Elena Fadeev. Elena, who had earned herself
the literary sobriquet of ‘the Russian George Sand’, died when her daughter was only eleven.
Although the family had moved around considerably, as army families do, her father was
unable to take little Helena with him after her mother’s death so Pyotr Alexeyevich farmed
her out to her maternal grandmother, Elena Pavlovna de Fadeev, she was nobly born, a well-
her out to her maternal grandmother, Elena Pavlovna de Fadeev, she was nobly born, a well-
known botanist, and another formidable character.
Helena Petrovna was to grow up to be one of the strangest women of the nineteenth
century, going from sweatshop worker to bareback rider, professional pianist and finally co-
founder and guru of a pop-
ular and once-influential new religion called Theosophy. Helena Petrovna was the first of
the New Agers, and she derived the name by which the world knows her today from her first
husband, General Nikifor Vassiliyevich Blavatsky.
Escaping from the General soon after the wedding by breaking a candlestick over his head
and fleeing on horseback to Constantinople, Madame Blavatsky – after another very short
marriage – set off to travel the world, ending up in 1873 in New York, where she set up as a
medium. There she teamed up with Henry Steel Olcott (a lawyer who left his family for her)
and others and founded the Theosophical Society, a new religion combining aspects of
Hinduism and Buddhism. This new creed, she claimed, had come to her in a ‘secret doctrine’
passed down from an ancient brotherhood. Unlike those of the Rosicrucians and
Freemasons, Blavatsky’s ancient brothers derived from Eastern rather than Western sources.
And in common with many subsequent New Agers, Blavatsky claimed that her so-called
Akashic Wisdom was consistent with science, and especially the then fashionable new
science of evolutionary biology. This was a remarkable claim, since the scientific idea she
most hated was the one that humans had evolved from apes. Madame Blavatsky had her
own ideas about that and set her own distinctive account of human origins on landmasses that
no longer existed. Lemuria, coming as it did with impeccable scientific credentials, fitted the
bill perfectly, just as it had for Tamils.
Blavatsky had moved from America to India in 1879, and in 1882 she passed a number
of letters from her late Master, Koot Hoomi Lal Sing, to an Anglo-Indian newspaper.
(Graphologists later determined that she wrote them herself.) The cosmology contained in
them was based on the number seven: seven planes of existence, roots of humanity, cycles of
evolution and reincarnation. This scheme formed the basis for her book The Secret
Doctrine, which became the main text of the Theosophical movement.
Before she could finish this opus, however, Blavatsky was hounded out of India. Two of
her staff, Alexis and Emma Coulomb (who may well have been put up to it by Christian
missionaries), threatened to expose her mystic feats as trickery, and Blavatsky returned to
Europe, where she completed The Secret Doctrine in 1888. It ultimately derived, she
wrote, from a ‘lost’ work called The Stanzas of Dyzan. According to these, modern
humans were the fifth of the seven ‘root races’. The third race had inhabited the lost
supercontinent of Lemuria, bandy-legged, egg-laying hermaphrodites, some of whom had
eyes in the back of their heads and four arms (though perhaps not both at once).
The Lemurians had, according to Blavatsky, lived alongside dinosaurs. As if this was not
exciting enough, they also discovered sex. This turned out to be A Bad Idea (for the
Lemurians) because it was the trigger, Blavatsky believed, for the destruction of their
continent. Their surviving offspring (the fourth ‘root race’) were the Atlanteans. It was they
who wrote the Stanzas and who gave rise to the fifth race, namely us. Modern humans
would eventually give way to the sixth and seventh races, who would inhabit North and
South America respectively.
Blavatsky died in London in May 1891 from a chronic kidney ailment aggravated by a
bout of influenza, and was cremated at Woking cemetery. Rather like Lemuria, the
movement she founded soon split up and sank in schism and recrimination, never maintaining
movement she founded soon split up and sank in schism and recrimination, never maintaining
the following it commanded while its high priestess was alive. (It is estimated to have peaked
at about 100,000 worldwide and is known to have included several influential and otherwise
apparently sane people.)
Theosophy, pioneer of a genre, lives on, as does its conception of Lemuria, though largely
on the ethereal plane of the World Wide Web.

Mystic Mu

The Indian Ocean had its Lemuria, and the Atlantic had of course its Atlantis. But what of the
largest ocean of all, the last surviving remnant of Panthalassa? The potential financial rewards
for this kind of work are great, as Blavatsky had shown; and as any scientific fraud or
unscrupulous journalist knows, it is a lot quicker to make things up than find things out.
Crucially too, the Pacific is the closest ocean to California, the best place in the world to
found new religions. Madame Blavatsky herself recognized this, and in her later writings
began edging her Lemuria out of the distant Indian Ocean and into the Pacific for this sound
business reason. Yet despite her tweakings, the Pacific Ocean still represented a huge vacant
lot to the would-be supercontinent maker, and before long one was duly ‘discovered’. The
odd thing is, by the time its name broke upon the public in the twentieth century, it had
already existed in the minds of (some) men for centuries.
Mu is perhaps the maddest of all imaginary lost continents. Its origins, however, lie not
with the sciences of zoology, botany or geology, but with archaeology; and the very
unscientific analysis of some very ancient writings.
Its existence was first proposed by one Charles Etienne, Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg
(1814–74). The Abbé travelled much of Europe and Central and South America in the
service of the Catholic Church, and apart from missionary zeal his main life interest lay in the
ethnography of the native peoples of America. In his later years he became convinced of
pre-Columbian connections between American and Eastern races, connections for which the
existence of the Pacific Ocean constituted something of a geographical snag.
The Mayans left very few written documents, and deciphering them has always presented
acute difficulties in the absence of any equivalent of the Rosetta Stone that offers the linguist
parallel texts of which at least one is known. Nothing daunted, the Abbé set about the task of
reading the Troano Codex. This codex consisted of half of one of three surviving Mayan
manuscripts, and it is now part of what is today known as the Madrid Codex. In his reading
he thought he discovered references to a sunken land by the name of Mu, and leapt at the
idea because it solved his ethnographical problems by bridging the Pacific. So Mu started
life, rather like Lemuria, as a means of explaining a distribution pattern – only this time, of
people.
The Abbé’s references were next picked up by a widely (though uncritically) read
Philadelphia lawyer and Minnesota congressman, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), author of
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882). Unhappily for Donnelly, his literary judgement
failed him over the de Bourbourg ‘translation’ of the Troano Codex on which he, the Abbé
and the supposed continent of Mu depended. For the translation was, in fact, nothing of the
sort.
De Bourbourg had ‘interpreted’ the Codex, having himself discovered a ‘Mayan alphabet’
 De Bourbourg had ‘interpreted’ the Codex, having himself discovered a ‘Mayan alphabet’
devised by a Spanish monk by the name of Diego da Landa. Arriving in America with the
Conquistadores, da Landa was among the first scholars to come across the vivid pictograms
of the Mayan people. His so-called alphabet was nonsense; the Mayan writing system was
not letter-based at all.
The Abbé’s Troano Codex ‘translation’, which supposedly described (in highly elliptical
terms) some great volcanic catastrophe, was nothing more than a figment of the Abbé’s
fevered imagination, spurred on by the application of da Landa’s bogus alphabet. And,
crucially for this story, during the process of his creative decipherment de Bourbourg came
across two pictograms that he could not at first identify. Thinking, though, that they bore a
slight resemblance to the symbols that da Landa asserted to be the Mayan equivalents of the
letters M and U, the Abbé duly discovered the name of the ill-fated continent. Thus was Mu
born.

The supposed ‘Mayan Alphabet’.

Back in Washington, unaware of how rotten its foundations were, Ignatius Donnelly took
the Mu story on. In his book he linked this entirely bogus Mayan legend with Plato’s
allegorical Atlantis and went on to speculate about how this connection might shed light on
archaeological links between the Mayan and other civilizations. And there the Mu legend
paused, until one Colonel Churchward picked it up and moved it back into the Pacific.
Colonel James Churchward (1851–1936) stares winningly out of his picture like a cross
between Colonel Sanders and a travelling medicine man peddling potions in a Hollywood
Western. He sports a rakish goatee and moustache, and wears a large rose in his left lapel.
Although he had written a book before, namely A Big Game and Fishing Guide to North-
Although he had written a book before, namely A Big Game and Fishing Guide to North-
Eastern Maine, this gasconading English émigré shot to literary success rather late in life with
his colourful accounts of a huge continent lost below the Pacific.

The two ideograms thought, from tenuous supposed similarities to characters in the supposed alphabet, to
represent the letters M and U.

The Lost Continent of Mu (1926) set out Churchward’s claim to have discovered the
tale of Mu and its destruction in mysterious ancient texts. He claimed the continent had sunk
about 60,000 years ago and that Easter Island, Hawaii, Tahiti and a few other Pacific islands
were its last remnants. This information he gleaned from the ‘Naacal Tablets’, having himself
been taught the Naacal language by a Hindu priest in India in 1866. (Churchward’s military
rank was said to have been gained in the British Army in India, but this too is unconfirmed.)
As well as the tablets of Naacal, Churchward gleaned information from a different set of
tablets found in Mexico by one William Niven, who is variously described as a geologist and
engineer. No one else has ever seen these tablets either.
 The lost continent of Mu as envisaged by Churchward.

Churchward held that the first humans had appeared two million years ago on Mu.
Modern humans were, he believed, all descended from the survivors of Mu’s cataclysmic
destruction, brought about by the explosion of the ‘gas belts’ on which it rested. Churchward
followed his first book with four more: The Children of Mu, The Sacred Symbols of Mu,
The Cosmic Forces of Mu and The Second Book of the Cosmic Forces of Mu.
One would think that after five volumes of elaboration (all of which are now back in print
in America) Churchward’s might have proved the last written words on the subject. But as
recently as 1970 yet another book appeared, Mu Revealed by Tony Earll. This claimed to
be the diary of a boy called Kland who, according to Earll, moved to Mexico in 21,000 BC
but was unlucky enough to meet with an earthquake and get his scrolls trapped in a
collapsing temple. Then in 1959, so the story goes, archaeologist Reedson Hurdlop
excavated the temple. He found the scrolls and discovered that they not only supported
Churchward’s Mu hypothesis but provided even more information about the lost continent
and its people.
Except all this was also fiction. Crossword enthusiasts may have noticed in passing that
‘Tony Earll’ is an anagram of ‘not really’ and ‘Reedson Hurdlop’ of ‘Rudolph Rednose’. Mu
Revealed was, in fact, the first novel by another émigré Englishman, the TV scriptwriter, self-
styled witch and occult author Raymond Buckland (b. 1934). In the same year that he
published Mu Revealed, Buckland also released (under his own name) Witchcraft Ancient
and Modern and Practical Candleburning Rituals.
It is probably true to say that there is no stretch of land too miserable, too mean, or even
too imaginary, that someone will not wish to be the king of it. For twenty years or so,
beginning in 1933, the Office of the Geographer of the US State Department carried on a
correspondence with a number of people concerning some alleged islands off Panama. One
Mrs Gertrude Norris Meeker wrote in 1954 (on headed notepaper declaring her to be the
Governor General of the Government of Atlantis and Lemuria) to point out that since 1943 a
group of islands 200 miles south-west of Florida and just eight degrees north of the Equator
had been the ‘Private Dynasty or Principality … named “Atlantis Kaj Lemuria”’. ‘Any
trespassing on these islands or Island Empire is a prison offense,’ the letter ended darkly.
The Department’s geographical adviser, Sophia A. Saucerman, responded that the USA
did not recognize such a state. In reply Mrs Meeker presented a detailed history of the
Principality, involving a Danish seaman called John Mott who in 1917, not wishing to return
to a war-torn Europe, took possession of the place and founded the dynasty to which Mrs
to a war-torn Europe, took possession of the place and founded the dynasty to which Mrs
Meeker belonged.
In 1957 an official inquiry was set up ‘to make a determination as to the reality of the Mu
Group in the Pacific Ocean’, as a result of which the Office replied that it did not believe
these islands existed – and nor did it believe that anyone else believed it either. But the
persistent Mrs Meeker then succeeded in persuading a US Congressman, Craig Hosmer, to
take a hand in her affairs. In 1958 he wrote to the Geographer pointing out that, if her plans
worked out, Queen Meeker of Mu might be a good source of trade. The Congressman’s
letter stimulated a swift reply. Three days later the Department pronounced itself definitively
unaware of the existence of any such island empire: ‘However, the Geographer of this
Department is most willing to make a geographical study of this matter …’
‘The file ends with this letter,’ writes Sumathi Ramaswamy. The Geographer’s kind offer
to conduct research in the South Pacific was not taken up.

Sunken lands

By the end of the nineteenth century geologists and biogeographers had found out much
about the rocks, fossils, animals and plants of the world, notably on the previously little-
known southern continents. They had found sequences of rocks that looked so similar, it was
incredible that they were now so far apart. Equally improbable was the fact that these rock
sequences began with boulder beds, which suggested there had been a massive glaciation
that had spanned the Equator and had apparently emanated from the middle of what is now
the Indian Ocean. Biogeographers meanwhile had found similar evidence of widely separated
animals that could not possibly have migrated across the waters that now separated them.
The obvious explanation at the time was that the intervening ocean had not always been
there. Where was that land now? The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that it had
sunk.
As the persistence of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu myths attest, ‘sunken lands’ tap into
something deep in the human psyche, and many theories have been advanced as to why this
should be. One has it that, after the last Ice Age, sea levels rose 125 metres in a relatively
short time. The sea reclaimed vast areas of coastal land that had been exposed during the
great freeze. We know that this happened and we know that humans must have witnessed it.
Perhaps this event really did leave deep scars and give rise to ancient legends of drowned
land, legends that informed early geological speculations.
On the other hand, if you throw a stone into the sea it sinks. Sinking is what rock does.
Land subsides. Things fall into holes. It’s the sort of movement that seems natural for rocks,
acting under the influence of gravity.
But although one could explain many troubling facts by supposing that former land (‘land
bridges’ was the somewhat misleading term) had fallen away to become the bed of the sea
(separating things that seem too similar to be so far apart), this did not help to explain
Wallace’s line, across which very different creatures live in such inexplicably close proximity.
Nor did it help much in explaining why the southern continents had all been glaciated at more
or less the same time, and on opposite sides of the (present) Equator.
The great British geophysicist Arthur Holmes, an early convert to continental drift, who
first suggested convection in the Earth’s mantle as a plausible mechanism for it as early as the
first suggested convection in the Earth’s mantle as a plausible mechanism for it as early as the
1920s, wrote in the 1965 edition of his great book Principles of Physical Geology:
The … climatic dilemma could only be resolved by realising that the deep-rooted ‘common sense’ belief
in the fixity of the continents relative to each other … was now in direct conflict with the evidence of
the chief witness – the Earth herself. In other words … continental drift had to be taken seriously. But
mathematical physicists declared [it] to be impossible and most geologists accepted their verdict,
forgetting that their first loyalty was to the Earth and not to books written about the Earth.

To see a thing, first you must believe it to be possible. As it was for the Blanford brothers
with their bold interpretation of the Talchir boulder bed, the simple act of believing your eyes
is very often an act of considerable mental courage. The same went for the faunal zones and
the Wallace line. The simplest explanation, such as William of Occam always urges upon
scientists, was that the continents had moved sideways across the surface of the Earth. But in
the late nineteenth century (and for much of the twentieth) that remained too wild a surmise to
be accepted.
Nevertheless, after all this confusion and speculation about a lost continent that had never
actually existed, the first genuine lost continent to be freed from oblivion by the human mind
was emerging into the gaze of a new breed of time traveller. A vanished geography, that had
begun its disappearing act 250 million years ago, was backing slowly into the light.

LAND OF THE GONDS

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
ALFRED TENNYSON, IN MEMORIAM

Fixed to number five, at the end of the street nearest to Angel tube station in Islington, north
London, is a rectangular green plaque put there by the Geological Society of London,
announcing it as the birthplace of Eduard Suess (1831–1914), ‘Statesman and Geologist’.
Sadly, today almost nobody remembers who Eduard Suess was. But he was recognized in
his lifetime as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century; one who, in the course
of a long and busy life, manned the barricades in a revolution; brought a new fresh water
supply from the Alps to another great European capital, Vienna; and tamed that city’s floods.
He also wrote a wholly remarkable book which made him the first human being to conceive
of a long-vanished giant landmass uniting the southern continents. This land still bears the
name he gave it: ‘Gondwanaland’.
Suess spent most of his student life in Vienna; but three years after he settled there the city
was caught in the liberal revolution that swept Europe in 1848, the momentous year in which
Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. Suess might have come from a bourgeois
Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. Suess might have come from a bourgeois
mercantile background but he didn’t let it hold him back; and for all his politeness to his
English friends, he was no Englishman. He was a young, liberal activist mingling with others
who, like him, were soon to take a decisive role in their country’s affairs, and who were of
an age (and disposition) to man barricades. Suess learnt, in 1848, that the world could
change, suddenly and permanently. What is more, sudden revolutions were not only possible:
they could do you good. Not that it did him much good at first.
Like many things revolutionary, it started in France. The 1848 Paris revolution, which
eventually led to the short-lived Second Republic, caused a run on the Vienna stock market.
There was revolution in Austria-Hungary as the rising middle classes demanded change.
Reformers roamed Vienna’s streets demanding the resignation of Prince Metternich, the
widely hated conservative Chancellor, who ruled the Empire in place of the feeble-minded
Habsburg Emperor, Ferdinand I (1793–1875). The protesters wanted such things as a free
press, freedom of assembly and a national German parliament.
After trying to placate the populace with half measures, Metternich and the Emperor fled
to Innsbruck. Barricades, Paris-style, were set up in Vienna’s streets – and the young
Eduard Suess was on them.
As in other countries, the 1848 revolution in Austria was inconclusive. By August the
Imperial family had returned. Sentiment among the ruling elite swung back, hankering after
stability. The government camp rallied with the aristocracy and others keen to see the
Habsburgs back in power. On 23 October 70,000 troops besieged and bombarded Vienna,
against at most 40,000 rebels who included students and academics. They were doomed.
No help arrived, and after three days’ fighting 2000 of them lay dead. The leaders of the
uprising were rounded up and court-martialled. Nineteen were sentenced to death.
Suess who had been sent away for his own safety, now returned to Vienna and continued
his studies, yet remained under suspicion, because in December 1851 he and a number of
others at the Polytechnikum suspected of allegiance to the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos
Kossuth (1802–94) were arrested, subjected to court martial and imprisoned.
Suess was now in trouble. He might have remained at the Emperor’s pleasure for much
longer than he did had it not been (if we are to believe some sources) for the intervention of a
powerful mentor, Wilhelm von Haidinger (1795–1871), founding director of the Austrian
Geological Survey, who used his influence to get his protégé freed in 1852 without
indictment.
The great old geological surveys of the world mostly date from this phase of the Industrial
Revolution, when governments began to realize that everything society needs that cannot be
grown has to be found by a geologist. The Austrian Survey was founded in 1849 at the
former Mining Museum in Heumarkt, making it one of the oldest in the world. In 1851 the
geologists removed to a more prestigious address, Vienna’s Rasumovsky Palace. This
gigantic pile, on what were then the outskirts of Vienna, had been built, accidentally burned
down and then rebuilt, by the former Russian ambassador to the Austrian Court, Andrei
Kirillovich Rasumovsky (1752–1836), now chiefly remembered as a patron of Beethoven.
Suess had published his first scientific paper in 1850 (on the mineral waters of Karlsbad)
and another in 1851, the same year that Haidinger commissioned him to map sections across
the Dachstein region of the eastern Alps. This work sparked Suess’s lifelong interest in the
structure of mountain ranges and was to lead to one of his most lasting contributions to
science. But that lay far in the future. For the time being he needed gainful employment and
finally, in 1852, he secured it. It didn’t sound like much – clerk in the Imperial Geological
finally, in 1852, he secured it. It didn’t sound like much – clerk in the Imperial Geological
Museum – but Suess was launched. In 1857, still only twenty-six, he completed a
spectacular feat of counter-jumping by being made the first ‘extraordinary professor’ of
geology at the University of Vienna. Promoted to full professor ten years later, Suess
remained in post for his entire career, retiring in 1901: ‘88 semesters later’, as he was to say
in his valedictory lecture.

Man of substance

Suess was no prisoner of the ivory tower. Five years after joining the professoriate he
published a pamphlet lambasting the typhoid-ridden water that the Austrian capital’s citizens
were forced to drink, and proposing a dramatic solution. As he later wrote in his
Erinnerungen (Memories): ‘The basic principle [is] that drinking water is to be looked for
outside settlements.’ Suess joined Vienna’s City Council in 1862, the year his pamphlet hit
the streets. From this position he pushed forward the first Wiener
Hochquellenwasserleitung – Vienna Mountain Spring Water Pipeline – which eventually
solved the city’s drinking-water problem in 1873 (and is still used today).
Suess was made an honorary Burgess, Vienna’s highest civic honour. Soon afterwards he
was chosen as a parliamentary representative and subsequently sat for more than thirty years
in the Austrian Parliament, for three of them as leader of the Liberals, raising hackles with his
forthright anticlericalism and strident denunciation of political privilege. In many ways he
became the Austrian version of Britain’s Thomas Henry Huxley: a very public scientist
indeed, doughty, rebellious, controversial, yet fully engaged in public works and showered
with more honours than he ever accepted.
Perhaps because of his political commitments, Suess’s scientific life was not filled with the
sort of relentless travelling that geologists usually indulge in. Instead he used his academic
resources to survey the world from his study, with his almost unbelievably wide command of
literature: from the latest research reports from the far-flung corners of the world’s great
empires to the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was soon recognized across the world that no man
alive could match his knowledge of the globe. Between 1885 and 1909 he distilled this
unrivalled worldview in a monumental four-volume book called The Face of the Earth (Das
Antlitz der Erde). Even before it was completed the Scottish geologist Sir Archibald Geikie
was writing of this ‘noble philosophical poem in which the story of the continents and oceans
is told by a seer gifted with rare power of insight into the past’ and of its ‘firm hold of detail
combined with singularly vivid powers of generalisation’.
Oddly to modern eyes, Geikie’s long tribute to Suess (published in 1905 as the third
volume was in preparation) does not mention the book’s biggest claim on history, the
greatest tribute to those very vivid powers of generalization; for as early as volume one,
Suess discovered and named his lost supercontinent.

Scott of Gondwana
In 1913, a year after Captain Robert Falcon Scott had frozen to death returning from their
failed attempt to be first to walk to the South Pole, his second in command, Edward Evans,
was returning to New Zealand aboard the Terra Nova and composing a letter to his
secretary and immediate family. Scott’s legend had yet to be printed, and Evans’s letter,
written before the myth of the Great British Hero stifled all criticism of the man, was frank. ‘It
seems to me extraordinary that in the face of such obstacles they stuck to all their records
and specimens … We dumped ours at the first big check. I must say I considered the safety
of my party before the value of the records and extra stores – not eatable.’
To find out why Scott of the Antarctic died lying beside thirty-five pounds of rock, you
have to go back to 1905 and a dinner he ate in Manchester in the company of a young
lecturer in the University’s Department of Botany. That woman, the first female ever to be
employed as an academic by the University, was Dr Marie Stopes (1880–1958).
The world knows Marie Stopes today for her later pioneering work on birth control, just
as in her day the readers of Married Love or Enduring Passion assumed that she was a
doctor of medicine. In fact, she held a DSc from London University and had already had a
distinguished career as a palaeontologist specializing in fossil plants. Much of the research for
which that degree was awarded had concerned the evolution of the seed. According to her
biographer Keith Briant, Stopes, having met Scott at this dinner dance, quizzed him during
the waltzes about his Antarctic ambitions and urged him to take both her and his own wife to
the frozen continent. At the end of the dinner, following Scott’s persistent polite refusal, she is
then said to have urged him, as second best, to find for her the fossils she most wanted.
Seven years later, on 20 March 1912, the exhausted Scott, Henry Bowers and chief
scientist Dr Edward Adrian Wilson put up their tent against the blizzards for the last time.
Their frozen bodies had to wait until 12 November to be found. The leader of the relief
party, Edward Atkinson RN, wrote: ‘We recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with
their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35lb of very important geological specimens
which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier … they had stuck to
these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the
specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.’
However, Scott was not deceived about the importance of the geological specimens. In
all, 1919 samples from the 1911–12 Antarctic adventure are now housed at the Natural
History Museum in London. Most were collected by expedition geologists Raymond
Priestley, Frank Debenham and T. Griffith Taylor, and come from McMurdo Sound and
Terra Nova Bay. However, the ones you pick up with most trembling of the hands are those
that lay for eight months beside the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers just 12.66 miles
south of One Ton Depot. There are samples of coal and fossil plants, and among them is the
first find from the Antarctic of Glossopteris.
French geologist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801–76) coined the name Glossopteris
for a fossil leaf in 1828. At the time he thought he was describing part of an extinct fern.
Glossopteris means ‘tongue fern’ in Greek, and its leaves are very like those of Asplenium,
the familiar houseplant Hart’s Tongue Fern. However, the Glossopteris plant held quite a
few surprises. First it turned out to have been a tree which grew to about eight metres; and,
despite its fern-like appearance, it produced seeds. Such ‘seed ferns’ became extinct in the
Triassic Period, well over 200 million years ago. Today they are studied by a few dedicated
palaeobotanists, modern inheritors of Marie Stopes’s scientific interest, as they provide
fascinating insights into how reproduction by seed evolved. Glossopteris, on the other hand,
fascinating insights into how reproduction by seed evolved. Glossopteris, on the other hand,
is a name famous among all geologists because it planted, in the mind of Eduard Suess, the
first idea of Gondwanaland.
Suess painstakingly pieces together the evidence for his supercontinent. He notes in
volume one that India and South Africa have many things in common. Each supported very
similar sequences of rocks: ‘a mighty series of non-marine deposits which extend from the
Permian to the Rhaetic … a series of similar terrestrial [fossil] floras flourished in both regions
…’ Madagascar, too, shared this similarity. Finally, near the end of the first volume, Suess
utters the sentence: ‘We call this mass Gondwana-Land, after the ancient Gondwana flora
which is common to all its parts.’ And so the first true supercontinent was born – reborn –
in the mind of Man.

A reconstruction of the Glossopteris tree.

Suess was a great coiner of words. Geologists use them all the time without realizing it.
Words like sima, Tethys, Panthalassa, epeirogenesis, syntaxis and eustasy, unfamiliar to
most people, have sewn Suess into the fabric of geological language. Yet even everyday
speech bears him testimony. Every time we talk of ‘the biosphere’, meaning the sum total of
all living things on Earth, we invoke Eduard Suess. None of his many terms, however, has
caused as much etymological controversy as ‘Gondwanaland’.
Suess chose the ancient name meaning ‘Kingdom of the Gonds’. The Gonds, like the
Tamils, were Dravidian peoples, and once inhabited much of what is now Madhya Pradesh,
in the heart of peninsular India. Their kingdom’s name, Gondwana, had already been
attached by palaeontologists to the typical fossil plants that seemed to link the now far-flung
southern continents, in the term ‘Gondwana Assemblage’. For Suess ‘Gondwanaland’ meant
the land whose rocks yielded this assemblage.
By the time Suess came to write his last volume, his lost supercontinent had grown to
include: ‘South America from the Andes to the east coast between the Orinoco and Cape
Corrientes, the Falkland islands, Africa and the southern offshoots of the Great Atlas to the
Cape mountains, also Syria, Arabia, Madagascar, the Indian peninsula, and Ceylon.’ Its
characteristic fossil plants had now been found in the Permian rocks of South America,
South Africa, India and Australia. Once the specimens salvaged from Scott’s last tent had
South Africa, India and Australia. Once the specimens salvaged from Scott’s last tent had
made it back to London, Gondwanaland would extend its dominion even further, and include
the great frozen continent of Antarctica. This last fact never made it into Suess’s book, as it
was first revealed in print five years after the last volume of Das Antlitz came out, in the
same year that Suess died.
Though an obvious point, the main thing to remember about supercontinents is that they
have vanished – for the moment. As Suess was the first to find, bringing a lost supercontinent
back to life was as nothing to the problem of accounting for its disappearance. Just where
did Gondwanaland go? ‘Gondwanaland was a continuous continent. Then it broke down,
sometimes along extensive rectilinear fractures, into fragments,’ Suess wrote. A modern
reader, encountering this with a head full of continental drift, might conclude that Suess was
not only father of the supercontinent but of continental drift as well. But this would be wrong.
In Suess’s worldview the Earth was shrinking inexorably as it cooled; his lost continents had
sunk, like those lands of myth Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu, beneath the sea.

FROM OUT THE AZURE MAIN

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion … or you will learn
nothing.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

For all the eternity of the ocean, there is nothing timeless about its shoreline. Over great
spans of geological time the ocean may invade large tracts of the continents and create vast,
shallow seas, as it did when chalk, for example, came to be deposited over so much of the
Earth. Also, ice ages pull water out of the oceans and pile it up on land, causing the global
sea level to fall hundreds of metres and leaving the continental shelves (those fringes of
continent temporarily covered by the sea) fully exposed.
The crust of the Earth itself also goes up and down. When I was a research student,
working on the Baltic island of Gotland, I had the good fortune to know a local architect
named Arne Philip who had a passion for geology. He would criss-cross the island in his MG
convertible, theodolite in the back seat, making surveys of thousands of the ancient beach
ridges that ring the island and all its outlying islets, recording the high-water marks achieved in
the Baltic region thousands of years ago. Arne collected shelves full of data on these ‘storm
beaches’ and plotted the results on gigantic maps. I do not think, however, that he ever
reached any firm conclusions.
The reason is this: when ice ages end, and the heavy ice is removed after tens of thousands
of years, the land recovers, just as a cushion does when you get up. The Earth, on its vast
timescale at least, is soft to the touch, and this recovery has been happening in the Baltic for
10,000 years. But Arne’s problem was that his equation had (at least) two variables. At the
end of the Ice Age the sea level rose globally; but locally the land was also rising where it had
been covered by thick ice sheets. Gotland’s storm-beach heights were therefore a function of
been covered by thick ice sheets. Gotland’s storm-beach heights were therefore a function of
two unknown variables – and almost impossible to disentangle.
At least Arne knew what he was dealing with, and understood that the Baltic region is
rising and why. Suess did not enjoy the benefit of such well-established explanations. In his
day the relative ups and downs of crust and sea over geological time were hotly contested
issues, attempted explanations for which came to occupy much of his gigantic book. This
plastic quality, this mobility of the rocky crust (the very fact that, given time and sustained
pressure, rocks flow), eventually proved crucial to moving beyond Suess’s contraction
theory as an explanation for the break-up of Gondwanaland, and towards building a truly
accurate map of the supercontinent he discovered. Yet although geologists now regard as
obvious this plastic behaviour of rock over long periods, most non-geologists are still quite
surprised to hear how fickle the relationship between the land and sea can be: and not just in
Scandinavia.

An island that went away

One day in late 2002 a mysterious volcanic island reappeared in the middle of a busy
shipping lane off Sicily. A diplomatic row quickly flared over whose territory this resurgent
island would be. Did previous claims still hold? Opinion was hot, strong and diverse. And
caught in the middle of it were geologists: the one group that knew most, and cared least for
territorial squabbles.
This speck of strategically important potential land has become known to the British as the
Graham Bank volcano (and to the Italians as Isola Ferdinandea, the French as L’Isle Julia,
and to various others as Nerita, Hotham, Corrao and Sciacca). Professor Antonio Zichichi, a
geophysicist at the Ettore Majorano Centre in Sicily, put it simply, and perhaps with a little
exasperation, when he told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir: ‘It goes up and down because
the Earth’s crust goes up and down and that’s that!’ But geologists were not always so
apparently uninterested in the question of the Earth’s crust’s ups and downs.
It was Enzo Boschi of Italy’s Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology who seems to have
rekindled this century’s new-found interest in the Graham Bank, in an interview with Reuters,
following reports of water disturbance in the area. Dr Boschi had said the volcano might
erupt ‘in a few weeks or months’. This quote quickly spread through the online media and
resulted in a thoughtful feature by Rose George in the UK newspaper the Independent. Then
the whole thing went quiet for a month, until the Italian Naval League reawakened the story
by demanding that Italy do something to prevent perfidious Albion (or any other foreign
nation) from stealing their island again.
The thing about volcanoes is that they erupt from time to time, and as Professor Zichichi
knew well, when they do this they tend to swell up as the magma rises (and subsequently
down after it erupts). The new activity of 2003 was just the latest phase in the life of the
Graham Bank volcano. The previous time it had appeared above the water was in 1831. In
the very year that Eduard Suess was born, a small Mediterranean island a few hundred
metres across was also coming into the world, just off Italy’s toe.
 Location of Ferdinandea, or Graham Bank as the British have it.

The British name derives from Admiral Sir James Robert George Graham, First Lord of
the Admiralty, who claimed the newly emerged island for Britain by planting a flag on it. This
did not stop competing colonial claims by France, Spain and of course the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies. The Italians, whose nation now encompasses the Two Sicilies, still refer to
Graham Bank as Ferdinandea, after King Ferdinand II, who ruled the Two Sicilies from
1830 to 1859. The competing colonial nations only gave up their territorial squabble when
they realized that the sea had eroded the island away completely while their backs were
turned.
Graham Bank sometimes seems to have been put on Earth simply to make fools out of
men. As recently as 1987 US warplanes spotted it, believed it to be a Libyan submarine and
dropped depths charges on it. Even more recently the two surviving relatives of Ferdinand II
commissioned a plaque to be affixed to the then still submerged volcanic reef, claiming it for
Italy should it ever rise again. Astute readers will not miss the logical difficulty inherent in the
concept of a ‘submerged island’. For is not a ‘submerged island’ just another bit of the
seabed? But neither national sentiment nor fin de race royals find much use for logic.
The prime mover in the affair with the plaque was one Domenico Macaluso, surgeon,
voluntary ‘Inspector of Sicilian Cultural Riches’ and, as luck would have it, a keen diver. He
first became interested in Ferdinandea in February 2000, when news of fresh eruptions first
broke. These reports were all couched in terms of the reappearance of a ‘lost corner of the
British Empire’, thus ruffling some Italian plumage. The well-connected Macalusa
successfully persuaded Charles and Camilla de Bourbon to commission a 150kg marble
tablet, which he and some friends duly installed, twenty metres under the waves, in March
2002. (Mysteriously, it was later smashed into twelve pieces by a person or persons
unknown.)
That year Filippo D’Arpa, a journalist on a Sicilian newspaper, published a timely novel
about the events of 1831: L’isola che se ne andò (The island that went away). He
summed up the fiasco well when he told the Independent: ‘[Ferdinandea] is a metaphor on
the ridiculousness of power. This rock is worth nothing, it’s no use as a territorial possession,
and yet the French and the Bourbons … nearly came to war [and] 160 years later, England
and Italy are still fighting.’
If only politicians would listen to geologists, perhaps they would learn to curb their
enthusiasm. For alongside this grand opera buffa, the geology of Graham Bank is really
enthusiasm. For alongside this grand opera buffa, the geology of Graham Bank is really
rather boring. Today the volcanic scoria that surrounded the vent in 1831 have been planed
off: to thirty metres deep. A column of rock twenty metres in diameter – the lava-choked
neck of the old volcano – rises to a dangerous eight metres below sea level (and looks, one
must suppose, rather like the conning tower of a submarine to the pilot of a B52). To a
geologist it is just alkali olivine Hawaiite basalt, a typical piece of ocean floor. Most of our
planet is covered in similar stuff. No wonder geologists were so nonplussed by the public
interest in this here-today-gonetomorrow island.
But in 1831 men of science exhibited no such disdain. Its emergence was greeted as an
amazing prodigy, and the most advanced scientific thinkers of the time seized on it with glee.
The man who founded the Société Géologique de France, Louis Constant Prévost, wrote a
lengthy scientific paper about the island (which he called L’Isle Julia); though by the time it
finally appeared in print, in 1835, the island itself had long vanished. Meanwhile in England
there was another geologist for whom the movement of the Earth’s crust was a source of
interest.
Charles Lyell is undoubtedly one of the most influential geologists who ever lived, even
outstretching Suess’s shadow over subsequent ages. When you read Suess’s obituaries you
are struck by the way all of them reach for comparisons; for writers with comparable scope,
who published great books that will stand for ever as their monument. The one name they all
quote is Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology.
Through his Principles, which Darwin took aboard the Beagle as his bedtime reading,
Lyell had come to dominate the way geologists (especially English geologists) in the
nineteenth century thought about Earth history. He preached a strict version of a creed
known as uniformitarianism, the concept credited with putting an end to wild speculation
about the past and turning geology into a science.
So what is it? The essence of the principle is simple. It says that to understand what the
rocks are trying to tell you, you should look around at the causes operating today and find an
explanation among them. Geologists constrain their interpretations of the rock record by
looking at the way the modern world works. The modern world is the control on geologists’
thought experiments.
This is how it works. If you were to see me in the street with a black eye and grazed
elbows, you could devise a number of possible scenarios to explain how I got that way. You
might conclude I had been abducted by aliens and used as a guinea pig in their experiments.
That explanation would not be uniformitarian because, although some pretty unusual things
do happen in Stoke Newington, alien abductions are not among them. On the other hand you
might surmise that after one glass of Pinot Grigio too many I had missed my footing and
measured my length in the gutter. This would be a uniformitarian conclusion, because similar
events happen almost every day (though not to me, you understand).
As well as urging present-day processes upon geologists, uniformitarianism also has
something to say about their intensity. In addition to looking around for modern-day causes,
the strict Lyellian assumption is that those processes have also always operated at a
comparable rate. Thus deep time becomes paramount. The raindrop falling on the stone can,
given enough time, move the mountain. Tiny changes, all but imperceptible to us, can achieve
everything geologists might want because time is almost infinitely available. There is therefore
no need to appeal to great upheavals or catastrophes; the gradual ups and downs of the
Earth’s crust, as in the Baltic or the Graham Bank, will be enough.
This view of uniformity is an extreme one, but it was the prevailing view in Suess’s time,
 This view of uniformity is an extreme one, but it was the prevailing view in Suess’s time,
especially in England. The third (1834) edition of Lyell’s Principles devoted six pages to
Graham Bank. It provided Lyell (who trained as a lawyer, and it showed) with a convincing
courtroom argument against his catastrophist opponents. But Suess, who also subscribed to
uniformitarian principles, had a different mind: one with mountains in it. Geologists who work
among the world’s great ranges will tell you they leave an indelible stamp on the imagination.
The Alps lay at the root of the Romantic revolution, as artists turned to them for inspiration.
Mountains were no longer merely inconvenient obstacles but meaningful. Suess had cut his
geological teeth mapping the Alps and wrote an early book about them.
By contrast, Lyell hardly mentioned mountain building at all in his magnum opus. Today
this seems very curious. It is almost as though he thought of mountains as a bit embarrassing,
a sort of unsavoury fracas from which an English gentleman should avert his eyes. European
geologists like Suess found the Alps much less easy to ignore. They knew in their bones that
the Alps had something very important to say about the world and how it worked.
Something about the beginning and the end of the world seemed locked up in their tumult.
So geologists are still struggling with two types of change: gradual, repetitive Lyellian ones
that go in cycles, and secular – one might even say ‘Suessian’ – changes: progressive,
revolutionary once-and-for-all changes after which there is no going back. The history of the
Earth is made of both.
In nature, cyclicity is going around all the time. Our Earth goes around the Sun and we
have cycles called seasons. The Moon goes round the Earth and we have cycles called tides.
Our planet rotates and we get cycles of day and night. This book is about the greatest cycle
of nature: from one supercontinent, through phases of breakup, to the reassembly of a new
supercontinent over a period of between 500 and 750 million years.
But there are plenty of examples of Suessian change too. Owing to the friction caused by
the tides of the global ocean, the Earth is rotating more slowly today than it did yesterday.
The moon’s orbit takes it a little further away from us each day. Days are longer now than
they were 500 million years ago, which also means there were more days in the year back
then. The Sun is gradually becoming hotter as it uses up its hydrogen fuel. And despite the
delaying tactics of radioactivity, the Earth is indeed very gradually cooling down. Changes
like this are one-way-only.
Cycles, however, were the essence of uniformitarianism as presented by Lyell. They
allowed nature to repeat herself endlessly to the last syllable of time. What attracted Lyell to
cases like the Graham Bank volcano and the ups and downs of the Bay of Naples was that
they allowed him to make a subtly different point, namely that even if the rocks do speak of
catastrophe, gradualism still dominates time.
The Vesuvius eruption of AD 79 left a lot of geological evidence behind. Catastrophes
often give rise to more evidence than the uneventful ages that pass between them. But this
does not mean that the past was more violent than today; it just means that the rocks are
unrepresentative. Like a scandal sheet called the Geological Record, rocks scurrilously
report everything lurid and gruesome but leave out the everyday stuff. Lyell’s Earth was
cyclic, placid even, and there was no progression, wave following on wave.
Suess wasn’t having this. His was a uniformitarianism for revolutionaries. For Suess there
was more to existence than endless repetition. Not everything that goes around comes
around. What happens today can make a difference, for ever. Suess rejected the idea that
processes going on around us now are the only yardstick against which to measure the
Earth’s massive history.
Earth’s massive history.
In reconstructing supercontinents even older than Gondwanaland, lands that existed when
the Earth was very different, Earth scientists today are able to envision much stranger things
than Lyell’s philosophy would ever allow them to dream of, and yet still keep their scientific
heads. Suess, who also peered deeply into time, lacked the true Englishman’s fondness for
the status quo. This man, who had stood on mountains and barricades, built aqueducts,
tamed rivers and discovered a supercontinent, understood something Lyell did not: things
need not always have been the way they are.

Endeth the world … (not)

In mid-1960, engineers were carving out the Mont Blanc tunnel, which connects France and
Italy, through the roots of the tallest Alpine massif. But on 14 July a small band gathered
nearby to witness the End of the World, which was supposed to take place at 1.45pm. As
the moment approached, women began wailing. A bugler in lederhosen stood up and
delivered an impression of the final trump.
Then, unexpectedly, 2.46 arrived.
The cult leader, Elio Bianca, who before becoming a prophet had worked as a
paediatrician with the Milan Electric Company, said afterwards: ‘We made a mistake.’ The
next day the New York Times ran a story under the headline ‘WORLD FAILS TO END’. You
could hardly ask for a more succinct statement of strict Lyellian uniformitarianism.
By contrast, the first people to climb Mont Blanc did so at the behest of a geologist, who
was more anxious to know about how the Earth began. Horace Bénédict de Saussure
(1740–99) put up two guineas for the first person to find a route to the top of ‘la montagne
maudite’ (‘the accursed mountain’) after visiting Chamonix for the first time in 1760. It was
twenty-five years before anyone made a claim, but in the end it was chamois hunter and
crystal gatherer Jacques Balmat, together with a local physician, Michel-Gabriel Paccard,
who became the first humans to stand at the summit, on 8 August 1786.
De Saussure himself gained the summit himself a year later and verified its height as 4785
metres (twenty-five metres short, but enough to put it in the record books). And although he
later gave up trying to disentangle the fearsome structural complexity of the Alps, de
Saussure summed up a whole tradition of European geology when he wrote: ‘It is the study
of mountains which above all else can quicken the progress of the theory of the Earth.’
Understanding mountains and the processes that build them was to unlock the tectonic
enigma of how supercontinents form and break up. Crucially, mountains were soon to
demonstrate the impossibility of up-and-down tectonics and foundered continents.
In almost his first geological assignment, Suess had discovered evidence of large lateral
displacements in the Alps, which seemed to show that massive terrains had been moved
sideways for large distances. In doing so he unwittingly planted the seeds of an idea that
would unravel not only the structure of mountains but help lead eventually to the idea that
continents themselves can move laterally. In later work and his magnum opus Suess did not
ignore lateral displacement; instead he said it was a side effect of ups and downs. For him the
basic force governing all tectonics was shrinkage, which caused large sections of the planet’s
contracting crust to founder. As he put it, ‘The collapse of the Earth is what we are
contracting crust to founder. As he put it, ‘The collapse of the Earth is what we are
witnessing.’
As the Earth’s innards shrank, Suess believed, the crust was put under strain. From time
to time parts of it would be forced to subside as the rocky outer shell accommodated to the
collapsing planet within. The fragmentation of Gondwanaland, he reasoned, was caused by
great subsidences, which left parts of the crust standing high as table-lands (Africa, India and
South America) and parts deep below the sea. So the formerly connecting stretches of land
in between, for example, Africa and South America, or India and Madagascar, had simply
dropped and been lost beneath the waves. Gondwanaland had left fragments behind, but it
had not fragmented. The lost parts of it were still there, sunk beneath the Indian and Atlantic
oceans like the lost continents of myth. Because these foundered areas of new ocean were
broadly elliptical, Suess said, they tended to leave behind landmasses with pointed ends: for
the same reason that a round pastry cutter leaves you with triangular offcuts on the rolling
board.
The idea of a shrinking Earth was a powerful one, because it seemed to flow, with all the
inevitability of physical law, from the simple observation that it is hot in mines. The further
down in the crust you go, the warmer it gets. Heat is escaping from the Earth’s interior. And
to nineteenth-century physicists this meant that the Earth was cooling. And if the Earth is
cooling, it therefore must be shrinking because that is what happens when things cool. (The
idea only finally lost support after the discovery of radioactivity, when scientists realized that,
because of the heat generated by radioactive decay, the Earth was not in fact cooling at
anything like the rate that had been assumed.)
Although Suess was still alive when Alfred Wegener first proposed continental drift in
1912, he remained committed to fixed continents that occasionally sank below the waves.
Yet his explanations of how the Earth’s contraction could lead to the very lateral
displacements that he himself had noted as a young man were never wholly convincing,
perhaps even to him.
Later geologists, Wegener foremost among them, merely tipped their hats at his global
observations, synthesis and deductions and, freed from the shackles of contraction theory,
explained them away using another mechanism entirely: the notion that continents could move
sideways. And that is how, rather paradoxically, Suess is numbered among the true
precursors of continental drift, despite having remained resolutely ‘fixist’ all his life.

