Basin and Range

Annals of the Former World #1

by John McPhee

The first of John McPhee’s works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Geology, Nature, History, Natural History, Geography

215 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1981

About the author

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Nataliya · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you had told me that I’d absolutely adore a nonfiction book about geology, a book now over 40 years old, I would have seriously doubted your sanity. But that was before I discovered (thanks, Justin!) the works of John McPhee.

And now, in the nerdiest pun ever, I can happily proclaim — GEOLOGY ROCKS!!!

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

I suppose if you think of geology as a study of the unimaginable depths of time then the excitement suddenly makes sense. Because it’s not just geology; it’s the look at the absolutely mind-boggling timescale of planetary history where we are but a tiny speck. It’s the power of the slow change that shapes and reshapes the Earth.

“If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

It is a skill taking a subject without the reputation for being exciting — seriously, it’s rocks that move on the timescale of tectonic plates rearranging the planet verrrrrrry veeeeeerrrrrrrry slowly — and making it fascinating. In his trip along Interstate 80 McPhee takes on the journey through geological epochs as well as a crash course in geological theories (how did we figure out plate tectonics - since I was one of those kids taking the knowledge of that for granted?). Along the way we meet the experts on geology (Kenneth Deffeyes sounds like a lovely person to hang out with) and hear their explanations of the field, and tag along with McPhee on field expeditions and even some silver mining.

“A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”

John McPhee is not a geologist; he is a journalist and a writer — and apparently a damn good one, with this book a great example of good popular science writing that can make any literary fiction hang its head in shame and go to its room without dinner. The writing is clear and expressive without ever being over-the-top, without over-philosophizing, without getting lost in metaphors. The little anecdotes about the scientists he interviews are just enough to give you an idea about people involved but not to the point of ever becoming annoying digressions. He gets to the point unerringly while still using his confident writing to make geology shine.

Plus, he’s genuinely funny.

“As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve, when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute’s Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was “a quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.” The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pupellyite. Meyerhoffferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Mtakirchheimerite, phlogopite, katzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite.”

5 stars. My first McPhee — and certainly not my last.

——————

Also posted on my blog.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I absolutely love about McPhee's nonfiction is his ability to write about place (Bason and Range), people (Deffeyes) and ideas (plate tectonics) with both beautiful prose and amazing intimacy. My favorite parts are where McPhee weaves place and people, or people and ideas, together and establishes the grand metaphor for his book. Example:

"At any given moment, no two geologists are going to have their heads exactly the same level of acceptance of all hypotheses and theories that are floating around," Deffeyes said. "There are always many ideas in various stages of acceptance. That is how science works. Ideas range from the solidly accepted to the half-baked--those in process of forming, the sorts of things about which people call each other up in the middle of the night."

IT is amazing to me that McPhee is able to illicit a quote from a geologist that suggests, subtly, that all science itself IS like plate tectonics (shifting, moving, banging into each other, erroding, collapsing). Again, McPhee is amazing.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rocks. A book on rocks. A book on rocks that rocks. There was a time when I would've assumed that a head full of rocks was a prerequisite for reading a book on rocks. There was a time when I wasn't aware of John McPhee. McPhee rocks.

Why? This book rocks because it's really about time, or as McPhee calls it, "deep time" -- the mind-blowing discovery that the planet is a pebble or two older than, say 40,000 years, which, once upon a time, was the received wisdom about Mother Earth's age. Turns out we missed her birthday by a few ticks and tocks of the planet's natural time piece (you got it -- more rocks). Whatever divine stork delivered the planet in a galactic diaper flapped its wings this way around 5 billion years ago (give or take millenium or two). Whatever god you worship, curse, ignore, or deny, that's a significant miscalculation that's hard to sweep under the crusty carpet of our geological living room.

But before you grow melancholic under the existential landslide of that idea, rest assured that McPhee serves as a most lucid and entertaining guide of the geological heavings and grindings underlying (literally) that process whereby our understanding of time shifted from Biblical finitude to scientific near infinity (and if you need a little OTC supplement to calm your nerves, may I suggest chanting Theodore Roethke's wise line, "All finite things reveal infinitude"). As in all his books (or at least the ones I've read), he does this by organizing his material around a story featuring an expert protagonist, in this case the geologist Ken Deffeyes, whom McPhee follows around, learning how to read the face of rock, rendering the abyss of various fault lines more compreshensible than terrifying. But the real character that makes this such a fascinating read, whether for expert or novice, is McPhee's vivid but never intrusive prose. Permit me just one sample with a description of one feature of the Great Basin in Nevada: "In the manner of a seesaw, the high, mountain side of the block as a whole reached a state of precarious and temporary truce with God, physics, and mechanical and chemical erosion, not to mention, far below, the agitated mantle, which was running a temperature hotter than normal, and was, almost surely, controlling the action."

