A Novel In Stone.

100 posts! So, here's a shot from a trip I took last summer:

Dinosaur National Monument, Moffat Co, CO 5/25/2013

This is part of Dinosaur National Monument, on the border of northwest Colorado and northeast Utah. It's a neat spot, since the lack of water means we can see a lot of the underlying rock. And those rocks tell a long, slow story, if we're able to read it.

How would we do that? The same way we would read the story we see here:

Black Oak (Quercus velutinus),
 Illinois Beach State Park, Lake County, IL 4/25/2014

This Black Oak probably fell over in our big storm a few years ago, and the park cut it off to keep it from falling the rest of the way onto the trail. If you look closely, you can see that the rings formed around two centers, which tells us that this tree probably had it's tip cut off (by a deer, or maybe a rabbit?) when it was just a sapling, so it grew two trunks. If we were to count the rings, of course, we could tell how old the tree was when it died. If you look at the upper left, there's a darker area, which suggests that the tree survived a fire a while back, and we can see where and when several branches began growing on the lower left. Since the tree died, you can see that there have been fungi and insects working around the outsides, with some tunnels probably caused by beetle larvae in the upper right.

Much of this story probably predates my moving into the area -- oaks are slow growers. Despite that, I feel quite confident that we can know what happened to this tree. We can watch these processes happen elsewhere, and observe the signs that those processes leave behind. That gives us the knowledge we need to infer those processes when all we have are the signs that remain.

This is how we would read the story of Dinosaur National Monument, too. We can observe sediments settling in various settings, we can compress and heat small samples of those same sediments to see how rock forms, and we can compare the fossil remains that Dinosaur is famous for to modern creatures and to fossils from other locations on Earth. Those modern processes tell us, for instance, that the most famous fossils in the park came from animals that were buried in a river's floodplain, in an otherwise rather dry area. And they tell us that sediments form in horizontal layers -- when we see angled layers of rock, or curls like we see here, then we can confidently say that the land itself has been folded by the immense forces of continental drift.

I sometimes tell my students that every place has a story to tell, if we take the time to learn the language. Sometimes the story is short, in a script best read by ecologists. Sometimes, as here, it's a Russian novel, set in a font defined by millions of years of geology.