Everest’s missing feet

What finally killed off the age-old idea of sinking continents was the discovery that continents
simply can’t sink: they are, in fact, already floating.
Gravity is a property of matter. Every object exerts a certain gravitational attraction on
every other, but the force is so weak that only truly massive objects exert it to a degree that
we can measure. Obviously the Earth and other planets exert gravity, but if you are using
very sensitive instruments, even the extra mass of mountains could be expected to have an
effect.
Mapping can be said to be an act of colonization, and the British Raj was keen to
reinforce its dominion by surveying the Empress’s possessions with the most modern
techniques then available. Mapmakers criss-crossed India using two methods to determine
techniques then available. Mapmakers criss-crossed India using two methods to determine
their position, one providing a check on the other. The first of these fixed positions on the
ground like a sailor at sea, using the stars, the horizon and a sextant. The other method was
triangulation, whereby each point on the ground is fixed relative to another by measuring the
intervening distance and taking the compass bearing from each triangulation point to two
others. The rest is trigonometry.
When, during the mapping of the Gangetic Plain, south of the Himalayas, these two
methods were found to give widely differing results, the mapmakers found themselves in a
spot of bother. It came to a head over the difference in latitude between the towns of
Kalianpur and Kaliana. These were supposed to be 370 miles apart. But their latitude
measurements, determined using the two methods, differed by 550 feet. This did not much
please India’s Surveyor General, Colonel George Everest.
Astronomical measurement depended on the use of a plumb bob to level the instrument
before readings were taken, and Everest had the idea that the extra gravitational attraction of
the Himalayas might have been pulling the plumb away from true vertical. The Archdeacon of
Calcutta, John Pratt, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, was recruited to examine the
conundrum; but his first results singularly failed to make things clearer. When Pratt
compensated the astronomical readings for the expected extra gravitational attraction exerted
by the mass of mountains that he could see, the observed discrepancy turned out to be
much smaller than it should have been. The mountains were exerting less of a pull on the
plumb bob than they should have done. It was as though they were hollow.
When Pratt continued correcting readings taken in places near to the coast, the reverse
was true. The ocean, despite its thick covering of less dense water, seemed to be pulling the
plumb bob much more than it should have done. Pratt and the mapmakers were on the verge
of one of the most fruitful discoveries in all geology. The Archdeacon wrote a paper for the
Royal Society.
One of the things that makes science scientific is the fact that reputable journals will not
publish anything before receiving the comments of one or more of the expert referees to
whom they send every paper. This peer review remains a cornerstone of reliable science. It
fell to George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal, to review Pratt’s paper for the Royal
Society. And it was he who came up with the geologically more correct explanation of these
puzzling gravity anomalies. Mountains, Airy said, exert less gravitational pull than they should
do because they have roots. Their less dense material extends down into the planet, in whose
denser interior they float like icebergs in water. Continental masses, Airy said, stand high
above the ocean floor because they are buoyant; in their case, floating in a substrate of
denser rock. They stand proud, but only because they have much larger roots below.
Mountains are higher than plains for the same reason that big icebergs stand taller than small
ones.
 A cartoon showing how, according to the Airy hypothesis of isostasy, like blocks of wood floating in
water, mountains stand high because they are thick. Their light ‘roots’ lie immersed in the more dense
rock of the mantle, like the counterbalancing nine tenths of an iceberg below the waterline
The ocean floor, on the other hand, is made of denser rock. To change the analogy from
ice to wood, if continents are light, like balsa wood, and stand high in the water, the ocean
floor is like mahogany or teak: so dense that it floats, but only just. Hence, despite all that
water on top of them, the oceans still exert more gravitational attraction than scientists had
expected.

The original
FIGURE ‘hypsographic
1.-Generalized Profile,curve’ by Grove
showing relativeKarl
AreasGilbert, showing
of the Earth's that the
Surface surfaceHeights
at different of the and
Earth lies
Depths.
mostly at two levels – average continent and average ocean. Mountains (extreme left) and ocean
trenches (extreme right) account for very little of the Earth’s total surface area. Gilbert deduced that this
graph said something fundamental about the way in which the Earth’s crust was organized.
Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of America, Boulder, Colorado © 1893.

Later it was discovered that if you make a graph of the Earth’s crustal elevation against the
total area lying at that level, on this broad scale (at which small ups and downs can be
neglected) the crust has only two basic levels. Continents are almost everywhere a few
hundred metres above present sea level, and ocean basins are almost everywhere four to five
kilometres below it. The continents have the odd mountain that’s very high and the oceans
have the odd trench that’s very deep. But, basically, nearly all land is at one level and nearly
all ocean floor is at another.
This is because ocean crust has its characteristic density and is the same everywhere
(basalt), while continental crust is lighter and sits higher. And finally, there’s just enough water
in the ocean basins to fill them, so nearly all continent is also land and nearly all ocean floor is
under several kilometres of water.
This principle is called isostasy, but it is really no more than Archimedes’ Principle applied
to rocks, which, contrary to all intuition, are all floating. Continents, despite what everyone
to rocks, which, contrary to all intuition, are all floating. Continents, despite what everyone
thought they knew, and despite all the legends and myths, simply cannot sink. True, if you
freight the land with thick ice sheets, then the extra mass of ice will gradually cause material
underneath slowly to flow away. But when the ice melts, the deep, hot rock will flow back,
and the land will rise again.
Although it took time, the idea of isostasy, of the buoyant balance of light and dense rock
types, and the knowledge that, given time, the Earth is indeed soft to the touch, was what
ultimately paved the way for a true understanding of how supercontinents form and disperse.
They do it by moving sideways.

Old world, new world

In 1896, acknowledging the Wollaston Medal, the Geological Society of London’s highest
honour, the sixty-five-year-old Eduard Suess wrote that it came to him ‘at an age when the
natural diminution of physical strength confines me to my valley and my home; hammer and
belt rest on their peg, and dreams and remembrances alone still carry me along those Alpine
wanderings which form the highest charm of our incomparable science, and in the lonely
grandeur of which Man feels himself more than ever a child of surrounding Nature’. His last
years, devoted to writing his memoirs, were, according to the accounts, peaceful and happy.
Suess’s great book was completed nine years after he had retired from the university. His
faithful servant, who had continued to bring and take away armfuls of books each day, quite
unaware that his master had discovered a continent vaster than any man would ever see,
looked at the foot-thick tomes, shook his head and said: ‘Is that all you managed to get out
of those books I brought you?’
As a boy I inherited my father’s partwork encyclopaedia dating from about 1935, entitled
The World of Wonder. This unwieldy tome contained popular and improving science and
engineering articles. Edited by one Charles Ray, with copious but dingy black-and-white
pictures and diagrams, it came in regular sections like ‘The Romance of Engineering’ or
‘Wonders of Land and Water’, punctuated by illustrated features with headings like ‘Inside a
great Scotch boiler’ and my particular favourite, all about resonance, entitled ‘How a small
girl can play a big trumpet’.
In year one of its publication, on page 172 there appears a short caption, set beneath
three pictures: the Earth with its mountain ranges, a drying apple and an old man’s hand. It
reads: ‘As the Earth gets older, its face wrinkles more and more, just as an apple wrinkles
when it becomes dry and shrinks … and as the human skin wrinkles when a person becomes
aged. Men of science are not agreed as to the cause of the Earth’s wrinkling. To some extent
it is due to the shrinking of the Earth owing to the loss of interior heat …’
Suess’s cooling, shrinking Earth appeared to be still alive and well in the 1930s. But
change was afoot. Turning to the World of Wonder’s page 731 (year two) you find another
story, headed ‘The Drifting of the Earth’s Continents’. Three drawings show the world
today, ‘3,000,000 years ago’ and ‘as it possibly appeared 200,000,000 years ago’: all lands
locked together in one outline, one supercontinent, which we call Pangaea, and whose
southern lobe bears the legend … ‘Gondwanaland’.
The iconic diagram by Alfred Wegener, showing Pangaea (consisting of Laurasia in the North and
Gondwanaland in the South) slowly splitting up to form the continents we recognize today.

PART TWO

EXISTENCE OF LAW
 6

WONDERLAND

Geologist finds hole that lured Alice

THE TIMES, 15 SEPTEMBER 1999

Down the rabbit hole

‘Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve
fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the
earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—”’
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was originally called Alice’s
Adventures Underground, and its opening chapter makes it easy to see why. But the
geological connections of this tale may go deeper than Alice’s (fairly accurate) reflections on
the radius of the globe.
Lewis Carroll was an Oxford University mathematics don, whose real name was Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson. He was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, in 1832, the son of a local curate.
The family later moved across the Pennines to Yorkshire when Carroll’s father became a
Canon of Ripon Cathedral. In that cathedral town Charles senior had a friend and colleague
named Canon Baynes Badcock. Badcock was the Principal of Ripon College, a Church of
England teacher-training school established in 1862. He lived in a house called Ure Lodge,
which took its name from the river that flows through this prosperous market town.
The Badcock family included a young daughter by the name of Mary: the model, many
believe, for Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice when Wonderland came to be published.
Lewis Carroll, a prolific pioneering photographer, is said to have passed her picture to the
artist. However, amid this Trollopean idyll of rural canons, Oxford dons and genteel pursuits,
dark forces were at work.
The district around Ripon is renowned for an alarming geological phenomenon: the sudden
appearance of deep, vertical pits, often ten metres or more across, that can swallow trees,
gardens, garages and even homes in seconds. These holes are not usually much deeper than
twenty metres (though that is deep enough when the remains of your house are at the bottom
of it). Worse, though many are dry, some are filled with churning water. As landscape
features they are unstable. Left to their own devices, they gradually widen out as their walls
collapse, evolving into shallow, conical depressions that may become ponds, marshes or
empty hollows. Then they tend to be forgotten.
The fields opposite Canon Badcock’s home displayed many examples of this
 The fields opposite Canon Badcock’s home displayed many examples of this
phenomenon, both old and new. In 1837 a particularly big hole developed: one the young
Carroll may have seen, either on a visit, or when his family moved to Yorkshire in autumn
1843.
The annals of the Diocese of Ripon record similar collapses down to the present day. And
in 1997 local and national newspapers reported that on the 23rd and 24th of April a large
crater opened up outside the house of Mrs Jane Sherwood-Britton in Ure Bank Terrace,
within the garden of Canon Badcock’s former home. The great maw quickly swallowed up
two out of a row of four garages, and narrowly missed Mrs Sherwood-Britton’s two
children, who had been playing beside them only minutes before.
If you visit Ripon you will notice that on the parapet of the Town Hall is inscribed the
pious motto ‘EXCEPT YE LORD KEEP YE CITTIE YE WAKEMAN WAKETH IN VAIN ’. The annually
elected Ripon Wakeman is an ancient office that may date back to Saxon times, though the
earliest firm evidence is from 1515. In 1604, with the coming of a new City Charter, the
Wakeman was restyled Mayor; but his original job was to keep the peace and act as
watchman from the blowing of the Horn, in the Market Place at 9pm, until dawn. (The
Hornblower, incidentally, still does his stuff today.)
The Lord may keep the city of Ripon, but to any inhabitant unfortunate enough to suffer
from one of its occasional subsidences, the Lord is not much help. English law is distinctly
quirky about landslip and subsidence, for which it holds landowners responsible, even
though, you might think, such natural phenomena fit the bill perfectly as ‘acts of God’. As far
as subsidence is concerned, landowners’ faith is better placed in geologists than the
Almighty.
Nature rarely respects property boundaries, and legal argument at Ure Bank Terrace has
since concentrated on demonstrating that no single proprietor can be held responsible for the
whole of the hole, two of the four garages that vanished having belonged to two other
people, one the modern owner of Canon Badcock’s Ure Lodge. And, bringing the story full
circle, while the authorities were trying to find that elusive person (who has still to be
identified), Ure Lodge itself also succumbed to local geology. Abandoned, empty and
crumbling, it was finally transformed by workmen, who took it to pieces and recycled it.
The alarming tendency for bits of Ripon to vanish without warning down deep holes
creates many civil engineering problems requiring close cooperation between engineers and
geologists. Ripon now boasts a bypass, much of which is elevated above the River Ure on a
reinforced embankment. The river flyover had to be designed so that it would remain
standing should the ground suddenly vanish from beneath any one of its many well-founded
piers. This is comforting to the motorist, because holes like the one that almost swallowed
Mrs Sherwood-Britton’s house appear on average once every three years, and (on a human
timescale) are never going to stop.
In fact, if you tot up the combined volume of the thirty-five subsidence hollows that have
formed in the past century and a half, it comes to at least 27,000 cubic metres, according to
geologist Dr Tony Cooper. Cooper, an expert on the geology of the area, calculates that
under each square kilometre of the Ripon district, at least thirty-six cubic metres of rock are
dissolved every year by groundwater.
Tony Cooper recently retired as District Geologist for Yorkshire at the British Geological
Survey, where he worked for thirty years. There is a boyish candour and enthusiasm about
the way he talks about these alarming subsidences, and an obvious glee when, on his
computer, he overlays digitized versions of historic maps one after the other to show how,
over the decades, cartographers have mapped ‘pits’ that in later years became shallow
depressions and then boggy hollows. Then there’s one map that shows a building on the site,
the old pit now filled in and long forgotten. The modern technical sophistication of the
Survey’s digital resources is a far cry, however, from the hammer, compass-clinometer,
pencil and field-slip world of geology in the 1970s.
‘When I first joined the Survey I started mapping in Yorkshire,’ Cooper told me, ‘near
York, then Wetherby, Knaresborough, Ripon and Bedale. I started to come across holes in
the ground that I couldn’t explain. The first were south of Knaresborough. On the floodplain
of the river, in a dead straight line, I found four craters. They were fairly sharp-sided, but
they had no spoil heaps, so they didn’t look like someone had dug them. As I worked north
towards Ripon I came across more, and started delving into the old literature. By 1982 I had
sorted out the story, and come across quite a lot of other historical material’ – including one
Revd Tute and the paper ‘On certain natural pits in the neighbourhood of Ripon’ that he
presented to the seventy-third meeting of the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West
Riding of Yorkshire in the Wakefield Church Institute one April night in 1869.
From the Revd Tute’s first steps towards a rational understanding of Ripon’s subsidence
problems comes our modern knowledge that Ripon’s bedrock conceals layers of calcium
sulphate – the soluble mineral known as gypsum (raw material for plaster) – in two thick
strata.
Tony Cooper saw that prominent joints in the rock – natural partings and lines of
weakness – were dictating the sites where dissolution of this gypsum was having the greatest
effect. Rocks rarely have just one set of joints; they tend to occur in what are called
conjugate sets, rather like the intersecting cardboard sheets in a case of wine. Where one set
of joints intersects another, Cooper realized, dissolution was doubly enhanced. That was
where the biggest caves formed, so giving rise to the regular, lattice-like pattern of sinkholes
dotted about the landscape.
But Cooper was also responsible for another discovery, the link between Ripon’s unique
geology and the world’s most famous children’s book. Lewis Carroll’s connection with
Ripon was already well known: some of his characters were allegedly inspired by carvings on
misericords in the Cathedral’s choir stalls. If you inspect the misericord under the Mayor’s
seat (north side, east end) you will see a gryphon chasing two rabbits, an allegory of evil
preying on the weak. One rabbit has been caught, but one has dived into its hole – you can
see his little scut just disappearing into the Earth. Gradually, as Cooper pored over the old
geological literature, he began to notice a recurring coincidence of collapses, clergymen and
Lewis Carroll.
By 1997 Cooper’s notion about the link between Carroll’s imaginative landscape and the
landscapes the writer had known as a boy was growing stronger. He began reading up on
the author’s life and while doing so he also noted an earlier, possibly significant geological
association, with the village of Croft-on-Tees, south of Darlington, where the Dodgsons
moved when Carroll was eleven years old. Barely a mile from where they lived are some
mysterious (reputedly bottomless) ponds called Hell Kettles, one of which was formed by a
dramatic subsidence in 1179. To this day, Hell Kettles are filled with water that rarely
freezes, visibly steaming in the winter, and giving off sulphurous smells. As at Ripon, the
subsidence was caused by gypsum dissolving underground. Such a local landmark and its
diabolical legend could not have failed to come to the notice of the inquisitive young writer.
diabolical legend could not have failed to come to the notice of the inquisitive young writer.
Cooper, who like Carroll is an enthusiastic amateur photographer, carries his enthusiasm
for geology and landscape into many other fields, and this excursion into literary research
was for him not that unusual. But his theory lacked an outlet until 1999, when the annual UK
science festival organized by the British Association for the Advancement of Science rolled
into Cooper’s alma mater, Sheffield University.
The tide of ideas that had been rising in Cooper’s mind for the best part of a decade had
suddenly found an outlet. Sheffield University geologist Dr Mike Romano was charged with
organizing the geology sessions and contacted him to speak about the recent Ripon
subsidence. Cooper decided to enliven his story about gypsum dissolution by linking it to
something everybody knew about: Alice in Wonderland. The rest is a small part of media
history.
In fact, everything about Ripon’s civil engineering problems is history, except the modern
technology to deal with them. The collapses happen because groundwater dissolves gypsum
lying beneath the whole region. As caverns open up within it deep underground, their roofs
begin to spall and stope their way slowly upward to the ground surface. If you have ever
removed a fireplace and then watched in horror as the bricks in the chimney-breast above
fall out on to the floor, course by course, you have seen this process at work.
But how did the gypsum get there in the first place? To find that out we need to treat
Alice’s rabbit hole as a time tunnel to Wegener’s lost supercontinent, just as it is beginning to
break up.

In the mind a map

Leaving behind Field View, Mrs Sherwood-Britton’s old house, you return to the main road
at Ripon’s medieval North Bridge. Pausing to admire the piers of the new A61 Ripon
bypass, with their invisible big feet, you turn through the city centre and head out on the
B6265, due west, towards the Pennines: the backbone of England. Passing Royal Studeley,
its deer park and Fountains Abbey World Heritage Site on your left, you take the turning to
High Grantley and make your way up the rich, gently climbing farmland to High Skelding and
Dallow Moor.
Quite suddenly, after the rich farms, their fertile fields and ancient hedgerows dotted with
oak trees, the landscape begins to change. Drystone walls replace the hedges, and then
themselves vanish as you pass on to the open moor underlain by Millstone Grit,
Carboniferous-age rocks that were already deposited, hardened and folded into mountains,
as the supercontinent of Pangaea assembled. They are humbler now, of course, after 250
million years of erosion; but as you walk up the heathery slopes to stand on a rough lump of
Grit or in the lee of a sheep shelter and look down across the lowlands to Ripon, you are
climbing the exhumed topography of Pangaea.
Close your eyes. You hear the wind over the heather, gorse bushes and hawthorns. Larks
are rising. Mournful, far-off cries of birds of prey drift across the hillside. It is time to follow
the White Rabbit, and imagine his pocket watch racing backwards 250 million years.
You are now just two million years or so into what geologists have named (after the
Chinese locality where its deposits are best displayed) the Wuchiapingian Age of the Late
Permian. You, and those barren grey mountains of Millstone Grit behind you, whose roots
Permian. You, and those barren grey mountains of Millstone Grit behind you, whose roots
will one day lie exposed to the boots of fell walkers, now sit about twenty degrees north of
the Equator; the same latitude as Port Sudan, Timbuktu and Santiago de Cuba today.
Although the Sun is slightly less luminous, it is searingly hot, perhaps in the upper forties.
From the bare rock at your feet, you take in the slopes of brown, varnished boulders
stretching to the plains, a sea of brownish dunes, up to fifty metres tall. Not everywhere
down there is covered in sand; in some places rock desert pokes through, and in others,
more low-lying, you can see greyish white: the salty fine mud of a desert playa. Towards the
horizon its dirty white merges into the mirage. Towering greenish dust devils suck at the dry
mud and, driven by the merciless Sun, carry it high into a sky where no bird has ever flown.
Behind you the Pennine range separates you from similar lowlands to the west, but you
would have to cross another 4000 kilometres of mountain and desert – nearly all of the future
North American continent – before you would come to a coast. But what a coast! This
longitude-paralleling shore stretches almost from pole to pole.
Eastward you could travel through all of Europe, across the newly formed Ural
Mountains, and across much of modern Siberia beyond, before you would meet sea again.
To the south (following the ‘N’ on your compass because this is a time of magnetic reversal)
you could walk all the way to the South Pole. This period, when the north magnetic sits at the
south geographic pole, will last for another two million years before flipping back again over
the geological instant of a few thousand years. But by that time the eastward view below you
(over what will one day be the Vale of York) will have changed beyond recognition.
You feel as though marooned on a raft in mid-ocean, lost in the remotest heart of this
seemingly endless expanse of parched land. But though dry, it is not completely lifeless. In
the folds of the higher ground, or nestling at the foot of rocks where water comes nearer to
the surface or seasonal rainwater collects perhaps once a decade, shrubby horsetail-like
plants grow in clumps, relying on their tough, deep rhizomes to find what water they can.
Another shrub, Peltaspermum, and in rare places some conifers related to pines and the
gingko, provide sparse shade. The living is about to get a bit easier for some of these
survivors. Still others will be overwhelmed.
Since the beginning of the Permian Period forty million years before, the supercontinent on
which you are sitting has slowly drifted about fifteen degrees north. The time of the greatest
dying in the history of life, the most severe mass extinction in the geological record, is almost
upon the Earth. In the next few million years 90 per cent of all species now living will become
extinct. After Pangaea, nothing will ever be the same again.
You might have noticed (had you really been trekking up these same gritstone slopes in
the Late Permian) that you had become a little more out of breath than usual, as though you
had suddenly become a lot less fit. That is because the air is thin. The atmosphere of the
modern world contains about 21 per cent oxygen. About 300 million years ago, before the
Permian began, with the Carboniferous coal forests pumping out oxygen from their rampant
photosynthesis, it had been higher still, at about 30 per cent. But the atmosphere’s oxygen
has been tailing off as the great coal forests dwindled. In the late Permian it stands at about
16 per cent. Breathing at sea level has become like breathing at 3000 metres in the modern
world; but by the time global oxygen levels bottom out at 12 per cent, as in the next few
million years they will, living at sea level will be like living at almost 6000 metres today –
higher than any permanent human settlement in the modern world. Little wonder, then, that
the four-legged land animals stalking the Permian landscape were having a bad time. Of the
forty-eight families of such beasts recognized among the rare fossils found in land sediments,
forty-eight families of such beasts recognized among the rare fossils found in land sediments,
thirty-six had died out by the end of the Permian. Lack of oxygen was one factor among
many that drove them to their doom.
The whole globe has also been slowly, fitfully getting warmer. Carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases have been building up in the air, making life even more difficult. As
temperature rises, animals’ metabolic rates also rise, further increasing their need for oxygen.
And although at this time it may not quite have begun as you sit on the Pennine slopes, far
over those distant Ural mountains, in what will one day be northern Siberia, the Earth is
about to split asunder in a catastrophe surpassing any biblical horror.
Over a period lasting as little (to a geologist) as 500,000 years, and almost exactly
coincident with the disappearance of most living species 250 million years ago, massive
eruptions will spew between two and three million cubic kilometres of lava on to the Earth’s
surface in our planet’s biggest-ever series of volcanic eruptions. Today those lavas, known
as the Siberian Traps, cover 350,000 square kilometres and are nearly four kilometres thick
in places. Significantly for life on Earth, along with that molten rock also came (according to
one estimate) 10,000 billion tonnes of carbon, most of which ended up in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide will not be the only gas evolved. Sulphur dioxide will also pollute the air
and acid rain will fall everywhere. The sea’s plankton, bottom link of the oceanic food chain,
will be decimated. Rising temperatures will also affect the sea bed. Billions of tonnes of
methane, trapped in cold, shelf-edge sediments, will suddenly become unstable and rise
catastrophically to the surface, liberating even more carbon into the air than the Siberian
volcanoes. Methane is the most powerful greenhouse gas of all, and thus the spiral of
environmental breakdown will career towards the greatest extinction in Earth history.
Although there is no ice at the North Pole (and, like today, no land either), the South Pole
has been located within Pangaea’s southern half, Gondwanaland, for millions of years. There
a massive icecap has eroded huge amounts of ancient rock and pushed it out over much of
what is today India, South America, Antarctica and Australia; but it has now dwindled
almost to nothing. Mud and boulders the size of men have been dumped everywhere as the
ice fell back, like the abandoned weapons of a retreating army, for the Blanford brothers to
find at Talchir. Water, locked in the ice sheets for millions of years, has poured into the
global ocean, Panthalassa, which has begun a fitful but inexorable rise.
The formation of Pangaea itself, coupled with the removal of carbon dioxide from the air
by land plants, triggered the great Gondwana ice age. Although this lasted for many millions
of years and the centres of glaciation migrated as Gondwanaland shifted relative to the South
Pole, the decisive moment came when the northern continental mass joined Gondwanaland at
the close of the Devonian Period 355 million years ago. This closed off the equatorial current
that helped distribute heat about the globe and Pangaea was born in an ‘icehouse’ world.
But at the end of the Permian all this is changing. The Earth system is flipping from
icehouse to greenhouse mode. The increased volcanic activity associated with the break-up
of Pangaea, and the eruption of the Siberian Traps, will both pump greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere. The melting of the glaciers is already increasing the Earth’s absorption of the
Sun’s heat. As the submarine spreading ridges become more active, they are swelling up and
pushing the oceans, already full of glacial meltwater, on to the continental shelves. This in turn
is further raising the heat-absorbing capacity of the planet because water absorbs and retains
heat better than land.
The Earth’s climate will remain in its new greenhouse state for much of the next 220 million
 The Earth’s climate will remain in its new greenhouse state for much of the next 220 million
years, until quite close to our own time, as life gradually recovers from the end-Permian
disaster, the dinosaurs come and go, birds fill the sky and the supercontinent of Pangaea
slowly dissolves, fragmenting into today’s map.
As you sit on the proto-Pennines, something of those tectonic processes tearing Pangaea
apart is at work below you, under the parched desert lowlands to the east. The seemingly
endless plain is feeling the tension as Pangaea’s northern half, Laurasia, begins to unzip: a
process that will eventually form the Atlantic Ocean. The floor of the plain is subsiding, falling
like a keystone into a widening rift, and desert sediment is tumbling in, piling up into layers of
porous rock that will one day act as reservoirs for North Sea oil and gas. As the
supercontinent rends itself, the tension extends northwards along a relatively narrow belt
between the ancient rocks of Greenland and Norway, now lying cheek by jowl.
There in the distant north, perhaps a week or so before your visit, the inevitable has finally
happened. Thanks to that subsidence (despite the inrush of sediment that is doing its best to
fill the vacuum), the desert plain over which you gaze lies up to 250 metres below sea level:
an ancient Death Valley on a vast scale, stretching from here far into eastern Europe. That
entire desert basin is about to become sea, and the whole flooding process will take just a
few months. These two events, the flooding of the North Sea basin and the eruptions of the
Siberian Traps, took place at about the same time in Earth history, and show how misleading
the strict uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell can be. Our knowledge of what is normal
behaviour for the Earth is extremely limited. Human beings have not existed on the Earth long
enough to have witnessed the eruption of a Large Igneous Province. Nor has our species
ever seen a major inundation like that about to unfold at your feet; though neither event is that
uncommon in the long history of the Earth.

A wild surmise

Take an example from more recent geological time. The modern Mediterranean would not
exist if it were not connected to the global ocean via the Strait of Gibraltar, because not
enough water flows off the land that surrounds it to outstrip the process of evaporation. But
the Strait is shallow, and about six million years ago, during the Miocene Period, global sea
levels fell so much that the connection was broken. The Mediterranean dried out, leaving a
vast desert basin that was only retaken by the sea 900,000 years later (still millions of years
before modern humans were around). If you ever wondered why there are so many deep
gorges in the South of France, this is the reason. Starting from their new bases (the bottom of
the desiccated Mediterranean), these rivers eroded back rapidly along their courses, cutting
deep, slot-like canyons like cheese wires slicing through a slab of Cantal.
Long before this became fact, H. G. Wells was studying geology at London University
under his uninspiring teacher John Wesley Judd (‘washing his hands in invisible water as he
talked’). The science-fiction pioneer learnt about geological speculations that the
Mediterranean had once been dry, which were then being bandied around as explanations
for some odd distributions of plants and those mysteriously deep gorges. In 1921 Wells
incorporated the (then) unsubstantiated theory in a tale he published in the April issue of
Storyteller magazine about an encounter between modern humans and Neanderthals. It was
called The Grisly Folk.
called The Grisly Folk.
‘It was in those days before the ocean waters broke into the Mediterranean that the
swallows and a multitude of other birds acquired the habit of coming north, a habit that
nowadays impels them to brave the passage of the perilous seas that flow over and hide the
lost secrets of the ancient Mediterranean valleys.’
Now, Wells’s suggested timing for the Mediterranean’s big flood was awry by several
million years, and as a theory the ‘dry Med’ remained unproven until 1970. On 28 August
the Deep Sea Drilling Project research vessel Glomar Challenger was poking a hole in the
western Mediterranean floor, south of the Balearic Islands. They were drilling in almost 3000
metres of water at the time, so the geologists on board were greatly surprised when they
picked, from between the teeth of their drill bit, chunks not of gypsum exactly but of the
anhydrous calcium sulphate mineral anhydrite. You find anhydrite only where there has been
evaporation, and you certainly don’t find it on the bottom of the ocean – unless of course the
ocean had once dried up and then been reclaimed by a catastrophic flood.
Something very like that flood is now unfolding below you as you perch on the Permian
Pennines. Geologists continue to debate the relative role of local subsidence versus global
sea-level rise, but the evidence in the rocks for the speed of the inundation is dramatic and
unequivocal.
What first signs of the advancing tide might you sense from your vantage point? Some tang
on the prevailing north wind of this desert basin perhaps? A smell like that of rain on parched
city streets? Distant thunder as an unseasonal line of thunderheads advances, formed as
water vapour convects violently off the desert and climbs miles high into the atmosphere? Or
perhaps a sudden increase in the abundance of small reptiles, fleeing before the advancing
menace, planting their three-toed tracks in the sands?
Such events as these would leave few or no conclusive traces; but still we can tell the
flood was sudden. The evidence lies in the remains of those sand dunes, which today survive
as some of the topmost sandstone gas reservoirs of the southern North Sea. The dunes that
built those sandstones were huge, some probably over fifty metres tall. You can see them
clearly from where you sit. But dunes are just sand: loose, weak, unconsolidated. Think of a
sandcastle on the sea’s edge; it doesn’t take many feeble ripples to plane it flat. But these
dunes were not planed flat.
Two hundred and fifty million years later, if you visit quarries where these fossil sand dunes
are now exposed in section, you can clearly see how the first bed deposited on top of them
by the new sea drapes over those ancient sand hills’ original shape. Moreover, the parts of
the dunes closest to the interface with water-laid sediments – where the sand could be
expected to have been reworked into beaches as the transgression gathered pace – lack any
of the features of beach sands (typical bedding, or the shells that should be found if the beach
had existed for any length of time). There are not even any fossil burrows. The inescapable
conclusion is that the desert became the bottom of the sea far too quickly for normal shallow
water features to be established – or even for the waves to plane the dunes flat.
By the time the great flood was over, the new sea was nowhere more than 250 metres
deep. That means that the amount of water needed to fill the entire basin (stretching all the
way from Yorkshire to Poland and Russia) would be about 110,000 cubic kilometres. All
this would have passed through one narrow northern channel; so the greatest uncertainty in
the equation comes in estimating how wide and deep that channel was. If it were ten
kilometres wide at its narrowest and allowed a flow twenty metres deep travelling at about
three metres per second (a rather conservative estimate), the water could have rushed in at
three metres per second (a rather conservative estimate), the water could have rushed in at
the rate of about fifty cubic kilometres per day. The whole process of filling the new sea
would have taken about six years.
Six years seems long enough, but the rate at which the process was completed is not
important when we are confronted by rocks in outcrop. Face to face with the record of
events at a single locality, the question is: how fast could any single dune have been covered
by water? Even using our conservative estimate of influx rate, it would seem that in what is
now Yorkshire, the sea would have risen by some tens of centimetres a day – enough to
bury a fifty-metre-high dune in about eight months. One season and the dune sea below you
would have become the sea bed, its once sunstruck curves draped in black mud.
The suddenness of the inundation also explains other features characteristic of the dune
sandstones underneath the first marine sediment. Dunes have a characteristic internal
structure, formed as sand grains are blown over the crests to cascade down the lee slope as
the dune migrates downwind. This creates a large-scale form of ‘cross-bedding’, measurable
in metres; the fossil dune surfaces forming great rococo festoons and swags.
The odd thing about these particular dunes is how many of them now appear to lack this
characteristic bedform, especially at their centres. Here the laminae of sand are often either
contorted and chaotic or have vanished completely. For a long time geologists were at a loss
to explain this; but the emerging tale of the dunes’ sudden inundation provided an
explanation. As the dunes were buried, large pockets of air became trapped at their hearts.
Eventually, as the water got deeper, this trapped gas would eventually overcome the strength
of the sediment confining it and be released suddenly, disrupting all the original bedding of the
sand as it escaped.
So, as you watch the advancing tide from your vantage point on the slopes of the Pennine
mountains, and see the dune tops slowly vanish beneath a scummy, turbid tide of thick, slimy,
bitter water, you will be rewarded from time to time by the sight and sound of sudden
bubbling.

Zechstein

Because at least part of this transgression of the sea was caused by the global rise of sea
levels, this story was repeated all over the edges of the fragmenting supercontinent. But this
particular example, which geologists call the Zechstein Sea, was (like many of the others) not
stable. Like the modern Mediterranean, it could not exist for long without being connected to
the global ocean. But because the Zechstein was a shelf sea underlain by continental crust, it
was much shallower than the Mediterranean, which is a true ocean floored by dense ocean
crust that sits low on the Earth’s surface. This made the Zechstein especially vulnerable to
drying.
This cannot have been a simple ‘on-off’ process. Zechstein sediments, now buried deep
below the bed of the North Sea, are hundreds of metres thick. To make just thirty
centimetres of evaporite (as minerals produced this way, including anhydrite and gypsum, are
known), you need to drive off five hundred metres of seawater: twice the depth of the
Zechstein Sea at its deepest. Clearly, fresh supplies of ocean water had to be entering the
sea continuously, over long periods, and evaporating under the intense heat of the Permian
sea continuously, over long periods, and evaporating under the intense heat of the Permian
desert.
And this, of course, is where Ripon’s troublesome soluble gypsum comes from. The
Zechstein Sea may have dried up almost completely as many as five times in its relatively
short lifespan of barely ten million years. In doing so, it left behind regular cycles of chemical
deposits, each series beginning with the most insoluble minerals (which precipitate first) and
ending with those that crystallize only when there is hardly any water left to be dissolved in.
So the first minerals to appear are limestone (calcium carbonate, which precipitates readily in
warm, saturated water and may do so in your kettle) and dolomite, an impure limestone
made of a chemical mixture of calcium and magnesium carbonate.
The first such rock to be deposited, known generally as the Magnesian Limestone, was
the very rock chosen to build the grand new Palace of Westminster, home of the British
Parliament, which was rising as the Blanford brothers were leaving for India in 1856. Called
Anstone, it came from quarries near Worksop, and proved a disaster in the metropolis’s acid
rain. Alas, despite its workability and lovely biscuit colour, the Mother of Parliaments’ new
home soon began dissolving before its builders’ eyes, giving rise to a lot of amusing but
chemically suspect jokes about why the geologists advising the Parliamentary commission
had suggested building the Palace of Westminster out of laxative (Epsom Salt is magnesium
sulphate).
The new sea brought some relief to the barren heart of northern Pangaea, and it is likely
that around its edges the land grew green, or at least greener than it had been. But the
supercontinent that enclosed it turned the Earth into a very different world from ours.

Immortal cells

The Earth’s climate is largely controlled by a set of fairly simple physical constants, but as
scientists are increasingly finding, the combination of simple things can have results of almost
unpredictable complexity.
As it orbits the Sun, at a distance of ninety-four million miles, the Earth receives a certain
amount of radiation from it, known as insolation. The Sun’s output has been increasing with
time, and over hundreds of millions of years this small increase – brought about by the
gradual exhaustion of its primary fuel, hydrogen – is significant enough to have to be taken
into account. It is one of those secular changes of which Sir Charles Lyell would not have
approved.
This radiation hits the Earth and warms it up, and the atmosphere of the Earth keeps the
heat in by the well-known ‘greenhouse effect’, and moves it around. By and large, the
average energy received at the top of Earth’s atmosphere is a fairly constant 343-watts per
square metre: a bit more than three lightbulbs’worth. But the complex interaction of axial tilt
and other superimposed cycles made the distribution of heat over the surface of the planet a
very complex thing to model.
Seasons, the most obvious climate changes of which we are aware, are caused by the tilt
of the Earth’s axis relative to the Sun, which currently stands at about 23.4 degrees from the
‘vertical’ (defined as the right angle to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, called
the ecliptic). Thus, as the Earth revolves around the Sun, for half the year the Northern
the ecliptic). Thus, as the Earth revolves around the Sun, for half the year the Northern
Hemisphere is tilted towards it, while for the other six months it’s the turn of the Southern
Hemisphere. This tilting effectively concentrates the Sun’s heat first in one hemisphere and
then in another, just like leaning towards the fire to warm your face (Northern Hemisphere
Summer) and then walking around to the other side, so that you face away from the fire and
the heat warms your bottom instead (Southern Hemisphere Summer). At the Equator, of
course, this axial tilt has little effect and seasonality is less noticeable.
But there’s much more to it than that. If you have ever watched a spinning top that isn’t
moving perfectly, or the behaviour of a double pendulum, you will have a feeling for the
complex way in which harmonic systems behave. There are also eccentricities in the system
to consider, and cycles that affect the degrees of eccentricity. Several such long-period
cycles affect the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and these in turn change the climate
because they affect the amount of insolation: how much heat hits a unit area of Earth in any
one place. How all these cycles interact, sometimes reinforcing one another, sometimes
cancelling one another out, creates a highly complex system that means that the Earth’s
climate is never constant.
Take the Earth’s elliptical orbit. The Sun does not sit at the centre of the ellipse, so the
Earth–Sun distance that every schoolboy thinks he knows is actually only an average.
However, this ellipticity varies (over a period of 98,500 years) from very elliptical to almost
circular. At its most elliptical, the extra distance from the Sun can cut the amount of insolation
by as much as 30 per cent from when the Earth is closest. This cycle has almost no effect at
all on the total amount of heat received by the Earth per year, because it all averages out.
However, it does increase ‘seasonality’ (the contrast between the seasons) in one
hemisphere, while reducing it in the other.
The inclination of the Earth’s axis to the ecliptic varies (over a timespan of 41,000 years),
between extreme values of 21.39 (nearest to ‘vertical’) and 24.36 degrees (most inclined).
This cycle also affects the length of the dark polar winters, and has a marked effect on
climate in high latitudes. In addition, the Earth’s axis of spin describes a circle (over a period
of 21,700 years). You can make a spinning top do this very easily by giving it a nudge. This
is called precession.
If you combine two of these factors – the 98,500-year cycle in orbital ellipticity with the
21,700-year cycle in the Earth’s axial tilt (precession) – you generate a harmonic interference
between the two cycles: they produce another cycle. At one extreme the Earth will come
closest to the Sun during the Southern Hemisphere Summer; and at the other it will come
closest during the Northern Hemisphere Summer. At these extreme points in the cycle, the
additive effect of axial tilt and proximity to the Sun makes the summer more intense (and, six
months later, the winters deeper, occurring as they will, when the Earth is at its farthest from
the Sun). Intense summer conditions will increase the heating of land areas (land heats up and
cools down much more quickly than the more even-tempered ocean), with striking effects on
rainfall, as we shall see. The overall effect creates cycles of seasonality. But by the same
token, when the seasons are at their most contrasted in one hemisphere, they will be at their
least contrasted in the other.
Orbital climate-forcing effects were first described by Scots geologist James Croll (1821–
90) and later developed by Serb mathematician Milutin Milankovich (1879–1958), and for
this reason they are known collectively as Croll–Milankovich cycles. But the climate is not all
about angles of tilt and rays per square metre. The Earth’s fluid shells – the air and water –
are what make it completely different from any other space rock struck by starlight. Earth’s
are what make it completely different from any other space rock struck by starlight. Earth’s
atmosphere and the hydrosphere absorb and transport the Sun’s heat around, creating an
equable average temperature at surface (currently about 25 degrees Celsius). In the oceans
this circulation is achieved by a set of interlocking convection-driven cells called gyres;
there’s one in the North Atlantic and one in the South Atlantic, for example. But they are not
discrete: they mesh like cogs in a gearbox, shunting water (and heat) from one gyre to
another. In fact, the ocean basins are connected by a three-dimensional ‘global conveyor’, as
it has become known, refreshing and warming bottom waters, creating fertile upwellings of
cold, mineral-rich waters elsewhere, and preventing stratification: the tendency of warm
water to float on cold, light on dense. This keeps the whole ocean system oxygenated and
healthy.
Oceanic convection cells are very much dependent on the shape of the ocean basins – and
hence on the distribution of continents. But if you want stability, look to the atmosphere.
Here three huge, sausage-like convection cells sit around each hemisphere like the folds of
rubber flesh surrounding M. Michelin. They are invisible of course, though the cloud patterns
give them away – if you know what to look for. They have existed for billions of years and
continue their convection more or less irrespective of what the orbit is doing, or where the
continents happen to lie on the shifting surface of the globe. Behind the fickle airs there is a
dynamic stability that has easily outlasted the transient continents.
These great convection tubes create the major climatic zones of the Earth, which like them
lie in belts parallel to the Equator. The cells exist as the stable answer to the need to dissipate
heat from where it is most plentiful – at the Equator – to the poles. At the Earth’s waistline,
hot air rises, creating more or less permanent low pressure and rain as moisture condenses.
The rising air hits the upper edge of the atmosphere and splits in two, some going south,
some north. We shall follow the northern limb.
This air travels north high up at the top of the atmosphere until it meets more – circulating
in the next cell – coming in the opposite direction. The two currents collide and sink back to
Earth again. This falling air is dry and creates permanent high pressure. Where it hits land it
produces desert conditions everywhere on land except near coasts, where some moisture
can blow a little way inland. Thus on either side of the wet equatorial region you find bands
of deserts. They stand out well on those ‘where is the plane?’ simulations provided on long-
haul flights.
On hitting the Earth, the air splits again. Some goes back south, to pick up moisture and
rise again at the Equator. The rest travels north along the Earth’s surface and does not rise
again until it meets cold air travelling Equatorwards from the pole. The two then meet and
rise, creating another line of low-pressure systems, and rain. Over the poles, in the final or
Polar cell, cold dry air sinks, creating high pressure with (usually) relatively low evaporation –
the dry arctic air of the tundra.