It is lines like that one that have transformed my weekly Sunday drives back from my sweetie's home in Southwest Virginia, as I slalom down through the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Piedmont of North Carolina dropping off a thousand feet and sweeping out into a vast plain that resembles a leafy ocean floor it may once have been and may well become again. Instead of speeding home heedlessly, preoccupied with thoughts of the coming work week filled with meetings, classes, bills, and chores, I tap the breaks now and then in an attempt to savor the descent and momentarily forestall my own passage into deep time.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the two in his "Annals of the Former World " series that I gave 5-star ratings to. This one was my favorite. My old stomping grounds for work. I spent a lot of time in Nevada in the gold-boom days! I have fond memories of those times -- although perhaps colored by nostalgia, as weather and accommodations were often not the best. But the lonely views across the endless sagebrush plains were great! The long drives after a day in the field, especially during the dark days of winter, got really old . . . And sometimes terrifying, like Emigrant Pass on I-80 at night in a snowstorm, with semis jack-knifing in front of me! Holy shit.

One of my favorite memories was in Battle Mountain, where I happened to be working when Nevada Arts sponsored a chamber music concert. It was great -- a couple from Tucson who had their camper-van modified to carry a harpsichord. They slept on top of their harpsichord! And a visit with the mine geologist for Battle Mountain Gold above town, after a talk I think, when he recalled that he'd been snowed on in the field every month of the year -- that year he'd completed his 12!

Anyway, if you read just one of McPhee's geology books, read this one. But I'll bet you will want to keep going. I've read it twice, plus reading some of the original NYer serializations. Great stuff.

[Margie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be two-and-half stars, if that were an option.

I very much wanted to love this book. It's been recommended to me multiple times by multiple people, even long before I started working with geologists, long before I held oolites in my hand, or saw an angular unconformity, or got to know Walter Alvarez.

Although I'm not an earth scientist, I'm familiar with most of the ideas in the book, and recognized many of the words. I'm interested in geology. So I was presumably in the target audience - a well-suited reader.

Yet I found much of it incomprehensible. Poetic and interesting, but not understandable. It's too technical to be fully engaging for non-scientists, but doesn't include enough maps or diagrams to be illustrative/educational. And it's probably too travelogue-ish or narrative to be of interest to scientists.

McPhee opens the second chapter by saying that when he took an earth science class as a young person, he let the words go sailing past him like paper airplanes. I got a similar feeling reading his book. I enjoyed the words flowing past me, but would have preferred to be able to catch a ride on that drift.

I'm glad I read it, and will be interested to read another of his books to see how it compares. Overall, though, I'm disappointed.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this long ago, but am going through a review-writing drought as I work my way through two very long other books.

Back in my college days, I once, with two other people, rented half of a duplex in the 'student ghetto' adjoining the university. Because space was so tight, my delightful roommate Maureen would leave a lot of her school-related stuff heaped up in the living room. One day I spied this slender volume resting atop a stack of thick, boring textbooks and asked her about it, since it appeared to be about geology and she was studying microbiology.

"It's actually for my English class," she answered, "and it's really good. You should check it out someday." Now, Maureen was a shy, nerdy type beset by personal issues that it broke my heart to witness, because she was one of those people who made me feel like a clumsy, lumbering bozo just to even bid her good morning. Of what possible use could I be with her self-destructive spiral? Regardless, so wise did she seem that I considered any advice from her to be indispensable. So as the end of the school year neared, I asked if I could borrow it, and read it in one protracted sitting.

This was the first John McPhee book I ever read, and I instantly became one of his many fans. He has, it seems to me, the best job in the world: Become interested in something. Devote months, if not years, hanging out with experts in the field and learning everything you can about the subject. Write fascinating books about these topics. Move on to the next thing. The things he's become interested are completely random, and include oranges, plate tectonics, nuclear weapons, lacrosse, shipping, Alaska.....In each of these topics, and many others besides, he has written what many consider the definitive review.

