Time Frozen, Folded, Slipped and Pummeled

I fell in love with rocks for their beauty: the way they catch and throw light, the shapes of mineral crystals, their different weights and textures. But what keeps me captivated is what rocks teach us about time.

In Glacier National Park, 2016

In geology, a million years is a rounding error. Humans are as inconsequential as gnats, here and (soon enough) gone. The basement rocks visible at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are approximately 1.8 billion years old, almost half the age of the earth. Because of a missing section called "the Great Unconformity," you can't just lay out the vertical rocks on a horizontal timeline; however, the rocks laid down during the Precambrian add to more than 12,500 feet in depth, not counting the basement rocks. The Paleozoic rocks, dating back to the Cambrian era 525 million years ago, add up to more than 3,500 feet in depth. The most recent layers  weathered away as the canyon was forming, so the rocks at the top are estimated to be 250-270 million years old. (See https://www.nps.gov/articles/age-of-rocks-in-grand-canyon.htm for more.)

During those not-quite-two billion years, the Colorado Plateau was taking a long journey around the globe, below and above the equator, as part of Pangaea and then broken free, below oceans and above them, as beach and as desert dunes. These rocks have been lifted, folded, squeezed and sometimes melted. They have been subject to forces we can barely imagine.

For comparison, modern humans appeared no more than a few hundred thousand years ago, and only developed language about 50,000 years ago. If all the missing rock layers from the last 270 million years still existed in the Grand Canyon, human history would represent a thin layer of dust on the top.

Kind of puts your office deadlines into perspective, doesn't it? 

Not the Grand Canyon - sedimentary layers visible in Utah

More than 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Someday humans will be too, although whether we die out because we can't adapt to the damage we have wrought, or instead we evolve into some presently unimaginable form, we can't know. And the Earth doesn't care. Tectonic plates will continue to bang into one another, or rift apart. Mountains will be shoved up and worn down, grain by grain. Silicon dioxide will continue to form quartz, which makes hexagonal crystals whether or not we are here to judge them beautiful.

If I get too caught up in politics, or office work, or some puny individual concern, it helps to remember that all of it will pass away. For all our worry and upset and pain and judgment, time makes dust of us all. The best response is just to be kind, today, and let all the rest flow by like a river, carving its way through rock.  

-Elena