Turning in the widening gyre

A complication, introduced by the Earth’s rotation, is the Coriolis effect, named after French
mathematician Gustave-Gaspard de Coriolis (1792–1843), who worked out the
mathematics governing it. This is the apparent force, acting on all objects moving on the
Earth’s rotating surface, that tends to deflect them to the right in the Northern Hemisphere
Earth’s rotating surface, that tends to deflect them to the right in the Northern Hemisphere
and to the left in the Southern. This is why weather systems (and, allegedly, water
disappearing down plugholes) rotate clockwise north of the Equator and anticlockwise south
of it. On air moving in the cells, it acts to change the simple circular, ‘up-across-down’
convections I have just hinted at into helical ones.
So in fact the winds within the cells spiral around inside them, like the rifling inside a gun
barrel. And because these helical convection currents are wound in opposite directions either
side of the Equator (coiling to the right in the north and left in the south thanks to the Coriolis
effect), they give rise at surface to the famously reliable trade winds, beloved of sailors. The
trade winds just north of the Equator blow from the north-east because the Coriolis effect
deflects winds travelling south (completing their return leg to the Equator) to the right (i.e., the
west). Contrariwise, below the Equator, the south-east trades blow from that quarter
because these winds are deflected to the left (the west again) as they travel north.
At higher latitudes than the tropics, the surface winds of the second great cell blow from
the south-west in the Northern Hemisphere (bringing Britain its rain from the Atlantic)
because those convection currents become deflected to the right, veering westerly. Above
the southern tropics, winds that would be blowing back towards the South Pole (i.e.,
northerlies) are deflected to the left, backing westerly.
What does all this mean for reconstructing vanished supercontinents? To some extent, no
matter where the continents lie, the prevailing winds between the Equator and the tropics,
and between the tropics and the pole, have always blown, and will always blow, in pretty
much the same direction. These winds will be wet in the same places, and dry in the same
places. Falling air will create high pressure; rising air will create lows. It’s simple – it’s
physics.
The way in which the atmosphere then interacts with them creates different environments,
which the geologist can diagnose by looking at fossils, and the rocks that contain them, and
by comparing this evidence with organisms and sedimentary environments around us today.
But then the distribution of land and sea comes into play, and snarls up this simple
convecting system. Think of how, joining Laurasia, the northern landmass to Gondwanaland
cut off the equatorial currents and plunged Gondwana into a deep ice age. The distribution of
continents clearly affects the way the oceans’ gyres work, and in much more unpredictable
ways than the unchanging and imperturbable Polar, Ferrel and Hadley Cells of the
atmosphere. Moreover, the monsoon is entirely dependent on the distribution of land and
sea, the heat differential between them, and seasonal temperature differences across the
Equator. These elements prevent the atmospheric circulations from perfectly overlaying an
unchanging pattern of climatic stripes upon the shifting continents.

Megamonsoon

Children’s encyclopaedias never fail to include an explanation of onshore and offshore

breezes; the former created during the day when the sun heats the land, and the latter at night
when the land cools off quickly, leaving the sea warmer. Monsoons are in a way similar, but
writ large, operating at continental scales over annual rather than daily cycles, and large
enough to disrupt entire climate zones.
enough to disrupt entire climate zones.
The word ‘monsoon’ comes from the Arabic mausin, meaning ‘season’, and refers to
winds that change from one part of the year to another. However, the common usage of
‘monsoon’ is for heavy rain associated with the summer monsoon winds of Asia, blowing
ashore off the Indian Ocean.
In India, for example, monsoon rains arrive in early summer. The winds blow onshore
from the south-west, though these are actually the south-east trade winds of the
subequatorial Hadley Cell, being pulled off course by hot air rising over the baking heart of
India. The Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau intensify this process, by introducing hot air much
higher in the atmosphere.
The moisture-laden winds, which otherwise would have made landfall in the Horn of
Africa, find themselves yanked back on themselves (the Horn receives its rains either side of
the summer monsoon season, when the trades go back to normal). As the winds rise up over
India’s great plateau, they are forced to drop their moisture; but as the rain condenses out, a
runaway effect is created because condensation releases yet more heat, the ‘latent heat’,
which pays back the extra energy needed to evaporate the water in the first place (which is
why fountains feel cool: the evaporation they induce absorbs heat from the surroundings).
To create a monsoon, therefore, all you need is a strong heat contrast between land and
sea, and a source of moisture-laden air. At times in the Croll–Milankovich cycle when
seasonality is most pronounced (say, a Southern Hemisphere Summer coinciding with the
Earth’s closest approach to the Sun) any monsoon in that region will be enhanced. And that
is the sort of cyclicity that geologists expect to find when looking at the rocks laid down
through many such cycles over thousands of years.
Computer climate models for a Pangaean Earth show that by far the greatest portion of
global rainfall in that time was convective, and took place at the Equator – and hence almost
entirely over the ocean, Panthalassa and its reef-fringed embayment, Tethys. As the great ‘C’
of Pangaea drifted slowly northwards, coming to straddle the Equator more symmetrically,
the huge baking landmasses now sitting just north and south of the Equator exerted a gigantic
effect upon the distribution of rainfall.
Tethys, embraced by the supercontinent, was a warm ocean. An equatorial current flowed
directly into its maw, concentrating heat and nutrients gathered from Panthalassa and
introducing massive amounts of moisture into the atmosphere above it. However, the huge
land areas north and south of the gulf would have set up Northern Hemisphere Summer
monsoons on Tethys’s northern coast, and a Southern Hemisphere Summer monsoon on its
southern flank. Climate modellers believe that this effect dwarfed even the biggest modern
monsoon, and have dubbed it ‘megamonsoon’. Also, Pangaean mountain belts were
probably among the mightiest ever seen on Earth. Those bordering Tethys’s northern coasts
would have mirrored the enhancing effect of the modern Himalayas on the modern Asian
summer monsoon, making the megamonsoons even more so.

A new Lyell

In conjuring these vanished worlds back into being in such great detail, geologists use two
forms of uniformitarian reasoning. They project physical constants back into the past
forms of uniformitarian reasoning. They project physical constants back into the past
(adjusting for secular change, such as the Sun’s slowly increasing energy output) because
physical laws do not change with time. And they interpret sediments in the light of what is
known, by inspection, of sedimentary processes and environments around us today.
Working from several lines of evidence (including fossil magnetism in rocks, fossil animals
and sediment types), geologists can determine where all the broken bits of Pangaea used to
be and how they fitted together, giving a broad outline of the supercontinent. On to this
outline, the ancient topography (young, high mountain belts like the Urals, older ones like the
Pennines, the basins and plains) can be plotted. Those fossils and sediment types that give
firm indications of climate – so-called ‘climate proxies’, such as glacial deposits or coals –
can then be added to the picture. If the geologists have plotted and interpreted the rocks and
fossils correctly, if the assumptions made about them by analogy with modern sediments and
living things are correct, if the palaeomagnetists have got the continents in the right place, if
the modellers have understood the palaeoclimate correctly, and if the computer model is truly
reflecting the way energy balances between land and sea and the way oceans and the
atmosphere exchange heat and moisture, then everything should fit perfectly and make sense.
Needless to say, it rarely does, and this is what keeps it interesting.
To objectify the process of deciding if the distributions really do make sense – to make it
more ‘scientific’ – modellers compare the geological evidence (often referred to as the
‘ground truth’) with computer predictions generated by (more or less) the same sort of
computer models used every day to generate weather forecasts. These massive programs
attempt to mimic the complexity of the Earth’s climate system by breaking the hydrosphere
and atmosphere down into layers and the geography of the Earth into manageable pixels
1.25 degrees square. With a supercomputer doing all the calculations, they re-create ancient
water temperatures, winds, evaporation, cloud cover, storminess, snow depth, soil moisture,
hurricanes, monsoons. The lost continents of science are brought to life partly in machines.
Energy Balance Models look at the land–sea distribution and solve the thermodynamic
equations that can give some idea of how hot the land was relative to the sea at different
times of the year. Climate-predicting programs are called GCMs, General Circulation
Models, and combine fluid dynamics with ancient geography to simulate the climatic
response to the energy balance. GCMs that try to simulate the atmosphere are called
AGCMs, while OGCMs treat the circulations of the ocean. In recent years these have been
brought together in coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation models (OAGCMs). Researchers
can tweak the parameters of these models – for example, to take account of the Sun’s lower
energy output 250 million years ago, or to allow for different mixes of gases in the air at
different times in the Earth’s history. They keep tweaking until the model matches the
evidence – or exposes anomalies that merit closer inspection.
Model predictions of the Pangaean megamonsoon have one major thing in common: all
predict strong seasonality on and around the northern and southern shores of Tethys. And
seasonality is something that geologists can look for, because pronounced seasons leave
behind patterns in sediment sequences. Also, plotting particularly climate-sensitive rock types
on a reconstructed map of the supercontinent will produce a pattern that – if the monsoon
phenomenon is real – will not be perfectly zonal, as might result from the atmospheric cells
alone. The monsoons will perturb this pattern, and the zones will depart from perfectly
paralleling latitude.
In orbit over Pangaea

So, as the waters seep in, the Zechstein Sea fills and the drowned dunes release their sudden
frothy exhalations, let us avoid the possibility of being surprised by a gorgonopsian, the top
predator of its time, and soar through the air in which no bird has ever flown, up through the
circulating atmosphere to the edge of space, and look down upon the latest (but not the last)
supercontinent.
Below the bands of cloud, Pangaea sits within the globe like the ‘C’ in a copyright symbol.
The curve of land encloses a great sea – an inland ocean, the Tethys – whose east-facing
opening to the global ocean Panthalassa is partially obstructed by a number of small island
subcontinents covered in dense jungle, much like Borneo or Sulawesi today. One day these
microcontinents will drift north and collide with the northern limb of Pangaea to form much of
what is now China. But for the time being they are the only major land areas not accreted to
the supercontinent, which is just now at or about ‘maximum packing’. Mountain building is
still taking place along the northern shore of Tethys, which is fringed by a long mountain
range created by the subduction of Tethyan ocean floor and the occasional accretion of those
small continental fragments, waiting like ships outside harbour. This line of mountains already
includes the older, northern ranges of the great mountain belt most people refer to collectively
as the Himalayas: the Tien Shan and Nan Shan mountains.
The northern limb of Pangaea, stretching from Siberia, the Urals, Europe, Greenland and
North America to the future Pacific rim, is known as Laurasia and was formed when the Ural
Mountains were raised in the collision of North America with Europe and Siberia. This
towering young belt bisects Laurasia north–south, to the northern Tethys shore. To the west
the Hercynian (and beyond them the older Caledonian) mountains stand proud; but they are
much older and (thanks to millions of years of erosion) already less pronounced. Between
these ranges a finger of sea reaches south from the Boreal Ocean and feeds a growing area
of water, the Zechstein Sea, that will soon spread south and east to cover much of future
central Europe, bringing moisture to the heart of the great northern deserts. On the other side
of the Pennines another inland sea, the Bakevellia Sea, fills a basin that mirrors the shape of
the modern Irish Sea.
From its desolate western shore, the lone and level sands are interrupted only by the
Appalachians, the US continuation of the Caledonian range, before vast stretches of sandy
and rocky desert extend for thousands of kilometres towards what is now much of central
and western America, where shallow ephemeral shelf seas and massive reef complexes
mirror, on a much larger scale, what is happening in northern Europe.
To the south, where the supercontinent narrows to its equatorial waist, the Hercynian
mountain system cuts inland, rising to four kilometres above sea level and marking the suture
between the continental blocks of North America and North Africa. The range separates
Laurasia from Pangaea’s southern lobe, Gondwanaland. At its western end, where it meets
the longitude-parallel Panthalassan coast, it turns south, defining the coastline of the future
South America: the early Andes. At their southern tip these mountains touch also the Cape of
South Africa, skirt Antarctica, and run up the western coast of Australia before coming to an
end on the south-eastern extremity of Tethys, and so completing our round-Pangaea trip.
Gondwanaland is a much more ancient entity than Laurasia, and many traces of the older
suturing events that brought it together can be seen in the remnants of much older mountain
ranges, one of which runs between eastern South Africa, Antarctica and the eastern coast of
India, passing through ‘Gondwana Junction’, where those three future separate continents
now touch. There, in 250 million years’ time, when the old sutures have opened up again,
thousands of miles of ocean will have squeezed into the crack, and the Vivekananda
Memorial will stand on a rocky islet of charnockite at India’s Land’s End, staring out across
the sea to its vanished neighbours.

Forests of the polar night

As Pangaea has moved steadily north through the Permian, the South Pole has all but slipped
into the sea. The great continental icecap that had existed for many millions of years since the
Carboniferous has finally melted away completely, releasing the last of its cargo of mud and
boulders the size of men. Unique to Gondwanaland, dense forests of Glossopteris trees,
standing up to twenty-four metres tall, the shape of Christmas pines and growing a thousand
to the acre, fringe the southern coasts of Tethys and stretch inland to within twenty degrees
of the pole.
These forests of the polar night withstand two seasons: one of feeble light and one of
unremitting dark. Today’s world has no equivalent of this eerie ecosystem. Their growth rings
show that each summer these trees grow frenetically. Those nearer the coast are lashed by
megamonsoon rains roaring in from Tethys, the thick cloud further weakening the feeble
sunshine raking the latitudes at the bottom of the world. And as the brief growing season
comes to an end, and the orbital progress of the leaning Earth draws the sun in its undulating
course daily closer to the horizon, the tongue-like leaves turn wild and fall on thick beds of
countless others on the sodden forest floor. The sun dips further, finally no longer peeping
above the ending line, and all growth ceases for six months without prospect of a dawn.
Leaves that will one day lie fossilized beside the frozen body of Captain Scott fall into the
anoxic peat. The great Permian coals store up the Sun’s ancient energy like a battery, waiting
for release in power stations and steel mills.
These coal-producing forests occupy a climate zone designated ‘tropical everwet’ and,
according to the occurrence of coals at this time, this zone extended from about midway
along the southern coast of Tethys, across the island archipelagoes standing in the great gulf’s
mouth, to the northern shore’s eastern promontory, and then back west, ending not far short
of where the Ural mountains join the coastal cordillera. Oil source rocks and coral reefs
cluster here, bearing testimony to the high organic productivity of the Permian tropics.
Around the reef-fringed Tethys, only rarely does this everwet zone give ground, and then
mostly to ‘tropical summerwet’ conditions that also prevail across the mountainous mid-
section of equatorial Pangaea and extend only a little way east along each shore of the great
embayment.
Tropical summerwet is too dry for coals, and none is found today in places that were once
situated here. But coal can, and does, form beyond the everwet tropics. It is a common
misconception that all coal forms in steaming swamps like the Amazon or Congo basins of
today. The main requirement for coal formation is a high water table that prevents plant
matter from decaying. So, if that can be combined with high productivity of plant matter,
matter from decaying. So, if that can be combined with high productivity of plant matter,
coals can also form in cool and warm-temperate climate zones. This was particularly true
over Gondwanaland, clothed with its unique Glossopteris forests, growing amid the lakes
and valleys of the sodden, recently deglaciated southern continent. But plant remains (not
abundant enough to make coals, though significant enough to create tantalizing ‘floral
localities’) also extend around the shallow seas running south from the northern Boreal
Ocean – like the Zechstein.
Despite these exceptions the main signature of Pangaea is one of almost unremitting
aridity. The continent is too large for the moisture of the oceans to reach its interior; the late-
Permian atmosphere, richer in carbon dioxide by perhaps five times the modern level, holds
in the heat of the weaker Sun. In the parched heart of the northern and southern lobes of
Pangaea summer temperatures soar over 45°C, while at polar latitudes they fall in winter
below –30°C. South of the equatorial mountains, salt flats, gypsum playas and dune fields
link the west coast of Pangaea, across the whole of the landmass that is now split into North
America, North Africa and Arabia, to the southern shore of Tethys. North of it, desert; from
shining, reef-fringed western shores bordering Panthalassa, all the way to the towering Urals
– interrupted only by ephemeral, evaporating seas, recently filled and soon to teem with rich,
spiny shellfish adapted to their bitter, hypersaline waters.
Further north, around the Boreal Ocean and its embayments, under the northerly storm
track, the prevailing westerlies bring moisture in from Panthalassa, just as they do today from
the Pacific to the boreal rainforests of moss-curtained pinestands of Washington State and
British Columbia. But that moisture is soon spent and cannot penetrate far inland, so these
conditions give way rapidly eastward to cool and finally cold temperate zones along the
chilly, but ice-free, roof of the end-Permian world; a silent tundra shore, where soon some of
the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history will devastate hundreds of thousands of square
kilometres, burying them in kilometres-thick lava piles and nearly bringing the whole story to
an end, even before the first dinosaur stalked the planet.

World reborn

Since Alfred Wegener first pieced it back together in 1912, Pangaea continues to be reborn
in the minds of Earth scientists – and their computers – as a living and ( just about) breathing
world; a unique place with many lessons to teach us about how our planet’s climate works. It
is the supercontinent about which we will always know most, because it is not long gone; its
sediments are everywhere; our modern oceans contain a magnetic road map that helps us
reconstruct it from its shattered remnants. Pangaea gave us much of our coal; Tethys laid
down most of our oil and gas; evaporites formed in its shelf seas gave us nearly all our salt,
on which almost all our chemical industries were established. The Zechstein Sea even gave us
the fabric of the Palace of Westminster, and the treacherous landscape of Ripon. It even
gave us dinosaurs, Alice and the rabbit hole.
Pangaea was the first lost supercontinent that actually existed to be imagined by the
human mind. In one sense, it is still and always will be a fantasy; but one constrained by
uniformitarianism – not Lyellian, but one that truly takes full account of the importance of the
rare event in geological time. Thus the human imagination is held within the fruitful confines of
rare event in geological time. Thus the human imagination is held within the fruitful confines of
method. You can see the effect of this in every academic reconstruction of Pangaea. Ever
since Wegener himself, whose didactic purpose made them necessary, the outlines of the
present continents are always made clear, embodying the claim of this supercontinent to its
objective reality.
But what of older supercontinents? What of the supercontinent that broke up to give us
Pangaea? And the one before that? Compared with Pangaea, those lost worlds seem truly
lost. As with all geological evidence, the older it is, the less of it survives, the more mangled it
has become and the harder it is to interpret. It is all but impossible to picture them – to see
oneself standing on them – as you can with Pangaea. They have their magical names, which
lend them reality of a sort despite the fact that, for some, even their very existence remains
controversial. About Rodinia, Pannotia, Columbia, Atlantica, Nena, Arctica or distant Ur,
the mists of time gather ever more thickly.

WORLD WARS

At a specified time the earth can have just one configuration. But the earth supplies no information
about this. We are like a judge confronted by a defendant who refuses to answer, and we must determine
the truth from circumstantial evidence …
ALFRED WEGENER

Freikörperkultur

A white-backed vulture, circling high over the empty central deserts of Namibia one day in
1940 would have seen something odd going on at the bottom of one of the rocky gorges of
the Kuiseb River, which drains the Khomas Hochland west of Windhoek. Unusually for a
Namibian river, the Kuiseb does not peter out into the Namib Desert but runs into the South
Atlantic at Walvis Bay, the major port along Namibia’s beautiful but forbidding Atlantic
coastline.
There has been a river valley at Kuiseb for perhaps thirty million years, though the present
gorge is as little as two million years old, dating from the beginning of the last Ice Age, when
global sea levels fell dramatically. Today, for most of the time, there is no water in the Kuiseb
River, but the size of some boulders, the smoothing of the rocks high along its banks, or the
occasional telltale tangle of logs and brushwood, lodged way up in the cliff, speak of the
river’s terrible force when rains finally come to Khomas Hochland. Yet, luckily for the game,
and the occasional bushman trekking by, water often persists in isolated pools on the valley
floor, even through the dry intervening months and years.
 At any time such water holes might play host to a troupe of zebra, encircled by a cloud of
hoof-kicked dust; or to a lone gemsbok, his dark, ribbed horns sweeping upright as he dips
his head to drink in the still heat. Light-coloured tracks lead off from the pool in all directions.
All around the water the trampled dust lies like buff flour. There is no patch that does not
bear a hoof print. An animal reek, from the spoor and urine with which the visiting beasts
pollute their source, hangs in the air. But on that day in the first year of the Second World
War, the hole has human visitors.
Two naked young German geologists are wading through its tepid, greenish water,
catching carp with a makeshift fence-net made out of two bed sheets sewn together with a
pair of string underpants and stiffened with tamarisk twigs. One of these intrepid hunters is Dr
Hermann Korn; the other – owner of the sacrificed pants – Dr Henno Martin. Both are on
the run.
The two fugitives, who had both studied in the ancient University of Göttingen in Germany,
had rejected the rise of fascism in their own country and emigrated to the protectorate of
South West Africa, a former German colony. They earned their living on water exploration
projects and together got to know the geology of this remote country. But not remote
enough; before the growing tide of war, the two men, fearing internment by the South African
Mandatory Government, hatched a plan. They would escape, to live a Robinson Crusoe
existence in the desert they had come to love; and on 25 May 1940, with a stolen truck full
of essential provisions, their dachshund Otto, an air rifle, a pistol and some ammunition, they
set off for the wilderness.
Their desert sojourn, a constant battle for survival fought over water, food and the many
dangers of the desert and isolation, lasted two years. It was described in a book known in
English as The Sheltering Desert, which Martin wrote for his wife and published in 1956,
ten years after Hermann Korn was killed in a road accident.
Martin and Korn were not on the run for their lives. In the desert their lives were in just as
much danger as they would have been in an internment camp. Yet – and Martin’s book does
not make this clear, perhaps because it would have been too painful a thing to say in post-
war Germany – the prospect of internment was not made so appalling by the fact of
imprisonment alone, or even fear of the regime in whatever camp might have received them.
It was fear of their fellow internees, who would most likely have been ardent Nazis.
Forsaking the hideous regime in their native Germany for the freedom of the southern
African desert in the late 1930s, Martin and Korn found themselves in one of the bastions of
free tectonic thought and quickly became aligned with it. Here, where geological evidence for
the break-up of Gondwanaland was at its most stark and undeniable, Wegener already had
his greatest champion. In the heart of Suess’s old imagined domain, amid the reality of
evidence that the great London-born Austrian had first pieced together from books in
Vienna, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn found themselves walking in the footsteps of one
of the greatest field geologists of all time: Alexander du Toit.
In 1961, just as the tide was beginning to turn for Wegener’s theory, Henno Martin
delivered a memorial lecture to Alex du Toit at the Geological Society of South Africa,
appropriately entitled ‘The hypothesis of continental drift in the light of recent advances of
geological knowledge in Brazil and south west Africa’. The paper was a development of
Namibia-based work he and Korn had carried out (partly during their desert exile) and
published in the decades before; gathering detailed evidence of the ancient glaciation in that
geologically unknown region, and fitting it together with the patterns of glacier movement first
geologically unknown region, and fitting it together with the patterns of glacier movement first
assembled by Suess and later taken up by Wegener in his reconstruction of Pangaea.
Martin’s later work in Brazil, which sought to make the correlations between sequences
now separated by the South Atlantic more precise and therefore persuasive, followed
pioneering work in the same vein by du Toit. South Africa’s greatest geologist, a man decent
and truthful to the roots of his hair, came in 1924 to be on another continent pretending to the
Carnegie Institution of Washington, which was paying his expenses, that he had nothing more
on his mind than the simple collection of data whereas in fact he was looking for evidence to
prove a rogue theory that most geologists (and especially geophysicists) in the USA
ridiculed.

The ‘colonist’

Alexander Logie du Toit was born in 1878 at Klein Schuur, under the shadow of Devil’s
Peak and Table Mountain, in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. His protestant family,
which originated around Lille in northern France, began its journey to South Africa from the
Netherlands, where it had been driven by religious persecution. From there in 1687, two
brothers du Toit sailed for the Cape, establishing their family dynasty one year ahead of the
main body of Huguenot settlers, who contributed so much (include wine-making expertise) to
South Africa. Du Toit eventually became one of the most widespread family names among
the province’s settlers.
The other element in du Toit’s genetics was Scottish. Shortly after the British took over
the Cape, Alexander Logie, a naval captain from Fochabers, Inverness, married into the
family and took over the estate at Klein Schuur. Scots genes, however, had a little more
difficulty gaining entry. Alexander, having no children of his own, adopted his wife’s nephew
(also called Alexander Logie du Toit) as his son and heir. He eventually came to marry his
cousin, Anna Logie. Their union produced four children, the eldest destined to become South
Africa’s first and greatest home-grown geologist.
Du Toit graduated from the forerunner of the University of Cape Town and then attended
the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, where, in 1899, he qualified in Mining Engineering.
After two years studying at London’s Royal College of Science, he was invited back to
Glasgow, where he held two posts, as lecturer in Mining Engineering at the Royal Technical
College and in Geology at Glasgow University. Then, in 1903, du Toit sailed back to the
Cape to join its new Geological Commission, charged since 1895 with geological surveys
and mapping in the resource-rich colony.
In the years between beginning work in 1903 and leaving the Survey in 1920, he mapped
in detail over 50,000 square miles between the Cape and Natal. Of this enormous area,
nearly 43,000 square miles found its way into published geological maps. Much of his work
was carried out from a donkey wagon, his mobile home kept by his diligent and long-
suffering Scottish wife. From this vehicle he would venture out across trackless mountain and
veldt on a bicycle. And that is not all. Geological mapping depends on having a base
topographic map – or today an aerial or satellite picture – on which the geologist plots his
rock types and readings of technical measurements. Nothing useful can be done without one.
However, for much of the area du Toit mapped, there were no such maps. So he made them
too, using a small plane table (a level sighting and drawing surface mounted on a tripod) that
too, using a small plane table (a level sighting and drawing surface mounted on a tripod) that
he would carry with him on his bike. In effect he mapped much of this vast area twice.
There is always a tendency to beatify the departed in their obituaries, but reports of du
Toit’s character are too consistent for this to be the case with him. For all his stature and
eventual fame among fellow geologists, du Toit was innately modest, eternally wary of
limelight, kind and generous with people he met, in whom he clearly took a warm and
sympathetic interest whatever their status. Reports abound of his phenomenal powers of
recall, he not only wrote everything down but remembered where he wrote it down. Yet, as
with Suess, his attention to detail was matched by an equal flair for the grand vision. He was
also an unstinting worker, whose superhuman capacity for physical and mental effort
continued almost unabated right up until his death, from a cancer diagnosed two years before
but which he bore in silence and in secret.
One would think that he must have been an impossibly saintly man, were it not for the sly
twinkle in so many of his portraits and an ingrained liking for devilment, for upsetting the
applecart. The first inkling of this trait would come from his air of faintly amused detachment,
his quaint and subtle sense of humour and certain unexpected pleasures. He had an unnerving
tendency in company to spring up suddenly and recite questionable limericks. His musicality
extended to a lifelong love of playing the oboe; and at one stage this outwardly quiet and
unassuming intellectual took up motorcycle racing. He cut a strange figure for a rebel, but
rebel he was.

Back in the USA

If anyone needed an example of how a theory’s acceptance could have benefited from a bit
of simple PR, then Alfred Wegener’s book On the Origin of Continents and Oceans
provides it. The truth is that Wegener could not have done more to antagonize scientists in
the USA if he had tried.
Derek Ager was able to write in 1961 that while he himself was (then) in a minority among
British geologists in opposing drift, ‘American geologists appear to regard the Declaration of
Independence as retroactive to the Palaeozoic.’ The hypothesis of continental drift was
nowhere more despised and rejected than in the United States, and by the late 1950s it set
the ‘island continent’ apart from the rest of the scientific world. This division today seems all
the more remarkable because now you might be forgiven for thinking it was American
geophysicists who invented it. The truth of how this schism came about is an object lesson in
the influence of prevailing culture upon science; and how it was eventually healed, as the
great supercontinent of science reunited around a new paradigm, demonstrates the self-
correcting nature of the scientific endeavour.
Objectivity in science is a contentious and difficult issue. At its heart lies a basic question:
how should a scientist approach nature? To take two extremes: one, you go to nature and
record what you observe. You clear your mind of any explanatory theories and amass data.
But factual data on their own do not explain anything, so after all this observational effort you
allow explanations to emerge. This is called the inductive method. Alternatively, you can first
develop a theory – a hypothesis – about how you think nature works, and then go out to test
that theory by observation. This is called the deductive method, or sometimes the
that theory by observation. This is called the deductive method, or sometimes the
hypothetico-deductive method.
At their extremes these two approaches produce, in one case, colourless fact-gathering,
and in the other, an unhealthy dominance of ruling theory that blinds the observer to
observations that don’t fit. Clearly, the way in which science really works is a sensible and
pragmatic mixture of the two; but balancing them has always been fraught with difficulty, not
least in geology.
Many early geological thinkers in the eighteenth century had deductive tendencies. They
imagined all-embracing ‘theories of the Earth’, expounded in thick tomes that offered
ideological frameworks of how the Earth evolved into its present state. By the time the
Geological Society of London was founded in 1807, after the spectacular failure of several
such ruling theories, advanced thought had swung back towards the inductive method. The
general mood of the time was that science needed more facts. The stirrings of an ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ approach to science were beginning to make themselves felt. The great early theorists
of the Earth had been chiefly French and German. And while the Scots geologist James
Hutton (1726–97), originator of uniformitarianism, also called his great book Theory of the
Earth, his approach was truly more aligned with the observers than the grand theorizers.
Not that Hutton lacked grand theory. It was his concept of judging the record of the past
by extrapolating from the present that Charles Lyell developed into its extreme form in the
nineteenth century; and thus gave the whole tenor of the research conducted and published
by the Geological Society of London its objective, inductive cast. This was very much in
opposition to the caricature of continental science as over-theoretical and dogmatic, driven
by God-like professors with their ruling theories and personal authority. This caricature, like
all good caricatures, has some basis in truth, and is reflected in the German term Weltall that
is given to this kind of theory and which means ‘whole world’.
Geologists in the USA, however, were facing other problems. First, there was the
immensity of the continent – still largely unexplored – to be documented. Second, they
remained deeply suspicious of European ‘authority’. They knew that evidence about the way
the Earth worked that derived from their continent should carry no less weight than that from
any other part of the globe. Moreover, they preserved a revolutionary dislike of
pronouncements from on high. Somehow their science also had to declare independence.
They had to find a new way of doing science, a democratic method that eschewed
discredited Old World ways.
What they hit on, first of all, was induction. But realizing that this cure could end up being
worse than the disease, and recognizing that the collection of data alone was not what
science was about, America strove to develop a third way of its own, a method called
multiple working hypotheses.
Under this method the scientist, like a good parent dividing his attention equally and
impartially among his offspring, first presented his factual findings in as ‘theory-free’ a way as
possible, and then discussed the observations in the light of as many different explanations as
seemed reasonable. If in due course a leading theory or two emerged, these must be further
refined by the subsequent collection of more data. From the end of the nineteenth century this
approach quickly became the accepted, democratic, American way of science.
Into the middle of this new, republican method of doing science, expressly devised to
counterbalance that outmoded, system-based theorizing of the Old World, dropped
Wegener’s On the Origin of Continents and Oceans.
Blast from the past

Even today, with our modern obsession with ‘directed’ research, and when a scientist
applying for research money won’t stand a chance of getting any unless he or she appears to
be testing some grand hypothesis, Wegener’s book makes strange reading. But to
Americans in the mid-1920s, which was when J. G. A. Skerl’s translation came out there, it
read more like an affront to decent society.
We have already met Skerl, the man who should strictly be credited with introducing the
English-speaking world to the word ‘Pangaea’. It is fair to say that his translation must share
some of the blame for the revulsion that greeted Wegener’s book in the USA. From its
opening paragraphs, everything that was upright, noble and distinctive about American-style
scientific method was, it seemed, being given a deliberate and blatant slap in the face.
The ideology behind American science was that it had no ideology. It built on the British
model of facts first, interpretation later (if at all); but then went further. Science had to be
democratic through and through. The multiple working hypothesis method enshrined these
egalitarian motives in the way scientists did their everyday work. America prided itself on its
pragmatic, no-nonsense approach, and on hard work.
Wegener’s book, by contrast, seemed to hark back to ‘the bad old days’, as they would
have seemed, especially to American readers.
‘The first notion of the displacement of continents came to me in 1910 when, on studying a
map of the world, I was impressed by the congruency of both sides of the Atlantic coasts,’
Wegener writes in his first chapter. He goes on: ‘This induced me to undertake a hasty
analysis of the results of research … whereby such important confirmations were yielded that
I was convinced of the fundamental correctness of my idea.’ In the English version of the
fourth edition the words ‘hasty analysis’ are replaced by the less pejorative ‘cursory
examination’ but the effect was the same.
Wegener in full flight often reads a little like the letter of a madman: an obsessive with no
education in the field, who suddenly undergoes a Damascene conversion that sets him off on
a selective spree looking for confirmations of his Big Idea and rejecting anything else. After
this strident and frank opening, which could hardly have been better calculated to annoy
Americans, there is the small matter of the over-use of the sensitive word ‘proof’. Skerl used
‘prove’ and ‘proof’ indiscriminately to translate gentler German originals, which might have
been better rendered as ‘demonstrate’ or ‘evidence’. Wegener’s apparent dogmatism,
enhanced by Skerl, gave the impression of an inexperienced, auto-intoxicated ‘armchair’
scientist with an idée fixe. Other ‘working hypotheses’ were not given a fair and equal
chance.
Wegener’s book, in other words, was a polemic. He knew he was right. And what is
more, when the criticisms began to rain down upon him, instead of meeting them halfway in
an attempt to win his opponents over, Wegener merely became more and more adamant. In
return, the trenchancy of his prose excused (and even encouraged) the brusquest of
dismissals.
As the eminent scholar Mott Greene has pointed out, much is made today of the fact that
Wegener was not a ‘proper’ geophysicist and was therefore shunned as an interloper. This
Wegener was not a ‘proper’ geophysicist and was therefore shunned as an interloper. This
‘fact’ arises, I believe, because quite a lot of the mud that was slung at him by his near
contemporaries still sticks. The same goes, as we shall see, for the assertion by the same
opponents that there was ‘no plausible mechanism’ for drift. Wegener’s opponents were not
just vehement: many were implacable.
Wegener was, in fact, no less a geophysicist than any of his contemporaries, he just
happened to have written a book about the physics of the atmosphere and to hold a post in
the only part of geophysics, meteorology, that had any money in it. Eventually he did move
on to hold a chair in Graz, Austria, whose title had the word ‘geophysics’ in it. His writings,
published in proper geophysical journals, show that he was fully conversant with all the
relevant material, and his ideas were discussed, albeit rejected, by geophysicists everywhere.
They could not ignore him. As Greene has written, if all this ‘does not identify Alfred
Wegener as a geophysicist then nothing can and we can all retire to bedlam’.
Cultural differences also play their part here. If the meaning of the word ‘science’ can be
so completely different between the Anglo-Saxon world and everywhere else (where it
means ‘organized knowledge’ about anything, including literature, for example), there is no
hope of attaining worldwide agreement on the meaning of ‘geophysics’. In the 1920s the
understanding in most languages of the term ‘geophysics’ as the physics of the ‘solid’ Earth
had not yet come about, and it still hasn’t in Russian. Indeed, in that language the term
‘geophysics’ still is understood to embrace all Earth sciences.
Cultural incongruities dogged Wegener. His PR skills were not good. His method of doing
science was out of favour. The Great War had ended almost a decade before, but the mid-
1920s were still not a good time to be German. Wegener himself also came with brandname
difficulties. As the eminent historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pointed out in her brilliant
and comprehensive textbook The Rejection of Continental Drift, to his geological readers
the name Wegener sounded ‘eerily similar’ to the name of his eighteenth-century compatriot
Werner.
Abraham Gottlob Werner (1750–1817) was perhaps the archetypal grand theorist of an
old school, and at that time one of the most blackened historical figures in the Anglo-Saxon
panoply of scientific bad guys. He was a vivid example of European system-building folly: the
proponent of a discredited Weltall theory who, being already slain, was only too readily re-
slain by subsequent generations. He was, in fact, still as unfashionable as only the most
recently fashionable can be. More subliminally yet, the name ‘Wegener’ even seemed to
echo another megalomaniac, world-building German Romantic, Richard Wagner.
Perhaps the final straw was the fact that Wegener’s book had been written by a man who
had gained the leisure to flesh out its ideas while recovering from wounds sustained during his
country’s recent assault upon the free, democratic world. In 1914 Wegener was drafted, and
was shot in the arm during the assault on Belgium. Two weeks after his return to active
service, he was shot again, this time in the neck, and his days of active duty were over. The
fact that this objectionable theory had come to maturity in the mind of a man invalided from
the hordes of the Boche was tactlessly given away in the author’s Introduction to the third
and fourth editions. Drift seemed to pose as much a Teutonic threat as a tectonic one, with
Wegener being described in print with such choice words as ‘forgetful’, ‘selective’,
‘unscientific’ and even ‘deranged’.
In Britain things were less heated. At the British Association meeting in Hull in 1923,
British geologists had met to consider the drift idea. According to a report of the ‘lively but
inconclusive’ meeting printed in Nature, the main common point of opposition occurred over
inconclusive’ meeting printed in Nature, the main common point of opposition occurred over
Wegener’s idea that Pangaea could have broken up and the Atlantic opened during the
Quaternary, the most recent geological period. Nobody was very sure at that time when, in
years, the Quaternary had begun (actually about 1.6 million years ago) but, while they might
have been prepared to concede that continents moved, they didn’t think it likely that they
moved that much.
But while British geologists were arguing over the speed of the process, the basic concept
did not seem to give those present much trouble. It helped that many of them had seen the
African and South American rocks, but there was neither philosophical outrage nor any
feeling at all that public decency had been affronted.
But there was another problem facing Wegener in the USA that did not affect his Hull
audience. British geologists thought of isostasy in terms of the Airy model, with its mountain
roots, that presupposed that rocks not only could flow but did. This was not the prevailing
view in America. There a different model held sway.

Models versus reality

After a seventy-three-second flight, at 11.39am on 28 January 1986, Mission 51L, the

Shuttle programme’s oldest vehicle, Challenger, and its seven-strong crew, were blown to
oblivion in the Florida sky. The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman quickly and intuitively hit
on the immediate cause. Standing on the launch pad in freezing weather had reduced the
springiness of rubber O-ring seals between the sections of Challenger’s solid rocket
boosters, causing them to fail under pressure during lift-off. In a press conference Feynman
demonstrated this simple idea using a section of O-ring, a beaker of iced water and a simple
clamp.
But that engineering failure was only the immediate cause. Subsequent investigations
exposed many quality-control shortcomings at NASA, notably a tendency to tweak the
safety envelope rather than the engineering, so that systems could be certified ‘safe’ more
quickly and so allow NASA to meet its tight launch schedule, dictated largely by the need to
put secret defence-related satellites in orbit. In his appendix to the Rogers Commission
report, Feynman reserved his most withering criticism for this. NASA, he said, had made the
fundamental scientific mistake of confusing their models with reality. ‘Nature,’ Feynman
wrote, ‘cannot be fooled.’
Models encapsulate our view of the world according to scientific principles and
hypotheses, though, like supercontinents, even those that really did once exist, they are no
more than imaginary constructs. Models are maps of reality, and like all maps, they have
errors and it’s never too long before someone finds something that was missed.
Nevertheless, it is all too easy for scientists to forget this and start thinking that model and
reality are the same. As we have seen, in Britain the accepted model of isostasy – the theory
that explains why mountains stand high and oceans stand low – was based primarily on the
Airy model. This envisaged mountains as the tops of great rocky icebergs with deep ‘roots’,
‘floating’ in the Earth’s mantle. But the other explanation, put forward by Archdeacon Pratt,
supposed instead that mountains stood high because they were less dense and had no ‘roots’
reaching deep into the Earth. This idea, though not entirely mistaken, is less in accord with
the true internal geometry of the planet than Airy’s. However, Pratt’s model does have one
big advantage to mapmakers: it makes the sums easier.
If you belonged to a hard-pressed survey department in the early twentieth century,
desperately churning out accurately triangulated maps of an emerging nation with a booming
economy, you also had to correct thousands upon thousands of survey measurements for the
effects of local gravity variations. And because nobody had yet invented the computer, this
was all done manually, by armies of careful ladies with pencils. The big advantage of the Pratt
model is that it makes these laborious calculations much easier. Easier means quicker, and
time is money.
But it appears that the sober and practical US Coast and Geodetic Survey had become so
attached to their convenient calculating strategy that some of them actually came to believe it
was true, and none more so than the chief geodesist, William Bowie (1872–1940).
It is often said that the Airy model, with its implicit presumption that rock must flow over
long periods of time, actually demands that continents can move. The Pratt model, on the
other hand, carries the reverse implication. If you choose to believe it, then the idea of
laterally sliding continents becomes worse than unnecessary: it becomes inconceivable.
In Pratt’s model the base of the ‘crust’ is envisaged as a smooth, uniform surface sitting at
the same depth everywhere. Mountains stick up above the general surface level to the extent
that their rocks are less dense; the higher the mountains, the less dense the underlying rocks.
But lateral motions of the crust would even out these density differences in time, and although
the Earth is very old, we still have mountains. To a Pratt believer, therefore, drift seemed to
be impossible. The influential Bowie had glimpsed an elegant model and taken her for
Mother Nature: just because the maths was simpler.
Wegener was walking into a tough room.

Lone drifter

Not all US geologists were opposed to drift. Today (and indeed also in older literature, when
American pro-drifters were trying to make it seem less un-American) continental drift is often
referred to as the Taylor-Wegener hypothesis to recognize US Geological Survey geologist
Frank Bursley Taylor (1860–1938), who proposed a form of drift in 1910. There were also
others. But despite converts (many highly respected), it was slow going. As the Wegener
theory’s huge explanatory power won new adherents elsewhere, by and large, and for a
wide variety of reasons (some spoken, others not), American geologists stood out against it
almost to a man. Just how unanimous this opposition was became evident at a landmark
scientific meeting in 1926 organized by Dr Willem Anton Joseph Maria van Waterschoot van
der Gracht (1873–1943).
Three years earlier Royal Dutch Shell had fired this brilliant, Amsterdam-born geologist.
Van der Gracht was by no means the last geologist to find that being sacked by a
multinational was the making of him, and a distinguished career in the United States as a
pioneer in prospecting by seismic interpretation lay before him. He was also destined to play
a pivotal role in the history of continental drift theory. In 1917 he had co-founded the
American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), today the world’s largest
Earth-science society, and in 1926 convened one of that body’s meetings. The conference,
Earth-science society, and in 1926 convened one of that body’s meetings. The conference,
in New York City, had a single purpose: to discuss theories of continental drift.
For the AAPG, which was then still a fledgling organization, this was a decisive moment.
Its co-founder had chosen a controversial topic because it was, he believed, the biggest
scientific game in town, with massive implications for oil prospecting. What better launch for
a prestigious series of published symposium proceedings than to treat such a revolutionary
subject?
In the mythology of the subject this meeting has often been portrayed in something of the
manner of the famous confrontation at the British Association in Oxford in 1860 between
Darwin’s defender and champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
Although the earlier debate is always held up as a triumphant rout of the forces of
fundamentalism, the New York meeting on drift is portrayed as one man’s lonely defence of
Wegener’s theory against seemingly insuperable opposition. Neither of these histories is
really accurate.
Wegener was not present in New York, and it should not be forgotten that his theory was
by no means the only drift theory in town. Other theories about how continents might have
drifted were also on the agenda; it’s just that Wegener’s happened to be the main target.
Frank Bursley Taylor, for example, also presented his theory. The American survey geologist
suggested that two supercontinents, formerly at or near the Earth’s poles, gradually drifted
towards the Equator, pushing up mountains along their leading edges and splitting under
tension along their poleward, trailing edges. However, although Taylor’s theory had been
around for about two years longer than Wegener’s, only Wegener had written so
persuasively and at such length about it, and almost none of the other speakers addressed
themselves to Taylor.
In fact, with Taylor concentrating on his own ideas, the only person present who was at all
in favour of Wegener was the convener himself. Almost without exception, Wegener was
condemned, and even those who did not join in the condemnation merely urged further
research. Reservation of judgement, however, was not to be the order of the day.
The interesting thing about discussion meetings is, of course, discussion. If unanimity
should unexpectedly break out, people reading the resulting proceedings will wonder why the
meeting took place at all. So, in order to save his publication, and introduce at least a
semblance of balance, van der Gracht solicited a number of supporting contributions from
people who had not been present in New York. He commissioned contributions from Alfred
Wegener himself, from the Irishman John Joly of Trinity College, Dublin, his fellow Dutchman
Gustaaf Molengraaf, of Delft’s Institute of Technology, and Glasgow University’s professor
John W. Gregory.
These men were known to be broadly open to drift theory. Joly (1857–1933) was a
highly original thinker with his own theory. His contribution, though, barely covered two
sides, and concentrated on generalities. Molengraaf pronounced himself a drift enthusiast, but
quibbled about Wegener’s insistence that Pangaea’s fragmentation had all been westerly.
Gregory was also lukewarm. He was not opposed to drift per se, but saw no reason why the
present distribution of land and sea could not equally well be attributed, à la Suess, to
vertical rather than horizontal movements.
These endorsements, though hardly ringing, did help, but not very much. So the convener
decided to exert his privilege not only to have the first word, reproducing a seventy-five-page
set of opening remarks, but also the last, book-ending the proceedings with a twenty-nine-
page summing-up, in which he critically examined (and often demolished) various objections.
page summing-up, in which he critically examined (and often demolished) various objections.
In the end van der Gracht himself wrote 43 per cent of the entire volume. The proceedings
were saved (and are now a sought-after collector’s item); but in its list of contributors the
transatlantic divide over continental drift theory was made flesh. The supercontinent of
science had undergone a geological rift.