And remember: Although this book was about geology (the first of four books in a series, which together describe the infra-infrastructure of the United States, and use this as an exploration of geology in general), she was reading it for her English class, because McPhee is such a masterful writer. The four books of this series are the best science writing I have ever encountered; the second best, a book called The Neaderthal Enigma, was written by one of McPhee's students. (In his day job, McPhee was a professor at Princeton). His secret sauce consists of letting scientists themselves describe the science, while McPhee describes the scientists. His research, as noted, takes place over months and years and feels comprehensive. He excises about 95% of what he's learned in the interests of readability, and comes across as a curmudgeonly-but-approachable expert in all that he writes.

This book explores the mountainous region that begins, as one travels west-to-east, in the Sierra Nevada of California and across Nevada and Utah, a region of unsurpassed natural beauty and vast, depopulated regions still dominated by pines, birds and lizards. In Nevada, the strips of desert between mountain ranges are so forbidding that each mountain range is an island, biologically speaking, and evolution occurs much as it did where Darwin studied his finches. This region ends just east of Salt Lake City; the Rocky Mountains are a different thing entirely, and appeared fifty million years before the mountains of the far West. In fact, as those of us living in earthquake-rattled California are aware, the Sierra is still rising. These mountains, McPhee explains, are like 'stretch marks' -- due to plate tectonics, the earth here is literally pulling apart, and huge blocks of stone tip as they break free. That's why the mountains here are rather shallow-sloped on one side and extremely steep on the other -- think of a sidewalk square pried up on one side.

I'll review the other three books as time permits, which describe the Appalachians, the Rockies and California, respectively. (Yes, California is so weird that it merits its own book -- not that anybody should be surprised.)

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was the man walking all over San Francisco with a pillow under his arm. It was the wrong kind of pillow and I had to exchange it. I got a few looks aboard the train. I suffered a few comments at the office too. But the lunch-hour march down Townsend Street was the worst part: a wind in the February style, shin splints from a hard pace, slanting rain in the eyes, and mud puddles for sidewalks through an industrial sector of the city. Then there were the art students, twenty or thirty of them, squinting at the tips of their lit cigarettes near the Academy campus. They parted like waters for Moses to watch the bourgeois thirty-something pass on his incomprehensible errand.

I thought of what I’d read that morning in John McPhee’s Basin and Range. “On the geologic timescale,” McPhee writes, “a human life is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about.” Infinitely briefer, then, and even less worth consideration, was my present discomfort. McPhee expands on the idea by quoting a geologist friend:

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

Looking round at the train tracks, the warehouses, the built-up terraced hills of the city, for a moment I saw the place through a lens of geologic time: I walked atop the Cambrian seabed in clouds of groping arthropods; I was wrapped in folds of cooling rock; I was buried in volcanic ash and thrust above the surface of the waters. Before my eyes the city resolved into a work of insects, a temporary beeswax hive. There were eons still to roll over it. My own consciousness was reduced, by a weight of years that smothered sensible regret, to the briefest electric spark of dream in one immemorial night.

I came to the shop where our misbegotten purchase had occurred a few days before. A middle-aged man in round, frameless glasses helped make my exchange. He had a gray goatee and a pleasant voice. Ten minutes later I passed through the crowd of students again with an apparently identical pillow under my arm, like someone on his way to a slumber party at an address he can’t find.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had such potential to be a 5 star, but alas...

I have a great interest in geology/paleontology and was excited to read a book that would lay out geology and geological subjects in such a way as to make it interesting to us lay-folk. McPhee attempts to do this by following a geologist along I-80 in the Basin and Range (Nevada and western Utah) and intermingling this region's interesting geologic history with the story of the geologist. This approach was both good and bad, making the book more interesting than say a textbook, but giving the story a schizophrenic feel. Among the things McPhee incorporated into this book include his travels with the geologist, the geological history of the Basin and Range, a short geologic history the US, a biography of the geologist, geological terminology, a history of geology as a scientific discipline, and some geologic theory. He jumps from one subject to another and back again, sometimes abruptly, and I felt like he never addressed each of these subjects completely or satisfactorily.