Du Toit’s proof

In the pragmatic, fieldwork-obsessed world of early-twentieth-century American geology,

where hard work and first-hand familiarity with the rocks were the only justification for any
excursion into theoretical territory, the accusation of being an ‘armchair geologist’ was a
grave one. It was levelled at, for example, Suess, whose great insights were indeed the
product of much book learning and relatively little fieldwork (at least in his mature years).
Both Suess and Wegener, in pointing to the geological correlations between the modern
fragments of Gondwanaland, were generalizing from observations made by others about the
congruence of facing Atlantic coastlines, Wegener doing little more than taking Suess’s data
and interpreting them differently.
American scientists might not have liked the method, but, some asked, what was the truth
of this assertion? How alike were these sequences of rocks? Would it not be scientific to go
there and check it out? The logic seemed faultless, but there was a snag. Proceeding in this
way would be engaging in deductive research – setting out explicitly to test a ruling theory –
and that was not the American way. Given that, who in the States would be prepared to put
up the funds needed to send someone halfway across the globe to test a theory that most
geologists in America had already dismissed?
By good fortune, Reginald Daly, Harvard University’s Sturgis Hooper Professor of
Geology, had been on a nine-month fact-finding mission to Africa in 1922, the year
Wegener’s book was published for the first time in America. The main focus of the
expedition had been South Africa’s massive Bushveld Igneous Province, and during the trip
Daly had met Alex du Toit. The party had also included Molengraaf and Frederick Wright
(1877–1953), a geologist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which funded the trip.
Returning that autumn a convinced ‘drifter’, Daly began to hatch a plan with his friend in
that well-endowed institution. The result was an illuminating exchange of letters between
Wright and the Carnegie’s Director, John Merriam. In the first, Wright told Merriam about
how the geological world was now in the thrall of an amazing new theory. He told his boss
about the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and how its meeting in Hull
had listed some crucial tests that should be done to verify the claims made for the geology of
facing shores. The correlation of the Karoo rocks of South Africa with their South American
equivalents particularly cried out for attention. There was only one man for the job, Alex du
Toit. The Institution should pay for him to go to Brazil and verify it. In high hopes he sent off
the proposal.
Merriam turned it down. After the initial shock of disappointment, however, Wright found
that the boss had not closed the door completely. Merriam was not about to put to his
Trustees a request to spend the Carnegie Institution’s money on any overtly deductive search
after facts. No, the proposal had to be more circumspect, more pluralistic, more American.
after facts. No, the proposal had to be more circumspect, more pluralistic, more American.
To judge by Wright’s second (successful) attempt, it also had to be less exciting.
Where version one had begun, like a piece of contemporary journalism, ‘The hypothesis
of continental drift … is arousing the keen interest of geologists the world over’, version two
opened: ‘In accordance with your request for information I take pleasure in presenting,
herewith, an outline of some of the results that may be expected from a comparative study by
A L du Toit of the Karoo, Gondwana and other equivalent formations of the southern
hemisphere …’
When Merriam finally gave the project the green light, Wright copied both versions to du
Toit and explained the situation. Sure, they all knew why he was going to Brazil: to test
Wegener’s hypothesis. They just couldn’t say so. This was important information for du Toit
because, whatever his own intentions, he would now have to write up his results the
American way, using multiple working hypotheses. This thoroughly deductive expedition had
to be turned on its head and made to look like induction in action. The stated main purpose
of the trip would be to gather facts: to add these good, solid bricks to the great edifice of
science, and then to offer many different explanations of them, drift being merely one theory
among equals. Wright’s letter arrived in Pretoria the very day du Toit set off on the Trans-
Karoo railway for Cape Town, where he would catch a boat for Brazil.
It would take du Toit two years to complete his monograph, and it would be four years
before it finally appeared in print, in 1927. It is a curious document, and the tension between
the dictates of American-style induction and du Toit’s own pro-drift convictions shows in
almost every line. Du Toit succeeded in confirming the transatlantic correlations of Suess,
expanded by Wegener, and he added some more of his own; yet to his dismay, all his work
hardly seemed to help the cause of drift. In fact, he often found his painstaking fieldwork
dismissed as irrelevant or inconclusive; he was even tarred with the same brush as Suess and
branded an armchair geologist for his pains – he, a man who had mapped 50,000 square
miles!

Non posse

The reason for du Toit’s failure lay in the nature of the evidence itself, of the ‘proofs’, as
Skerl would have translated it. Both du Toit and Wegener were aware of this problem,
which was that by their nature, geological correlations did not compel drift. In fact, du Toit
committed a PR blunder of his own by admitting in his monograph that the similarities
between the fossils of Africa and South America ‘can generally be explained equally well,
even if less neatly, by the orthodox view that assumes the existence of extended land bridges
…’. This was putting weapons in the hands of his enemies; but his point was that fossils on
their own could not decide anything because fossils are remains of living things and living
things can move. Instead, he concentrated on the rocks themselves.
Sedimentary rocks change their character from place to place, depending on the
environment that lays them down. Beach sediments change as the bay merges with, say, a
river estuary. What du Toit showed was that sediments of the same age in South America
and Africa often showed greater changes within their outcrops in those continents than
they did across the wide expanse of the South Atlantic. This, for him, was far more
they did across the wide expanse of the South Atlantic. This, for him, was far more
compelling evidence than the fossil similarities that the two continents were once close
together and hence probably joined along their now distant coastlines.
But this evidence was also circumstantial. Geophysicists persisted with their non posse,
‘it’s impossible’, line of argument (it is a well-known fact that a scientist always finds
evidence from his own field most convincing). If you wanted to win over physicists, it was
little use drawing their attention to fossils and sediments. For that group, drift didn’t happen
because it couldn’t happen.
Writers of popular science are often accused of ‘hardening up’ stories to make them
simpler, clearer or more exciting. This sometimes gets them into trouble with scientists, who
tend to favour caution. Charles Ray was writing The World of Wonder, my father’s
unwieldy science encyclopaedia, in the early 1930s. Wegener, referred to throughout as ‘the
late Professor Wegener’, had not long perished on the Greenland icecap. Continental drift
theory had been around for eighteen years but was still highly controversial. Yet undaunted,
after an excellent summary of the theory, Ray writes: ‘It seems a startling theory to think of
the continents sliding or drifting over their foundations; but distinguished geologists say there
is nothing at all impossible in the theory from a mechanical point of view …’
When I first read this as a boy, of course I believed it. When I came across it again later,
having by then read the conventional textbook histories of plate tectonics, it made me laugh.
Surely, the situation was quite the reverse? Was it not precisely the ‘mechanical point of
view’ (the mechanism) that gave even the most eminent geologists the greatest difficulty of
all? No amount of evidence based on animal or fossil distributions, or similarities in
sequences of strata, or matching up of mountain ranges across oceans would convince
anyone about continents doing this unthinkable thing until a mechanism had been found; and
I remembered the observation ‘To see a thing, you must first believe it possible’.
But a number of plausible mechanisms were on offer at the time, one of which –
convection currents in the Earth’s mantle, driving the continents around like scum on a slowly
roiling pan of pea soup – had existed in the literature since 1839. It had been used as a
possible explanation for surface features since 1881, in The Physics of the Earth’s Crust ,
the first geophysics text ever written, by the Reverend Osmond Fisher (1817–1914). Nor
had they been forgotten. Convection currents below the Earth’s crust were forcefully
advocated through the 1920s by British physicist turned geologist Arthur Holmes (1890–
1965). Also, calculations comparing the probable viscosity of mantle rocks accorded well
with the speed of the isostatic uplift of Scandinavia after the retreat of the ice sheets, and the
rate of movements seen across big faults like the now-famous San Andreas in California.
Important work using scaled experimental models (rotating cylinders in tanks full of goo
covered with thin skins of wax) was carried out in the 1930s and produced some highly
suggestive results.
Indeed, mantle convection is the model geologists still favour today. Yet despite the
development of a much-refined model since Holmes’s day, direct evidence for convection
remains elusive. In other words, today ‘the mechanism’ remains a mystery, but it no longer
matters. Because geophysicists have proved with evidence of their own that the continents
can and do move sideways, the mysterious mechanism has changed from an insuperable
objection to a legitimate subject for research. This means that Charles Ray was right. Many
distinguished geologists had proposed plausible mechanisms. The acceptance of Wegener’s
theory did not fail, at least, for lack of convection!
Comparing drift to another geophysical phenomenon, the Earth’s magnetic field, helps to
 Comparing drift to another geophysical phenomenon, the Earth’s magnetic field, helps to
show why the ‘no mechanism’ argument once seemed so powerful. Before the 1940s, when
one was finally discovered, the lack of a mechanism for creating the Earth’s magnetic field
had never dented belief in its existence because scientists could measure it directly. Du Toit’s
work in Brazil merely provided a better class of the same circumstantial evidence, as did
Henno Martin much later when he published on the mirror-image glaciation evidence from
Namibia and Brazil. The question was, if the continents were drifting, how could you
measure it directly?
The scientific world was also moving away from the descriptive, personal methods
employed by field geologists like du Toit. America particularly was falling in love with
methods that removed the observer from the equation – that ‘objectified’ observations –
rather than demanding the expert view of seasoned experience. Anyone could see the
similarity of the opposing coastlines of the Atlantic – just as Ortelius, the first man to see the
evidence, had done in his great world map of 1570. He, Alfred Wegener and the mythical
‘any schoolboy’ could leap to the same conclusion. But if, on the other hand, a computer
did the matchmaking and confirmed the closeness of the fit, that would be different. And
indeed it was, when in 1965 the first computer-matched transatlantic fit was published. The
mirror image coasts were no longer dismissible as mere coincidence, a meaningless picture in
the clouds. A computer doesn’t find patterns where none exist; it doesn’t do things by eye or
use artistic licence; it applies Euler’s Theorem, and doesn’t care about the outcome.
Wegener glimpsed this need for direct, objective evidence in a paper he published in
German in 1927, and which he quotes in his introduction to the fourth edition of the Origin.
‘For all that,’ he wrote, ‘I believe that the final resolution of the problem can only come from
geophysics.’ This conviction was to take him to his death.

Touching the void

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) was the youngest of five children born to Dr Richard
Wegener, an evangelical preacher, and his wife, Anna. Two of his siblings died in childhood
and the most notable of the three remaining was undoubtedly his brother and fellow scientist,
Kurt. The usual facts you hear about Alfred always include that he and Kurt once held the
record for the longest balloon ride, 52.5 hours, and that he later wrote a weighty and
respected tome on The Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere (1912) in which he came up
with the still-accepted mechanism of how raindrops form. He also made many arduous
expeditions to Greenland, beginning with a two-year expedition in 1906 when he helped map
the island’s north-east coast. Crucially, he measured the longitude of Sabine Island and found
to his surprise that it appeared to have moved since it had last been measured, about forty
years before.
Before the Great War, and shortly after first exposing his heretical drift ideas at a meeting
of the Frankfurt Geological Society, Wegener made one more Greenland expedition (1912–
13), the first ever to overwinter on the ice sheet, and to do the journey east to west, using
ponies. After the war his father-in-law, Vladimir Köppen, retired as Professor of
Meteorology in Hamburg, and Alfred got his first proper job as Köppen’s replacement.
Two more expeditions to Greenland followed in 1920 and 1930 and in between,
Wegener became Professor of Meteorology and Geophysics in the University of Graz,
Wegener became Professor of Meteorology and Geophysics in the University of Graz,
moving Else and their three daughters to the city in 1924. The purpose of both Greenland
visits was the same – to establish three scientific stations across the widest part of the icecap.
Bad weather afflicted the 1930 expedition, and in late September Wegener led a
desperate attempt to take supplies to the remote central station. The relief party arrived at
the end of October; and after a few days spent sitting out some truly dreadful weather,
Wegener and an Inuit companion called Rasmus set off for home. No one saw either of them
alive again. The following summer Wegener’s body was found sewn into his sleeping bag and
buried in the ice. He is thought to have died of heart failure. What became of Rasmus,
nobody knows.
Wegener had a pressing reason for maintaining his interest in Greenland: his great hope of
convincing geophysicists by offering a means of direct measurement of the drift phenomenon,
escaping the trap of circumstantial evidence and making drift as real and tangible as the
planet’s magnetic field.
Wegener reasoned that the best place for seeing measurable drift would be between
Greenland and Europe. From the early days he had known about longitude measurements by
astronomical methods that had been made by the prestigious Danmark expedition to north-
east Greenland in 1906–08, under the leadership of Danish journalist and explorer Ludvig
Mylius-Erichsen, who took on the young Wegener as his assistant. Older measurements
existed from the general area of this expedition, so Wegener contacted the expedition’s
mapmaker, J. P. Koch, asking if he could compare their expedition’s longitude
measurements with them – including measurements taken by the great Irish scientist and
explorer Sir Edward Sabine FRS, who went with John Ross’s first Arctic expedition in 1818
and made longitude determinations on Sabine Island in 1823. Other measurements not far to
the east had also been made, in 1870, by the Germania expedition, and while Koch’s
measurements were taken in a different location, they could be connected by triangulation.
By combining astronomical and triangulation methods, Wegener and Koch were able to
establish a time-series of longitude measurements of Greenland and Europe. These suggested
that the gap between them had increased by 4210 metres between 1823 and 1870 (nine
metres per year) and by 1190 metres between 1870 and 1907: a massive thirty-two metres
per year. The average errors for these measurements were, they thought, in the order of
124–256 metres, which was small enough to make the trend believable.
In the last edition of his great book Wegener also referred to the latest longitude
determinations made by the Danish Survey, which in 1922 began a series using ‘the far more
precise method of radio telegraphy time transmissions’; basically, seeing how long it takes a
radio signal to travel between transmitter and receiver. These too seemed to suggest that
Greenland was moving west, and by about twenty metres per year.
In fact, none of these measurements was actually demonstrating continental drift. The fact
that they appeared to – and drift at such break-neck speeds at that – can only be explained
today as a combination of errors, flukes and perhaps also the unwitting interference of those
making the measurements. None of the longitude-fixing methods employed at that time was
precise enough to detect real drift over periods of tens of years, or even hundreds. But
Wegener was not to know that; and his quest for accurate, direct measurement of the
process he was convinced broke up Pangaea and created the continents we see today was
doomed from the start.
Today you can buy, in minutes and for a few hundred euros or dollars, a navigation system
that can pinpoint you or your car anywhere in the world, and tell you how to get from Stoke
Newington to Paddington without the need for an A–Z. To locate your vehicle to within
about ten metres it depends on a system of Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), of which
there is a constellation of twenty-four. These all occupy known, fixed positions in orbit
20,200 kilometres up, in a system put in space by the US Department of Defense and
completed in 1994. The system allows you, on the ground, to lock on to objects with very
precisely known positions, thus enabling it to triangulate on you and pinpoint you precisely.
Though GPS was designed and paid for out of military budgets, it was decided to allow its
use by civilians after a Korean airliner was shot down in 1983 when it got lost over Soviet
territory.
This technology has revolutionized the process of gathering the sorts of information needed
to understand the processes of plate motions, all of which require one thing: accurate
positioning on the Earth’s surface. The plate-tectonic pioneer Professor Tanya Atwater of
the University of California at Santa Barbara has written:
When I began going to sea, our biggest problem was figuring out our position…. We were proud if we
could locate the ship within a few miles twice a day (by measuring the stars at sunrise and sunset, and
then only ‘if the weather be good’). The advent of satellite navigation … has changed all this. With this
system we can now routinely locate the ship to within a few yards every second. When we tell our
students about … our navigational labours, they look at us as the poor, deprived, primitive ancients.

The sort of GPS kit you might buy for your car has the same sort of accuracy as
Wegener’s radio-transmission-time method, so you could not use it to detect the widening of
the Atlantic reliably over a human lifetime. However, more sophisticated (but still readily
available) kit can locate a tripod-mounted detector to within, not metres or even centimetres,
but millimetres: easily enough to detect the drift of continents over a few years. But by the
time war produced this beautiful technological spin-off, the scientific war over Wegener’s
theory was long over. The supercontinent of science had re-formed; the resistance of
geophysicists, and the opposition of the US geological community, had collapsed under the
combined weight of evidence provided by geophysics itself.
As Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego has pointed out in her
seminal study of this great scientific revolution, that geophysical evidence was initially no less
‘circumstantial’ than the fossils or the rock types of Suess, Wegener or du Toit. However,
that evidence was, still, geophysical in nature. These were ‘proofs’ untainted by association
with armchair, qualitative geology; with the opinions of book-learnt experts. They were ‘hi-
tech’ at a time when modernity, equated with computers, automation and machines with
flashing lights, was extremely compelling – even to the fogies of traditional geology.
Geologists who had long been convinced of the reality of drift, and who had had the
strength of character to regard its mechanism as a problem for geophysicists to sort out,
were gladdened by the vindication of their belief. Maybe they were also puzzled that while
lack of mechanism had been seen as an ‘objection’ when all the circumstantial evidence had
been geological, now that the circumstantial evidence was geophysical, nobody seemed to
worry about it. But they too were also unable to resist the Zeitgeist, and for the most part
continued to display that exaggerated and unjustified subservience that geologists have
always tended to show to the Queen of Sciences, despite the fact that they (and not
physicists) had been right about the age of the Earth and were now being proved right about
drift too.
Geologists had seen it in their sediments and palaeontologists known it in their bones: the
 Geologists had seen it in their sediments and palaeontologists known it in their bones: the
Earth had to be hundreds of millions of years old, at least. But the great physicist William
Thompson (1824–1907), later Baron Kelvin, had insisted otherwise, assuming that the Earth
had cooled from a once-molten mass. What Kelvin didn’t know about was an alternative
source of heat: radioactivity. As is often the case with physics, its objections had been quite
correct but only according to what was known at the time. There were more things in heaven
and earth than were dreamt of by physics at the end of the nineteenth century. Kelvin, it
turned out, didn’t know everything (a fact confirmed by some of his other infamous
prognostications: for example, that there was ‘nothing new’ to be discovered in physics, that
radio had ‘no future’ and that heavier-than-air flying machines were ‘impossible’).
There is absolutely no doubt that during and after the Second World War the advent of
geophysics completely revitalized the Earth sciences. But if, as they sometimes do,
geophysicists, especially US ones, write or talk as though physics not only proved the reality
of drift but even invented it, those who cleave to the geological tradition smile with the same
indulgence old men show towards impetuous tyros, and let it drop in the knowledge that real
history will teach otherwise.

An end of war

When the geophysical evidence finally came, much of it was derived from the ocean basins,
where nearly everyone had always thought the answers about continental drift would
eventually be found, and where geophysicists such as Tanya Atwater and others eventually
found it. Particularly fruitful was a technique that used sensitive ship-borne instruments to
map out the magnetization of the ocean bottom. These surveys discovered that the ocean
floor is magnetized in stripes created by rocks of either normal or reversed magnetic polarity.
In the mid-1960s it came to be realized that this pattern was created when basalt lava,
erupting at the mid-ocean ridges where ocean floor is made, became magnetized according
to the prevailing magnetic field. Then, as the ocean floor moved away on either side of the
spreading centre, new lavas welled up to take their place.
When, as it sometimes does, the Earth’s magnetic field flipped and the north magnetic pole
sat at the south geographic pole, all subsequent lavas would then be magnetized in the
‘reversed’ sense – until the field decided (for reasons that are even today not fully
understood) to flip back. Ocean floor, which was oldest near the continents and youngest
near the mid-ocean ridges, acted like a recording tape, setting in stone the history of
magnetic reversals that had happened since the ocean basin began opening, and creating two
‘bar code’ patterns of ridge-parallel magnetic stripes, one the exact mirror image of the
other.
Ship-time is notoriously expensive, and once again it was war that provided the rationale
for oceanic magnetic surveying. The reason was simple enough. If you want to detect
submarines using magnetometers, you need to see them against a known background. As
that research was just beginning, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn would listen to their
radio, powered by a truck battery charged by a wind-powered generator, passing the long
desert evenings making biltong by their campfire. Martial music and disturbing news from
Berlin were a constant reminder of what they were escaping; and long into the night they
Berlin were a constant reminder of what they were escaping; and long into the night they
wondered about the fate of humanity.
It must have seemed odd to Martin to see the drift theory, which he and Korn’s
researches had long supported, finally receiving its geophysical blessing as a result of
research that would never have been carried out had it not been for the very thing that
brought humanity its darkest hour. The uncomfortable truth remains that, while science should
never be taken as a reason to indulge in it, nothing in human history has done more to
improve our understanding of the past and future of our planet than fear of our fellow beings.

WRONG-WAY TELESCOPE

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time
D. H. LAWRENCE, ‘HUMMING-BIRD’

The naming of parts

Although science is a supercontinent and its citizens participate in a collective enterprise, it

remains a human enterprise, subject to most of the faults to which humans fall victim. For this
reason the desire to honour heroes is probably as strong among scientists as it is among
generals and admirals; but the nature of the enterprise makes it more difficult, even when the
motives are entirely blameless.
Science mostly honours heroes out of a genuine sense of admiration and respect, and two
kinds of scientific advance tend to get names attached to them. Most are grand hypotheses,
but some are objective discoveries, the equivalent of new mountains or other features of the
landscape. These objective discoveries are easier to deal with (though politically no less
fraught). There is no mistaking Mount Darwin, for example, in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, which
received its name on 12 February 1834 from Captain Fitzroy, the captain of HMS Beagle,
in honour of the expedition naturalist’s twenty-fifth birthday.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, however, is often referred to in the twin
names of Darwin and Wallace, to give credit to Alfred Russel Wallace, who sketched the
same idea (and, crucially, the driving mechanism) in February 1858, the year before Darwin
published The Origin of Species. Wallace was seized by the same idea as Darwin while
recovering from a malarial attack in a beach hut at Dodinga, on the almost unexplored island
of Gololo (Halmahera) in the Moluccas. The enforced rest gave him the respite from
collecting that he needed for more theoretical thoughts. Darwin, meanwhile, had been most
of the time at home in Kent since returning to England from the Beagle voyage, wrestling
with natural selection, and how to present it to the world, for the best part of two decades.
with natural selection, and how to present it to the world, for the best part of two decades.
Scientists usually mean nothing but well by seeking to honour their heroes, yet this will to
elect them to the pantheon of the gods so often embroils everyone in acrimonious, futile
disputes that an impartial observer may reasonably wonder why the habit persists. As we
shall have more to say about the chemical elements later, let us take this example from the
world of chemistry, where there is no greater honour than to have one of them named after
you.

Elemental forces

In 1997 a long-running and acrimonious dispute over the naming of the element seaborgium
(atomic number 106) came to an end. It was the first time an element had been named for a
living scientist (Nobel Prize-winner Glenn T. Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium). The
naming of elements and other chemical substances is the job of a body called the
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), of which all national chemical
societies around the world are members. Each member state pays its dues according to a
complex formula, and the nation that paid most to IUPAC was the USA. It was from this
quarter that pressure to name element 106 after Glenn Seaborg, Professor of Chemistry at
the University of California at Berkeley, principally came.
The US lobby held that a venerable IUPAC rule banning the naming of elements after
living scientists had already been broken in the case of einsteinium (element 99), discovered
in 1952 in the debris of the thermonuclear explosion at Eniwetok Atoll. It is probably true
that IUPAC would have fallen over itself to name an element after ‘the world’s greatest
scientist’, rules or no rules. However, as IUPAC pointed out, the finding was not published
until 1955, by which time the great sage had died. So there was no precedent.
Considering the case for ‘seaborgium’ dismissed, IUPAC proposed that element 106 be
named for Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford was the New Zealander who (with others) worked
out the structure of the atom and the nature of the various radioactive emissions and who was
also the first to realize that radioactive decay could be used to determine the age of the Earth.
But the Americans kept up their pressure.
In the end, by virtue of its enormous financial clout, the USA got its way over element
106, which officially became seaborgium in 1997 and Seaborg lived a further two years to
savour the crowning triumph of his career.
If naming things can cause such problems, it is easy to imagine the difficulties associated
with the attribution of ideas. Almost every idea has occurred before to someone else, and
often long ago, when nobody realized how important it was (like the mapmaker Ortelius and
continental drift). To take another example: geology’s central doctrine of uniformitarianism,
which allows geologists to interpret the past by reference to the processes going on around
us today, is usually said to have arisen in the late eighteenth century with the Scots geologist
James Hutton. However, it could be said to have been around since at least 55 BC, when the
philosopher-poet Lucretius wrote: ‘the movement of atoms today is no different from what it
was in bygone ages, and always will be. Things that have regularly come into being will
continue to come into being in the same manner; they will be and grow and flourish so far as
each is allowed by the laws of nature.’
each is allowed by the laws of nature.’
And as for atoms, they go back all the way to Epicurus (341–270 BC), whose school
helped lay the intellectual foundations for modern science. If you read original sources, you
soon discover that in fact nearly all science’s relevant ideas have been there right from the
beginning, like jigsaw pieces waiting for someone to see where they fit.
As we shall see, geologists soon came to grasp the idea of supercontinents older than
Pangaea, ones that broke up and re-formed, again and again, deep in Earth history. Finding a
scientist after whom to name the Supercontinent Cycle shows how hard it is to single out
individuals for honours in science’s cooperative venture. We shall attempt the choice from
three men, in reverse chronological order of their entry into the story: John Tuzo Wilson,
John Sutton and John Joly.

New under the sun

All through van der Gracht’s volume of proceedings from his New York symposium,
Wegener’s critics make one point constantly. If ‘a Pangaea’ really had existed, why did it
wait so long before breaking up? Rollin T. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago asked:
‘What was happening throughout most of geological time? Why did the continents remain
coalesced only to become fragmented very recently?’ David White of the US National
Research Council agreed: ‘How could it happen that conditions favouring the sliding of the
continents to the four corners of the earth did not come about until, geologically speaking,
almost yesterday?’ Joseph Singewald of Johns Hopkins University pointed out: ‘The forces
called upon by Wegener were operative in pre-Carboniferous time, as in post-Carboniferous
time.’ Why then should they only have become effective right at the end of our planet’s long
life story?
In his lengthy summing-up, the symposium’s convener nailed this point right away. There
was a logical flaw in the argument, he said. Wegener did not talk about any continental drift
that may have happened before Pangaea formed because ‘the relevant facts are too little
known’. It was not legitimate to infer that continental drift had not operated before Pangaea
just because the theory’s author had not chosen to address the issue.
Touché … But what may have begun as the response of a quick-witted lawyer on behalf
of his absent client soon took on the form of a crucial scientific idea, another truly wild
surmise. Perhaps supercontinents were indeed, like so much else in nature, cyclic. Even in
van der Gracht’s symposium, one of the very earliest records of a public discussion of drift
theory, geologists were hinting at previous phases of continental drift before Pangaea.
Wegener’s book had set out the story of only the most recent episode in a process that
perhaps stretched back into the depths of geological time. Drift did not need to be a
mysterious one-off, incompatible with uniformitarianism and endlessly repeating histories.

The benign cyclone and the unclassified residuum

Let us return for a moment to the carpenter’s bench, and the way the lasagne that was
Let us return for a moment to the carpenter’s bench, and the way the lasagne that was
squeezed in the vice to create the mountain range we called the Lasagnides stuck partly to
both jaws when the vice was reopened. What would happen next? The answer of course is
that new sediments will accumulate in the gap of the open vice (perhaps, on this occasion, a
helping of melanzane parmigiana), which then become squeezed in turn to create a new
range of mountains, the Melanzanides, sitting in roughly the same orientation as its
predecessors.
The spatial coincidence of old and new mountain ranges, noted by Swiss geologist Emile
Argand as early as 1824, is readily explained in modern, plate-tectonic terms of continental
blocks splitting apart again along the sutures that were created when they last collided. And
so it was that, as the era of plate tectonics was just dawning, the cyclic nature of continental
rifting, oceanic expansion, followed by subduction and contraction and finally collision and
mountain building, was explained by one of the greatest geologists of the twentieth (and
perhaps of any) century, the ‘benign cyclone’, John Tuzo Wilson (1908–93) of the
University of Toronto.
In some Huguenot history of geology, pride of place would have to be conceded to Alex
du Toit, but ‘Tuzo’would run him a close second. He was born in Ottawa to John Wilson, a
Scottish engineer, and an adventurous mountaineering woman called Henrietta Tuzo, whose
ancestors had crossed the Atlantic and landed in Virginia at about the same time as du Toit’s
people had been heading south.
Tuzo was one of those charismatic, larger-than-life people whose entry into a room
caused heads to turn and conversations to stop. Your eyes went to him; you felt your spirits
lifting. His school in Ottawa had made him head boy, and he kept the position for the rest of
his life. With his resonant voice he compelled your attention and persuaded you – often
against your will – that he was not only right about this but also pretty much right about
everything (which, by and large, he was). A positive man, not given to regrets, he would have
been brilliant, you felt, at whatever career he had followed, especially, perhaps, politics; and
as though to show off his wide-ranging facility, he was also a published expert on antique
Chinese porcelain. But global tectonics was his passion, and the plate-tectonic revolution
was made for him. It was also very largely made by him.
Tuzo had not always been right. Originally a devotee of the contracting-Earth hypothesis,
he became a convert to drift as he was entering his fifties (by which time he had been
Professor of Geophysics at the University of Toronto for a decade). Swiftly recanting his
former views, Tuzo saw the way the Earth’s mountain belts were often superimposed upon
one another, and set about explaining it in terms of plate tectonics. In a classic paper
published in Nature in 1966 and titled ‘Did the Atlantic close and then re-open?’ he
addressed the coincidence of the modern Atlantic with two mountain ranges called the
Caledonides in Europe and the Appalachians in the USA. It was the very first time the new
plate tectonics had been extended back to the pre-Pangaean Earth.
These two mountain ranges are really one and the same – except that they are now
separated by the Atlantic Ocean, which cut the range in two at a low angle when it opened
between them. At one time the two belts had been joined, end to end, Caledonides in the
north, Appalachians in the south; and the collision that had created them was one event
among many that built the supercontinent Pangaea. Indeed, the matching of the now
separated halves of this once-mighty chain provided Wegener with one of his key ‘proofs’ –
part of his geological matching of opposing Atlantic shores.
As van der Gracht pointed out on his behalf, Wegener did not speculate about how his
 As van der Gracht pointed out on his behalf, Wegener did not speculate about how his
Pangaea had come together. But as the new plate tectonics emerged from studies of the
ocean floor and began to revitalize drift theory, the time was ripe to see the break-up of
Pangaea as part of a bigger process. Professor Kevin Burke of the University of Houston,
Texas, recalls that on 12 April 1968 in Philadelphia, at a meeting titled ‘Gondwanaland
Revisited’ at the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, Wilson told his audience how a map of
the world showed you oceans opening in some places and closing in others. Burke recalls:
‘He therefore suggested that, because the ocean basins make up the largest areas on the
Earth’s surface, it would be appropriate to interpret Earth history in terms of the life cycles of
the opening and closing of the ocean basins … In effect he said: for times before the present
oceans existed, we cannot do plate tectonics. Instead, we must consider the life cycles of the
ocean basins.’ This key insight had by then already provided Wilson with the answer to an
abiding puzzle in the rocks from either side of the modern Atlantic.
Nothing pleased Tuzo more than a grand, overarching framework that made sense of
those awkward facts that get thrown aside because they don’t fit – ideas that philosopher
William James dubbed the ‘unclassified residuum’. Geologists had been aware since 1889
that within the rocks forming the Caledonian and Appalachian mountains – that is, rocks
dating from the early Cambrian to about the middle Ordovician (from 542 to 470 million
years ago) – were fossils that fell into two clearly different groups or ‘assemblages’. This was
especially true for fossils of those animals that in life never travelled far, but lived fixed to, or
grubbing around in, the seabed. By analogy with modern zoology, the two assemblages
represented two different faunal realms, just like those first described on the modern Earth by
Philip Lutley Sclater and Alfred Russel Wallace.
These two ancient realms were found to broadly parallel the shores of the modern Atlantic
Ocean and were described by Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927). Walcott, who had
received little formal education, rose to become Director of the US Geological Survey in
1894 and was perhaps one of the most industrious people ever to do and administer science
in the United States. He named these assemblages the ‘Pacific’ and ‘Atlantic’ provinces;
rocks in North America containing the Pacific assemblage, and rocks of the same age in
Europe containing the Atlantic.
Had this split been perfect it would have raised no eyebrows among continental fixists
because the division would have been easily explained by the present arrangement of
continents and oceans. Unfortunately there were some distinctly awkward exceptions to the
rule. In some places in Europe, such as the north of Scotland, geologists found rocks with
typical ‘American’ fossils in them, while in some places in North America rocks turned up
containing typical European species. In an echo of one of the two scenarios that puzzled
Victorian biogeographers, things were being found close together that should, by their
differences, have been far apart; but with the added twist that, by and large, they usually
were far apart.
This conundrum could be explained, Wilson reasoned, if the present Atlantic Ocean was
not the first to have separated its opposing shores: if there had been an older Atlantic, which
had closed and then reopened to form the modern one. According to his idea, the old
Caledonian–Appalachian mountain chain had formed as the vice shut for the first time,
eliminating a now long-vanished ocean that Wilson called the ‘proto-Atlantic’. But when this
suture had reopened, more or less (but not perfectly) along the same line, some of the rocks
squeezed between the forelands had stuck to the opposite jaw of the vice, stranding some
American fossils on the European side and vice versa. The fossil distributions were saying
American fossils on the European side and vice versa. The fossil distributions were saying
that there had been continental drift before Pangaea. Moreover, if this particular example
could be extended into a general rule, mountain building itself was inherently cyclic. This
process, involving the repeated opening and closing of oceans along ancient lines of suture,
has since come to be known as the Wilson Cycle, a term first used in print in 1974 in a paper
by Kevin Burke and the British geologist John Dewey.
Wilson did not address another interesting problem, which was the question of exactly
where on the Earth all this pre-Pangaean action had played out. From the geological
evidence it was clear which continental blocks had done the colliding: which had acted as the
jaws of the vice. But where had they been on the globe at that time?
Wilson did not address this issue because (as van der Gracht might have said) the relevant
facts were too little known. They were not long in coming. It soon turned out that Wilson’s
‘proto-Atlantic’ had in fact been sitting right at the bottom of the world. Before ‘our’ Atlantic
had opened, the two jaws of the vice (now represented by North America and Eurasia) had
not only opened and closed (and thus helped build Pangaea) but had since migrated north
together as far as the Tropic of Cancer before deciding to reopen hundreds of millions of
years later, in the great Pangaean split-up.
Wilson’s name for this ancient vanished ocean, the ‘proto-Atlantic’, soon came to seem
inappropriate, particularly since the same name was coming to be used for the early stages of
the formation of the modern Atlantic. Wilson’s ocean had been squeezed out of existence by
about 400 million years ago: 200 million years before the present Atlantic had even begun to
form within Pangaea; so it was no true ‘proto-Atlantic’ in any real sense. Therefore, in 1972,
Wilson’s Ocean was renamed Iapetus, which maintains a shadow of the Atlantic link, since in
Greek myth Iapetus, son of Earth (Ge) and Heaven (Uranos), was brother to Tethys and
Okeanos, and father of the Titan, Atlas.
However, Wilson’s great idea was a crucial step forward. It reopened the whole question
of ‘what happened before Pangaea?’ By suggesting that his ‘proto-Atlantic’ had opened
within an earlier supercontinent (just as the modern Atlantic did within Pangaea) he also
linked his process to a grander cycle leading from one supercontinent Earth to another.
Wilson’s originality consisted chiefly of being among the first to consider pre-Pangaean
plate tectonics; but it would be stretching things a little to name the whole Supercontinent
Cycle after him because his model refers only to ‘introversion’: the opening and closing of an
‘interior ocean’, one which opens within a fragmenting supercontinent. And that, as we have
seen, is only one way a supercontinent can re-form.

Sutton’s seed

In 1919 the Sutton’s Seeds dynasty was blessed with a son. Unfortunately for this British
business, which still flourishes today, it would have to do without the drive and determination
of John Sutton (1919–92), who would instead devote his talents to the study of the oldest
rocks on Earth. He would eventually join the long line of charismatic leaders of Imperial
College London’s Royal School of Mines, including Thomas Henry Huxley and Sutton’s
predecessor, Herbert H. Read. He would also marry his near contemporary, Janet Vida
Watson (1923–85), to forge perhaps the most formidable husband-and-wife team in
Watson (1923–85), to forge perhaps the most formidable husband-and-wife team in
geological history.
It was not always easy to work with the great Professor, who suffered from sudden fits of
incandescent rage. As his obituarist Professor Dick Selley recalls: ‘To be one of his students
was like living on the slopes of a volcano. The soil was fertile, the view awe-inspiring, but
long periods of productive calm could suddenly be punctuated by an eruption.’ Collaborating
on almost everything, Watson and Sutton together pioneered the study of the ancient,
complex rocks of the Precambrian, but their aim was clearly summed up in the title of a
lecture Sutton gave in 1967, ‘The extension of the geological record into the Precambrian’.
Their aim was to learn how to extend the familiar picture of vanished oceans and the
mountain ranges that grew up in their place, back into that mysterious age.
As the great physicist Ernest Rutherford had realized, physics had presented geology with
an infallible clock by which to settle the long-standing argument about the absolute age of the
Earth. Radioactive elements decay at known rates to products that either themselves decay,
or which are stable, in which case the cascade, or ‘decay series’, comes to an end. The rate
of decay is measured in terms of how long it takes a given amount of the radioactive element
to be reduced by half, that period being called the element’s ‘half-life’. Half-lives vary widely
in length. The longest-lived atoms of seaborgium, for instance, have a half-life of thirty
seconds, while element 104, the one that now bears the name rutherfordium, has a half-life of
3.4 seconds. But these elements, which come into existence for seconds and then just as
rapidly decay to something else, cannot exist in nature. Naturally occurring radioactive
elements tend to have much longer half-lives, some very long indeed.
To date a piece of rock from its content of a radioactive element, you need to compare
the amount of decay product with the amount of the preceding element in the decay series.
Then, by knowing the rate of decay (the half-life), you can work out how much time must
have elapsed since the rock reached its final form. You have to choose your radioactive
element carefully, because, just like clockwork clocks, radioactive ones run down at different
rates. You have to choose one that runs for the sort of timespan you wish to measure.
According to Rutherford and his contemporaries, atoms could be thought of as being
made up of three basic particles. In their scheme a central nucleus contains positively charged
protons with a mass of one and may also contain particles called neutrons with the same
mass but no charge. Orbiting the nucleus are a number of negatively charged electrons,
whose combined charge normally matches the combined positive charge of the protons.
Unlike protons and neutrons, however, electrons have negligible mass.
The number of protons is constant for any element; but elements can contain different
quotas of neutrons. As neutrons have mass but no charge, this means that, in nature, some
atoms of some elements may differ slightly in weight from others. These forms with different
atomic weight are called ‘isotopes’ of the element because, although different in mass, they
all have more or less the same (‘iso’) chemical properties typical of that element; hence they
all occupy the same place (‘topos’) in the Periodic Table. (Because their weights are
different, though, the physical properties of different isotopes are often different, which
makes them very useful in geology.) Some isotopes of normally stable elements may also be
radioactive: for example, carbon, the element of life.
Carbon exists naturally as three isotopes of differing atomic weight; carbon 12 (the most
common), carbon 13 (1.11 per cent of all carbon) and carbon 14 (0.0000000001 per cent).
Carbon 14 is radioactive and is continually being formed by cosmic rays bombarding the
atmosphere. Neutrons streaming in from space sometimes hit atoms of another element,
atmosphere. Neutrons streaming in from space sometimes hit atoms of another element,
nitrogen 14, knocking out a proton in the process and creating an atom of carbon 14. As
soon as you absorb this carbon 14 – say, when you eat a lettuce that has first absorbed it
from the atmosphere – you make that carbon 14 your own. It then begins its slow decay
back to stable nitrogen 14 inside your body; but your overall levels of carbon 14 do not
change because you top up your levels every time you eat. All food will do this for you,
because everything that lives absorbs carbon 14.
But when you die, all the carbon 14 in your remaining flesh and bones goes on
radioactively decaying to nitrogen 14; so a test of the carbon 14 in your mortal remains will
enable a scientist to determine how long it has been since you ate your last meal. The half-life
of carbon 14 is about 5500 years, making it an ideal tool for archaeologists interested in
dating once-living things, though these cannot be very much older than about 50,000 years
(by which time there’s too little carbon 14 left for the technique to work).
Radiometric methods used by geologists to date rock samples are basically the same but
depend upon the decay of long-lived elements and their isotopes: substances with decay
rates measurable over hundreds of millions, billions or even tens of billions of years. As
radiometric dating came to be applied to different rocks all over the world, the first and most
dramatic conclusion was that the Earth was definitely not tens of millions of years old, as
Lord Kelvin had insisted. Nor indeed was it hundreds of millions of years old, as geologists
had suspected. The Earth was billions of years old.
Geologists had been more than vindicated; in fact, having grown comfortable with their
estimate of ‘hundreds of millions of years’, they were now presented with a positive
embarrassment of time. What is more, nearly all of that embarrassment appeared to fit into
the rocks that geologists had until then lumped together in a tiny section at the base of their
stratigraphic tables and known (or rather dismissed) as ‘Precambrian’. Geologists recognized
with some horror that the greater part of Earth history had in fact been written long before
complex life had even evolved; that is, before the rocks of the past 542 million years were
laid down; which was to say, before those rocks they knew most about even existed. This
was a real shock.
The base of the Cambrian Period had been defined according to the earliest appearance
of abundant fossils; an evolutionary event caused by the development of hard skeletons that
can fossilize readily. Precambrian rocks seemed at that time to be unfossiliferous. There was
no reliable way of dividing up these cryptic, complex rocks until radiometric dating came
along. And as more Precambrian dates were added to the collection, geologists began to
notice a pattern. The dates were not evenly spaced through the 4200-million-year time span.
They were clustered.
The older a rock is, the more likely it is to have been buried, cooked up under conditions
of extreme heat, pressure or both, partially or completely melted, folded and stretched, and
mixed up in the tectonic storm that is mountain building. Every such event will reset the
atomic clocks, ticking away within the rock, to zero; so the primary radiometric dates
obtained from rocks of this great age do not record the date of their original creation, but
the date at which they became stable in their present form. In other words, these rocks’
radiometric ages refer to the episodes of mountain building in which they have been caught
up. The apparent clustering of ages from ancient rocks all over the world, and the broad
agreement of these date clusters between different modern continents, soon began to look
meaningful. Mountain building, which today we would think of in terms of the collision of
tectonic plates, was episodic. And if that periodicity turned out to be regular, which it
tectonic plates, was episodic. And if that periodicity turned out to be regular, which it
apparently did, for ‘episodic’ you could read ‘cyclic’.
And so it was, three years before Tuzo Wilson published his groundbreaking Nature
paper on the ‘proto-Atlantic’, John Sutton published in the same journal a four-page paper
titled ‘Long-term cycles in the evolution of continents’. In this visionary extrapolation from
the global radiometric clustering pattern, Sutton suggested that there was a grand periodicity
in mountain-building activity of perhaps 750–1250 million years. His data suggested that ‘a
structural rhythm of longer duration than the orogenic cycle’ might have repeated itself at
least four times since the Earth formed.
Sutton termed this the Chelogenic Cycle, because it had been detected in the rocks
making up what geologists call the ‘shield areas’ of the Earth, the ancient kernels of the
modern continents. (Chelos is ancient Greek for shield, by analogy with the carapace of the
tortoises (Chelonians to zoologists) and the defensive posture that Greek soldiers adopted
sheltering underneath many shields when under fire.)
One geologist of whom we shall hear more later has already suggested, on the strength of
this paper, that we should name the Supercontinent Cycle the ‘Sutton Cycle’. He is
Professor Mark McMenamin, of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, who like Sutton
forms one half (with Dianna McMenamin) of a connubial scientific partnership. But this
coincidence serves to remind us of a problem peculiar to the older team, which might
scupper the chances of the term ‘Sutton Cycle’ gaining widespread acceptance.
Just as it is hard to see the join between the work of unrelated scientists in the collective
activity of science, it is nigh impossible to separate the work of John Sutton from that of his
brilliant wife, Janet Watson. Just about everything they did, whether acknowledged in
authorship or not, was done together. John’s energy, ambition and drive, and Janet’s
daunting clarity of thought, complemented each other perfectly. Neither would have done the
work they did without the other, and there is undoubtedly as much of Janet as of John in the
great 1962 paper.
Despite the fact that Janet not only joined her husband as a Fellow of the Royal Society
but also became President of the Geological Society of London (something John never
achieved), there is a fairly widespread belief that Janet Watson still languishes unjustifiably in
the shadow of her powerful husband. Today the gender politics surrounding the scientific
legacy of Sutton and Watson is every bit as delicate as that of the Cold War. Naming the
Supercontinent Cycle for Sutton alone would not be popular in many quarters; but leaving
that aside, the case is a strong one. But there may be an even stronger one.
Like Wegener, Sutton had observed a pattern that cried out for a mechanism. Finding out
what happened in Earth history is step one in geology; the next step is a search for the
reason it happened. Why should mountain building be cyclic? Radioactivity, the discovery
that gave Earth science both a clock to measure the Earth’s age and a mechanism to explain
why the planet did not just cool down and die, provided Sutton with the mechanism.
But that idea was neither his, nor Janet Watson’s. Moreover, it was the oldest of all,
having first appeared in the literature in 1924, waiting for its moment to join, in the right way,
with another set of ideas, and finally make new sense.

Trinity – the third man

Trinity College, Dublin, founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592, has a tradition of supporting
individualistic thinkers. Within its grey granite walls three things came together: long-standing
interest in the age of the Earth, the new discovery of radioactivity and John Joly.
One of Trinity’s very first graduates was James Ussher (1581–1656), Archbishop of
Armagh and Primate of Ireland. Ussher was a versatile scholar, who set himself the task of
analysing astronomical cycles, historical accounts and several sources of biblical chronology,
to determine the precise date on which his God had created the Earth. His timetable of
creation, Annales Veteris Testamenti, was first published in 1650; but in 1701 it was
incorporated into the authorized Bible, and from that time the Archbishop’s calculations
came to be seen by believers in much the same dim, religious light.
Although today most people who have heard of Ussher know only about his dating of the
Creation to the evening preceding Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, Ussher’s project did not
rest on the seventh day. After succeeding in his main task the indefatigable Archbishop went
on to date other biblical events as well. Adam and Eve, he decided, were driven from
Paradise on Monday 10 November that same year, and Noah’s ark alighted on the summit
of Mount Ararat on 5 May 1491 BC (a Wednesday, apparently).
It is far too easy to laugh at the good Archbishop and his pedantic prose today, not to
mention the full English title of his work (1658), which reads: The Annals of the World
Deduced from the Origin of Time, and continued to the beginning of the Emperour
Vespasians Reign, and the totall Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and
Common-wealth of the Jews. Containing the Historie of the Old and New Testament,
with that of the Macchabees. Also the most Memorable Affairs of Asia and Egypt, and
the Rise of the Empire of the Roman Caesars, under C. Julius, and Octavianus.
Collected from all History, as well Sacred, as Prophane, and Methodically digested, by
the most Reverend James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland.
We do not need, after reading that, to go into the details of Ussher’s calculations. Clearly
this was a serious scholarly attempt, according to the ruling beliefs of his time, to consult the
records of many cultures and answer a nagging question that has only been finally determined
by science in the past sixty years.
This question of the age of the Earth was next taken up at Trinity by Samuel Haughton
(1821–97), Professor of Geology from 1851, who tried to estimate the Earth’s age by
adding up thicknesses of sedimentary strata in the belief that their maximum observed
thicknesses would turn out to be proportional to the time it took to deposit them. His
immensely laborious arithmetic came out with an Earth age of 200 million years, a figure that
then seemed so large he scarcely believed it himself. However, his method depended on so
many assumptions about rates of deposition in different kinds of rock that you could, by
tweaking the sums a bit, obtain almost any answer you wanted. This did not discourage
scientists from trying, and Haughton’s work was continued by another Trinity professor,
William J. Sollas (the eccentric father of Hertha Sollas, who translated Eduard Suess’s great
book into English). However, it fell to Sollas’s successor, the great Irish geophysicist John
Joly (1857–1933), at last to make progress in tackling Kelvin on his own terms.

Birth-time of the world

John Joly claimed descent from a line of King’s counsellors at the French court dating from
as far back as the fifteenth century. His mother went by the title of Julia Anna Maria
Georgiana, Comtesse de Lussi. But Joly’s father, who died not long after his youngest son
was born, lived modestly as a simple country vicar in County Offaly.

Contemporary cartoon of John Joly.

Joly was a remarkable all-round intellectual who made important scientific contributions in
geology and physics. But, along the way, he also found the time to take first-class honours in
modern literature, to invent the first single-plate colour photographic process, to pioneer the
use of radium in cancer treatment, devise new navigational techniques and to write poetry,
including sonnets on scientific themes, many of which are much better than merely competent.
Like du Toit, he rode a motorcycle and also sailed. Joly was a popular man, with his pince-
nez, swept-back hair, walrus moustache and rolled r’s (an affectation he thought helped to
disguise a slight lisp; though many wrongly imagined it was a French accent) and he cut a tall,
dapper, even roguish figure among the Trinity dons. He was not without his eccentricities
either, notable among which was his habit of wearing a radioactive hat to see if he could
detect the effect of gamma rays on his memory.
Joly’s was a restless and wide-ranging mind. Like many a don before and since, and
despite developing a taste for world travel, he gave Trinity College his life; never marrying,
but maintaining an intense long-term friendship with his opposite number in the Department of
Botany, Professor Henry Horatio Dixon. Joly worked with the younger scientist on botanical
problems, and they are now for ever coupled in the annals of botany for being the first to
work out, in 1895, how sap rises. The two men lived close to each other in suburban Dublin,
and are today even united in death. Ignoring his friend’s wish to be buried in his native Offaly,
Dixon had Joly buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin, not far from Trinity.
Though a brilliant technical scientist, at his best when solving problems by devising cunning
pieces of equipment, Joly seems to have been a little naive. Like many patriotic men of
science with some knowledge of the sea, he wrote letters to the Admiralty on the outbreak of
war, one of his ideas being to reduce submarine attacks on British merchant ships by building
all British ships in the shape of German submarines. However, like Eduard Suess, Joly was
no armchair general and was not above taking to the barricades.
On Easter Sunday 1916 Joly, armed with a Lee Enfield rifle, helped to secure his beloved
 On Easter Sunday 1916 Joly, armed with a Lee Enfield rifle, helped to secure his beloved
College against the Uprising that was then raging through the city outside. It was a tense time.
By Monday, 2000 Nationalists had taken up strategic positions and their leaders had
proclaimed an Irish Republic; but the Uprising lasted only a few days before its leaders
surrendered. Fifteen of them were executed and up to 3000 more were interned.
Joly put away his rifle, though his Loyalist sympathies remained with him and deceived him
badly. As a futurologist he proved no more successful than Lord Kelvin had been, when he
predicted that the Nationalists would never succeed in gaining independence from Britain.
Only five years later the Irish Free State was established.
Although Trinity first employed Joly as an assistant to the professor of engineering, and
then to the professor of natural philosophy, Joly turned increasingly towards geology and
used his own colour photographic process (which he patented in 1894) to produce the first
colour pictures of minerals in thin section under the microscope. It was following this work, in
1897, that he bid successfully for the vacant Chair of Geology and Mineralogy. He held the
job for the rest of his days, and healing the divide between his two main loves – geology and
physics – became a lifelong mission. The age of the Earth was too large a question, and too
wrapped in Trinity’s academic tradition, for him to ignore.

Not thy stars

In 1840 mysterious markings had been discovered on some rocks at Bray Head in County
Wicklow: marks evidently made by the feeding activity of some long-vanished organism. The
trace fossil was called Oldhamia, after the very same Thomas Oldham we have met before
in India, but who took up that colonial post with the Indian Survey after serving as Professor
of Geology at Trinity.
Joly wrote a sonnet to this humble trace, and Dr Patrick Wyse Jackson, who is today
curator of Trinity’s Geological Museum and an expert on Joly’s life and work, believes that it
betrays Joly’s special feeling for the immensity of geological time.
Is nothing left? Have all things passed thee by?
The stars are not thy stars. The aged hills
Are changed and bowed beneath the ills
Of ice and rain, of river and of sky;
The sea that riseth now in agony
Is not thy sea. The stormy voice that fills
This gloom with man’s remotest sorrow shrills
The mem’ry of thy lost futurity.
Joly, like many a geologist before and since, grew a little giddy staring into the abyss of
time, but the uneasy truce over the depth of that abyss finally collapsed when Kelvin revised
his estimate of the Earth’s age downwards from 100 million to twenty million years. Joly
knew there could now be no reconciling Kelvin’s conclusions with geologists’ gut feeling that
the planet simply had too much recorded history to be squeezed into such a short span. Joly
attempted to find another way; to search for a different quantitative approach, whose
conclusions were not (like Haughton’s) open to such differing interpretation, and which could
conclusions were not (like Haughton’s) open to such differing interpretation, and which could
offer a more probing test of Kelvin’s conclusions. Independently, he hit on an idea first
suggested by Edmond Halley (1656–1742), the first man to predict the return of the comet
named after him.
Halley had had different motives from Joly. Although Halley also wanted to expand the
amount of time available for geological processes (he was looking for a few thousand years
extra), his other objective had been to refute a different, to his mind more dangerous (and
much older), idea: namely, that the world was eternal. Halley was not simply trying to burst
bonds imposed by Christian dogma but, within that framework, to refute the Greek
philosopher Aristotle’s idea of an ahistoric, eternal Earth. Aristotle’s world without beginning
or end, oddly reminiscent of Hutton’s nineteenth-century version (‘no vestige of a beginning,
no prospect of an end’) had always offended Christian tradition, because (to use Archbishop
Ussher’s words) it ‘spoileth God of the glory of His creation’.
Just as Kelvin’s method was based on two central assumptions – that the Earth was
cooling down from an original molten mass, and that no new heat had been added since –
Halley’s and Joly’s idea presumed that the Earth’s first ocean had been freshwater, and that
all the salt now dissolved in it got there by being washed off the land. If Joly could find out
four things – the volume of the ocean, the average concentration of salt in it, the amount of
water coming down all the Earth’s rivers, and the amount of salt contained in that – then he
would have all the information needed to calculate how long it had taken for the rivers to put
all the salt into the ocean, and thus discover the age of the Earth.
If this sum is done carefully, accounting for all the reverse mechanisms that may return salt
to the continents (such as the creation of shallow evaporating seas like the Zechstein) what it
actually measures is the average residence time of a sodium atom in the ocean. That is neither
an uninteresting nor trivial fact, and the correct average figure is probably around 250 million
years, or about the same time that has elapsed since Pangaea began to break up.
Unfortunately, it has nothing whatever to do with the age of the Earth. Halley’s and Joly’s
initial assumptions were just as wrong as Kelvin’s.
However, Joly did not know this; and when he performed the calculation he came up with
an estimate of eighty-nine million years, which was near enough ninety million, which seemed
near enough to the 100 million years that geologists had got used to before Kelvin reduced
his estimate. When Joly published this research with the Royal Dublin Society in 1899, it was
hailed immediately. What was more, geologists (who had chafed under Kelvin’s yoke for
long enough by this time) at last saw the good Lord being tackled on his own, quantitative,
terms – and found it good.
Kelvin’s reign was not to last; though, instead of succumbing to attack from without, his
chronology collapsed from within. The dawn of the new century brought interesting times for
physics, when, with the discovery of radioactivity, subatomic particles and relativity,
physicists suddenly realized they actually knew a lot less about the world than they had
thought. Radioactive decay not only provided the tools to solve the age of the Earth problem
once and for all but gave the planet the independent internal source of heat that fatally
wounded Kelvin’s method and made his hitherto infallible conclusions seem as nonsensical as
Archbishop Ussher’s. Joly, who corresponded with all the great physicists of his time, was
well up to speed with the new thinking. He quickly saw that the Earth could at last be very
old indeed. You can sense the excitement in his writing: ‘No! The slow exhaustion of
primitive heat has not been the history of our planet. Our world is not decrepit by reason of
advancing years. Rather we should consider it as rejoicing in the gift of perpetual youth …’
advancing years. Rather we should consider it as rejoicing in the gift of perpetual youth …’
And he went on: ‘Endlessly rejuvenated, its history begins afresh with each great
revolution.’

Joly’s halo

Joly’s first great insight into the uses of radioactivity concerned something he and other
geologists had seen under the microscope, in rocks cut in thin section so that light could pass
through and allow all the mineral crystals within to be identified.
For some time it had been observed that crystals of a kind of mica called biotite, which
has a beige-brown colour in transmitted light, sometimes seemed to exhibit a rash of dark,
circular spots that looked rather like some virus infection on the leaf of a plant. Minerals
under the microscope can change their colour when the viewing stage is rotated in polarized
light, a phenomenon known as pleochroism. The puzzling spots therefore received the lovely
name of pleochroic haloes.
Before the discovery of radioactivity, it was thought that the haloes must result from
chemical diffusion of some sort, from whatever lay at the halo’s centre, rather like an ink
drop on blotting paper. Looking carefully at the haloes, however, Joly realized that this could
not be. The haloes were not just fuzzy diffuse blots but were made up of many concentric
rings, more like the rings of Saturn. In three dimensions, what presented to the microscopist
as two-dimensional rings were, in fact, spheres; and Joly was the first to realize that they
formed because a radioactive source at their centre had been sending out high-velocity
particles into the surrounding crystal. The colour change was an optical distortion caused by
the microscopic damage inflicted by these emanations. What was more, the concentric rings
represented different travel times within the surrounding lattice, which meant that different
kinds of radiation were being emitted, each with different powers of penetration. From this
Joly deduced that it should be possible to work out what the radioactive element was that
had given rise to the haloes, since each radioactive element has a distinctive radiation
signature.
And so it was that Ireland nearly entered the Periodic Table of the elements, because
much of Joly’s data defied ready analysis and at one stage he mistakenly thought that he had
detected a new element with a hitherto unseen radiation signature. He proposed the patriotic
name of Hibernium for this new element; but alas, it turned out that the element in question
was already known.
Most pleochroic haloes in biotite are caused by tiny crystals of the mineral zircon enclosed
within the mica. Zircon, often used today in jewellery as a substitute for diamond, is
chemically zirconium silicate, but within its crystal lattice it is quite common for some
zirconium atoms to be replaced by atoms of the naturally occurring radioactive elements
uranium and thorium.
Joly, always on the lookout for a new physical measure of the Earth’s age, also had the
idea that he might be able to use the haloes to date the rocks that contained them. Reviewing
various dating methods in 1914 he wrote:
The time required to form a halo could be found if on the one hand we could ascertain the number of
 The time required to form a halo could be found if on the one hand we could ascertain the number of
alpha rays ejected from the nucleus of the halo in, say, one year, and, on the other, if we determined by
experiment just how many alpha rays were required to produce the same amount of colour alteration as
we perceive to extend around the nucleus.
The latter estimate is fairly easily and surely made. But to know the number of rays leaving the
central particle in unit time we require to know the quantity of radioactive material in the nucleus. This
cannot be directly determined. We can only, from known results obtained with larger specimens of just
such a mineral substance as composes the nucleus, guess at the amount of uranium which may be
present.

Working with Ernest Rutherford, Joly published the results of this method in 1913, using
uranium haloes in micas from County Carlow. The research, he wrote, suggested ages of
‘from 20 to 400 millions of years’; the halo method, also, was disappointingly vague. But it
was, at least, pointing in the right direction. The rock in question was actually about 375
million years old.
But Joly’s inventive mind had spotted still more implications of radioactivity for geology.
He had realized that more heat was being generated under the continents than was actually
being caught in the act of escaping.
In his 1924 Edmond Halley lecture to Oxford University, ‘Radioactivity and the surface
history of the Earth’, Joly told his audience how radiogenic heat had a tendency to build up
beneath the insulating cover of the Earth’s continental crust. If that went on unchecked,
something would have to give. After hundreds of millions of years, Joly believed, rocks deep
under the continents would start to melt. The overlying crust would then break up and
massive outpourings of lavas – such as are seen in India’s Deccan Traps, or the older
Siberian Traps, whose eruptions coincided with the breakup of Pangaea – would herald a
period of great tectonic instability and fluidity, even rendering possible the outlandish idea of
continental drift.
Two years later Joly sat in his study in Trinity College’s Museum, writing his contribution
for van der Gracht’s symposium volume. Though his powers as a scientist were diminishing,
he remained open to new ideas and wrote that his theory of recurring cycles of sub-crustal
melting now threw the question of continental drift wide open. Offering van der Gracht what
support he could, he wrote that the acknowledged fact of radiogenic heat meant that it was
now at last ‘legitimate to enter upon the problems arising out of continental movement’.
Joly had realized that radiogenic heat, building up inexorably inside the Earth, governed the
way the Earth’s great heat engine worked. Like all the best scientific ideas, it was incredibly
simple. All it needed was the continuous generation of heat, and a thermal blanket to stop it
getting out. Van der Gracht noted with satisfaction: ‘If radioactive heat does accumulate in
the manner discussed, a periodic displacement of the blanketing Sial floats [continents]
becomes a requisite …’
Today Joly’s mechanism is still the accepted basic explanation of why supercontinents
break up. A supercontinent sits over the warm Earth like a fur cap sits on your head, holding
in heat. However, unlike a fur cap, eventually the supercontinent must break up because the
heat has nowhere else to go but up and out. Magmas generated at depth break through the
crust and create massive outpourings; convection rising deep below the continent tears it into
many smaller landmasses, and sends them off like flotsam in a stream. New oceans begin to
open within the supercontinent, whose fragments then, at the speed of your growing toenails,
either race all the way around the globe to meet one another on the other side (extroversion),
or stall and shrink back on themselves, consuming the young interior oceans in the process as
Tuzo Wilson predicted (introversion).
 Of this great cycle of the making and breaking of continents, Wilson glimpsed a part.
Before him, John Sutton, with his clustered radiometric dates from the Precambrian, outlined
the whole. But almost forty years before the plate-tectonic revolution, John Joly already had
the explanation of why the Earth’s grandest pattern operated: by predicting it from basic
physics.
The wrong-way telescope of time, which makes the distant seem more distant still, has
rendered Joly a sadly diminished figure in our view of history. Yet, if Wegener had
discovered a phenomenon looking for a mechanism, Joly discovered a mechanism in search
of a process, conceiving an idea that would sleep in the literature until its time was right.
Perhaps now that Joly, who also published on possible life on Mars, has had a crater there
named for him, the time is right to add to this the honour of the earthly Supercontinent Cycle;
for it was his vision that predicted it, and still drives it.
The poet in him certainly rejoiced that the dull fate of gradual heat-death did not, after all,
await our beautiful planet. He wrote presciently: ‘Our geological age may have been
preceded by other ages, every trace of which has perished in the regeneration which has
heralded our own … a manifestation of the power of the infinitely little over the infinitely great
– the unending flow of energy from unstable atoms wrecking the stability of the world.’
Our planet had, Joly saw, an inner life: a life whose warmth demanded a long-term cycle
of tectonic activity. Like Halley’s comet, supercontinents would keep returning. Mother
Earth had a pulse.

MOTHERLAND

This film is based on real myths.

NICOLAS CAGE (ATTRIBUTED)

Genesis

In 1934, four years after Wegener met his death on the Greenland icecap and drift theory
was perhaps at its lowest ebb, cosmic forces were at work. They were busy causing a set of
divinely inspired papers to be translated from the ineffable language of the Universal Father
into English, by a complex series of intermediary processes administered by an ‘editorial staff
of superhuman beings’.
At least, that is the view according to followers of the resulting tome, known as The
Urantia Book. Like other new religions, its followers make the claim that the teachings
contained in its 196 papers are literally true. As Harry McMullan III writes in his
contained in its 196 papers are literally true. As Harry McMullan III writes in his
introduction to The Urantia Book, it ‘claims to describe reality as it actually is’.
Describing reality as it actually is is, of course, what scientists think they are attempting,
though as a rule, if the results involve superhuman beings at all, they tend not to set much
store by them. Rather, scientists rely on thinking things out for themselves, producing original
ideas that explain, as closely as they can manage, the phenomena they observe. As the motto
of the world’s oldest scientific society, the Royal Society of London, has it, ‘Nullius in
verba’, or, loosely translated, ‘Take nobody’s word for it’ – and by nobody they really do
mean nobody.
It is quite the reverse of the revelatory approach, where in the beginning there always
tends to be somebody’s Word, which tends always to be with the writer, celestial or
otherwise, and with which there can therefore be no argument.
So how spooky must it have been for geology professor Mark McMenamin of Mount
Holyoke College, Massachusetts, to discover in 1995 that much of his work to date had
apparently been predicted by a sleep-talking mystic from Illinois claiming to be in contact
with a Universal Father and his superhuman editorial department?
Mark McMenamin researches rocks from another time, long before the time of
Wegener’s Pangaea, when all (or most) of the continents were fused into one giant mass. It
was also McMenamin who, in notes from 1987, first hit upon a name for it, calling it Rodinia,
which he published in a book written in 1990 with his wife Dianna called The Emergence of
Animals – the Cambrian Breakthrough. By the mid-1990s the name had stuck,
particularly (one suspects) because so many of the scientists who work on rocks of this age
are Russian. For it derives from the Russian noun rod, meaning family or kin; hence the
Russian verb roditz, which means to give birth to, which in turn gives rise to the noun rodina,
meaning birthplace, or native land. The McMenamins’ Rodinia was the supercontinent
around whose shores, and during whose fragmentation, complex life first evolved towards
the end of the Precambrian.
Native lands are important to us all, whether we happen to be a French Huguenot living in
South Africa or the USA, or a Jewish Viennese born in London. Ultimately the concept is
meaningless because, somewhere along the great chain of being, everyone has come from
somewhere else. But we are all products of the evolution of complex life. Rodinia is the
oldest known supercontinent upon whose former existence scientists more or less agree, and
so Rodinia can indeed be said to be the birthplace of us all – and of every moving creature
upon the Earth.

Urantia

In 1995 Mark McMenamin made an extraordinary fossil find while doing fieldwork in
Sonora, Mexico. It turned out to be the oldest known example of a group of enigmatic, long-
extinct fossil creatures, which existed before the major divisions of the Animal Kingdom, as
we know them today, came into being. He had found the world’s oldest Ediacaran fossil.
Nobody really knows what the Ediacarans were, so opinions on the subject among
palaeontologists are strong and divided. When I was a student in the 1970s they were
known from just a few places worldwide, including Charnwood Forest in the UK and the
Ediacara Hills in the Flinders Range of South Australia, after which they were named. But
Ediacara Hills in the Flinders Range of South Australia, after which they were named. But
these rare discoveries had occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. Ediacarans were rare,
perplexing and, above all, famous. New finds were like hen’s teeth.
So there was great excitement in 1977 at Swansea University when one of my lecturers
Dr (now Professor) John Cope – a man whose fossil-finding talents are almost supernatural
– discovered some new examples of these creatures right on our doorstep just a few miles
from the sleepy market town of Carmarthen. The find was also completely unexpected, as it
came from rocks that the Geological Survey had long previously mapped as Ordovician, and
was made as part of a mapping project that Cope had begun with a group of amateurs.
Needless to say, as soon as the find’s full significance was realized a mechanical excavator
was brought in. The whole lot was shipped back to the university for painstaking professional
research and a preliminary note of the find to be made in Nature.
Ediacaran forms – some palaeontologists feel unable to say for certain whether many of
them were animals at all, in the modern sense – display a variety of body plans. To be sure,
some may have been the ancestors of later animal groups such as the trilobites; but others
seem to show no obvious affinity with any other animal, living or fossil. This was a moment in
Earth history when many different forms of life evolved, some highly peculiar when seen
alongside modern life, and seemingly showing little or no kinship with anything we would feel
comfortable calling either animal or plant.
Many scientists say it is dangerous to assume that all these soft-bodied forms share any
common kinship, even among themselves. In fact, so curious are they that some scientists,
among them the formidable German geologist Adolf Seilacher of the University of Tübingen,
have put forward the view that they represent a completely unrelated evolutionary group that
flourished and then vanished leaving no descendants. Professor McMenamin has taken this
view further with his highly controversial theory that Ediacarans represent a unique
evolutionary creation: in some ways like animals, but also able to grow like plants by
absorbing energy from sunlight.
The McMenamin theory suggests that in this early shallow-sea environment surrounding
the fragmenting supercontinent Rodinia, these unique life-forms lived, happily sunbathing,
fixed to the layer of algal slime and lime mud that then coated practically every square metre
of the Earth’s shallow sea floor. The McMenamins have called this gentle Eden the Garden
of Ediacara: a garden from which these peaceable inhabitants were driven to extinction by
two (for them) highly unfortunate biological events. One was the evolution of burrowing
(which broke up and destroyed the algal mats on which they sat) and the other was
predation. Against these two nemeses the poor Ediacarans had no defence: they were
undermined and grazed out of existence.
When McMenamin got back from his 1995 field season, he enlisted the help of the Mount
Holyoke media-relations man Kevin McCaffrey and announced the oldest Ediacaran fossil to
the world. To release information in this way is guaranteed to annoy many scientists, who
prefer their colleagues to publish their findings in the scientific literature before talking to the
media. And sure enough, McMenamin took his fair share of criticism, especially when the
story received huge coverage.
But just as his new fossil’s fifteen minutes of fame were passing, in October that year
McMenamin received a communication from James (‘JJ’) Johnson, a central figure in the
Urantia movement. In the course of his many interviews with the media, McMenamin had
described the supercontinent Rodinia as the cradle of complex life; and the unfolding story
described the supercontinent Rodinia as the cradle of complex life; and the unfolding story
had begun to ring a bell with Mr Johnson. For there was, he said, a passage in Section 8,
paper 57 of The Urantia Book that read: ‘1,000,000,000 years ago is the date of the actual
beginning of Urantia history. The planet had attained approximately its present size …
800,000,000 years ago witnessed the inauguration of the first great land epoch, the age of
increased continental emergence … By the end of this period almost one third of the earth’s
surface consisted of land, all in one continental body.’
These quotations are selective, of course, which is always the key to making the
prophecies of mystics look ‘uncanny’. If you look at other parts of the same passage from
which those quotations come, you can find a rich and colourful mixture of half-correct ideas
and plain nonsense. For example: ‘850,000,000 years ago the first real epoch of the
stabilization of the earth’s crust began. Most of the heavier metals had settled down toward
the center of the globe …’
Not bad: the separation of iron and nickel to the Earth’s core was indeed an event that
took place in the early evolution of our planet, but it happened a lot longer ago than 850
million years. To counterbalance this, as an example of the nonsense among which these little
nuggets of correctness lie thinly distributed, we find: ‘Meteors falling into the sea accumulated
on the ocean bottom … Thus the ocean bottom grew increasingly heavy, and added to this
was the weight of a body of water at some places ten miles deep …’
But the trick of a successful prophet is to say enough things, and to phrase them
sufficiently elliptically, so that the occasional correct hits within the general rambling leap out
at the prepared mind – just like cloud patterns, or the face of the Man in the Moon. If you
are looking for something, in other words, you will tend to find it, which is the very reason
why early-twentieth-century American scientists so mistrusted what they saw as the
‘selective search after facts’ in Wegener’s deductive treatise on continental drift. What this
story also reveals is that, unlike any other supercontinent that really existed, Rodinia was not
envisaged by scientists and later colonized by mystics (like the zoogeographers’ idea of
Lemuria) but apparently independently ‘discovered’ by both groups – and it was the mystics
who sleepwalked there first.
What happened subsequently to Mr Thompson’s communication with Mark McMenamin
was ‘business as usual’. The devotee was latching on to science because its current
conclusions seemed to offer confirmation of a revealed myth. McMenamin, unsurprisingly,
fought shy of Mr Johnson’s invitation to attend a conference for followers of The Urantia
Book; but he plainly found the experience thought-provoking, even going so far as to suggest
in his book The Garden of Ediacara that it might repay scientists’ effort to trawl through
other mystical maunderings, just in case. It is not possible to be entirely certain how serious
he is about this idea. I suspect it might fail simply for lack of volunteers.
What particularly struck McMenamin about the prophecy was that during the mid-1930s
– a time when such ideas were distinctly out of fashion – the Urantians had hit upon the
existence of a supercontinent dating from one billion years ago (correct), surrounded by a
global ocean (obvious, but also correct), at a time when the continents emerged from the
ocean more strongly (correct; see Chapter 10) and which subsequently split up about 650
million years ago (about 100 million years out, but still in the right ball park) to form widening
ocean basins that became the crucible for the evolution of early complex marine life (also
correct). It is also true that until Eldridge Moores and distinguished palaeontologist Jim
Valentine wrote their joint paper proposing one in 1970, no legitimate Earth scientist had
ever considered the existence of a supercontinent older than Wegener’s Pangaea.
ever considered the existence of a supercontinent older than Wegener’s Pangaea.

Palimpsest

Now that geologists know the age of almost every part of the ocean floor, and can colour it
accordingly on ocean-floor maps, it is relatively easy to see how Pangaea fragmented. The
ocean floors of the modern Earth are a road map that leads us to Pangaea, by showing us
how the modern continents should be put back together. No such map exists for any older
supercontinent because the oceans that once opened within them have now all been
destroyed, eaten up by subduction and recycled. All that is left of those lost worlds are the
broken fragments of ancient continental rock, heavily deformed, embedded within younger
rocks, in the shield areas of the world, the ancient hearts of our continents. As the
Norwegian geologist Trond Torsvik has written, attempts to reassemble these pre-Pangaean
supercontinents ‘resemble a jigsaw puzzle, where we must contend with missing and faulty
pieces and have misplaced the picture on the box’.
Imagine yourself sailing out of a frozen Baltic port in winter, your ferry butting a channel of
black water through the thin ice. As you look over the side at the jagged, jostling floes, you
can see a mixture of old and young. Young ice, formed since the last boat passed that way
and cleared a lane through the chaos, has been broken for the first time. But that previous
boat had itself broken through fresh ice. Pieces dating from that event are still floating about,
but are now embedded in floes that tell of two phases of fracturing. Still other floes contain
ice fragments of three or more distinct ages, having been through the same process several
times, on each occasion the freshly re-broken floes becoming re-frozen into new ice awaiting
the passage of yet another ship.
In a similar way the Earth’s shields – the ancient hearts of every continent – bear the
remaining traces of all the cycles of supercontinent break-up and coalescence since plate
tectonics began. During subsequent history many of the pieces may have been destroyed by
erosion (Torsvik’s missing pieces); but, using the evidence that is left to them, somehow
geologists must try to work out which parts of each shield were once fused together in a
supercontinent at a given time, and how they fitted together when they are no longer the same
shape that they later became. It is one of the most intractable problems in science.
Studying Earth history through interpreting those rocks that have survived is an activity that
has a lot in common with the study of ancient texts. Scholars estimate that only 1 per cent of
the wisdom of the ancients has found its way to modern times, and the great works of
classical antiquity that we have, come to us in the form of documents that were copied,
scribbled over and even partially destroyed. Most copies were preserved by pure chance
just because of the preciousness, not of the words, but of the material on which they were
written.
Take the example of Archimedes and cast your mind back to the principle of isostasy.
Although isostasy applies to the way rocks of different density ‘float’ high or low on the
Earth’s solid mantle and thus give rise to either ocean or continent, it is really no more than an
extension of Archimedes’ Principle, which states that any floating body displaces its own
mass of the substance in which it is immersed.
Every half-educated person in the world today knows that Archimedes (287–212 BC)
shouted ‘Eureka!’ and leapt out of his bath. But what they should also know is that the story
shouted ‘Eureka!’ and leapt out of his bath. But what they should also know is that the story
began with a problem put to the great thinker by his patron, King Hiero II. The king was
worried that a goldsmith whom he had engaged to make a new crown had adulterated the
royal bullion with silver, keeping the remainder for himself. How could Hiero be sure?
Archimedes is reputed to have seen the answer as he lowered himself into his bath, when
it dawned on him that every substance has a distinctive density. If you compare the mass of
any material with the volume of water it displaces, you have a powerful means of testing its
purity, for in the case of gold, any added metal will reduce its density. Having solved the
king’s problem, Archimedes developed the idea further in one of his greatest works, the
Treatise on Floating Bodies. However, the only copy of that book to survive to our own
day in the original Greek is a rather small, unprepossessing manuscript damaged by mould,
fire, and twelfth-century religious zealots. It is called the Archimedes Palimpsest, and this
precious document came up for auction at Christie’s in New York in 1998.
Almost inevitably, there was a legal dispute over its ownership (the Greek Orthodox
Patriarchate of Jerusalem contending that it had been stolen from one of its monasteries in the
1920s) but the judge in the case decided against the Patriarchate on ‘laches grounds’ (that is,
because they had left it too long before asserting a legal right). The palimpsest was eventually
sold for two million dollars in October 1998 to ‘an anonymous buyer from the IT industry’. It
is now held by the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.
When Archimedes lived and wrote, there were no books like the one you are holding.
Archimedes would have copied his theorems and diagrams on to papyrus scrolls, leaving it to
succeeding generations to preserve his work by recopying. By the tenth century AD, when
what became the palimpsest was originally made in Constantinople, scrolls had given way to
more recognizable books composed of leaves of parchment (the preserved skins of sheep,
goats and cows) bound between wooden boards. The emperor-scholar Constantine VII
Porphyrogenitos and his successors put many scribes to this kind of work, thus rescuing for
future generations the rarefied intellectual works of antiquity.
The project was not, however, fully effective, because 200 years later Archimedes’ great
book was cut up and reused. Autres temps, autres mœurs; the great barbarian invasion that
was the fourth crusade had sacked Constantinople. In one of the worst disasters ever to
befall European culture, many manuscripts were destroyed and the Archimedes Palimpsest
only survived by chance. The new priority of the age had become the saving of souls; and so
Archimedes’ text became a Euchologion, a prayer book. The new writer took Archimedes’
treatise to pieces; scraped off the writing (‘palimpsest’ is Greek for ‘scraped again’), cut out
the pages, folded them to half the size, wrote over the original text at right angles and then
reassembled the book in its new form. Although this act now seems like desecration, it
probably saved the original, since the palimpsest eventually found a home in the Convent of
the Holy Grave in modern Istanbul, where it was rediscovered in 1907.
Dr Reviel Netz, Professor of Ancient Science at Stanford University, is a world expert on
the works of Archimedes. He has written of the palimpsest: ‘A manuscript is a window into
the past. It allows us to get a view of a lost world. Some manuscripts provide us with an
indirect view only, others with a better picture. What scholars do is to put together all the
evidence available, to form a single picture of the past.’ Netz could just as well have been
describing the work of geologists piecing together the pre-Pangaean supercontinents.
The Earth presents us with the most complex palimpsest of all; it is a text that has been
written over, erased, defaced, cooked and reheated; its binding has been broken, its pages
lost and shuffled. Each overwriting further obscures everything that has gone before; so that
what was originally written may never, indeed, be fully decipherable.

Orogenous zones

Radiometric dating provided geologists with the first clue about the existence of older
supercontinents: the clustering of radiometric ages noted by John Sutton throughout the long
‘Precambrian’ period providing the first hint that mountain ranges, that may today be widely
separated from one another, might once have been joined and shared a common origin.
When supercontinents form, all the continental blocks of the Earth come together in a big
crunch, eliminating the oceans between them and building mountains in their place as the jaws
of the tectonic vice come together. Rocks are pressure-cooked in the roots of each new
mountain chain, and radiometric clocks reset. This process is long and complex and does not
all happen at once. On the modern Earth, for example, the next supercontinent has already
begun to form, following India’s collision with Asia and Africa’s with Europe. Many other
collisions, spread out over the next 250 million years, will take place before the point at
which the supercontinent achieves what geologists call ‘maximum packing’. But the Earth has
a lot of time on her hands. Even dates that fall within 100 or 200 million years of one another,
will look clustered within a timespan of (by then) almost five billion years.
Rodinia seems to have formed 1–1.3 billion years ago, as indicated by the clustering of
dates. These dates are known as ‘stabilization ages’ because they mark the point in the
mountain-building process when the radiometric clocks were reset. Those rocks that show
the joins in this great global collision occur all over the world, but the event itself (called an
‘orogeny’ because it created mountain ranges) is named for the Grenville Belt of eastern
North America. The Grenville Orogeny was what created the supercontinent of Rodinia.
Rocks of this Grenvillian Orogeny are hidden under younger deposits across the eastern
and central United States, but crop out in New England, the Blue Ridge Mountains and west
Texas. They extend up the great peninsula of Norway and Sweden, as well as down through
eastern Mexico, where, once again, they lie mostly hidden under younger rocks laid, like
some subsequent historical text, on top. They then skirt the western edge of Amazonia,
passing through Bolivia, before diving again beneath younger rocks to the south.
Across today’s Atlantic they crop out in Mozambique and Natal, as well as South Africa.
In India they are found in the Eastern Ghats. In south-west Australia they are seen in the
Darling Belt (which skirts the Yilgarn Craton, the country’s richest mineral region, turns the
corner at Perth and stretches up the western half of the Great Australian Bight as the Fraser
and Albany belts). And because the Bight is the hole out of which East Antarctica was bitten
when Gondwanaland broke up, parts of coastal East Antarctica also display rocks whose
deformation histories match their Australian counterparts precisely.
So, having found the scars where the supercontinent’s component cratons were sutured
together into the Rodinian quilt, the next question to be faced is, do they join up, and if so,
how? This is much warmer work, and to help them geologists must engage the help of the
Earth’s changing magnetic field.
Jigsaw

One of the most important geophysical tools to emerge through the 1950s and 1960s
involved the discovery that many rocks preserve a trace of the Earth’s magnetism as it
prevailed when they formed (or became ‘stabilized’, depending on what kind of rocks you
are dealing with). Everyone knows how you can destroy a magnet by heating it, because
magnetization depends on the alignment of atoms, which heating disrupts. Rocks are not
normally thought of as magnetic, but don’t forget that the original ‘magnets’ that humans
discovered were lodestones, natural pieces of the iron mineral magnetite. Many rocks are
rich enough in magnetic minerals for them to become very weakly magnetized in the Earth’s
field.
Rocks that get very hot, such as lavas, or rocks that are cooked deep inside mountain
ranges, have to cool down below a certain temperature (called their Curie Point, after Pierre
Curie (1859–1906), who discovered the phenomenon) before they can become magnetized.
Sediments can also display a weak magnetization, because grains of magnetic minerals will
become aligned as they settle out, lending the whole rock a weak magnetic imprint.
When geologists take carefully oriented samples from these rocks and put them into very
sensitive magnetometers, they can work out the ancient latitude of the continent – hence
where the North Pole was, relative to the continent at the time the rock formed – and the
continent’s orientation. Because continents drift, their position relative to the magnetic poles
changes constantly. Combining palaeomagnetic data with radiometric ages therefore allows
scientists to track the movement of a continent over a given time, though by convention they
actually do it by pretending that the continent had stayed still and the pole did the wandering.
The resulting Apparent Polar Wander (APW) curves trace out distinctive signatures; and if
two continental blocks, which may now be widely separated because of subsequent
continental drift, can be shown to have shared APW curves at a certain time, it is a fair
assumption that they were once joined together and moved as one – possibly within a
supercontinent.
The magnetic field of the Earth can be thought of as a big bar magnet more or less aligned
with the planet’s axis of rotation. The field’s force-lines (which connect the south magnetic
pole to the north, describing a giant virtual apple shape in the space around the planet)
intersect the Earth’s surface at different angles depending on latitude: vertical at the poles and
near-horizontal towards the Equator. When you measure the fossil magnetism in rocks, the
inclination of the field (as it is known) gives you the rock’s original latitude when it formed.
The direction of north also enables you to tell the continent’s orientation at the time.
But how can you fix the continent’s position with respect to longitude at a given moment?
Correlation with other pieces in the jigsaw may help. If there are fossils available (as there
are after the base of the Cambrian), it may be possible to infer one continent’s distance from
another at a particular time by the similarity (or lack of it) between assemblages. Obviously,
the more similar two assemblages, the more migration was possible between their respective
habitats and thus the closer together they were on the Earth’s surface. You can also look at
sediments. If distinctive mineral grains occur in them, it may be possible to say exactly from
where they were eroded. That source may then tie in older rocks that have since become
widely separated by later continental drift from the sediments they gave rise to.
widely separated by later continental drift from the sediments they gave rise to.
A mineral widely used in this sort of study is the humble zircon, the silicate of the element
zirconium, which we have encountered already in the nuclei of John Joly’s pleochroic haloes.
The fact that zircons contain radioactive elements also makes them very suitable subjects for
radiometric dating. Zircon grains, eroded from an original mass of crystalline rocks, will give
the same age as other zircons still in situ in the original source rock. You may find sediments
containing zircons with quite different ages, suggesting that they were derived from
elsewhere, plucked from rocks that have since been rifted off by subsequent drift after the
break-up of the original supercontinent.

The Earth and its magnetic field. The lines of force of the field describe a
shape in space rather like an apple of which the planet is the core. Note that the
angle at which lines of force intersect the surface of the Earth varies from vertical
at the pole to near horizontal around the Equator. By finding the inclination of
fossil remanent magnetism frozen into rocks, palaeomagnetists (aka
‘palaeomagicians’) are able to work out continents’ ancient latitudes.
Marriage and divorce

Supercontinents, like people, get married and they get divorced. They may also repeat this
process more than once. When continents rift, however, they leave traces in the geological
record, even after the oceans that the divorcing continents leave in their wake have long been
destroyed and forgotten.
Some pieces of evidence, such as the clustered radiometric dates of mountain-building
episodes, show us when continents joined together. Different types of evidence have to be
used if we are to date the moment when supercontinents broke up. For example, when rocks
undergo tension they crack along lines at right angles to the pulling force. Molten magma may
rise up and fill these cracks, creating what geologists colourfully term ‘dyke swarms’ (a dyke
being a flat, sheetlike, cross-cutting body of once-molten rock). The dykes’ orientation
betrays the direction of the tension.
Another consequence of tension is rifting, just as we saw happening in the North Sea
Basin at the end of the Permian, when the Atlantic Ocean was beginning to open. In rifting,
rock in the valley floor drops down like a keystone in an opening arch, and sediment rushes
in to fill the space. Looking at the distribution of rift valley deposits and dyke swarms can
help geologists work out how a supercontinent broke apart.
The leading configuration for the supercontinent Rodinia was published by Paul Hoffman in
1991 in the American journal Science, and it is based on the assumption that the Grenville-
age mountain belts of the world were all created by the elimination of oceans. Hoffman’s
configuration placed the west coast of North America against East Antarctica, a solution
known as SWEAT (South West north America-East AnTarctica), and which was originally
proposed by the Scottish-American geologist Ian Dalziel. However, such is the uncertainty in
these reconstructions that there is as yet no general agreement among scientists even about
this basic configuration. Palaeomagnetic evidence may be geophysics, but it doesn’t tell you
everything; the results leave a lot of room for interpretation, at least as regards longitude.
Also, very ancient rocks lack the fossil controls that can be used to help determine the
relative positions of Cambrian and younger continental fragments at given times; and the
geological controls (matching mountain belts, dyke swarms, rift systems and the like) – as
Wegener himself found – need not of themselves compel particular solutions to the jigsaw.
For example, the chief rival configuration to SWEAT puts Australia alongside North
America (and is known as AUSWUS, for Australia-Western United States). Other possible
configurations are also occasionally dropped into this alphabet soup at international meetings,
all serving to demonstrate the extreme difficulty of solving the Rodinia jigsaw puzzle from the
scanty evidence of the ultimate palimpsest.
For supercontinents even older than Rodinia the situation is predictably even worse,
though just to show that controversy does not necessarily increase proportionately with age,
many geologists believe (with Ian Dalziel) that in between Rodinia and Pangaea another
supercontinent, Pannotia, was created. In this vision of events present-day Australia, East
Antarctica and India rifted off en masse from Rodinia about 760 million years ago and
became reattached to the eastern side of Africa and Arabia. However, whether Pannotia
qualifies as a true supercontinent depends on whether this event did any more than build the
megacontinent Gondwanaland. Opinion on this remains resolutely divided. One recent
textbook on the subject, for example, makes no mention at all of Pannotia among the
textbook on the subject, for example, makes no mention at all of Pannotia among the
panoply of pre-Pangaean supercontinents.
We have seen how supercontinents may form by two processes, for which geologists have
borrowed the psychological terms ‘introversion’ and ‘extroversion’. Introversion is another
name for the Wilson Cycle, sometimes also called ‘accordion tectonics’, whereby a continent
rifts apart, forms an ocean within itself and then closes again along the same line, destroying
the interior ocean and forming a new range of mountains more or less where an older range
once stood. Extroversion simply envisages this rifting continuing, so that the original
supercontinent is turned inside out and all its fragments meet one another along their leading
edges somewhere else on the planet.

Tales from topographic oceans

The solution to the question of continental drift did indeed lie at the bottom of the ocean, as
many geologists suspected. The problem that geologists have in putting pre-Pangaea
supercontinents like Rodinia back together (in other words, in distinguishing between such
possible solutions as SWEAT and AUSWUS) is the lack of ocean floor from that time,
because it has all long since been destroyed. However, it would be an immense help if, even
without that ‘road map’, they could somehow tell whether a given supercontinent (whose
existence and approximate date of fusion we should be able to tell from such evidence as
clustered radiometric ages) formed by introversion or extroversion. The question is, how?
Consider this. In the case of an interior ocean (like the modern Atlantic, opening between
fragments of a disintegrating Pangaea) all the ocean floor that has formed is obviously
younger than the break-up of Pangaea. If the two sides of the Atlantic should decide to close
again and form Chris Scotese’s Pangea Ultima, the ages of all ocean-floor rock that will have
to be consumed will fall (at their oldest) between the dates of Pangaea’s initial break-up and
(at their youngest) its eventual reunification.
But on the other hand if Roy Livermore’s vision comes true and 250 million years from
now his Novopangaea forms by the opposite process of extroversion, the ocean floor that is
consumed in forming the new supercontinent (mainly the Pacific Ocean) will all have lain
outside Pangaea at its state of maximum packing: the floor of an ‘exterior’ ocean called
Panthalassa. Nearly all of this ocean floor therefore formed before Pangaea was fully
assembled; and therefore nearly every piece of it, especially the very first pieces to be
destroyed, would yield ages older than the break-up of that supercontinent.
In other words, in introversion, all ocean floor consumed in making a supercontinent will
be younger than the break-up of the previous supercontinent, while in extroversion it will be
older.
This presents a potential method of telling which of the two mechanisms broke apart and
then formed supercontinents older than Pangaea. But how useful could it be? It relies, after
all, on dating ocean floor that is consumed in the creation of a new supercontinent. But
surely, you may ask, subduction consumes all ocean floor, so it is no longer available for
sampling. If there is indeed none left, how can this idea move us forward?
The answer lies in remembering the difference between perfect models and imperfect
reality. It may be true in textbook diagrams that subduction destroys all ocean floor, but it is
not so in real life. Real subduction is not the clear-cut business represented in these tectonic
cartoons; and sometimes, instead of diving down into the Earth like they should, something
goes wrong and pieces of ocean crust become scraped off on to the continents to become
parts of mountains: true ‘topographic oceans’.
Geologists have long recognized these distinctive rocks. They consist of three basic
elements: basalts, erupted underwater and thus forming characteristic pillow shapes; the
vertical dykes that fed these submarine eruptions with lava; and the glassy mineral chert
(silica, or silicon dioxide) sitting between the pillows. The pillows typically have chilled
margins (small crystals, or even glass) where the hot magma met the ocean and cooled very
quickly. Below, the dykes that fed their eruption formed as tension at the mid-ocean
spreading ridge opened up long, parallel cracks at right angles to the direction of tension. The
cherty sediments between the pillows, rich in silica, partly precipitated from solution and
partly derived from the skeletons of such creatures as sponges and the microscopic diatom.
(There are few other microfossils because, in the low temperatures of the deep sea, those
with skeletons made of calcium carbonate dissolve away.)