Nonetheless, I found the story interesting and plan to read the other books he wrote in this series.

[Erich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had heard about John's more popular titles while in college, Encounters..., In Control of Nature, etc. and heard all the good things about his writing, but had never read him. I picked up Basin and Range as something to read while my dad entered his cancer-induced coma and I would keep him company while he was dying. The book was the perfect combination of escape and realism for me at the time. It gave me relief during my grief and and gave me something to look forward to after the imminent death of my father. It started my love of McPhee's books and have read all of his books since, and also made me want to experience the terrain he described. I went to Nevada for several solo trips and backpacking experiences during the healing, and I think the state is one of the most unique in the Union despite it's appearances and Vegas reputation.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls · Rating 3 out of 5]

It might have been a lot easier to be impressed by this Pulitzer-Finalist when it was first published in 1981 not long after the "New Geology" revolution of the 1960s when Tectonic Plate theory became more widely accepted in the field. McPhee is said to have been a pioneer in writing literate but entertaining non-fiction and this book certainly qualifies as literate; it is more entertaining at some times than others although, to be sure, a working knowledge of - and/or a robust interest in - Geology would definitely help (and I'll be honest here: I recently read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson which covers a lot of the same ground perhaps with less grace but with a little more wit). This book kicks off a short series of books McPhee wrote about Geology which were was later collected into the 1999 Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World.

[Ben Goldfarb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible to reflect on just how recently plate tectonics became settled science.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've wanted to tackle Annals of the Former World for a while now, but have daunted by its density and length. For a book like this, starting is the hardest part, and so I've decided to approach each section as an individual book in a series -- it should be easier to review this way, too.

...[Where] gaps exist among the facts of geology the space between is often filled with things "geopoetical"...

As a self-described outdoorsy person living in the Rockies, I regularly encounter minor geological marvels on my hikes and runs: quartz outcroppings often flanked by old mine pits, weathered bulbous granite boulders of questionable (yet non-glacial) origin, mica flakes glittering in streambeds. Looking at the landscape can feel like looking at a piece of art, or listening to a foreign language, where you understand fragments but are unsure of "what it all means". Basin and Range feels like a primer in that new language and has me looking at my surroundings in a completely new light.

This first installment of Annals of the Former World focuses on the influences of plate tectonics on geology, particularly the "basin and range" area between Salt Lake City and Sacramento, where plates are pulling apart causing this distinct pattern of the landscape, and which, in a few hundred million years, may become a new ocean. Author John McPhee emphasizes the magnitude of the geological timescale, and how that is how, he says, "the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone."

I loved the author's literary approach to geology as he paints the picture of a long forgotten Earth with vivid description. I thought I would need to take longer breaks between sections of Annals, but I couldn't stop myself from moving immediately on to In Suspect Terrain which focuses on one area in which I'm particularly interested: the affects of the Ice Age(s) on the terrain of North America.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic perspective provider.
Developed an interest in geology after moving to Central Oregon, where USA's early astronauts trained in the rich array of diverse landscapes. Have since spent many hours with Mister McPhee.
***
Here in Crook County, the geographic center of Oregon, the land is also divided between Basin and Range domain and Columbia River drainage. The Maury Mountains in the south section of the county separate the Basin from the Crooked River drainage in the Ochoco Mountains. The Crooked River flows into the Deschutes River at Lake Billy Chinook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maury_M...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bi...

[X · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was surprisingly good. It's not something I would have read if I hadn't needed to for school, but it was very interesting, and I may consider reading the rest of the series. The book covered mountain building, volcanism, mining, plate tectonics, and continental drift, and also gave brief historical accounts of famous geologists, while describing the author's field trip with a geology professor. At times it seemed to skip around too much, though it always came back to the main point of continental drift, and on the positive side, the sometimes abrupt subject changes kept me alert while reading this book in 2 days. It was not at all dry or boring, though some of the technical terms would be lost on those who have not studied a little bit of geology.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting revisiting the work that more or less introduced me to the "geo-poetry" (pioneering geologist Harry Hess's term) of plate tectonics and brought a lyrical sense of deep geological time to life. Some details of our understanding of the earth's dynamics have changed, almost all of them in ways that confirm the basic vision. McPhee builds the book around his encounters with geologists and the basins and ranges fanning out from Interstate 80, primarily in the West, and nothing about either the culture or the landscape has changed, give or take humanity's hubris. Came out of it, as I come out of Gary Snyder's poetry, feeling like there's really nothing our species can do to change, or maybe even seriously effect, the story of the planet.