Cartoon representing plate tectonics. Ocean floor, produced at the mid-ocean

ridge, is pulled back down into the crust at subduction zones. However, the
process is not this neat in nature, and bits of the ocean floor get scraped off to
survive on top of the continental plate, as ‘ophiolite’.
Pillow lavas, dykes and cherts form a classic threesome first noted in 1905 by Gustav
Steinmann (1856–1929) and grandly named the ‘Steinmann Trinity’ in his honour by the
eccentric Scots geologist Sir Edward Battersby Bailey.
But the Steinmann Trinity is only part of what geologists now call an ‘ophiolite suite’, an
ocean-floor remnant that may run to thicknesses of three to five kilometres. Deeper still
within the sequence, below the sheeted dykes, come massive, coarsely crystalline rocks
called gabbros. These rocks are the solidified remains of the magma chambers that fed the
called gabbros. These rocks are the solidified remains of the magma chambers that fed the
dykes and that cooled more slowly because of their greater volume and depth, and thus
formed rock with the same chemistry but larger crystals. Lying below the gabbros are the
deepest rocks of all, including peridotite (which has sometimes been altered by seawater to
form a well-known rock called serpentine, often used for ornaments, ashtrays and
cheeseboards). These dark-green rocks are slices of the Earth’s mantle.
Only with the coming of plate tectonics were these distinctive rock sequences recognized
for what they are: the last remnants of long-vanished ocean crust, scraped off on to the
continent but destroyed everywhere else by a subduction process that once drew two
continental crust blocks together in a mountain-building episode. If enough ophiolite formed
during the accretion of a particular supercontinent could be dated, the spread of results
should enable us to tell if that supercontinent formed by introversion or extroversion.
However, there is a big problem with this idea, and it has to do with resetting of
radiometric clocks. Ophiolites commonly have three important ‘ages’. There is the date they
were created, their ‘magmatic age’. Their second radiometric age is an overprint that dates
from the point at which they began to be involved in subduction processes, as the increase in
heat and pressure began to alter their constituent minerals. Then there is their third age, which
is when they were scraped off on to the oncoming continental crust. For this method to
work, geologists need to know the rock’s first, true age: the date when it was first born from
the mantle.

Pannotia

In 1991 Paul Hoffman wrote a paper with the title ‘Did the breakup of Rodinia turn
Gondwanaland inside out?’ According to this model of how Rodinia fragmented, about 760
million years ago a megacontinental landmass made up of the continents we now know as
Australia and Antarctica rifted off from Rodinia along a line that now defines the western
edge of North America. (This is not the present-day coast of North America, because since
Pangaea split up, the USA and Canada have ridden over much of the ancient Pacific Ocean
floor, colliding with many small landmasses on the way. These have accreted as what
geologists call terranes to the west coast, and built up the mountainous western seaboard of
North America in a process akin to the way that litter collects against the top of an ‘up’
escalator, when the steps are finally subducted into the bowels of the machine.)
In making this move, the Australia-Antarctica continent opened up an interior ocean that
became the ancestral Pacific. Ancient ocean floor encircling the fragmenting Rodinia was
subducted, and the process continued until Australia-Antarctica had swung round and
collided with another continent consisting of South America-Africa, which at that time were
still joined along the line that would one day open to form the present South Atlantic.
Australia-Antarctica thus became fused with South America-Africa, creating a megacontinent
we have seen before: Suess’s Gondwanaland. Many geologists also believe (with Ian Dalziel)
that at this time other pieces of continental crust were also very close together, possibly
fused, and have given this supercontinent assemblage the name ‘Pannotia’ (‘all southern
continents’).
Because the ocean that was consumed in this process was all ‘exterior’ to Rodinia, it
 Because the ocean that was consumed in this process was all ‘exterior’ to Rodinia, it
provides a known example of extroversion; and a possible test for the dating method,
because the maximum ages obtained from any ophiolite remnants of the consumed ocean
floor should pre-date the break-up of Rodinia.
When Pannotia subsequently split, about 550 million years ago, the interior oceans created
by this event, such as Iapetus, Tuzo Wilson’s so-called ‘proto-Atlantic’ separating present-
day North America from Western Europe, were subsequently destroyed as the next
supercontinent (Pangaea) was created. They were, we know, destroyed by the accordion
tectonics of the Wilson Cycle process – that is, by introversion. Dating fragments of those
vanished ocean floors should therefore yield ages younger than Pannotia’s break-up.
If a large enough sample of true ages is gathered from ophiolites preserved during the
formation of Pannotia, they should fall in a period entirely before the date of Rodinia’s break-
up because the ocean floor they represent was all exterior to that supercontinent.
Conversely, if the same is done for oceans that formed between the break-up of Pannotia
and the formation of Pangaea, the ages obtained should fall within that interval of time
because all the ocean floor they represent formed as an interior ocean. If these predictions
hold up, our method should show that Rodinia extroverted to form Pannotia and Pannotia
introverted to form Pangaea.
Geologists Professor Brendan Murphy of the Tectonics Research Laboratory at St
Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, and Professor R. Damian Nance of Ohio University
have pursued this technique with great success. Their elegant joint research has, since 1985,
resulted in a much clearer picture of how supercontinents assemble. Murphy and Nance have
looked at rocks associated with the assembly of Pannotia (about 600 million years old) from
the Borborema Belt of Brazil, and the Trans-Saharan and Mozambique Belts of North and
East Africa. Rodinia began to split apart about 760 million years ago. So, if Pannotia formed
by the consumption of exterior ocean surrounding Rodinia, the formation dates should come
out at between 760 million years and about 1100 million years.

Taking on the mantle

But I still haven’t answered the main question: just how, exactly, do you find out such dates
reliably? Simple radiometric dating, as we have already seen, allows you to find out when the
atomic clock was last reset. But rocks from the floors of vanished oceans, now anomalously
preserved in the mountain belts that replaced those oceans when they closed, have all been
involved in mountain building and had their clocks reset. Simple radiometric dating would
reveal the date the mountains formed, but that is not what we want. We want to get at the
time these ocean floors formed at a mid-ocean ridge. We want the birthday, not the date of
the funeral, or the mid-life facelift. We want to know the very first time those ocean-crust
rocks were created by volcanic melts, erupting at a mid-ocean ridge; the very moment they
were derived from the mantle and became part of the crust.
To find out that crucial birth-time, Murphy and Nance have developed a method that
combines radiometric-dating techniques with the tendency of isotopes of elements to
separate out: become differentiated during natural processes because of their different atomic
weights. The technique is complex and beautiful, and it involves using isotopes of two unusual
elements: samarium and its daughter element neodymium.
elements: samarium and its daughter element neodymium.
These two elements are very similar in many ways. Both sit close together in Group 3 of
the Periodic Table, which occupies two long lines at the bottom of the chart, and which are
collectively known as the ‘rare Earth elements’. On the top row (the ‘Lanthanide series’) you
will find neodymium (Nd) at number 60 and samarium (Sm) at number 62. The atoms of
these two elements are about the same size, and they react similarly in chemical processes
because in their cloud of electrons both elements have the same number available for forming
bonds – two. However, something different happens to neodymium and samarium atoms
when rocks in the Earth’s mantle begin to melt and form the magma that will eventually build
the ocean floor.

The Periodic Table of the Elements. The Lanthanide Series is one of the so-called ‘transition element’
groups (horizontal lines) arranged in a double line below the main diagram.
Lanthanide-series elements display a very strange property. As their atomic number (and
hence their atomic weight) rises, the atoms actually shrink rather than expand. This is known
as the Lanthanide contraction. When melting begins, rock becomes a mixture of liquid and
solid. Lanthanide contraction makes the heavier and denser Lanthanides (such as samarium)
more likely to stay where they are in the solid phase, while the lighter, bigger atoms such as
neodymium will tend to prefer to melt. This means that neodymium atoms have a higher
tendency to leave the mantle, and samarium to stay put. Mantle rocks have therefore become
progressively depleted in neodymium since the planet formed 4700 million years ago.
If you could count all the atoms of samarium in the Earth and divide that number by the
number of atoms of neodymium, you would get a figure that expressed their relative global
number of atoms of neodymium, you would get a figure that expressed their relative global
abundance. If the two elements were present in equal amounts, the number would, of course,
be one. If you found more neodymium than samarium, then the resulting number would go
down. For example, if there were twice as much neodymium as samarium, you would be
dividing two into one, and the result would be 0.5. These numbers are called ratios, and they
are useful in expressing the relative abundance of two things.
If you do the calculation for real, taking the Earth as a whole and dividing the number of
Nd atoms into the number of Sm atoms, it works out at about 0.32: the ‘bulk Earth’ ratio.
Or, putting it another way, there are about a third as many samarium atoms as neodymium
atoms inside planet Earth.
But because, through geological time, Nd has been continually leaving the mantle in
volcanic melts that have gone to form oceanic crust, Nd is more concentrated in the crust
than in the Earth as a whole, so the samarium-to-neodymium (Sm/Nd) ratio of crustal rocks
is lower, at 0.2. Conversely, Nd has been depleted from the mantle, so the mantle now
contains less than average amounts of that element, making the Sm/Nd ratio of ‘depleted
mantle’ higher (about 0.5, in fact).
So far we have not considered the matter of different isotopes of samarium and
neodymium, but have thought of all the isotopes of each element collectively. However, both
samarium and neodymium have isotopes aplenty. Samarium has seven natural ones, one of
which, samarium-147, is unstable and undergoes radioactive decay to neodymium-143. This
radioactive transformation is very slow indeed, with a half-life of 106 billion years – or over
seven times the age of the universe. Neodymium has nine isotopes, seven of which are stable.
One of them, neodymium-144, is not a product of any radioactive decay series, so it does
not change in concentration in a given rock with time and therefore can be used as a
benchmark.
The gradual decay of samarium-147 (147Sm) to neodymium-143 (143Nd) therefore has
the effect of making 143Nd more common through geological time in all rocks, gradually
increasing the ‘bulk Earth’ ratio between its daughter element 143Nd and the unchanging
144Nd. However, remember that there is more samarium in the depleted mantle than in the
crust because of neodymium’s tendency to fractionate into melts that head upwards.
Therefore the increase through time in the ratio of the two isotopes of neodymium will be
faster in the depleted mantle (where the parent element samarium is relatively abundant) and
slower in the crust, where Sm is rarer.
This means that the isotopic signature provided by the ratio of 143Nd to 144Nd gives the
rock a fingerprint for its place of origin. Because radioactive decay processes are known,
unchanging and predictable, you can then, by extrapolating backward, determine when the
rock from which you obtained the sample left the mantle. It is as though the rock has never
lost its accent: you can take the melt out of the mantle, but you can’t take the mantle out of
the melt. Moreover, because samarium and neodymium are almost identical chemically, this
fingerprint is almost indelible: it is almost unaffected by most subsequent changes that a rock
might undergo.
This allows geologists to take more or less any rock that formed by the crystallization of
magma – even if it formed by the remobilization of previous crustal rocks – and work out
when its chemistry began to go its own way and depart from the isotope chemistry of the
depleted mantle. This works because, in the end, nearly all rocks were originally derived
from the upper mantle. As long as there has not been contamination from other melts with
from the upper mantle. As long as there has not been contamination from other melts with
different histories (and this is usually evident from the field geology) the method is a sound
way of telling when the rocks were first born.
This crucial date, the rock’s first birthday, is called the Depleted Mantle Model Age,
abbreviated as TDM. This is the tool we have been looking for: a way of telling when these
pieces of ocean floor, now preserved in mountain belts, first left the mantle at a mid-ocean
ridge.
Back now to the rocks. By taking as many samples as possible from ophiolite suite rocks
that were emplaced during the elimination of the ocean we are studying, and then comparing
their TDM ages with the date that the mountain range formed (which we know independently
from straightforward radiometric dating of that event), we should at last be able to determine
whether that process was one of extroversion or introversion.
Using this technique, Murphy and Nance found that the rocks from Brazil that were caught
up in the formation of Pannotia after what would become West Gondwana rifted off the
previous supercontinent Rodinia, provide TDM ages of about 1200 million years, and that
similar rocks from south-west Algeria and southern Morocco come out at between 1200
and 950 million years. In the Mozambique Belt the TDM ages come out at between 800 and
900 million years. From this they concluded that the vanished ocean, whose tombstone is
those ancient mountain belts, formed part of Rodinia’s exterior ocean, because the TDM ages
are all older than the date of the break-up of Rodinia. As predicted by the Paul Hoffman
model, Pannotia formed by the extroversion of Rodinia. Rodinia turned inside out.
In the case of Pangaea, the supercontinent after Pannotia, the results have been, as
expected, very different, but also consistent with predictions. The main mountain ranges that
formed as Pangaea reached its maximum packing – the great suture scars that mark the
healing up of oceans – are the Appalachians in the USA, the Caledonian mountains of the
UK and Norway, the Variscan mountains of southern Europe and the Urals of Russia. We
know that Pangaea’s predecessor Pannotia began to fragment at about 550 million years,
when oceans like Iapetus began to form. So, as oceanic rocks caught up in the formation of
Pangaea by the destruction of those ‘interior’ oceans, they should all have TDM ages of less
than 550 million years. No data are available as yet from the Urals, but data from the other
mountain belts all indicate that they were derived from the Earth’s mantle less than 550
million years ago. Pangaea formed by the accordion tectonics of introversion.

Quadrille

So, even from times 1000 million years in the past, geologists now are finding ways of
determining how continental fragments moved about the face of the planet, consuming the
ocean before them as they went. But this stately dance of the continents, which, like partners
in a quadrille, move apart, twist around one another and come together again in new
combinations, has not gone on for ever. Geologists can recognize the probable existence of
even older supercontinents than Rodinia, though they will remain even more dubious and
controversial until new techniques can be found to recover more information from the
geological record.
geological record.
But what makes ancient secrets more difficult still to unlock is the probability that in
Earth’s deepest past the tectonic processes that operated were quite different from those we
see around us today. For these distant pasts, the present no longer provides the key. The
Earth may then have worked in ways perhaps as different from the tectonics of today as the
Ediacara garden’s inhabitants may have been from modern life forms. And when it comes to
life on Earth, geologists tracing the evolution of the planet from its Hadean origins are
increasingly wondering how biology itself may owe both its beginning, and its drive to
complexity, to the workings of our planet’s inner life – as told in the greatest palimpsest of all.

10

BIRTH

We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances And do not realise that these stones are
one with the stars.
HUGH MACDIARMID, ON A RAISED BEACH

When geologists hit upon the notion of constraining their dreams of the past in terms of
processes observed operating today, it made geology a science. Although debate has raged
ever since about whether those processes always operated with the same intensity at all
times in the long history of the Earth, the method still held together. But it only held for those
youngest, lightly scraped and overwritten pages of the great palimpsest that was open to
geologists of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth: namely, the 542 million years
since the beginning of the Cambrian Period, when the age of animals (and eventually plants)
with easily fossilizable bodies dawned, heralding complex life’s long march – or random walk
– through increasing complexity.
But with radiometric dating came the shocking realization that this segment only
represented about the last 12 per cent of Earth history; and that, in the conventional
stratigraphic tables of the time, the tiny unregarded plinth of complex rocks labelled
‘Precambrian’ on which the geological column rested, actually contained nearly all the time
that had elapsed since the planet formed. It was like digging a well, only to find what you had
thought to be solid bedrock giving way into a black, bottomless, unsuspected cavern, loud
with a vast and terrifying silence.
An old-fashioned stratigraphic table, dating from 1898. The basal part labelled ‘Precambrian’ actually
contains 88% of Earth history. Taken from Charles Lapworth’s Intermediate Text-Book of Geology
(Blackwood & Sons). From the collection of the author.

As geologists now looked for ways to decipher the rare and often badly damaged pages
of the Precambrian chapter, they began to realize something else deeply shocking. They
began to see that there were things in the deepest places of Earth history for the unlocking of
whose secrets the present no longer provided the key. True, up to a point the old tools still
worked; after all, a poorly sorted conglomerate full of mud and cobbles and boulders the size
of a man were still probably dumped by glaciers. (However, the same difficulties and
controversies would attend their interpretation in the late twentieth century as in the mid-
nineteenth, the only difference being that now the arguments were more sophisticated.)
But the problem went deeper than just interpreting the meaning of particular rock types.
The Precambrian world that the old tools and other new tools such as isotope analysis
revealed was not the familiar, endlessly cycling Huttonian or Lyellian world, ringing to what
Thomas Hardy described as ‘the full-fugued song of the universe unending’: a world with no
beginning, offering no prospect of an end. By contrast the vast spans of Precambrian time
were dominated by progressive, secular processes that had wrought permanent change upon
were dominated by progressive, secular processes that had wrought permanent change upon
the evolving Earth system.
The more geologists thought about it, the more reasonable this began to seem. Just like the
life of a human being, Earth’s growing years left their indelible marks upon her; and yet
despite her difficult early traumas, by middle age she was leading a much more stable,
routine, almost (but not quite) predictable life. She had reached a time in her life in which it
was almost impossible to conceive of things ever being that radically different. Indeed, if
things were so radically different then from now, perhaps they were t oo different for
geologists to build a scientific picture of the Precambrian world? If the rule of the present
could no longer be used to measure out the ancient world, what price the scientific method?
How could a geologist’s imaginings of these very different times be constrained?
But all was not lost. Geologists turned first to the immutable laws of physics and chemistry;
and in addition they found something new: the emerging techniques of computer modelling.
Using these new approaches, John Sutton and Janet Watson’s dream of opening up the
Precambrian gradually came to be realized. It was the final confirmation that the
uniformitarian visions of Lyell and Hutton did not, and could not, do full justice to Earth’s
chequered past. Moreover, as the idea that human activity might be affecting the Earth
System became familiar to followers of current affairs, the whole question of how the climate
works (a question rooted in how it evolved into its current state since the birth-time of the
Earth) lent Precambrian geology a sudden relevance, even urgency. The purest of pure
science, this expedition to an alien planet whose curiosity-driven mission directive had been
drawn up without the slightest idea of practical application, suddenly moved politically
centre-stage. For the tale of the Precambrian has proved to be a litany of terrible climate
disasters, all of them brought about – or at least hastened – by life itself, and the
Supercontinent Cycle.

Genesis

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles’s eccentric, versifying, visionary ancestor, in his epic
poem The Temple of Nature wrote: ‘Organic Life began beneath the waves.’ In 1871 his
grandson, on the other hand, would speculate, in a letter to the Director of Kew Gardens,
the explorer-botanist Sir Joseph Hooker:
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which
could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond,
with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein
compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such
matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living
creatures were formed.

So who was right? Did life start in the seas, or in a little lightning-struck dish of lukewarm
primeval soup? Today’s leading theory about how life came to planet Earth suggests that the
older Darwin, on this occasion, came nearer the mark. Life, it now seems likely, originated
not in a superficial pond, but deep below the waves on the gloomy floor of the Earth’s early
oceans. What is more, it did so long before even the continents were fully formed and set sail
across the globe. It isn’t only Hugh MacDiarmid’s stones that are ‘one with the stars’: life is,
too.
The Earth began to accrete from a disc of space debris around 4.7 billion years ago, in a
hellish birth-time colourfully referred to by some geologists as the ‘Hadean’ eon, though this
name is not recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that
decides such things. It prefers instead the rather more prosaic name ‘Eoarchean’ for the
earliest, bottomless section of the Earth’s life story: the true and final plinth of the modern
stratigraphic column below which there was simply no Earth.
As it vacuumed space debris orbiting the young Sun, the Earth gradually heated up.
Gravitational energy from incoming bolides was converted into thermal energy. Deep within,
the iron and nickel in the mixture separated out from the molten rocky materials and sank into
the planet’s core, where it still remains, an eternal but querulous dynamo driving (and
occasionally flipping) the Earth’s magnetic field. Up above, and for perhaps as long as 500
million years, our planet was a cratered, volcanic spaceball, sporadically molten, dark,
sterile; blasted by solar wind, flayed by ultraviolet light, too hot for oceans, too hostile for life.
Although Lord Kelvin was quite wrong about how old the Earth could be because he
assumed it had just cooled by radiating heat into space from its original molten state, it is true
that our planet was a very much hotter place four billion years ago. This was partly due to
bombardment and gravitational heating; but it was also due to the much greater abundance at
that time of highly radioactive isotopes.
Remember that all radioactive decay series eventually end up in stable isotopes, or at least
in longer-lived and much less radioactive ones. Shortly after the solar system formed and the
rocky planets coalesced from space junk, Earth’s nuclear reactor burned much hotter than
today, just as radioactive waste, which will eventually become harmless, is at its hottest when
it is fresh.
Because the young planet needed to dissipate maybe five times as much internal heat, the
mantle convection systems deep below its crust would have been smaller and more active
than today’s. Therefore, with greater production of volcanic material at surface, and faster
movements among smaller plates, the number of spreading and subduction zones would have
been greater. Moreover, the crust that they formed (and consumed) would also have been
much thicker: somewhere between twenty-five and fifty kilometres. This has led geologists
like Eldridge Moores to ask when this non-uniformitarian change from thick to thin oceanic
crust took place, what the environmental implications of that change would have been, and
whether it happened gradually, or more suddenly.

Birth of the continents

The crust of the newly accreted Earth would have been everywhere of the same composition
(roughly speaking) as modern ocean floor, simply because this is the basic stuff of the Earth.
Lighter rocks, which float high as the continents of today, had to be distilled from that crude
material by the fractionation of lighter elements. Thus the silica and aluminium compounds,
identified as ‘SiAl’ by Eduard Suess, had to be separated from the heavy ones, made
predominantly out of silica and magnesium (‘SiMa’). So the continents cannot always have
been the same size as today: they had to grow. The oceans, too, may well have been more
voluminous than today because the hotter mantle could contain less water, chemically locked
voluminous than today because the hotter mantle could contain less water, chemically locked
up in minerals, than it can today. Some scientists think there may have been twice as much
water at surface, making the early Earth a truly panthalassic water-world.
An example of how the process of continent formation might have started can be seen
today on Iceland. By processes of partial melting and melt extraction in the system of
conduits under the island, magmas of granitic (classic SiAl) composition are being formed.
This is why, although Iceland is always portrayed as a black, basaltic place befitting its
position on a mid-ocean ridge, in fact up to 10 per cent of its rocks are of light, granitic type.
Iceland sits astride a hot, hyperactive stretch of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and has been
forming for a mere sixteen million years or so. Just like the early crust of the Earth, because
the amount of volcanic material erupted there is higher than average, Icelandic crust is twice
as thick as normal ocean crust, which all helps the lighter ‘continental’ type rocks to separate
out as the cooling magma circulates in the plumbing below. Because of their lower density,
sialic rocks – once created – would then remain at the surface, gradually coalescing as they
jostled and fused by continuous minor collisions forming the protocontinents.
As the Earth cooled further, oceans began to condense, hydrological cycles of
evaporation and precipitation began to operate and the erosion and deposition of
sedimentary rocks could really begin. The earliest evidence of erosion comes from rocks
over four billion years old, in the form of those amazingly robust and persistent microscopic
mineral grains that John Joly saw at the centre of his pleochroic haloes: zircons.
As we have seen, when rocks undergo melting, and elements of differing atomic weight
separate out between solid and liquid phases – a process called fractionation – different
isotopes of the elements (despite their identical chemical properties) behave differently
according to their slightly different weights and measures. Some prefer life in the melting pot,
while others tend to remain in the solid. If continental crust is continually fractionating from
the Earth’s primitive material, isotope ratios within the different rocks generated will gradually
come to differ from average, or ‘bulk Earth’, values. Thus, even in one single, tiny grain of
zircon, distinctive fractionated isotope ratios remain as the telltale signature of early crustal
processes that generated suites of continental rocks of which those tiny crystals are today the
only surviving remnants. Truly, a whole world in a grain of sand.
Mark Harrison at the Australian National University in Canberra and his co-workers have
been studying zircons that were eroded, reincorporated and then sealed within younger rocks
about 4.4 billion years ago. These rocks come from the Jack Hills in Western Australia, and
themselves constitute one of the oldest pieces of continental crust on the planet. Harrison and
his colleagues have tested these grains for two isotopes of the element hafnium (Hf ).
The zircons contain very low concentrations of another element, lutetium, whose
radioactive isotope 176Lu decays to hafnium; so the researchers believe that the ratios of
176Hf to 177Hf which they find in these grains are very close to the primitive ratios that
prevailed when they formed – that is, at the original zircon-containing rock’s absolute age,
determined independently using uranium-lead dating methods. Those ratios are characteristic
of fractionated sialic crust. What this suggests is that continents were not only forming, but
even being eroded and their detritus redeposited, within as little as 200 million years of the
Earth’s accretion: that is, between 4.4 and 4.5 billion years ago.
In fact, the more geologists look into this question, the more it seems as though
fractionation processes had produced continents of almost modern dimensions fairly soon in
Earth history. There is little direct evidence of this because very little continental crust dating
Earth history. There is little direct evidence of this because very little continental crust dating
from the Archean (between 4.5 and 2.5 billion years ago) survives today. Barely 7 per cent
of rocks in the present continents are that old; all the rest have now long been eroded and
recycled as younger continental crust. So how is it possible to tell how big Archean
continents were? The answer comes in the form of meteorites.
The stony meteorites are the leftover raw material out of which the early planets were
formed. This means that the early Earth originally displayed the same overall concentration of
uranium as meteorites still do. In geological processes, uranium tends to fractionate into
continental crust; the more uranium there is in the continents, the less there will be in the
mantle. Therefore, one measure of the total amount of continental crust in existence at any
given time is the degree to which mantle rocks are depleted in that element. The surprising
result of testing those few surviving mantle-derived rocks from the late Archean (2.4 billion
years ago) is that they appear to be just as uranium-poor as modern mantle.
Some time in the Archean (probably earlier rather than later) the continents became ‘fully
grown’. Continents may since have fused and split, danced and skated over the globe like
the faces of a Rubik’s cube in maddening and almost untrackable ways; but their total
volume has remained about the same for the greater part of Earth history, the product of a
dynamic balance between the erosion of existing continental crust and the production of new.
And into a very dark corner of this hostile, water-enveloped world, deep below the
turbulent surface of the first global ocean, life was born. Earth was a young, hot planet;
spinning so rapidly on its axis that a day lasted no more than five violent, storm-racked hours.
Its acid, anoxic ocean was raised in frequent massive tides by a Moon that had not yet
wound away to its present distance, though it may well not have been visible in the feeble
light filtering through the murk of gas and dust thrown up by meteorite impacts that would,
from time to time, vaporize sea and rock alike.

Slumbering green

Julian Huxley FRS (1887–1975), son of the great Thomas Henry Huxley, in a wistful poem
to a dancer whose performance had captivated him, lamented that he felt
Weary of plodding science, where the vision
Must for achievement clothe itself in clay …
Nowhere do you find the vision obscured more often, or more thickly, than in the dreaded
conference abstract: a tight little knot of compressed and overwrought jargon with which
scientists announce early findings to a room of critical colleagues they are hoping to impress.
But they are not all like that.
‘Earth agglomerates and heats. Volcanoes evolve carbon oxides, methane and
pyrophosphate. Convection cells, stacked in the planetary interior, begin the cooling process.
An acidulous Hadean ocean condenses from the carbon oxide sky. Stratospheric smogs
absorb a proportion of the Sun’s rays. The now cool ocean leaks into the crust and convects
…’
The author of this was Professor Mike Russell, then a research fellow at the Scottish
Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow and currently ‘distinguished visiting
Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow and currently ‘distinguished visiting
scientist’ at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Russell is a world-
renowned expert on the early Earth and the planetary geology that can give rise to life.
Together with his colleague Allan Hall, he has written widely about how life may have
originated; but in order to do that, any scientist has to ask what sounds like an unanswerable
question: namely, what exactly is life? For Russell and Hall, the best way to approach this
loaded question is to stick to what can be observed and measured. Instead of asking what
life is, Russell asks what life does. And to put it simply, life exists to make a mess.
‘A living cell assimilates nutrients, uses energy and generates waste. It consists mainly of
carbon-based (“organic”) molecules that also contain hydrogen and other elements. Their
defining structural feature is a mainly waterproof container, the cell membrane. Inside is a
watery solution with a high concentration of organic molecules as well as some inorganic
salts.’
To tackle this question of what life ‘does’, scientists need to understand natural sources of
energy and what forms of energy are involved in life processes. Says Russell: ‘What does a
waterfall do? It drains water from a greater to a lesser height, giving the water a lower
gravitational energy. What does a warm spring do? It is a plumbing system draining
thermal energy from underground and dissipating it on the surface. So, what does life do?
Life is a chemical system that drains and dissipates chemical energy. For example, animals
and plants gain chemical energy from sugar in food by burning it in inhaled oxygen, a process
we call respiration.’
On Earth today, nearly all life ultimately derives its energy from the Sun, which drives the
whole process. Green plants catch the rays and use them to ensnare carbon from the air and
water from the soil to produce big organic molecules, with which they build their tissues. The
waste product of this process (called photosynthesis) is oxygen, which animals then use to
break down the carbon compounds in the food they eat, thus releasing their energy and
generating the raw materials they need to grow. Plants are the origin of nearly all life as we
know it because only they can use pure energy to build their bodies; bodies that animals at
the bottom of the food chain must eat to build theirs. All flesh, as the Bible says, is grass. This
has been the way the living world has worked for billions of years. But not always. Certainly
not from the beginning.
Mike Russell and Allan Hall think that the first living cells formed on the floor of the
Earth’s first newly condensed oceans, where warm, alkaline submarine springs focused
chemical energy, and the mixing of the hot spring water and seawater caused simple
chemicals to precipitate out as thin, inorganic films.
Under today’s oceans, at regions where the heat-flow is high, such as the mid-ocean
ridges, seawater leaking into the hot rocks of the seabed is superheated (sometimes as high
as 700°C), becomes charged with minerals and is then extruded into the cold sea at
submarine hydrothermal vents known as ‘black smokers’, because the dissolved minerals
immediately come out of solution with the sudden fall in temperature and create the
impression of chimney smoke. But these waters can be hot enough to melt lead, and are only
kept from boiling by the intense pressure. They are far too hot for organic life to have
originated in or near them, even though they are often densely colonized today by specially
adapted organisms.
However, a similar hydrothermal process can also happen far away from the hot ridge, on
much older (and cooler) ocean floor. At these vents, percolating seawater itself is responsible
for creating heat, by hydrating the mineral olivine (the basic mineral component of the mantle)
for creating heat, by hydrating the mineral olivine (the basic mineral component of the mantle)
to create another mineral, serpentine. These springs reach only relatively moderate
temperatures (the hottest being about 170°C); but these off-ridge alkaline vents (first
discovered in 2001, though predicted by Professor Russell some years before) do grow
much larger than their hotter equivalents on ridges. They are also a distinctive ghostly white
(since they are mainly made of calcium carbonate) and the largest of them are known to rear
up over thirty metres from the ocean floor.
Ocean-floor springs also contain many essential minerals which all organisms require, such
as phosphorus, nickel and zinc. At a time when the Earth’s surface was inimical to the
existence of organic molecules, here was somewhere safe and protected, where life could
form uninterrupted. The gradients of temperature and acidity/alkalinity could provide the
energy while the minerals brought chemical food within a solid structure built of a mix of
carbonates, silica, clays and sulphides of iron and nickel. Mike Russell, who began his career
apprenticed as a chemical engineer studying nickel catalysts, recognizes in this system what
an industrial chemist would call a ‘continuously regulated flow reactor’.
A further hint that life truly originated in these dark, submarine places soon after the
oceans first condensed perhaps 4.4 billion years ago, is that the microbes still living today
among modern hot springs include some of the most genetically simple life-forms on Earth.
Vent communities may form a closed ecosystem, but Russell believes life eventually escaped
from them to colonize the world. And that great escape was probably brought about by the
processes of plate tectonics: familiar to us as elements in the Supercontinent Cycle.
Russell’s insight into the way life originated on the Hadean ocean floor began while he was
entertaining his son Andy by making ‘chemical gardens’ with the sort of chemical kit you can
buy from science museum shops. These crystal gardens seem to ‘grow’ in a plant-like way;
but the snaking, knobbly tubes rising from the beaker bottom are purely inorganic, forming at
the interface of the crystals that the experimenter drops into the solution. However, Russell
remembers that on the night after starting the chemical garden, Andy started to break it up.
‘Deaf to my pleas to join us at supper,’Russell remembers, ‘he announced, from behind the
locked bathroom door, “Hey Dad, these things are hollow!”’
Suddenly Russell thought about the puzzling patterns he had seen in the rocks of an ancient
ore body he had studied in Ireland, long after he had left the chemical industry and qualified
as a geologist. He had seen columns, chimneys and bubbles in the rock, all made of iron
sulphide. These had once been natural ‘chemical gardens’, a garden, he soon realized, in
which the seeds of life could have grown. As he discussed the idea the next day with his
colleague Allan Hall, he saw how organic molecules could have become trapped and
concentrated along those flimsy chemical membranes precipitated as the hot alkaline spring
water, rich in minerals, met the cold, acidic sea. These small pockets of proto-cells could
have encouraged more complex and unlikely reactions to take place, just as every life-form
today uses a membrane to protect and concentrate its contents. Russell says: ‘The
precipitation of chemicals on mixing of solutions forms a barrier, preventing further mixing
and precipitation. At the warm spring we envisage the formation of a special precipitate that
not only formed a barrier, but also provided a template for the assembly of chains of organic
molecules, and acted as a catalyst for electrochemical reactions.’
He thinks that along such thin chemical boundaries organic molecules like amino acids, the
building blocks of proteins, first became concentrated. These organic molecules would have
formed a little deeper in the columnar ‘flow reactor’, where water and its dissolved chemicals
formed a little deeper in the columnar ‘flow reactor’, where water and its dissolved chemicals
were reacting with iron and nickel-rich minerals. The precipitate membrane would then
capture and concentrate other chemicals that could participate in reactions, he thinks; but
eventually this system would evolve, by a process of ‘organic take-over’, into a cell
membrane consisting entirely of organic molecules. Russell and Hall also believe that by
acting as a template, the iron-sulphide precipitate could bond chemically to, and assemble a
sequence of, the molecular components of RNA, a chain molecule very similar to DNA,
which plays a supporting role in genetic evolution.
‘Once organized on the iron sulphide, this RNA could influence the assembly of amino
acids into proteins, as well as the assembly of further chains of RNA, and, finally, of DNA.
Eventually, these new large organic molecules could reproduce themselves through the
interaction of DNA, RNA and proteins, without any need for the original iron-sulphide
template.’
But how could life, assuming that it was indeed born on such ocean-floor vents, have
escaped from its abyssal refuge? Russell thinks that during life’s first few hundred million
years the only safe escape route would have been down. Early organisms could have
migrated into the ocean floor, with its warm underlying sediments, and subsisted there on a
diet of trapped hydrogen and carbon dioxide. This was the beginning of the so-called ‘deep
biosphere’, the mass of microbes that sits silently and invisibly in the pore spaces of the
Earth’s lithosphere, but whose total mass even today outweighs all the living things around us
on the planet’s surface.
There, safe from lethal solar rays, early life played its long waiting game; until the rocks,
now teeming with endolithic microbes, completed their plate-tectonic journey and became
involved in a subduction zone. While most of the sea floor slid down into the mantle, some
would inevitably become scraped off on the overriding plate to form an ophiolite suite; and,
thrust up into the shallows, a few bacteria would have found themselves deep enough to be
protected from harmful rays but shallow enough to use the Sun’s longer-wavelength light to
build organic molecules from carbon dioxide. It was the beginning of photosynthesis.

Rust world

Earth’s early acid-bath oceans contained huge amounts of dissolved iron, which by mid-
Archean time had been spewing into it from ocean-floor hydrothermal springs for a billion
years or more. This iron was held in solution in both its positively charged ionic forms: ferrous
iron (an atom lacking two electrons and thus having a positive charge of two) and ferric iron
(lacking three electrons, and with a positive charge of three). The ferrous iron mostly came
into the water from very hot springs, whereas the ferric form would have been created by
oxidation of this ferrous iron by the weak sunlight, or by the waste product of the earliest
forms of photosynthesis.
The novel condition of matter we call life probably originated some time around 4.4 billion
years ago, probably around the time that the Australian rocks containing those robust little
zircons, with their telltale hafnium isotope ratios, were forming. As the mantle roiled beneath,
small blocks of light continental crust were forming at the Earth’s surface and sticking
together, growing like plaques of scum on a lake: a process that geologists have called
cratonization. By three billion years ago these had coalesced into the first known
cratonization. By three billion years ago these had coalesced into the first known
recognizable supercontinent: Ur.
It is interesting that cratonization did not occur at the same pace all over the Earth’s
surface. At the time that the supercontinent of Ur was forming (it connected areas of South
Africa, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, India, Western Australia and parts of East Antarctica),
elsewhere on the Earth small convection cells were still producing ‘greenstone belts’, the
typical product of the Earth’s earliest tectonics: small kernels of continental rocks surrounded
by highly deformed, ocean-floor-type rocks.
Yet on Ur, processes of erosion and deposition were taking place in modern style.
Between about 3.1 and 2.7 billion years ago, for example, on what is now the western side
of southern Africa, large thicknesses of sediments were laid down in the Witwatersrand and
Pongola basins. Here, geologists have been able to decipher distinctive environments, such
as intertidal flats and braided streams (some containing gold), sand ripples, mud cracks (and
the very first glacial deposits to form on Earth).
Ur was also, it seems, the first supercontinent to experience glaciation, which in turn
supports the idea that even then the global climate was not too dissimilar from that of today.
That said, the atmosphere contained very low concentrations of oxygen, perhaps less than 1
per cent of modern levels. How glaciations could happen at all when the atmosphere was
essentially full of greenhouse gases is one of those questions that further research into the
Earth system must answer. As the Supercontinent Cycle that would continue to our own day
was just beginning, emergent life unleashed the first of its many great climatic catastrophes on
Earth, as oxygen – this new and toxic gas, hitherto just the rare product of chemical
dissociation – began to appear in rising quantities as life escaped from the upper deep.
Life’s ancient sleep had ended. It came to the surface as bugs living in the pore spaces of
rocks that, instead of being subducted beneath them, were scraped off on to continental
masses. Under those shelf-seawaters, lit by the sickly light of a weak Sun perhaps 20 per
cent less luminous than today, beneath the suffocating twilight of a greenhouse atmosphere
full of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen, life learnt to photosynthesize.
Oxygen is a highly reactive gaseous element that now makes up about 16 per cent of the
atmosphere. The growth of oxygen has not been steady: there have been times when much
more oxygen was present in the air than now; for example during the Carboniferous Period,
just as Pangaea was forming. Coal forests then covered much of the planet, pumping out
oxygen and sequestering carbon. These forests were therefore even more inflammable than
they are now, and the higher oxygen levels also made it possible for dragonflies of the time to
have wingspans of a metre.
But oxygen was almost entirely absent from the (to us) toxic atmosphere of the early
Earth, composed as it was mainly of volcanic exhalations. That this was so is proved by the
fact that Archean sediments often contain detrital grains of the mineral pyrite (iron sulphide),
which means that this unstable chemical could then survive intact at surface. You may have
found Jurassic fossils preserved in this mineral (also known as fool’s gold because of its
brassy colour) on the beach at, for example, the world-famous fossil site of Lyme Regis in
Dorset, England. It formed there under anoxic conditions below the Jurassic seabed. But if
you have ever taken these fossils home you may also know how short a time they last, all
shiny and lovely, unless protected from air. For oxygen corrodes the pyrite and one day you
find that your fossil has disintegrated into an ash-like powder. Such is the fate of all pyrite at
the Earth’s surface today – but not in the Archean. Yet as soon as life had escaped from its
submarine lair and gone green, this was to change.
submarine lair and gone green, this was to change.
Free oxygen was pouring into a world where elements such as iron and sulphur had
always been able to exist quite happily – on land or in the ocean – in their unoxidized (or
‘reduced’) form. Today unoxidized iron cannot exist on the Earth’s surface for long, and we
see the evidence all around us in the rusting hulks of old motor vehicles. But before ‘free’
oxygen could build up in the air to levels that could support oxygen-breathing animals, the
products of the first photosynthesizing organisms had to oxidize all the iron and sulphur.
These elements constituted a vast oxygen ‘sink’; one that geological evidence suggests was
not completely filled for as long as 1.6 billion years.
The ‘rusting’ of the Earth began about 3.5 billion years ago, which is how we can date the
approximate emergence of photosynthesis. The first of a new and distinctive rock type began
to be deposited in the oceans: rocks that are today the world’s dominant source of iron ore.
They occur on every continent and contain about 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred
trillion) tonnes of iron, nearly all of it deposited between 3.2 and 1.5 billion years ago. These
spectacular rocks, marking the second-biggest biochemical event since the creation of life,
are the Banded Iron Formations, or BIFs.
BIFs consist of interbedded iron ore and chert, a flinty rock that began as a gelatinous
deposit formed by the chemical precipitation of volcanic silica from seawater. As fast as the
first photosynthesizers pumped their waste into the air, reduced iron dissolved in the acidic
seas combined with the reactive new element and precipitated out as insoluble oxides in
unimaginable quantities: not only in the shallow shelf seas, but presumably all over the oceans
too. This means that the 100 trillion tonnes of iron that has survived to the present day is but
a tiny fraction of the total iron deposited at this time, partly because the ironstones that
formed on the deep ocean floor must have been destroyed by subduction. David Dobson
and John Brodholt of University College London, in research first published in 2005, think
they know exactly where this ancient iron now is: deep inside the planet, sitting at the
boundary between the core and the mantle.
Seismologists have long puzzled over the nature of what they call Ultra Low Velocity
Zones (ULVZs) between one and ten kilometres in thickness, where seismic waves,
generated by earthquakes far above, suddenly and anomalously slow down as they travel
close to the core-mantle boundary. If BIFs did form everywhere in the Archean ocean,
including over ocean floor, because a BIF is 25 per cent denser than the mantle, once
subducted it would tend to go on sinking until it hit – literally – rock bottom, where the
silicate mantle touches the roiling, molten iron and nickel of the outer core. If Dobson and
Brodholt are right, the processes of life, far from being a superficial veneer, have affected this
planet to its deepest interior.
For this reason, it may also be that life changed the speed of the Earth’s rotation. The
sinking of such a huge mass of iron to the coremantle boundary would have had an effect
similar to the gradual drawing in of a pirouetting skater’s arms, causing the days to get
shorter. Scientists remain undecided about this idea, however, since we know (from the
growth lines on fossil corals) that since the Devonian period (a mere 360 million years ago)
the drag of the ocean tides has tended to slow the Earth’s rotation. However, the period
over which the BIFs were sinking occurred so long before the evolution of complex life that
its opposite effect on day-length remains a plausible but untested idea.
Oxygen’s chemical sinks began to be near ‘full’ about 2.3 billion years ago. By 1.9 billion
years ago, BIFs had ceased to form (though they did make a brief comeback, as we shall
see) and levels of oxygen in the atmosphere began climbing towards modern levels, with
further disastrous consequences.
During this time more large continental groupings were beginning to coalesce. At about 2.5
billion years a second more northerly supercontinent emerged, called Arctica because the
Arctic Ocean opened through its middle, incorporating much of northern and central Canada,
Greenland and Siberia. At about two billion years a second northerly supercontinent, called
Baltica (consisting of much of north-west Europe as far as the modern Urals), assembled and
eventually collided with Arctica to form (1.6 billion years ago) another larger continent,
known variously as Nena, Nuna or Columbia.
Also at about two billion years ago, a southerly megacontinent dubbed ‘Atlantica’
(because eventually the Atlantic Ocean would open through it when Gondwanaland broke
up) united much of north-eastern South America with West Africa and the Congo, and
forming the heart of what would one day be West Gondwana. These three components of
different ages, ancient Ur, Nena/Nuna/Columbia and Atlantica, finally came together about
one billion years ago to form the first true supercontinent, motherland of complex life,
Rodinia.
But this is to race ahead. After BIFs ceased to be deposited and oxygen began to be
more freely available, sediments exposed on land became oxidized too, and ‘red beds’
became common. At about 1.7 billion years ago there was also a marked increase in
weathering, because thick deposits of quartzite, a rock type made from pure silica sand,
suddenly became widespread all over the continents. Such an outbreak of silicate weathering
would have had a drastic cooling effect on climate, as carbon dioxide in the air became
combined with rock materials to form bicarbonates, which were washed into the seas. What
happened then, effectively sequestering the carbon and keeping it from returning to the
atmosphere, relied on another development happening in the oceans.
One by one, the panes of the greenhouse that had kept Earth warm for billions of years
were being smashed.

Lasagne world

It is one of the most remarkable discoveries in deep time that for most of the history of the
biosphere, a period four times longer than all the time since the first complex fossils began to
be preserved, the most advanced life-form on the face of the Earth, and the absolute pinnacle
of evolution, was slime.
When a slimy surface, coated in some kind of alga or bacterium, is exposed to sand and
mud on the floor of the sea, the sediment tends to stick. The organisms then grow through the
sediment to expose a fresh surface of slime to the sea, and in this way great thicknesses of
thinly layered rock consisting of interleaved slime and lime can be deposited. These lasagne-
like sedimentary structures are called stromatolites.
The very oldest stromatolites come from 3.5-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia,
a time when we still find no firm fossil evidence for the existence of photosynthetic organisms.
But ‘stromatolite’ just means ‘layered stone’, irrespective of what creatures built it. It is
entirely possible for many different sorts of bacteria to produce layered structures, and what
exactly made these very ancient examples is still a mystery. However, at around 2.7 or 2.8
exactly made these very ancient examples is still a mystery. However, at around 2.7 or 2.8
billion years ago something changed dramatically. Isotopes of carbon obtained from rocks of
this age indicate the activity of a group of primitive organisms called Archaebacteria, and
highly resistant organic molecules called steranes also suggest the presence of another
bacterial grouping, the cyanobacteria: photosynthetic bugs formerly known as ‘blue-green
algae’.
Before levels of atmospheric oxygen rose very far, these cyanobacteria had the new trick
of photosynthesis more or less to themselves and began to coat the shallow shelf seas
surrounding the early supercontinents of Ur and Arctica. Their heyday was brief, though, and
came to an end about 2.2 billion years ago, when oxygen in the environment built up enough
for oxides of nitrogen (the nitrates) to form. Nitrates are a powerful plant fertilizer which
cyanobacteria can do without; but from that point stromatolites built by invigorated true algae
(primitive plants whose cells’ genetic material is organized into a nucleus) took over. Lasagne
World was born just as Rust World was dying.
Algal stromatolites were soon coating every available square kilometre of shelf sea, and
building the first massive limestones in the geological record. In fact, by about one billion
years ago (at just about the time that all the continental fragments of the Earth were coming
together in the supercontinent Rodinia) limestones were forming a greater percentage of
sedimentary rocks than ever before or since. Some of these limestones are of truly awesome
dimensions, kilometres thick, and the effect of trapping all that calcium carbonate – coming
on the heels of increased continental weathering – was to reduce the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere even further.
Earth’s atmosphere has two main ‘greenhouse’ gases that cause it to trap the heat of the
Sun: methane and carbon dioxide. Methane, also known as natural gas, is by far the more
powerful; but it is very susceptible to oxidation (burning, by another name). With global
oxygen building up, free methane in the atmosphere went into steep decline. Now, as carbon
dioxide started to be drawn down by weathering on the emergent continents and then locked
away in limestones at the bottom of shelf seas, the planet began finally to lose the last threads
of its insulating atmospheric blanket.
Stromatolites reached the high point of their distribution just as Rodinia was forming: a
major turning point in Earth history. For it seems from geological evidence that at about this
time, one billion years ago, a fundamental and irreversible change occurred to the way our
planet functioned.

Freeboard

The fact that the modern ocean basins are more or less the right size to accommodate all the
water currently available to fill them is one of the great apparent coincidences of geology.
True, from time to time, notably when supercontinents break up and volcanic mid-ocean
ridge systems become more active, the ocean basins become a little less voluminous as the
ridges all over the world swell up. (Imagine yourself lying in a full bath. You breathe in. Your
body expands, and the water of the bath spills on to the floor. In the Earth’s case, the oceans
spill on to the continents, creating vast areas of shelf sea that can persist for millions of years.)
But even this phenomenon, which has been responsible for most of the great marine
 But even this phenomenon, which has been responsible for most of the great marine
transgressions of geological history, is mere tinkering. If studies of fossil ocean floor from
before one billion years ago are correct, at that time the ocean crust was over twice as thick
as it was after that crucial moment in Earth history. This switch may have changed for ever
the way the world looked and functioned.
How thick the ocean crust can be is governed by the volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges. The
more active they are, the thicker the resulting crust (remember Iceland). On the other hand,
the thickness of continental crust is a product of mountain-building processes, combined
with the innate strength of continental rocks, which imposes an upper limit. When continents
collide they build thick crust that extends both down into the mantle and up into the
atmosphere. But there is a point above which mountains cannot rise, set by the limit of the
rocks’ mechanical strength. Beyond a certain weight and height, mountains are not
mechanically strong enough to support themselves.
Bradley Hacker, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, recently spent time investigating the Tibetan Plateau (which dates back 13.5 million
years and is like a ‘bow wave’ to the collision of India with Asia). The Plateau affects
weather worldwide. It plays a powerful role in creating the monsoons of India and Asia, for
example, and has a global cooling effect on climate that may have helped tip the world into its
current ‘icehouse’ regime shortly after it began to rise.
Although his was not the first contribution on this subject, what Hacker confirmed was that
although the crust thickens in the area of the collision, after a certain amount of thickening it
weakens and spreads apart. He reported his findings in the journal Nature in 2001:
‘Consider stacking pats of butter on top of one another. Imagine that stacking each pat …
also generates heat, so that a thicker stack of butter is hotter than a thin stack.’ In the case of
the Earth, heat generated by radioactive decay within the rocks builds as the crust piles up,
making the thickened crust weaker. Ultimately the rocks reach a certain maximum height and
begin to flow outward. As Hacker concluded, ‘There is a balance between the strength
provided by the thickening of the crust and the weakness caused by heating from all that
material.’ The Tibetan Plateau is in a steady state. Currently standing at five kilometres tall, it
will not get any higher.
For similar reasons of dynamic balance (and not including their very earliest days) the
continents’ average thickness has not changed very much through most of geological time.
However, a pre-Rodinian world with much thicker oceanic crust would have been a very
different place. All the ocean basins above the thick crust would have been much shallower.
The difference between average continental height and average ocean floor depth, or
‘continental freeboard’ as it has been called, would have been much lower than now. Just as
The Book of Urantia appears to have ‘predicted’, one billion years ago does indeed seem
to have been an ‘age of increased continental emergence’. Until the worldwide orogeny that
created Rodinia, the amount of continental crust that poked above sea level would have been
much smaller than it has been since. This is especially likely when we realize that, the mantle
being very much hotter, more of the Earth’s total water would have been in liquid form.
But as Rodinia formed, things were changing. The oceanic crust, responding to falling
mantle temperatures, began to approach present-day thickness (about six to seven
kilometres). Increased continental freeboard exposed more rock to the atmosphere, with a
resultant increase in weathering on land. The chemical breakdown of rock materials sucked
yet more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as it was converted to bicarbonate and
carried away into the oceans in solution.
carried away into the oceans in solution.
Because there was now more exposed land, seasonality also became more important on
Earth than ever before, because land areas are much more susceptible to seasonal variation
in the power of sunlight. Greater seasonality, combined with the return of more nutrients to
the seas (as a result of enhanced weathering) further improved the oceans’ organic
productivity, which in turn led to even more carbon dioxide being swabbed from the
atmosphere (just as even more algae could trap even more of it in even more lime mud).
The Earth’s climate was reaching a threshold: a ‘tipping point’. Rodinia’s eventual break-
up, on top of all these cooling factors, would precipitate the greatest climatic catastrophes
ever to afflict our planet.
Within this cooling world Rodinia seems to have sat astride the Equator, leaving the
planet’s poles free of land, a rather rare event in Earth history. The stage was set. Rodinia
gave way to the radiogenic heat building up beneath it, and started to fragment. Massive
igneous provinces erupted, their dust and ash blocking out heat from the Sun, which by this
point in its evolution was about 6 per cent weaker than today.
Supercontinents are arid because moisture cannot reach their interiors; but on smaller
continental blocks this situation is reversed. After supercontinent fragmentation, more rain
tends to fall on more land, and rock weathering speeds up. Because the continental
fragments were then sitting entirely within the tropics, weathering rates were particularly high.
What is more, the newly erupted basalt provinces were especially susceptible to chemical
weathering.
So, as more rocks were weathered, even more carbon dioxide was removed from the
atmosphere and delivered to the seas. The length of coastline increased, as did the area of
shallow shelf sea, providing even more habitat for stromatolite-forming algae to colonize.
As these progressive effects took hold, they drove the climate into colder and colder
territory. Icecaps began to form and expand. Normally, when icecaps expand over
continents lying at high latitude, they exert a negative feedback on the process because they
cover up more rock, preventing weathering and leaving more carbon dioxide in the air to
keep the planet warm. But that didn’t happen. With the continents far away from the poles,
no brake was applied. As the icecaps crept Equatorwards to within about 25–30 degrees of
latitude, they passed a point of no return. Earth was doomed to ten million years of icy
stillness.
This point came because, at a certain coverage of brilliant ice and snow, the amount of
heat reflected back into space became so high that the cooling process was unstoppable.
The Earth system had no choice, the cooling effect had nowhere else to go but completion,
encasing the whole surface of the planet in ice. This was how Lasagne World gave rise to
Snowball Earth.

Iceworld

Once the planet was encased from pole to pole, the Earth system was frozen, literally and
figuratively. Apart from rare nunataks of rock, the tallest mountaintops poking above the
endless ice plain, the whole sunlit globe shone in only two colours: blue above and white
below. On Iceworld there was no evaporation and no clouds anywhere. The hydrological
below. On Iceworld there was no evaporation and no clouds anywhere. The hydrological
cycle, in which water evaporates from the sea to be deposited as rain and snow on land and
so returns in rivers to the sea once more, became restricted to the precipitation of the small
amount of water that would ‘sublime’ from the ice surface: in other words, go straight from
ice to vapour. And beneath their icy carapace, the seas became stagnant as interchange
between them and the atmosphere ceased.
Yet deep below, far underneath ice, oceans and rocky crust, churning away irrespective
of the catastrophe at surface, Earth’s planetary heat engine rolled on, driven by the
imperative to dissipate its radiogenic heat. Beneath the sealed seas, volcanically active
spreading ridges pumped their acidic, superheated, mineral-rich waters into the frigid water;
while above the ice, volcanoes that poked their hot heads through the frozen veneer spewed
their gases into the atmosphere.
And there they stayed. No rain washed these gases out of the air and into the seas, and
carbon dioxide began building up. It is a fairly safe uniformitarian assumption that
Neoproterozoic volcanoes gave off at least as much gas as volcanoes today. From this it can
be calculated that after a snowball event lasting ten million years, levels of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere would have risen possibly as much as a thousandfold. Earth’s inner fire was
about to save the world from the reign of the ice.
The end would have come suddenly. As the greenhouse effect kicked in, temperatures
swung wildly upwards, to perhaps as much as 50°C at the ocean surface. Evaporation began
again, further enhancing the greenhouse, since water vapour is one of the most powerful
greenhouse gases of all. The water cycle now went into overdrive; torrential rainfall washed
carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, creating acid rain that landed on the newly exposed
land surface (strewn with glacial rock flour) and so dissolved its minerals even more quickly.
The reborn rivers returned huge quantities of bicarbonates to a sea already saturated by ten
million years’ worth of volcanic carbon dioxide pumped into it by submarine volcanoes.
Massive limestones were then deposited in shelf seas worldwide: seas that were also
progressively deepening as the liberated water of the ice sheets filled up the ocean basins.
Carbonates precipitated out on the seabed, depositing thick limestones directly above glacial
deposits, with no sign of a time-break. Some of these limestones contain crystals of the
calcium carbonate mineral aragonite, which normally only precipitates today from
supersaturated pore-fluids as microscopic, needle-like crystals. Aragonite crystals that
formed on the Neoproterozoic seabed took on gigantic dimensions as giant fans, some as tall
as a man.
The ice-break of a snowball would have been Earth’s most dramatic spring. The gradual
release of the last Ice Age’s grip 10,000 years ago must have been as nothing to the chaos
that prevailed as the Neoproterozoic icecaps retreated. Persistent winds of over 70
kilometres per hour blew over much of the Earth’s surface as a result of the vast air-pressure
differences between the thawing tropics and the polar caps. These winds were not passing
storms but lasted for years, causing huge oscillation ripples to form in sediments accumulating
as deep as 400 metres: nowadays far beneath the reach of even the biggest storm waves.
The ocean-surface waves generated by these global hurricanes probably exceeded
seventeen metres in height, over huge tracts of sea. Below, meanwhile, the dissolved volcanic
iron built up during the snowball finally oxidized and precipitated, and Banded Iron
Formations suddenly made a comeback after a hiatus of a billion years.
Can all this really have happened? The geological evidence – glacial deposits at low latitudes,
directly overlain by limestones, and the reappearance of BIFs – all fit the hypothesis.
Moreover, they make sense of phenomena that have long been seen as ‘anomalies’, giving
the Snowball Earth model immensely persuasive explanatory power.
As early proponents of continental drift had found, ‘old-fashioned’ geological evidence is
qualitative, and often open to several possible interpretations. Powerful hypotheses,
especially when they are ‘non-uniformitarian’ in the sense that they have no precise modern
analogue on the planet today, are at once exhilarating and disturbing. Doubters mutter that a
powerful ruling theory is driving interpretation. Could the whole snowball story be no more
than a ‘selective search after facts’? What of ‘multiple working hypotheses’?
We have already seen some of the many different isotopes of carbon, the element of life,
and how their different atomic weights lead them to behave differently in the natural
environment. Carbon 12 is the common form, but there is an unusual heavy isotope, carbon
13, which gains its extra unit of mass by having an extra neutron in its nucleus. The carbon
that comes out of volcanoes (mostly as carbon dioxide) contains both isotopes in a well-
known ratio. But any carbon that has been involved in life processes has a different
signature, because photosynthesis, where everything begins, prefers carbon 12. Living tissues
therefore contain lower than average amounts of 13C; but conversely, limestones (principally
calcium carbonate) that form at times when life is thriving have above average values of 13C
because they are made out of the carbon left over in the environment after life processes
have taken their share.
If you test the carbon-isotope ratios in limestones immediately underlying and overlying the
snowball’s glacial deposits, remarkable changes are revealed, bringing impressive support to
the snowball model. When pre-snowball limestones were laid down, life was thriving; so
13C values begin high but drop steeply as the contact with the glacial deposits approaches.
This says that life was shrinking back with the onset of snowball conditions, leaving more
13C around in the seawater to be incorporated in limestones. For ten million years or so that
the snowball lasted, no limestones were laid down. However, the first limestones deposited
after the snowball – the ‘cap carbonates’ – remain low in 13C because life had yet to
recover. Then, gradually, 13C values rebound as resurgent life in the recovering shallow seas
fractionated ever more 12C into living tissues.
Between 710 million and 580 million years ago, the snowball cycle happened twice,
possibly three and (some say) even four times during this never-to-be-repeated interval in
our planet’s history, as the supercontinent Rodinia split apart. So why did they stop
happening? Why did snowballs not happen, for example, during our most recent glaciation,
commonly known as ‘the’ Ice Age, which ended between ten and twelve thousand years
ago?
The reason lies in the fact that, unique among supercontinents, Rodinia seems to have
straddled the Equator, meaning that the world had no land at either pole. Never has that
coincidence of low greenhouse gases, weak Sun and tropical concentration of landmasses
come about again. Since the end of the Neoproterozoic, despite ice ages aplenty, none has
ever gone to anything approaching a snowball. Since the break-up of Rodinia, the safety
catch has been back on. Iceworld was finished.
Snowball or slushball?

In structuring the story as I have, however, I have taken one particular route through a mass
of scientific evidence treading a line of stepping stones across a torrent of argument. The
Snowball Earth hypothesis remains controversial and contested.
Take, for example, the one big question mark over the whole idea of the snowball model
as advocated by Paul Hoffman and his supporters. How could a total white-out, involving a
global ice-cover perhaps many kilometres thick, ever have allowed photosynthetic organisms
in the oceans to survive? Clearly, life did survive successive snowballs and therefore, argue
the theory’s critics, each so-called snowball must really have been a ‘slushball’, preserving
ice-free refuges at the Equator.
The slushball model, on the other hand, produces a slower deglaciation, with no sudden
‘flip’ from icehouse to greenhouse, and has atmosphere and hydrosphere remaining in
balance throughout. A Slushball Earth might not even have had uniformly anoxic oceans. Can
this explain the recurrence of BIFs? Some geologists have found evidence for erosion and
deposition, with glacier advance and recession at this time. Those who believe in the Hard
Snowball have to say this all took place during the short deglaciation phase, because their
model predicts a total shutdown of such hydrologically dependent activity for ten million
years. This may be true; but is it?
Could computer models help resolve these issues? They tend to produce a runaway
snowball effect when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are about the same (or only
slightly lower) than today. However, not all climate computer models display this kind of flip-
flop instability. For example, models in which no heat is transported across the ice-line are
less likely to go to total snowballs because the tropics stay warm enough to remain melted.
Programs that couple atmosphere and ocean circulations are also resistant to global
glaciations, because they allow ocean convection at the ice-free tropics. So climate models,
on their own, do not provide conclusive evidence because they can be tweaked, within quite
reasonable bounds, to support a number of plausible outcomes.
So although models that result in ‘slushball’ solutions keep biologists happy, they do not
appear to explain the geological evidence, especially the ‘cap carbonates’, and the
temporary return of BIFs, quite as well. The full snowball model also demands that
deglaciation be very rapid, which is consistent with the way cap carbonates seem to have
been deposited, without any time gap, on top of glacial deposits.
Resolution of this impasse hinges on one crucial question: exactly how thick did the ice of
Snowball Earth get? We know how sea-ice thickness and surface temperature are related in
modern oceans, and we know from computer models roughly how cold it would have been
during a snowball episode. Applying these simple formulae in a uniformitarian way suggests
that, during a full snowball, ice at the tropics should have exceeded a kilometre in thickness,
far too thick for any light to get through. How, under a full snowball, could slimeworld have
survived even one ten-million-year-long night, let alone two (or more)? Clearly, somehow it
did.
In 2000 a new suggestion came along to break the impasse, involving a more biology-
friendly ‘thin ice’ model. In this model the ice-cover is total, but just a few metres thick at the
friendly ‘thin ice’ model. In this model the ice-cover is total, but just a few metres thick at the
tropics: thin enough to allow light through while providing enough of a seal to restrict the
hydrological cycle to a minimum and prevent the oceans breathing. The idea came from
David Pollard and James Kasting, of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at
Pennsylvania State University.
With ice, thinness and transparency go hand in hand. Opaque ice is compelled to be thick.
You could call this another ‘greenhouse effect’, because transparent ice, on the other hand,
traps heat like a greenhouse’s glass panes, melts itself from below, and stays thin.
Today’s sea ice is full of inclusions that scatter the light and make it highly opaque. Critics
of the ‘thin ice’ idea were quick to point this out; for if ice at the Neoproterozoic tropics was
like modern sea ice, it would have been opaque, hence also thick. However, Pollard and
Kasting are not so sure about this uniformitarian approach. According to them, the ice at the
tropics would have formed by a combination of two processes: the Equatorward flow of ice
from high latitudes, forming ‘sea glaciers’, and water that simply freezes on to the bottom of
the sheet.
When sea ice grows in the modern-day Baltic, for example, water freezes to the underside
of the ice sheet, trapping pockets of brine that make the ice opaque. But Pollard and
Kasting’s model suggests that Neopoterozoic Snowball Earth ice would have formed at a
mere seven millimetres per year – much more slowly than modern sea ice. Such slow freezing
would have produced much clearer ice.
As for ‘sea-glacier’ ice, its nearest analogue today is the ice seen on land glaciers, like
those in Antarctica, which form by the accumulation of snow. In land-glacier ice the main
light-scattering inclusions are bubbles of air, which originally lay between the snowflakes
before they were annealed together by pressure. According to Pollard and Kasting, for
Neoproterozoic sea-glacier ice to have been clear enough for it to stay thin, it must have had
a bubble density of no more than about 0.32 per square millimetre, and that lies well within
the range of bubble densities seen in the upper parts of ice cores taken from Antarctic ice
sheets today.
So it appears that life could indeed have survived ten million years in the chiller, because
when the freezer door closed the light didn’t, for once, go out. Slushballers, on the other
hand, regard the thin ice idea as an unnecessary sophistication. They do not believe that total
ice cover is required to ensure that the oceans stagnate and so accumulate ferrous iron in
solution. Evidence emerged in 2005, from organic-rich rocks dated to 700 million years ago,
that suggested to Alison Olcott of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and
her colleagues that not only was photosynthesis operating during the snowball, but it was
widespread, tropical and happening in stagnant water. If their interpretation of the
biomarkers in these rocks from south central Brazil is correct, even the photic zone of the
Neoproterozoic ocean was oxygen-free. Perhaps there was a thin ice cover, as Pollard and
Kasting suggest; but perhaps there was simply no ice at all. Perhaps a tropical, ice-free
waistband around the Earth was just not enough to break up the stratification of the global
ocean.
As I finish writing this book at the beginning of 2006, another international conference, this
time in Switzerland, is planned for the summer. More evidence, from all over the world, will
be presented in support of new interpretations of these pages from the greatest palimpsest
that may settle the controversy between snowball and slushball. But just as Lemuria finally
sank beneath the waves of new knowledge, today’s closest approximation to truth slides into
myth as the latest ideas are subjected to the evolutionary pressure exerted by the realities of
myth as the latest ideas are subjected to the evolutionary pressure exerted by the realities of
new evidence.

Hope and glory

Can it be entirely coincidental that, after three billion years during which the pinnacle of
evolution was green slime, complex life burst into existence just as the last snowball melted
away never to return? Could it be that, if a low-latitude supercontinent called Rodinia
allowed the snowballs to happen, and if the snowballs somehow gave life the kick in the
genes it needed to develop complexity, Rodinia really was our motherland? Could the
vagaries of the Supercontinent Cycle be the main reason why, in place of universal lasagne,
we have in Jacques Prévert’s words, ‘New York passions, Parisian mysteries, the little canal
at Ourq, the Great Wall of China, the river at Morlaix, legionnaires, torturers, rulers, bosses,
priests, traitors, pretty girls and dirty old men’? Could Rodinia be the reason we have such a
diverse world? Could Rodinia be the ultimate reason we are all here today, doing what only
humans do: wondering how we got here?
To try to answer this question, we need to know something rather accurately. When
exactly did complex life first develop? Only when we know that can we hope to judge
whether there is a case here to answer.
On 12 November 1931, three years before his death at the age of seventy-six, Sir
Edward Elgar and the London Symphony Orchestra performed the trio from the Pomp and
Circumstance March No. 1 (‘Land of Hope and Glory’) for the opening of EMI’s new
recording studios at 3 Abbey Road, not far from a certain pedestrian crossing later made
world famous by the Beatles.
The Abbey Road recording was not Elgar’s first foray into this newfangled technology; he
made his first recording in 1914, weeks before the First World War broke out. But despite
the poor quality of contemporary reproduction (imagine a wind-up gramophone playing
78rpm shellac discs using a needle and a big horn as acoustic amplifier), these ancient
recordings actually contain a wealth of sound detail that was invisible – or rather, inaudible –
to the old technology. With digital remastering all kinds of unimagined detail can now be
heard. All that information was always there, but only the new tools allow it to be revealed.
The same is true of the geological record.
When geologists began looking systematically for fossils for the first time in the nineteenth
century, using William Smith’s discovery that you could identify and correlate strata of any
given age by the fossils they contained, they noticed that rocks below the Cambrian system
were barren. The term they gave to the whole ‘Cambrian and younger’ geological record
was ‘Phanerozoic’, which means ‘evident life’. The apparent suddenness of life’s appearance
posed a great problem for evolutionary theory because at 542 (plus or minus one) million
years ago, and seemingly from nowhere, nearly all the main animal body plans (arthropods,
molluscs, echinoderms and so on) seemed to burst on to the scene and hit the ground
running, swimming and burrowing like there had been no yesterday. It all gave Darwin
sleepless nights.
Since then, geologists’ reading of the record has become more sophisticated. Now,
instead of just looking for things they can hold in their hands, they can detect fossils and
fragments of fossils mere microns across. Using the tools of organic chemistry, they can even
fragments of fossils mere microns across. Using the tools of organic chemistry, they can even
pick up the molecules of life, so-called ‘biomarkers’. These chemicals, many of which are
quite specific to certain types of organism, are remarkably durable in the fossil record. Now,
when apparently barren rocks are ground up, dissolved in organic solvents and passed into a
mass spectrometer or a gas chromatograph, these telltale molecules stand out as diagnostic
peaks in the instrument’s read-out: the merest whiffs of long-vanished life.
Darwin often invoked the imperfection of the fossil record to get himself out of such
difficulties with evidence, and he was quite right to do so. The circumstances under which a
fossil can form are rare. The nineteenth century’s fossils, the hand-specimen or ‘macrofossil’,
is a very scarce beast. Microfossils and molecules, on the other hand, have a much higher
chance of being preserved, and so provide a much more reliable tool for judging ‘first
appearance’.
Think about it: if an organism evolves at a certain moment, it will take some time for this
creature to become common. Yet even its hard parts (its shell, or bones) stand a very slim
chance of being preserved as fossils at any time, let alone during that species’ very earliest
days on Earth. Pile upon these slim chances the chance of those rare fossils surviving the
vicissitudes of all subsequent geological history and then add the further unlikelihood of their
being found, and you produce some very unfavourable odds indeed. So, any macroscopic
species’ first appearance in the fossil record is bound to post-date its true first appearance
on Earth.
But microfossils are different. Microscopic things are everywhere in the environment – ask
a hay-fever sufferer. We are trying to produce an accurate date for the first appearance of
complex multicellular animals, when the first actual fossils we may discover will post-date that
event quite considerably. It would be very useful if the creature in question produced
something durable and microscopic in astronomical numbers. Unfortunately, unlike modern
plants with their spores or pollen, animals don’t do this.
Alternatively, you could test for animals’ first appearance by using some superabundant
microfossil as a proxy. It is a reasonable assumption that the appearance of multicelled
animals had profound ecological effects, and that these might be visible in the remains of
other organisms. It was, after all, the first time any of them had ever been eaten. You would
expect this to provoke an evolutionary response. You might therefore be able to detect
something both in the appearance of microfossils (a change to the roughness and durability of
their armour-plating, for instance) and in the style and pace of their evolution.
Such a potential proxy group exists in the rather unprepossessing form of tiny organic sacs
called acritarchs. Acritarchs are an ancient but artificial grouping of microscopic (20–150
microns across), organic-walled fossils found in nearly all sediments – once you have
dissolved away everything else in bath after bath of strong acids. Acritarchs are thought to
represent the ‘resting cysts’ of single-celled algae with a many-staged life cycle. They were
first discovered in 1862, but the term ‘acritarch’, which just means ‘of uncertain origin’, was
only coined in 1963. Acritarchs are useful for correlating sedimentary rocks of Proterozoic
and Palaeozoic age mainly because they were the only microfossils around then; but their
usefulness as correlation tools increases enormously after the snowballs.
The oddest thing about acritarchs is that before the younger of the two main snowball
events, the Marinoan glaciation, individual acritarch species tended to exist for 1000 million
years: something inconceivable in the modern biosphere. But after this period of extreme
evolutionary stasis, at about 650 million years ago, everything changes. Thereafter, acritarch
species tend to survive only for a few tens of millions of years. Something fundamental in the
way the biosphere worked had changed.
This is thought to be the proxy evidence pinpointing the moment that planktonic animals
appeared. For the first time, the acritarch-producing algae found themselves to be prey.
Before then, the seas had probably been a saturated algal soup, with nothing more than the
availability of nutrients to control runaway growth. No wonder things did not change for a
billion years. Why should they?
But now things were different and soup was on the menu. Life had turned on itself for the
first time, and the selection pressure this imposed accelerated the origin and the extinction of
new acritarch species. The spiny, heavily armoured and relatively short-lived forms of the
post-snowball world are nothing less than the first tooth and claw marks of nature’s new
order.
A little later, at around 580 million years ago, we find the first unequivocal animal fossils, in
the form of a beautifully preserved clusters of cells representing embryos of an animal (though
we cannot say what sort), in the mid to upper parts of the Doushantuo Formation of southern
China. Not long afterwards the first trace fossils – those telltale marks made by animals
moving across and through the sediment – first appear, in rocks no younger than 558 million
years old, in the Verkhovka Formation of north-west Russia.
The period we are speaking of is called the Ediacaran, now officially named for the
remarkable forms over which Mark McMenamin and many others have been puzzling. The
Ediacarans were part of this new evolutionary order, but although some may have evolved
into animal forms that are still around us today, others (perhaps, who knows, those
photosynthesizing animals in McMenamin’s vision of the Ediacara Garden), after first trying
sheer size as an evolutionary refuge against the mounting pressures against them, finally
succumbed. They succumbed to the destruction of the algal lasagne they rested on and
ended up as lunch for those voracious new predators that, tiring of soup and lasagne, moved
on to the meat course.

Code breakers

There is one final line of evidence for life’s sudden dash to complexity after the snowballs,
suggesting that these climatic crises were indeed what set the process off. That evidence is
found inside the molecule of life itself. DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic codes and
governs our growth and development by regulating the process whereby amino acids build
proteins, is vast; yet it is a lot vaster than it needs to be, since large tracts of every organism’s
genome have no known function. Because they are not expressed in the biology of the
organism, they are not subject to natural selection like other areas of the molecule.
Natural selection is often thought of as what ‘changes’ organisms, but this is only true if
something in the environment is changing, disturbing the equilibrium. Under stable conditions,
natural selection is a strongly conservative force that keeps things the way they are and
makes sure that things that aren’t broke don’t get fixed. But those areas of the DNA
molecule that are not expressed biologically are able to mutate freely without impairing an
organism’s evolutionary ‘fitness’. Biologists have found that, left to its own devices in this
way, this so-called ‘junk’ DNA mutates at a rate that (over geologically long periods of time)
way, this so-called ‘junk’ DNA mutates at a rate that (over geologically long periods of time)
is constant enough to be used as a clock (though it has to be regulated by reference to a
good fossil record).
Despite what the film Jurassic Park would have you believe, very little DNA is preserved
in the older fossil record, and the further back you go, the less survives. So if you want to use
DNA to date events that took place more than 500 million years ago, finding DNA from
those times is not an option. But fortunately there’s no need; we can look at the DNA of
different groups of living animals (sponges, worms, molluscs etc.) instead. Then we can
combine what we know about the rate at which the DNA clock ticks, with a statistical
expression of the difference between the junk DNA sequences of sponges, worms or
molluscs, to work out how far back we would have to extrapolate these in order to make the
different groups’DNA look the same. The result should be the point in time at which the
groups’ evolutionary paths diverged, and it should be confirmed by the fossil record. On the
supercontinent of science, everything must fit together. The molecular biology of today’s
animals confirms the fact that they are all related, that some groups split before others and
that every living thing is the product of its unique history: a history that dates back billions of
years and ultimately makes us one with the stars.
To confirm whether the snowballs and the Supercontinent Cycle might have been
responsible for creating complex life, the crucial evolutionary divergence that we want to date
is the one that gave animals the power to move purposefully, even through sediment
(burrowing), to ingest material, process it in a gut and expel excrement. For these were the
developments that changed nature for ever and finally dug up the Garden of Ediacara. This
evolutionary event was all to do with how the tissues of animals became organized and
differentiated in the embryo.
Sponges are simple multicellular animals, but they are little more than balls of barely
differentiated cells. Jellyfish, on the other hand, are two-layered animals. This allows them to
move, albeit in a rather undirected way, as they drift with currents or to move away from
harm (they hope) when warned by their rudimentary sense organs. They have an outer layer
of cells and an inner one, separated by a springy, gelatinous mass. Muscles around a jellyfish
bell contract against the springiness of this mass, which bounces back into shape when they
relax, allowing the swimming cycle to start again.
But the next development in the history of embryology was crucial because it created
animals with three layers of tissues, the middle layer developing from the jelly-like stuff as it
became invaded with cells. Moreover, the embryos of the new three-layered animals
developed a method of ‘turning in’ on themselves. First, the embryonic ball of cells became
hollow, to create the body cavity. A fold in the outer layer then developed, forming a pouch
on the inside. This became budded off along most of its length, but remained connected to
the exterior by a single pore that developed into, literally, the fundamental opening: the anus.
The mouth developed later, at the opposite end. You can see this evolutionary process re-
enacted every time a human embryo develops today, and it is the reason why you have a
body cavity filled with tubular guts.
Three-layered animals were a giant leap. The outer layer gave skin, nerves, ears and eyes.
The middle layer gave rise to muscle, bone and the circulatory system; while the inner layer
created the digestive, glandular and respiratory systems. Worms, snails and humans all have
this same basic organization. Having three layers meant having more cells per unit volume,
and separating the digestive tube from the body wall created problems of transport. Oxygen
needed to be brought in, and wastes and nutrient carried out. All this required ducts,
needed to be brought in, and wastes and nutrient carried out. All this required ducts,
circulation systems and respiratory mechanisms that simpler animals didn’t need because they
could live by absorption alone.
Above all, three-layered animals were directed by sense organs concentrated at a head
end, and their muscles enabled them to move in more or less any direction in active pursuit of
food. The mouth, being also at the head end, was the first thing to arrive at the food source,
ingesting what it found, filling the gut with a mixture of food particles and sediment.
Burrowing and grazing modes of life were born; and as a result, trace fossils started to
appear in the fossil record, and the fine, undisturbed laminations of Lasagne World became
rare as the Garden of Ediacara went under the plough.
According to the molecular clock, the first three-layered animals, complete with heads and
nerves and muscles and guts, should have appeared about 580 million years ago, which
places this evolutionary event right in the middle Ediacaran (630–542 million years); just after
the Marinoan snowball had melted, after its cap carbonate had been safely deposited, and
the climate had settled down again. What is more, 580 million years also turns out to be the
date when fossils of the Ediacaran animals, though already doomed, became abundant
enough to be preserved in non-exceptional circumstances. And all this took place barely
forty million years after the last of the two major Neoproterozoic white-outs came to an end.
As scientists are fond of pointing out, correlation need not imply causation; but to many,
these convergences are too consistent and too numerous to be meaningless coincidence. If
true, the correlation between the origin of complex life and the end of major snowball
episodes firmly ties our own origins to the Supercontinent Cycle, because it was the chance
siting of continents around the Equator 1000 million years ago that made those all-important
snowball events possible.
Life itself probably owes its origin to the geology of ocean-floor hydrothermal vents. But
that part of it that isn’t slime may owe its brief 580-million-year tenure of this planet to
nothing more than random turbulence within the Earth’s convecting mantle, which once swept
the continents to the tropics. There, far from stopping a runaway snowball, their
fragmentation from maximum packing enhanced weathering, created volcanic cooling and
multiplied the length of shallow, lasagne-covered sea floor, just at the time when a billion and
a half years of photosynthesis and carbon sequestration had already made the Earth System
especially vulnerable.
Out of this catastrophe came glorious, complex life. And now, we are blessed (or cursed)
with the brains to work it all out for ourselves. The question then becomes: will we bother, or
will we sit, like Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholy, surrounded by the tools that can help us
explain the world, but too indolent to use them?
Melancholia by Albrecht Dürer. Hapless Melancholy lies surrounded by the untouched tools of science
and art. Reproduced by permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library.

EPILOGUE

LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND THE PUDDLE

For nature, heartless, witless nature,

Will neither care nor know
A. E. HOUSMAN, LAST POEMS XL

On the morning of Sunday, 26 December 2004 about 1300 tourists and pilgrims crowded
on to Kanyakumari rock, a charnockite islet 200 metres or so off the southernmost tip of
India. Geologists call the islet ‘Gondwana junction’ because it marks the 550-million-year-
old suture where India, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, East Antarctica and Australia once joined
together to build the eastern portion of Suess’s Gondwanaland. But to followers of Vedantist
spiritual philosopher Swamy Vivekananda (1863–1902), the rock is remarkable for being
the foundation for his memorial, which opened to visitors in 1970. This was the impressive
structure that drew them to Kanyakumari as the sun came up over the Bay of Manar that
structure that drew them to Kanyakumari as the sun came up over the Bay of Manar that
morning.
Mr G. Ramalingam of the Port Authority remembered afterwards that they had sold 3469
tickets for sailings between 8am and 9.45am, though they had suspended sailings to another
outlying rock, Valluvar, at 9am – a decision that probably saved about 500 lives because the
monument to the great Tamil poet, a forty-metre-high statue on a square plinth, offers no
shelter. For 26 December would prove to be a much more memorable day than anyone
expected. Although not one of the tourists and pilgrims would die at Kanyakumari, some
230,000 others around the Indian Ocean would lose their lives before the day was out.
Perhaps as they were preparing for their expedition, some of those pilgrims may have
been aware of a slight earth tremor; but most of them either didn’t notice or slept through it.
Yet even as that distant seismic shock rumbled through India and around the world, slower
and much more deadly waves began spreading across the Indian Ocean. By the time the
pilgrims climbed aboard the ferry of the Poompuhar Shipping Corporation that would take
them to the island, tens of thousands were already dead in Indonesia. Thousands more lives
were being lost in Sri Lanka, just over the horizon. Soon the wave would turn the corner and
sweep up Sri Lanka’s west coast and bear down upon Kanyakumari.

No surprise

The deep ocean trench that skirts the Indonesian Archipelago on the other side of the ocean,
marks the contact between two of the tectonic plates making up the cracked eggshell of the
Earth’s crust. One is the Australian Plate, consisting of Australia and the floor of the Indian
Ocean, and the other, to the north, carries Europe and Asia and is called the Eurasian Plate.
At this trench the floor of the Indian Ocean is subducting, sinking down into the mantle,
beneath the island arc of Indonesia. This is but one small part of the long process of building
the next supercontinent, piece by piece, each fragment edging into place, just as India has
already been annealed to Asia in the collision that is today creating the Himalayas and the
Tibetan Plateau.
In many ways the earthquake that caused the 26 December tsunami should have taken
nobody by surprise. There are known to have been two great earthquakes of over magnitude
8 along this part of the Indonesian Arc: in 1833 and 1861. The zones of rupture that caused
these two events sit along adjoining, non-overlapping parts of the same plate boundary,
adjoining the Batu Islands. No quake of similar size happened during the twentieth century,
until June 2000, when a 7.9 quake struck near Enggano at the extreme south-eastern end of
the 1833 rupture zone. The 26 December event extended movement along the plate
boundary from the island of Simeulue, at the other end of the chain, almost to the coast of
Myanmar (Burma). This left a gap of a few hundred kilometres between Banyak and
Simeulue over which no movement at all had taken place in historical time. The omission was
rectified on 28 March 2005, when the last ‘stuck’ part of the fault gave way in an 8.6
magnitude tremor that thankfully produced no very serious widespread tsunami.
The processes of plate movement are not smooth at our human timescale; the heat engine
of the Earth is no perfectly oiled machine. So while the average rate of convergence between
South-East Asia and the floor of the Indian Ocean may be 5.2 centimetres per year, unlike
South-East Asia and the floor of the Indian Ocean may be 5.2 centimetres per year, unlike
your growing toenails, these figures represent the averages of many sudden discrete
movements, some of which, especially when long delayed, can be very large and very
sudden indeed.
On 26 December 2004 stress that had built up over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
years was finally released along a 1200-kilometre stretch of plate boundary to the north-west
of Simeulue. This stupendous quantity of energy, stored as though in a giant leaf-spring, was
liberated in seconds as the crust of the overriding plate (which had been bent downwards by
the pressure of the sinking ocean floor beneath) bounced back, flinging the ocean up by as
much as ten metres.
At a magnitude of 9.3 (on a scale whose every increment denotes a quake thirty times
larger than the one below), this was the largest quake unleashed by the Earth for half a
century, the second strongest ever recorded, and the first true ‘Global Geophysical Event’
since Krakatoa erupted in 1883. Its seismic waves, travelling quickly through the Earth’s
crust, crossed the Indian Ocean and passed through the Vivekananda Memorial almost
instantaneously, as the whole planet reverberated like a bell struck with a massive hammer.

The Sumatra subduction system, showing the dates of known historical earthquakes and the sections
that moved during each. First published in Geoscientist 15, 8 p. 4. Reproduced courtesy of Dr John
Milsom.
 Milsom.

The tsunami meanwhile rolled outwards from where the ocean floor had been uplifted. In
deep water, travelling at the speed of a jumbo jet, its waves were only a few centimetres
high, passing unnoticed beneath the hulls of container ships crossing the Bay of Bengal,
stacked and sleeping in the morning light. But in the shallows, the waves slowed and bunched
together, piling up huge cliffs of surging, turbid water that rushed inland like supercharged
high tides, sometimes tens of metres tall, razing all before them, scouring the coastline of an
entire ocean.

Rescue

The tourists and pilgrims, now disembarked at the Vivekananda Memorial, watched as the
horror unfolded. The morning was calm and the sky clear and blue. The first thing the visitors
noticed was the withdrawing roar of a false tide, as though someone had pulled a plug on the
ocean. Dark, wet rocks at the foot of the many islets, and finally the seabed in between,
were suddenly exposed. It was as though the sea had inhaled. In the eerie quiet, which had
almost silenced the chatter on the Memorial, the visitors could hear the hiss of air being
sucked into the pore spaces of the draining sand and the flapping of a few stranded fish.
Then, just as the onlookers had begun to shrug their shoulders at the sight, a series of huge
waves, each several metres high, rushed in, crashing over the sunstruck promenades
surrounding the Vivekananda Memorial. The great statue of Tiru Valluvar was engulfed in
spray, like a deep-sea light breasting an Atlantic storm, but on a cloudless morning.
How many of the visitors to that tiny outcrop of charnockite thought at that moment about
Katalakōl, of the lost books, and the palaces of the great scholar kings who, in the
dreamtime of Tamil myth, held benevolent sway over the lost lands of Ilemuriakkantam?
Perhaps many thanked the gods, because they had indeed made a life-saving choice that
morning. All three boats of the Poompuhar Shipping Corporation were washed ashore by
the tsunami; but after a long wait all the visitors were rescued, not by the Indian Air Force
helicopter, which found it could not land, but by local fishermen whose boats survived the
tsunami and who made several sorties to pluck the visitors to safety.
Over the days and weeks that followed, many stories emerged about how, here and there
around the ocean, a little learning had been a life-saving thing; tales of the teacher who saw
the tide go out unexpectedly and shooed all her pupils upstairs just in time. They served to
show the life-saving power of knowledge; knowledge that most simply didn’t have. But it
became clear that, given the right combination of technology and education, many might have
enjoyed a fate like that of the lucky fishermen of Nallavadu, on India’s eastern coast.
The story goes that the son of one Nallavadu fishing family was on holiday in Singapore
when he saw a news report of a massive earthquake and rumours of a terrible wave. He
telephoned his sister and told her to spread the word and leave home immediately for high
ground. This small community had for several years benefited from the presence of a small
Internet-linked communications centre, set up by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Centre in
Chennai to provide information to fishermen about weather in the Bay of Bengal. Armed with
the news, villagers broke into the centre’s telecoms facility and, using its public-address
system, told the village’s 500 families to run for their lives. And in the end, not one life was
system, told the village’s 500 families to run for their lives. And in the end, not one life was
lost from Nallavadu’s population of 3500; though 150 houses and 200 boats were reduced
to rubble and matchwood.
For scientists, especially those working at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii,
the unfolding situation was immensely frustrating. Together with seismologists all over the
world, they had detected the massive quake and knew that a tsunami was a likely
consequence. But there is no regular correlation between earthquake magnitude and
tsunamis; and without any tsunami sensors in the Indian Ocean, still less any established lines
of communication with the countries bordering it, it was impossible for them to get any
warning to those who might have benefited (except, finally, to the Horn of Africa, where
casualties were low as a result).
But it was not long before the political will arising from the disaster began to take effect.
On Monday 10 October 2005 a German research vessel set sail from Jakarta to place the
first of fifteen earthquake sensors on the seabed some 620 miles offshore. Attached by ties
to large buoys at surface, their signals are now being continuously beamed to the offices of
Indonesian government geologists, and warnings can be relayed to the media and the public
via SMS, fax and email. For its part, India decided to set up a tsunami warning centre in
Hyderabad at an estimated cost of $27 million, and by December 2005 an interim Indian
Ocean tsunami early-warning system costing $53 million, tying together seabed earthquake
sensors and tide gauges, was nearing completion thanks to the United Nations
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC).
As usual, because such warning systems involve links at all levels stretching from
international to local, coordination will be the biggest problem. Emergency preparedness
planning, awareness campaigns, drills and local evacuation plans, educational programmes,
and installing emergency operational capability – all these need to be present across a vast
area that pays no heed to national boundaries. But without these things, none of the new
technology will prove to be any use at all.