[Gia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book on the clearance rack at a thrift store and bought it on a whim; it looked interesting and I had never read a geology book before. I took my time reading this book and I truly savored it. For some reason I experienced this highly technical and fairly complex book as comforting and poetic. I have no idea why I enjoyed this book so much. I learned a lot of new things I have never thought of before, bringing a new and fresh perspective to my view of the world and its terrain. I will look for other books by this author.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

See the review for Annals of the Former World for the beginning of this review.

My last thought for the book is the idea that as the North American Continent is spreading apart in the Basin and Range (from Salt Lake City to Reno which are spreading about 1 inch every ten years, and dipping into Mexico), it will open an ocean. “The Red Sea of today was what the Atlantic and its two sides had looked like about twenty million years after the Atlantic began to open. The Red Sea today was what the Basin and Range would probably look like at some time in the future.” Geologist use their knowledge and instinct, or gut feelings to theorize where exactly the ocean will open up, either the Great Salt Lake’s ancestral Lake Bonneville in Utah, or like a zipper from the Gulf of California, or from the Cape Mendocino fault line in Northern California from the Pacific.

“The geologist Kenneth Deffeyes places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California—from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno—not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada.” Under water. A new ocean. My idea of heaven is knowing if any of this conjecture is right. Of being able to see what happens.

Exactly like Annie Dillard writes: “Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, ‘that was a good time then, a good time to be living.’ And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’ I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.”

Other interesting thoughts, topics, teasers:

Solid-earth tides could break it up, too. The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.

The country rock was a shale, which had earlier been the deep muck of some Triassic lake, where the labyrinthodont amphibians lived, and paleoniscid fish.

To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane. The rock itself are the essential clues to the scenes in which the rock began to form—a lake in Wyoming, about as large as Huron; a shallow ocean reaching westward from Washington.

There’s a little bit of the humanities that creeps into geology, and that’s why I am in it. You can’t prove things as rigorously as physicists or chemists do.

To be sure, there is plenty of absorbing geology under the shag of eastern America, galvanic conundrums in Appalachian structure and intricate puzzles in history and stratigraphy.

The physiographic boundary is indistinct where you shade off the Allegheny Plateau and onto the stable craton, the continent’s enduring core, its heartland, immemorially unstrained, the steady, predictable hedreocraton—the Stable Interior Craton. There are old mountains to the east, maturing mountains to the west, adolescent mountains beyond.
The craton has participated on its edges in the violent creation of the mountains. But it remains intact within, and half a nationwide—the lasting, stolid craton, slowly, slowly downwasting. It has lost five centimetres since the birth of Christ.

Now with each westward township the country thickens, rises—a thousand, two thousand, five thousand feet—on crumbs shed off the Rockies and generously served to the craton. At last the Front Range comes to view—the chevroned mural of the mountains, sparkling white on gray, and on its outfanning sediments you are lifted into the Rockies and you plunge through a canyon to the Laramie Plains.

Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones.

He explained that gold is not merely rare. It can be said to love itself. It is, with platinum, the noblest of the noble metals—those which resist combination with other elements. Gold wants to be free. In cool crust rock, it generally is free.

In the southern part of the province, in the Mojave, the ranges have stopped rising and are gradually wearing away. The Shadow Mountains. The Dead Mountains, Old Dad Mountains, Cowhole Mountains, Bullion, Mule, and Chocolate mountains. They are inselberge now, buried ever deeper in their own waste.

The ranges of the Basin and Range came up another way. The crust—in this region between the Rockies and the Sierra—is spreading out, being stretched, being thinned, being literally pulled to pieces. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City, on opposite sides of the province, have moved apart sixty miles.The escarpment of the Wasatch Mountains—easternmost expression of this immense suite of mountains—faced west. The Sierra—the westernmost, the highest, the predominant range, with Donner Pass only halfway up it—presented its escarpment to the east.

For another example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet loaded two miles of ice onto Scotland, and that dunked Scotland in the mantle. After the ice melted, Scotland came up again, lifting its beaches into the air.

When the rock of this big Utah roadcut had been the limy bottom of the Ordovician sea, the water had been so shallow that the lime mud had occasionally been above the surface and had dried out and cracked into chips, and then the water rose and the chips became embedded in more lime mud, and the process happened again and again so that the limestone now is a self-containing breccia studded with imprisoned chips—an accident so lovely to the eye you want to slice the rock and frame it.

Growing barley on his farm in Berwickshire, James Hutton had perceived slow destruction watching streams carry soil to the sea. It occurred to him that if streams were to do that through enough time, there would be no land on which to farm. So there must be in the world a source of new soil. It would come from above—that was to say, from high terrain—and be made by rain and frost slowly reducing mountains, which in stages would be ground down from boulders to cobbles to pebbles to sand to silt to mud by a ridge-to-ocean system of dendritic streams.

Hutton had no way of knowing that there were seventy million years just in the line that separated the two kinds of rock, and many millions more in the story of each formation—but he sensed something like it, sensed the awesome truth, and as he stood there staring at the riverbank he was seeing it for all humankind.

What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean.

Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

So by looking at the paleomagnetic compasses in rock you can tell not only whether the magnetic pole was in the north or south when the rock formed but also—from the more subtle positions of the needles—the latitude of the rock at the time it formed.”
On the striated pavement of Algeria lies the till of polar glaciers. There are tropical atolls in Canada, tropical limestones in Siberia, tropical limestones in Antarctica. From fossils, from climates preserved in stone, such facts were known long before paleomagnetism was discovered; but they were, to say the least, imperfectly understood.

The Himalaya is the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian Plate. India, in the Oligocene, crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed in under the newly created Tibetan Plateau and drove the Himalaya five and a half miles into the sky. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had formed into rock.

The California Coast Ranges—the hills of Vallejo, the hills of San Simeon, the hills of San Francisco —are a kind of berm that was pushed up out of the water by the incoming plate, including large slices of the seafloor and a jumble of oceanic and continental materials known to geologists as the Franciscan mélange.

The huge body of sediment would one day be lifted far above sea level and dissected by weather and wrinkled into mountains in the way that the skin of an apple wrinkles as the apple grows old and dry.

In the nineteen-forties, a professor at Delft had written a book called The Pulse of the Earth, in which he asserted with mild cynicism that where gaps exist among the facts of geology the space between is often filled with things “geopoetical,” and now Hess, with good-humored candor, adopted the term and announced in his first paragraph that while he meant “not to travel any further into the realm of fantasy than is absolutely necessary,” he nonetheless looked upon what he was about to present as “an essay in geopoetry.”

“The whole ocean is virtually swept clean (replaced by new mantle material) every three hundred to four hundred million years,” he wrote, not then suspecting that ocean crust is actually consumed in half that time.

Where is the suture in California?’ of course, that there were at least three sutures. In each instance, a great island had closed up a sea and hit into America—just as India hit Tibet, just as Kodiak Island, which is a mini-India, is about to plow into Alaska. Fossils from the mid-Pacific have been found here in the West, and limestones that lithified a thousand miles south of the equator. Formations in California have alien fossils with cousins in the rock of New Guinea.

As a result, the style of geology is full of inferences, and they change. No one has ever seen a geosyncline. No one has ever seen the welding of tuff. No one has ever seen a granite batholith intrude.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

John McPhee is like an eccentric relative: both fascinating and incomprehensible. But no matter, this is a book about the big picture and in that context it's easier to sidestep the occasional opaqueness.

Originally released as a standalone book B&R is now book 1 in McPhee's geological collection "Annals of the Former World." It was good enough for me to continue on to the next book although I'm a little concerned the big picture won't change and the side material won't be enough to hold my interest.

The big takeaway for me was the dynamic nature of earth and the discussion of plate tectonic theory. It may take tens or hundreds of millions of years to effect change but in that time mountains form and erode, oceans move, continents shift. The planet remakes itself. McPhee effectively described the massive changes so you could almost see them in time lapse. Beyond that there were some funny anecdotes and some technical details that may only interest a burgeoning geologist.

I own both the kindle and physical versions of the book and each have their own advantages. The physical book has a Narrative Table of Contents which provides a handy overview of the collection. The illustrations are also easier to see. The kindle has the built in dictionary which I used regularly.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never would have read this on my own; it was a class assignment. But it was surprisingly fascinating for a book on rock formations. I regret getting rid of it. I think I was trying to raise some quick cash to buy ramen noodles or something.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If by some fiat, I had to restrict this all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mt. Everest is made of marine limestone."