Useful knowledge

Science historian Naomi Oreskes has written: ‘Scientists are interested in truth. They want to
know how the world really is, and they want to use that knowledge to do things in the
world.’ It was this same impulse that drove Eduard Suess to design and build his clean-water
scheme for Vienna, or Henno Martin and Hermann Korn to find water for Namibia, or John
Joly to apply radiotherapy to the treatment of cancer.
Earth scientists often complain, with reason, that politicians underuse the full potential of
their subject, especially for the benefit of vulnerable (for which read ‘poor’) people living in
unsafe housing in unstable places. But, in times like the tsunami’s aftermath, this feeling rises
to a pitch higher than mere frustration. That feeling is despair: that the world is still so ruled
by the short-term, by superstition, inertia and irrationality, and that their humane, possibilist
long-term view of the world is not only ignored but even denied.
If today there is fresh water on Namibian farms and in Vienna, and an emerging tsunami
early-warning system in the Indian Ocean, it is because geologists in the past have done the
science that brings a closer understanding of deep time and the inner workings of the Earth.
science that brings a closer understanding of deep time and the inner workings of the Earth.
You cannot pick and choose with science. A seemingly rarefied geology that reconstructs the
lost supercontinents of Earth’s deep past is the same science that (with political will) can save
hundreds of thousands of lives in the Indian Ocean when the next tsunami strikes. The arcane
business of how our Earth’s atmosphere evolved during the Precambrian under the influence
of evolving life is the same science that now helps us understand the massive, uncontrolled
climate experiment in which the human race is currently engaged. But to deny one part of
science is to deny it all. Science hangs together. It is a supercontinent.
It is also progressive, as its ideas approach ever more closely the actual truth of nature as
revealed in the great palimpsest of the geological record. ‘Progress’ may be an unfashionable
Enlightenment notion, but in science it is real; and the test of that progress’s reality is the
ever-increasing power that science puts in our hands. Just as the history of the Earth is made
up of both repetitive cycles and directional arrows, as the wheels of science turn, throwing up
the same ideas time and again throughout intellectual history, the train to which they are fixed
moves forward.

When thy judgments are in the Earth

Therefore how grotesque was it to read, just seven days after the tsunami struck, in the
Sunday Telegraph, whose front pages were given over to detailed geological explanations
of the earthquake and tsunami, of a new folly being made ready for its first visitors in
Petersburg, Kentucky, USA. Called the Museum of Creation and costing about the same as
Hyderabad’s tsunami early-warning centre, the theme of this particular park is the literal truth
of the Old Testament creation myth, which it seeks to uphold against all (genuine) scientific
evidence. Just as the Tamil devotees appeal to outmoded nineteenth-century science to
bolster the idea that their national myth is literally true, here the Old Testament creation story
is bolstered by what the museum’s backers call ‘creation science’.
This non-subject, devised by young-Earth creationists to lend credibility to their
prejudices, is alas much more than some regrettable but harmless local dispute about the
romantic tales of ancient poets. Overenthusiastic appeals by Tamil politicians to a few
outdated science references may occasionally be embarrassing for their academics; but it
remains, at most, a little local difficulty. On the other hand, the purpose of ‘creation science’
is to misrepresent real knowledge in a crusade to replace free enquiry with slavish adherence
to simplistic dogma – with belief in the Word before the world.
I have tried in this book to show something of how ideas in science often grade into –
perhaps even sometimes derive from – ideas in myth, and I have done this to show how
important it is to know the difference between the two. The truth is that we, as a species, can
no longer afford the luxury of irrationality and prejudice. We are too many and too powerful
to live in dreams. And the greatest and most irrational of the prejudices from which we must
free ourselves is one identified by Lucretius in the last century BC: the belief that the world
was made for us.
The supercontinent story tells us, like no other in Earth science, that she was not made for
us – any more than she was made for the trilobites that grubbed around in vanished Iapetus,
or for the Glossopteris tree or the little Mesosaurus, whose fossils reunited Gondwanaland,
or the tiny feeding-trace Oldhamia, on whom John Joly mused. Douglas Adams picked up
or the tiny feeding-trace Oldhamia, on whom John Joly mused. Douglas Adams picked up
this theme in what I call his ‘parable of the puddle’:
… imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting hole I find myself in. It
fits me staggeringly well; must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the
sun rises in the sky … and the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging onto the
notion that everything is going to be all right because this world was built to have him in it; so the
moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on
the watch-out for …

We can, if we choose, either fret over our lost futurity or comfort ourselves with the
thought that one day our species may shuck its bonds and spread throughout the galaxy; and
that our space-going descendants may, millions of years in the future, rediscover our home
planet after the greatest racial diaspora of all. Maybe that way, our direct offspring will see
the next supercontinent on Earth. But this is a long shot. Until we can live without her, Earth
is not a part of our story – we are a part of hers.
As the poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world’s geology
But what happens to the world’s geology
Is not irrelevant to us.

The last dethronement

Science has been trying to humble the hubris of humans from the start, in a series of what
Sigmund Freud referred to as ‘dethronements’. The first dethronement was of the Earth as
the centre of the universe. Second was our own dethronement as a unique creation in the
image of God. Third (in Freud’s opinion) was his demystification of the human mind’s
deepest motivations.
Science is not often thanked for delivering such slights to our collective ego; though in fact
these blows have been nothing like crushing enough. For when, like Douglas Adams’s
puddle, we find ourselves standing on the brink of destruction it will be our arrogance, as
much as the ignorance on which it feeds, that will prove our undoing.
Science cannot tell us everything that matters about being human, but it provides us with
the only practical knowledge of the natural world in which we have any reason to believe.
We know this because it works. But science also teaches us another important lesson – that
there is no absolute knowledge of any kind – either about the Earth, or anything else. True,
science can put some things past reasonable doubt: organic evolution or the age of the Earth
are now well beyond that point. Despite what they may tell you in the Museum of Creation,
the likelihood such basic scientific ideas being simply wrong is precisely nil. But the key word
here is reasonable. Nothing ever remains beyond unreasonable doubt, especially to the
fanatical adherents of outworn creeds who desire only to enslave.
The discovery of deep time is perhaps the greatest single liberating contribution that Earth
science has made to wider culture. Conceiving of a timeframe large enough to encompass
science has made to wider culture. Conceiving of a timeframe large enough to encompass
many repetitions of a cycle that can span 500 million years or more changes one’s
perspectives – especially on how properly to judge the relationship between ourselves and
the Earth. As our species becomes more numerous and powerful, our last chance of long-
term survival will depend on embracing yet another dethronement. We have to realize that
we are the puddle, at the mercy of circumstances, but at least able to figure out how to keep
ourselves alive and comfortable if we use the capacities with which evolution has equipped
us.
Lucretius, speculating about the age of the Earth, came to the mistaken conclusion that it
was new. For if not, he asked, where were the works of the poets who sang before Homer?
Twenty centuries later John Joly wrote in reply:
We do not ask if other Iliads have perished; or if poets before Homer have vainly sung, becoming a prey
to all-consuming time. We move in a greater history, the landmarks of which are not the birth and death
of kings and poets, but of species, genera, orders. And we set out these organic events not according to
the passing generations of man, but over scores or hundreds of millions of years. We are … in
possession today of some of those lost Iliads and Odysseys for which Lucretius looked in vain.

FURTHER READING

Books

Adams, Douglas, 2002. The Salmon of Doubt. Pan. 284pp. Posthumous collection of writings by the renowned
author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Contains the ‘parable of the puddle’ in the essay ‘Is there an
artificial God?’
Benton, Michael J., 2003. When Life Nearly Died – The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Thames & Hudson.
336pp. Readable text-book by an acknowledged expert and popularizer, focusing on the end-Permian extinction
and possible reasons for it.
Bronowski, J., 1973. The Ascent of Man. BBC. 448pp. Accessible and authoritative examination of the place of
science within the rise of human civilization.
DeCamp, L. Sprague, 1954 (rev. 1970). Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature.
Gnome Press (1954), Dover Publications (1970). 348pp. Spirited account of the influence of Plato’s Atlantis
story on subsequent lost-world makers.
Greene, Mott T., 1982. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Cornell
University Press. 324pp. A classic, well-written analysis of Earth science’s heroic age, including the origins of
drift theory.
Koertge, Noretta (ed.), 1998. A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science. Oxford
University Press. 322pp. A selection of essays by scientists and philosophers that examine postmodern
constructions of science and analyse the political damage they inflict upon science in society.
McMenamin, M., 1998. The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex Life. Columbia University Press.
295pp. An idiosyncratic view of how complex life first evolved on the shores of the supercontinent Rodinia.
Oreskes, Naomi, 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift – Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford
University Press. 420pp. Insightful analysis of the true sociocultural reasons why US scientists found Wegener
so hard to swallow.
Oreskes, Naomi, 2003. Plate tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. Westview Press.
424pp. Accounts in their own words by many of the surviving major players in the plate-tectonic revolution.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 2004. The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories.
University of California Press. 334pp. On the interface between Lemuria, Tamil world history and culture.
Superb scholarly study by the noted Tamil cultural historian.
 Superb scholarly study by the noted Tamil cultural historian.
Rogers, John J. W., & Santosh, M., 2004. Continents and Supercontinents. Oxford University Press, New York.
289pp. Graduate/postgraduate level academic textbook for Earth scientists on the Supercontinent Cycle.
Vrielynck, Bruno, & Bouysse, Philippe, 2003. The Changing Face of the Earth: The Break-up of Pangaea and
Continental Drift over the Past 250 Million Years in Ten Steps . Commission for the Geological Map of the
World/UNESCO publishing. Available from CMGW, Paris [Link] 33pp + CD ROM.
Winchester, Simon, 2005. A Crack in the Edge of the World – The Great American Earthquake of 1906. Viking
Penguin. 412pp. Immensely readable account of the whys, wherefores and social context of the San Andreas
Fault and San Francisco’s greatest calamity.

Websites

[Link] for information on the TV documentary and how to get hold of the
CD set produced by Paramount Home Entertainment.

INDEX

Abyssinia, 1
Académie Française, 1
accordion tectonics, 1, 2, 3
acid rain, 1, 2, 3
acritarchs, 1
Adam and Eve, 1
Adams, Douglas, 1, 2
‘parable of the puddle’, 1
Adams, John, 1
Afghanistan, 1
Africa, 1, 2
collision with Europe, 1, 2
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4
link to India, 1, 2
Livingstone’s exploration, 1
and Pannotia, 1
rock equivalents, 1, 2
and Ur, 1
Ager, Derek, 1
Airy, George Biddell, 1, 2
Albany Belt, 1
algae, 1, 2, 3
Algeria, 1
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 1, 2, 3
Alps, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
aluminium, 1
Amasia, 1, 2
Amasia, 1, 2
Amazon basin, 1
Amazonia, 1
American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), 1
Americas, 1, 2, 3
see also North America; South America
amino acids, 1, 2
amphibians, 1
Andes, 1, 2
anhydrite, 1, 2
animals, 1, 2, 3
Annales Veteris Testamenti (Ussher), 1
Anstone, 1
Antarctic, Scott’s expedition to, 1
Antarctic Peninsula, 1
Antarctica, 1, 2, 3, 4
Ortelius and, 1
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3
and Rodinia, 1
anthropology, 1
Antichthon, 1
Antwerp, 1
Appalachian mountains, 1, 2, 3
Apparent Polar Wander (APW), 1
Arabia, 1, 2, 3
aragonite, 1
archaebacteria, 1
archaeology, 1
Archean eon, 1, 2, 3, 4
Archimedes Palimpsest, 1
Archimedes’ Principle, 1, 2
Arctic expeditions, 1
Arctic Ocean, 1
Arctica, 1, 2
Argand, Émile, 1
Argentina, 1
aridity, of supercontinents, 1
Aristotle, 1
arthropods, 1
Asia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
collision with India, 1, 2, 3
astronomy, 1
Atkinson, Edward, 1
Atlanteans, 1
Atlantic Ocean, 1, 2, 3
closing of, 1, 2
and congruent mountain ranges, 1
 and congruent mountain ranges, 1
congruent shores, 1, 2, 3, 4
formation of, 1
opening of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
‘proto-Atlantic’, 1, 2, 3
rainfall over, 1
Atlantica, 1, 2
Atlantis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (Donnelly), 1
Atlas computer program, 1
Atlas mountains, 1
atmosphere, see Earth’s atmosphere atoms, 1, 2
Atwater, Tanya, 1, 2
Australasia, 1, 2
Australia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
and AUSWUS configuration, 1
coastal shelf, 1
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4
and Grenvillian Orogeny, 1
and Pannotia, 1
and Rodinia, 1
Australian Plate, 1
Austria-Hungary, 1
Austrian Geological Survey, 1
AUSWUS configuration, 1
bacteria, 1
Badcock, Canon Baynes, 1
Badcock, Mary, 1
Bailey, Sir Edward Battersby, 1
Bakevellia Sea, 1
Balearic Islands, 1
Bali, 1
Balmat, Jacques, 1
Baltic region, 1, 2, 3, 4
Baltica, 1
Banded Iron Formations (BIFs), 1, 2, 3
Banyak, 1
Barry, Patrick, 1
basalt, 1, 2, 3, 4
Batu Islands, 1
Bay of Bengal, 1, 2
Bay of Manar, 1
Bay of Naples, 1
Beardmore Glacier, 1
Bedale, 1
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1
Belgium, 1
Bengal, 1
Betelgeuse, 1, 2, 3
Bianca, Elio, 1
Bible, 1, 2
bicarbonates, 1, 2, 3
biomarkers, 1
biosphere, 1
‘deep’, 1
biotite, 1
birds, 1, 2, 3
black smokers, 1
Blanford, Henry Francis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Blanford, William Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Blavatsky, Madame, 1
Blue mountains, 1
Blue Ridge mountains, 1
Bolivia, 1
Borborema Belt, 1
Boreal Ocean, 1, 2
Borneo, 1, 2, 3
Boschi, Enzo, 1
boulder clay, 1
Bourbon, Charles and Camilla de, 1
Bourbourg, Charles Etienne, Abbé de, 1
Bowers, Henry, 1
Bowie, William, 1
Bray Head, 1
Brazil, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Briant, Keith, 1
Britain, 1, 2;
see also United Kingdom
British Antarctic Survey, 1
British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1, 2, 3, 4
British Columbia, 1
British Empire, 1, 2
British Geological Survey, 1, 2
Brodholt, John, 1
Brongniart, Adolphe Théodore, 1
Buckland, Raymond, 1
Buddhism, 1
‘bulk Earth’ ratio, 1, 2
Burke, Kevin, 1, 2
Burma, 1
burrowing, 1, 2
Bushveld Igneous Province, 1
Bushveld Igneous Province, 1
Cage, Nicholas, 1
calcium carbonate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
calcium sulphate, 1, 2
Calcutta, 1, 2, 3
Caledonian mountains, 1, 2, 3
California, 1, 2
Cambrian period, 1, 2, 3, 4
Canada, 1, 2
cap carbonates, 1, 2, 3
Cape Comorin, 1
Cape Corrientes, 1
Cape Geological Commission, 1
Cape mountains, 1
Cape of Good Hope, 1, 2
Cape Town, 1
carbon, 1, 2, 3
isotopes, 1, 2, 3
sequestration, 1, 2, 3
carbon dioxide, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
carbonates, 1
Carboniferous period, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Caribbean, 1
Carmarthen, 1
Carroll, Lewis, 1, 2
Catholic Church, 1
Celebes, 1, 2
Central America, 1
Central Provinces, 1
Ceylon, see Sri Lanka chalk, 1
Challenger disaster, 1
Chamberlin, Rollin T., 1
Chamonix, 1
Charnock, Job, 1
charnockite, 1, 2
Charnwood Forest, 1
Chelogenic Cycle, 1
chert, 1, 2
China, 1, 2, 3
Churchward, Colonel James, 1
civilizations, 1, 2
climate modelling, 1
climatic zones, 1
coal forests, 1, 2
coal formation, 1
coals, 1, 2
coals, 1, 2
colour photography, 1, 2
Columbia, 1, 2
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 1
Comores, 1
computer modelling, 1, 2
Congo basin, 1
conifers, 1
conjugate sets, 1
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, Emperor, 1
Constantinople, 1
continental drift, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
development of theory and
opposition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
measurements of, 1
mechanism for, 1
Ortelius and, 1, 2
before Pangaea, 1, 2
continents
rainfall over, 1
size and volume of, 1, 2
thickness of crust, 1
Cooper, Tony, 1
Cope, John, 1
coral reefs, 1
corals, fossil, 1
Coriolis, Gustave-Gaspard de, 1
Coriolis effect, 1
Coulomb, Alexis and Emma, 1
cratonization, 1
Creation, date of, 1
‘creation science’, 1, 2
Croft-on-Tees, 1
Croll, James, 1
Croll–Milankovich cycles, 1, 2
cross-bedding, 1
crystal gardens, 1
Curie, Pierre, 1
Curie point, 1
cyanobacteria, 1
cyclicity, 1
da Landa, Diego, 1
Dallow Moor, 1
Daly, Reginald, 1
Dalziel, Ian, 1, 2
Danish Geological Survey, 1
Danish Geological Survey, 1
Darling Belt, 1
D’Arpa, Filippo, 1
Darwin, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and fossil record, 1
Darwin, Erasmus, 1
Das Antlitz der Erde (Suess), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
day and night, 1, 2
Debenham, Frank, 1
Deccan Traps, 1
deduction, 1, 2
deep time, 1
Depleted Mantle Model Age (TDM), 1
Devonian period, 1, 2
Dewey, John, 1
diatoms, 1
Dickens, Charles, 1
dinosaurs, xiii, 1, 2, 3
Dixon, Henry Horatio, 1
DNA, 1, 2
Dnipropetrovsk, 1
Dobson, David, 1
Dodinga, 1
dolomite, 1
Donnelly, Ignatius, 1
Doushantuo Formation, 1
dragonflies, 1
Drake Passage, 1, 2, 3
Dravidian peoples and languages, 1, 2
du Toit, Alexander, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Dürer, Albrecht, 1
Dwyka Formation, 1
dykes, 1
dyke swarms, 1
Earll, Tony, 1
Earth
age of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
axial tilt, 1
axis, 1, 2
climate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
contraction of, 1, 2, 3, 4
cooling of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
core, 1, 2
core-mantle boundary, 1
cyclicity, 1, 2, 3
‘dethronement’ of, 1
 ‘dethronement’ of, 1
distance from Sun, 1, 2
elliptical orbit, 1
formation of, 1
frozen, 1
heat distribution, 1
impact of life on climate, 1, 2
rotation, 1, 2, 3
‘rusting’ of, 1
shield areas, 1, 2
size, 1
temperature, 1, 2, 3
‘theories of’, 1
Earth’s atmosphere, 1, 2, 3
balance with hydrosphere, 1
composition of, 1
oxygen content, 1
Earth’s crust
composition of, 1
levels of, 1
mantle convection, 1, 2, 3
movements of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
neodymium concentration, 1
radiogenic heat and sub-crustal melting, 1
thickness of, 1, 2
Earth’s magnetic field, 1, 2, 3
reversals of, 1, 2
earthquakes, 1, 2, 3
East Africa, 1, 2, 3
East African Rift, 1
East Antarctica, 1, 2
and SWEAT configuration, 1
and Pannotia, 1
and Ur, 1
Easter Island, 1
Easter Rising (1916), 1
Eastern Ghats, 1
echinoderms, 1
ecliptic, 1
Ediacara Hills, 1
Ediacaran period, 1, 2
see also Garden of Ediacara Ediacarans, 1
Egypt, 1
einsteinium, 1
Elgar, Sir Edward, 1
embryology, 1
embryology, 1
Emergence of Animals, The (McMenamin), 1
Energy Balance Models, 1
Engels, Friedrich, 1
Enggano, 1
Eniwetok Atoll, 1
Enlightenment, 1
Eoarchean eon, 1
Epic of Gilgamesh, 1
Epicurus, 1
Equator, 1, 2, 3, 4
glaciation at, 1, 2
and position of Rodinia, 1, 2, 3
Erinnerungen (Suess), 1
erosion, 1, 2, 3, 4
Euler’s Theorem, 1
Eurasia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Eurasian Plate, 1
Europe, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
collision with Africa, 1, 2
fossil assemblages, 1
and measurements of drift, 1
mountain chains, 1, 2, 3, 4
Evans, Edward, 1
evaporites, 1, 2
Everest, Colonel George, 1
evolution, theory of, 1, 2
extroversion, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Falkland Islands, 1
Ferdinand II, Emperor, 1
Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, 1
Ferdinandea, 1
Ferrel Cell, 1
Feynman, Richard, 1
First World War (Great War), 1, 2, 3
fish, 1
Fisher, Revd Osmond, 1
Fitzroy, Captain, 1
Flinders Range, 1
Florida, 1, 2
flying machines, 1
fool’s gold, 1
Fortey, Richard, 1
fossil magnetism, see palaeomagnetism fossil record, 1, 2
fossils, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Antarctic, 1
 Antarctic, 1
assemblages, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
corals, 1
earliest, 1
Ediacaran, 1
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2
Jurassic, 1
and Precambrian base, 1
fountains, 1
fractionation, 1
France, 1, 2, 3, 4
Frankfurt Geological Society, 1
Fraser Belt, 1
Freemasons, 1
Freud, Sigmund, 1
gabbros, 1
gamma rays, 1
Gangetic Plain, 1
Garden of Ediacara, 1, 2, 3, 4
Garden of Ediacara (McMenamin), 1, 2
gas, 1, 2, 3
Geikie, Sir Archibald, 1
General Circulation Models (GCMs), 1
Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding, 1
Geological Society of London, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Geological Society of South Africa, 1
Geological Survey of Canada, 1
geology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
‘armchair’, 1, 2
geophysics, 1, 2, 3
George, Rose, 1
Germania expedition, 1
Germany, 1
Gilbert, Grove Karl, 1
glaciation
earliest, 1
low-latitude deposits, 1
Marinoan, 1, 2
mirror-image, 1, 2
glaciers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
glass, 1
global conveyor, 1
Global Geophysical Events, 1, 2
Glomar Challenger, 1
Glossopteris, 1, 2, 3
gold, 1
gold, 1
Gololo (Halmahera), 1
Gonds, 1
Gondwana Assemblage, 1
Gondwana ice age, 1, 2
Gondwana Junction, 1, 2, 3
Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
fragmentation of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and Glossopteris forests, 1
location of South Pole in, 1
modern fragments and rock equivalents, 1
and Pannotia, 1
and Rodinia, 1, 2
Suess and, 1, 2
gorgonopsians, 1
Gotland, 1
GPS, 1
Graham, Admiral Sir Robert George, 1
Graham Bank volcano, 1, 2
Graham Land, 1
granitic rocks, 1
gravity, 1
gravitational attraction, 1
local variations in, 1
Graz, 1, 2
Great Australian Bight, 1, 2
Great War, see First World War Greene, Mott, 1
greenhouse effect, 1, 2, 3
greenhouse gases, 1, 2, 3, 4
Greenland, 1, 2, 3, 4
movement of, 1
Wegener’s expeditions, 1, 2, 3
greenstone belts, 1
Gregory, John W., 1
Grenville Orogeny, 1, 2
Grisly Folk, The (Wells), 1
gypsum, 1, 2, 3
gyres, 1, 2
Hacker, Bradley, 1
Hadean eon, 1, 2, 3
Hadley Cell, 1
Haeckel, Ernst, 1, 2
hafnium, 1, 2
Hahn, Helena Petrovna, see Blavatsky, Madame
Haidinger, Wilhelm von, 1
Hall, Alan, 1, 2
Hall, Alan, 1, 2
Halley, Edmond, 1
Halley’s comet, 1, 2
Hardy, Thomas, 1
harmonic systems, 1
Harrison, Mark, 1
Haughton, Samuel, 1, 2
Hawaii, 1, 2
Hell Kettles, 1
Hercynian mountains, 1
Hiero II, King, 1
High Skelding, 1
Himalayas, 1, 2, 3, 4
Hinduism, 1
Hipparchos of Rhodes, 1
HMS Beagle, 1, 2, 3
HMS Rattlesnake, 1
Hoffman, Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Holmes, Arthur, 1, 2
Homer, 1
Homo neanderthalensis, 1
Hooker, Sir Joseph, 1
Horn of Africa, 1, 2
Hosmer, Craig, 1
Housman, A. E., 1
Huguenots, 1, 2, 3
human beings
‘dethronement’ of, 1, 2
embryology, 1
human evolution, 1
and theosophy, 1
hurricanes, 1
Hutton, James, 1, 2, 3, 4
Huxley, Julian, 1
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
quoted, 1, 2
Hyderabad, 1, 2
hydrogen, 1, 2, 3, 4
hydrological cycle, 1
hydrosphere, 1, 2, 3
hypsographic curve, 1
Iapetus, 1, 2, 3, 4
ice, 1, 2, 3
and snowball events, 1, 2
Ice Age, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
ice ages, 1, 2, 3
ice ages, 1, 2, 3
Iceland, 1, 2
India, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
collision with Asia, 1, 2, 3
geology, 1, 2, 3
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
link to Africa, 1, 2, 3
Madame Blavatsky and, 1
monsoon rains, 1
and Pannotia, 1
response to tsunami, 1
and Ur, 1
Indian Geological Survey, 1, 2, 3, 4
Indian Ocean, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
monsoon winds, 1
subduction and convergence, 1
tsunami, 1, 2
warning system, 1
Indonesia, 1
induction, 1, 2
Industrial Revolution, 1
insolation, 1
International Commission on Stratigraphy, 1
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), 1
introversion, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
inundations, 1
Ireland, 1
Irian Jaya, 1
Irish Sea, 1
iron, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
iron ore, 1
iron sulphide, 1, 2
ironstones, 1
Islam, 1
isostasy, 1, 2, 3
isotopes
differentiation of, 1, 2
radioactive, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
ratio analysis, 1, 2, 3, 4
Italy, 1, 2
Jack Hills, 1
Jackson, Patrick Wyse, 1
Jakarta, 1
James, William, 1
Japan, 1, 2
jellyfish, 1
jellyfish, 1
Johnson, James (‘JJ’), 1
Joly, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Judd, John Wesley, 1
Kaliana, 1
Kalianpur, 1
Kalimantan, 1
Kanyakumari, 1, 2, 3
Karlsbad, 1
Karoo rocks, 1
Kasting, James, 1
Katalakōl myth, 1, 2, 3
Kelvin, Lord (William Thompson), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Kent, 1
Khomas Hochland, 1
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 1
Klein Schuur, 1
Knaresborough, 1
Koch, J. P., 1
Köppen, Vladimir, 1
Korn, Hermann, 1, 2, 3
Kossuth, Lajos, 1
Krakatoa, eruption of, 1, 2
Kuiseb River, 1
Kumarikkantam, 1
Lanthanide Series, 1
Laurasia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Lawrence, D. H., 1
laxatives, 1
lead, 1, 2
Lemuria, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
lemurs, 1, 2, 3
life
complex, 1
date of origin, 1
impact on climate, 1, 2
origins of, 1
preference for carbon 1, 2
limestones, 1, 2, 3
Linnaeus, Carolus, 1
Linnean Society, 1, 2
L’Isle Julia, 1, 2
Livermore, Roy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Livingstone, David, 1
lodestones, 1
Logie, Alexander, 1
Logie, Alexander, 1
Lombok, 1
Lost Continent of Mu, The (Churchward), 1
Lowell, Percival, 1
Lucretius, 1, 2, 3
lutetium, 1
Lydekker’s line, 1
Lyell, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Lyme Regis, 1
Macalusa, Domenico, 1
McCaffrey, Kevin, 1
MacDiarmid, Hugh, 1, 2, 3
McMenamin, Dianna, 1, 2, 3
McMenamin, Mark, 1, 2, 3
McMullan, Harry, III, 1
McMurdo Sound, 1
Madagascar, 1, 2
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4
and Ur, 1
Madhya Pradesh, 1
Madras, 1, 2
Madrid Codex, 1
Madurai, 1
magnesian limestone, 1
magnesium, 1
magnesium carbonate, 1
magnetite, 1
Malay Archipelago, 1
Manchester, 1
mapping, 1, 2
Marinoan glaciation, 1, 2
Mars, 1, 2
Martin, Henno, 1, 2, 3, 4
Marx, Karl, 1
Mascarene Islands, 1
mass extinctions, 1, 2
maximum packing, 1, 2
Maxwell, James Clerk, v
Mayans, 1
Mediterranean Sea, 1, 2, 3, 4
Meeker, Gertrude Norris, 1
megamonsoons, 1, 2, 3
Melancholia (Dürer), 1
Merriam, John, 1
Mesopotamia, 1
Mesosaurus, 1
Mesosaurus, 1
meteorites, 1, 2
meteorology, 1
meteors, 1
methane, 1, 2, 3
Metternich, Prince, 1
Mexico, 1, 2, 3, 4
mica, 1
microfossils, 1
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 1, 2, 3
Milankovich, Milutin, 1
millstone grit, 1
Mindanao, 1
Miocene period, 1
Molengraaf, Gustaaf, 1, 2
molluscs, 1, 2
Moluccas, 1
monsoons, 1, 2
Mont Blanc, 1
Moon, 1, 2, 3
Moores, Eldridge, 1, 2
Morocco, 1
Mott, John, 1
Mount Darwin, 1
Mount Rinjani, 1
mountains, 1, 2, 3, 4
and continental crust, 1
cyclic mountain building, 1
and formation of Pangaea, 1
Pangaean, 1
pre-Pangaean, 1, 2, 3
spatial coincidence of ranges, 1, 2
stabilization ages, 1, 2
Mozambique, 1
Mozambique Belt, 1, 2
M. S. Swaminathan Research Centre, 1
Mu, 1, 2
Mu Revealed (Earll), 1
mudstone, 1
multiple working hypotheses, 1, 2, 3
Murphy, Brendan, 1, 2
Museum of Creation, 1, 2
Myanmar (Burma), 1
Mylius-Erichsen, Ludvig, 1
Naacal language, 1
Nallavadu, 1
Nallavadu, 1
Namibia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Nan Shan mountains, 1
Nance, R. Damian, 1, 2
NASA, 1, 2, 3
Natal, 1, 2
natural selection, 1, 2, 3, 4
Näturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Haeckel), 1
Neander Valley, 1
Nedunceliyan, R., 1
Nena, 1, 2
neodymium, 1
Neoproterozoic eon, 1, 2, 3, 4
Netz, Reviel, 1
New England, 1
New Stone Age, 1
New York, 1, 2, 3, 4
New York Times, 1
New Zealand, 1
nickel, 1, 2, 3, 4
nitrates, 1
nitrogen, 1, 2, 3
Niven, William, 1
Noah’s ark, 1
North Africa, 1, 2, 3
North America, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
and AUSWUS configuration, 1
fossil assemblages, 1
and Rodinia, 1
and SWEAT configuration, 1
North Atlantic, 1, 2
gyre, 1
North Pole, 1, 2, 3
North Sea, 1, 2, 3, 4
Northern Hemisphere, 1, 2, 3
Summer, 1, 2
Norway, 1, 2, 3
Novopangaea, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
nuclear fusion, 1
Nuna, 1
nunataks, 1
Occam, William of, 1
ocean floor, 1
age of parts, 1
Archean, 1
composition of, 1
 composition of, 1
and continental drift, 1, 2
magnetization of, 1
and origins of life, 1, 2
and pre-Pangaean supercontinents, 1, 2
thickness of crust, 1
oceanic convection cells, 1
oceans
evolution of complex life in, 1, 2
salt content, 1
volume of, 1
oil, 1, 2, 3
exploration, 1, 2
Olcott, Alison, 1
Olcott, Henry Steel, 1
Old Testament, 1
Oldham, Thomas, 1, 2, 3
Oldhamia, 1, 2
olivine, 1
On the Origin of Continents and Oceans (Wegener), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 1
ophiolites, 1
suites, 1, 2, 3
Ordovician period, 1, 2
Oreskes, Naomi, 1, 2, 3
Orinoco, river, 1
Orissa, 1
orogeny, 1, 2
Ortelius, Abraham, 1, 2, 3
Outline of History (Wells), 1
oxygen, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Paccard, Michel-Gabriel, 1
Pacific Ocean, 1, 2
ancestral, 1
early-warning systems, 1, 2
shrinkage of, 1, 2, 3
subduction zones, 1
Pacific rim, 1
Padangbai, 1
Palace of Westminster, 1, 2
palaeographic atlases, 1
palaeomagnetism, 1, 2, 3, 4
Palaeozoic period, 1
Paleomap Project, 1
Palk Bay, 1
Panama, 1
Panama, 1
Pangaea, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
climate, 1, 2
continental drift before, 1, 2
formation and fragmentation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
mountain formation, 1
and pre-Pangaean supercontinents, 1, 2, 3
reconstructions of, 1, 2, 3
time of fragmentation, 1, 2, 3
the word, 1, 2
Pangea Ultima, 1, 2, 3
Pannotia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Panthalassa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Paris, 1
parrots, 1, 2
Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, The (Engels), 1
Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 1
Peltaspermum, 1
Pennines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
peridotite, 1
Periodic Table, 1, 2, 3
Permian period, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Persia, 1
Perth, 1
Phanerozoic eon, 1
Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, 1
Philip, Arne, 1
phosphorus, 1
photosynthesis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
physics, 1, 2, 3
Physics of the Earth’s Crust, The (Fisher), 1
pillow lavas, 1
plankton, 1, 2
plants, 1, 2
plate tectonics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and origins of life, 1
pre-Pangaean, 1, 2, 3
Plato, 1, 2
pleochroic haloes, 1, 2, 3
plutonium, 1
Poland, 1
Polar Cell, 1
polar winters, 1
Pollard, David, 1
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 (Elgar), 1
Pongola basin, 1
Pongola basin, 1
Port Sudan, 1
Pratt, Archdeacon John, 1, 2
Precambrian period, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
precession, 1
preconstructions, 1
predation, 1
Pretoria, 1
prevailing winds, 1
Prévert, Jacques, 1
Prévost, Louis Constant, 1
Priestley, Raymond, 1
Principles of Geology (Lyell), 1
Principles of Physical Geography (Holmes), 1
proteins, 1, 2
protocontinents, 1
pyrite, 1
Quartenary period, 1
quartzite, 1
Queensland, 1
radio, 1
radio telegraphy, 1, 2
radioactive decay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
radioactivity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
radiometric dating, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
radium therapy, 1, 2
raindrops, 1
rainfall, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Ramachandran, M. G., 1
Ramalingam, G., 1
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 1, 2
Raniganj coalfield, 1
Rasmus (Inuit), 1
Rasumovsky, Andrei Kirillovich, 1
Ray, Charles, 1, 2, 3
Read, Herbert H., 1
red beds, 1
Rejection of Continental Drift, The (Oreskes), 1
relativity, 1
respiration, 1
Rhaetic period, 1
rifting, 1, 2
Ripon, 1, 2, 3
RNA, 1
Rodinia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
age of formation, 1, 2
 age of formation, 1, 2
and complex life, 1, 2
configurations, 1
fragmentation of, 1, 2, 3, 4
position of, 1, 2
Romano, Mike, 1
Romantic revolution, 1
Romm, James, 1
Rosicrucians, 1
Ross, John, 1
Royal Dublin Society, 1
Royal Geographical Society, 1
Royal School of Mines, 1
Royal Society, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Russell, Mike, 1
Russia, 1, 2, 3
Rutherford, Ernest, 1, 2, 3
rutherfordium, 1
Sabine, Sir Edward, 1
Sabine Island, 1, 2
St Hilaire, Geoffroy, 1
salt, 1, 2
samarium, 1
San Andreas fault, 1
sand dunes, 1
sandstone, 1
Sanskrit, 1
Santiago de Cuba, 1
sap, rising of, 1
Saucerman, Sophia A., 1
Saussure, Horace Bénédict de, 1
Scandinavia, 1, 2, 3
scientific method, 1
Sclater, Philip Lutley, 1, 2, 3, 4
Sclater, William, 1
Scotese, Chris, 1, 2, 3
Scotia Sea, 1
Scotland, 1, 2
Scott, Captain Robert Falcon, 1, 2
sea levels
falling, 1
rising, 1, 2
Seaborg, Glenn T., 1
seaborgium, 1, 2
seasons, 1, 2
seasonality, 1, 2, 3, 4
 seasonality, 1, 2, 3, 4
Second World War, 1, 2
Secret Doctrine, The (Blavatsky), 1
sediments, 1, 2
and age of Earth, 1
Archean, 1
and environment of Ur, 1
eroded minerals in, 1
magnetization of, 1
oscillation ripples in, 1
oxidation of, 1
and stromatolite formation, 1
seeds, evolution of, 1
Seilacher, Adolf, 1
Selley, Dick, 1
Senegal, 1
Senghor, Léopold-Sédar, 1
serpentine, 1, 2
sex, 1
shellfish, 1
Sheltering Desert, The (Martin), 1
Sherwood-Britton, Jane, 1, 2, 3
sialic rocks, 1, 2
Siberia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Siberian Traps, 1, 2
Sicily, 1
silica, 1, 2, 3, 4
silicon, 1
silicon dioxide, 1
Simeulue, 1
Singewald, Joseph, 1
Skerl, John George Anthony, 1, 2, 3
slime, 1, 2, 3
Smith, Alan, 1, 2
Smith, William, 1
snowball events, 1, 2, 3, 4
Société Géologique de France, 1
sodium, 1
solar wind, 1
Sollas, Hertha, 1
Sollas, William J., 1
Sonora, 1
South Africa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2
and Grenvillian Orogeny, 1
Karoo rocks, 1
 Karoo rocks, 1
and Ur, 1
South America, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and Atlantica, 1
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4
rock equivalents, 1, 2
South Atlantic, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
gyre, 1
South Australia, 1
South China, 1
South Pacific, 1
South Pole, 1, 2, 3, 4
location of, 1, 2
South West Africa, 1
South-East Asia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Southern Hemisphere, 1, 2, 3, 4
Summer, 1, 2
Southern Ocean, 1
Spain, 1
Spender, Stephen, 1
sponges, 1, 2
Sri Lanka (Ceylon), 1, 2, 3, 4
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2
and tsunami, 1
and Ur, 1
stabilization ages, 1
Steinmann, Gustav, 1
Steinmann Trinity, 1
steranes, 1
Stopes, Marie, 1
storm beaches, 1
Strait of Gibraltar, 1
stratification, 1
stratigraphic table, 1
stromatolites, 1, 2
subatomic particles, 1
subduction, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
in Archaen ocean, 1
in Indian Ocean, 1
zones, 1, 2, 3
submarines, 1, 2
subsidence, 1, 2, 3
Suess, Eduard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and continental drift, 1
flair and attention to detail, 1
and Gondwanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4
later years, 1, 2
 later years, 1, 2
and movements of Earth’s crust, 1, 2, 3, 4
and sialic rocks, 1
and Vienna water supply, 1, 2
Sulawesi, 1
sulphur, 1, 2
sulphur dioxide, 1
Sun, 1, 2
distance of Earth from, 1, 2
increasing energy output, 1, 2, 3
and origin of life, 1, 2
weaker, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Supercontinent Cycle, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and complex life, 1, 2, 3
mechanism for, 1
and origins of life, 1
super-volcanic eruptions, 1
Sutton, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Sutton Cycle, 1
SWEAT configuration, 1
Sweden, 1
Sydney, 1
Syria, 1
Tahiti, 1
Talchir Formation, 1, 2, 3
Tamil language, 1
Tamilnadu, 1, 2
Tamils, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Taylor, Frank Bursley, 1
Taylor, T. Griffith, 1
Taylor-Wegener hypothesis, 1
temperatures, rising, 1
Temple of Nature, The (Erasmus Darwin), 1
Tenniel, Sir John, 1
Tennyson, Alfred, 1
Terra Nova, 1
Terra Nova Bay, 1
terranes, 1
Tertiary period, 1
Tethys, 1, 2
Texas, 1
Theobald, William, 1
Theory of the Earth (Hutton), 1
theosophy, 1
Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere, The (Wegener), 1
Thesaurus Geographicus (Ortelius), 1
Thesaurus Geographicus (Ortelius), 1
Thompson, William, see Kelvin, Lord thorium, 1
Tibetan Plateau, 1, 2, 3
tides, 1, 2, 3
Tien Shan mountains, 1
Tierra del Fuego, 1, 2, 3
till and tillite, 1
Timbuktu, 1
Times, The, 1
Timor, 1
Tiruvallur, 1
Torsvik, Trond, 1
trade winds, 1
Trans-Saharan Belt, 1
Treatise on Floating Bodies (Archimedes), 1
triangulation, 1, 2
Triassic period, 1
trilobites, 1
Troano Codex, 1
Tropic of Cancer, 1
tundra, 1, 2
Tute, Revd, 1
Typus Orbis Terrarum (Ortelius), 1, 2
Ultra Low Velocity Zones (ULVZs), 1
ultraviolet light, 1
uniformitarianism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
United Kingdom, 1
United Nations Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), 1
United States of America, 1, 2, 3, 4
geology and opposition to drift theory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
and Grenvillian Orogeny, 1
mountain chains, 1, 2, 3, 4
and naming of elements, 1
universe
age of, 1, 2
centre of, 1
Ur, 1, 2, 3
Ural mountains, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
uranium, 1, 2
Urantia Book, The, 1, 2, 3
Ure, river, 1
US Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1
US Department of Defense, 1
US Geological Survey, 1, 2
US State Department, Office of the Geographer, 1
Ussher, Archbishop James, 1, 2, 3
Ussher, Archbishop James, 1, 2, 3
Vale of York, 1
Valentine, Jim 1
Valluvar, Tiru, 1, 2
van der Gracht, Willem Anton Joseph Maria van Waterschoot, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Variscan mountains, 1
Verkhovka Formation, 1
Vesuvius, eruption of, 1
Vienna, 1, 2, 3
Vivekananda Memorial, 1, 2, 3, 4
volcanoes
Neoproterozoic, 1
at mid-ocean ridges, 1
volcanic eruptions, 1, 2, 3
Wagner, Richard, 1
Walcott, Charles Doolittle, 1
Wales, 1
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1, 2, 3
Wallace’s line, 1, 2
Wallacea, 1
Walvis Bay, 1
Washington State, 1
water vapour, 1
Watson, Janet Vida, 1, 2, 3
weather forecasts, 1
Weber’s line, 1
Wegener, Alfred Lothar, 1, 2, 3, 4
and continental drift, 1, 2
Greenland expeditions and death, 1, 2, 3
opposition to his theory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and Pangaea, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Pangaea diagram, 1
quoted, 1
Wegener, Kurt, 1
Wells, H. G., 1, 2
Weltall theories, 1, 2
Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 1
West Africa, 1, 2
West Gondwana, 1, 2
Western Australia, 1, 2
Western Europe, 1
Wetherby, 1
White, David, 1
Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel, 1
Wilson, Edward Adrian, 1
Wilson, Edward Adrian, 1
Wilson, John Tuzo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Wilson Cycle, 1, 2, 3
Windhoek, 1
Witwatersrand basin, 1
Wollongong, 1
Worksop, 1
World Wide Web, 1
worms, 1
Wright, Frederick, 1
Wuchiapingian age, 1
Yilgarn Craton, 1
York, 1
Yorkshire, 1, 2, 3
Zechstein Sea, 1, 2, 3, 4
Zichichi, Antonio, 1
zinc, 1
zircon, 1, 2, 3, 4
Zoological Society of London, 1, 2

About the Author

Ted Nield holds a doctorate in geology and currently works for the Geology Society of
London, where he is editor of their monthly magazine Geoscientist. He is Chair of the
Association of British Science Writers and Chair of the Outreach Programme of the
International Year of Planet Earth – a UN-backed venture. He lives in London.

Copyright

Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR

First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2007

This ebook edition published by Granta Books, 2012

Copyright © Ted Nield, 2007

‘Different living is not living in different places’ by Stephen Spender from New Collected Poems © 2004,
reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender; ‘Humming-Bird’ by D. H. Lawrence,
reproduced by kind permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli; ‘On a Raised
reproduced by kind permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli; ‘On a Raised
Beach’ by Hugh MacDiarmid from Complete Poems, reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press
Limited; The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy © 1979 Douglas Adams, reproduced by kind permission of Pan
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ISBN 978 1 84708 677 8