But I'm also going to have to make a tag for "read aloud, during Pandemic."

[Anna Snader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew tectonic plates could be so beautiful? This was a “wedding recommendation” from Andrew Peterson, who discovered, at this said wedding, that I aspire to write place-based nonfiction. I admit, the book confused me at first but it was mainly my fault. I was reading at night. Once I was actually awake, I fell in love with McPhee’s rich imagery, his immersive history and personal accounts, and his expansive and detailed geological focus. I am most captivated by the concept of “deep time,” this idea that the historical/geographical moment we are living is only a millisecond within a larger, sweeping narrative. Geology helps us contextualize our place in it. We are comparatively small, but still apart of this long tradition of the world and humanity. He writes, “‘If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.’” (129)

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone"

John McPhee has been called the pioneer of creative fiction, and it's easy to see why. Here is a book that seeks to highlight the ancient geology of the Basin and Range region of the United States and how it has changed over time. In the hands of a lesser writer, such a subject could never appeal to the lay reader. With McPhee, however, the prohibitive terminologies and speculative timelines of academic geology become charming, and so too do the geologists with whom McPhee travels. I found myself wondering, for really the first time in my life, maybe, what the geology of my own part of the world might reveal about what came before.

[Caitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, glad I read it, as expected john mcphee is worth his salt as a nonfiction writer but also a writer in general. At times I did wondering if there was thought to the structure? What were we doing going back and forth and unconnectedly, maybe it would have been better as a collection of essays? Lastly, who the fuck doesn’t write an acknowledgements? Bitch?

[OGthellama]

Awesome!

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite parts are the parts where he just recites geological terms. “Frasnian. Givetian. Eifelian. Emsian. Pragian.” “Laccoliths. Bismaliths. Bathyliths.” Half joking, of course. Not about the fact that he does this, which he does. Making geological approachable is a tall order I think, because as he notes it’s a “descriptive” science. Prolix might be the better word. I went in craving a rundown of foundational principles, so was a little disappointed. But I think that’s really because geology doesn’t have a lot in the way of foundational principles. (I guess it’s all chemistry when you get right down to it, and plate tectonics on top of that.) McPhee keeps it engaging, though, and I think he does that by delivering on metaphors. So much of what makes geology fun is how much it betters your understanding of the epic scope and scale of earth’s history. How looking at the dirt can deliver you eons. And he’s got a skill for that, even if it sometimes means plundering the compendium of geological terms.

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone

[Austin R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I am biased as a geoscientist, but McPhee takes a subject that might to many at first seem dry or unappealing and make it into something profound and beautiful. It is 200 pages of quietly marveling at not just the way our planet works, but the way that people learn about it and what it is like to study it

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The summit of Mt Everest is marine limestone"
Overall, what a brilliant way of communicating science through so-called 'creative non-fiction'

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starting with an idea of traveling Interstate 80 from New York to San Francisco, John McPhee begins to explore the geology of America and the world. His search takes the reader deep into geology as well as the history of geology. What does New York's Palisades, Delaware Water's Gap, and Nevada's fault block mountains have in common? This book covers it!

The idea of range and basin as seen across the Great Basin (especially Nevada) is used as a laboratory to understand plate tectonics. It's interesting how much of a revolution geology has undergone since the end of World War 2. An interesting book, but heady at times as the reader is dragged through all the ages and epics of the earth's formation. But at times, the detail is overwhelming and it appears that McPhee does like to drop names of those he's met (or dug holes for while exploring the Great Basin). He is also quite proud of his Princeton connections, as he informs his reader over and over again.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was hoping for a time capsule of geology as captured in a book published in 1980. Perhaps much of the information is still relevant, maybe some of it would be amusingly outdated.

But my exercise in nostalgia was quickly overshadowed by sentences like these:

Make a fresh roadcut almost anywhere at all and geologists will close in swiftly, like missionaries racing anthropologists to a tribe just discovered up the Xingu.

When I was seventeen and staring up the skirts of Eastern valleys...

These crystals are like Vietnamese villages. You have to destroy them in order to preserve them.

I closed the book on this last one, on page 40.