The Earth: An Intimate History

  • Richard Fortey
HarperCollins: 2004. 502 pp. £25. To be published in the US by Knopf in November 0375406263 0002570114. | ISBN: 0-375-40626-3

Neither names nor place will I reveal, but the year was 1968. We had just heard a lecture delivered by a geological bigwig of the day. His subject had been the new geological synthesis, and he had preached the gospel of plate tectonics. As we left the auditorium, one of my colleagues — a noted palaeontologist — commented: “He really seems to take all this quite seriously!”

My colleague was not unique. We were living at the time amidst a revolution in geological thought. Our intellectual world was experiencing massive seismic upheaval. Those of us raised on the first edition of Arthur Holmes' Principles of Physical Geology had once marvelled at the daring that had allowed him to devote a whole final chapter to continental drift. Yet by the 1960s we were being told that our continents ride mobile plates as performers ride their bucking mounts in some Western rodeo. Exciting stuff. I feel it a great privilege to have been an Earth scientist during a period when geology sprang back into vigorous life after well-nigh a hundred years of semiparalytic lethargy.

An eminent palaeontologist, Richard Fortey has achieved an international reputation as an expositor of the Earth sciences, as the cover of his latest book emphasizes: his name appears in the same typeface as the title. In Life: An Unauthorised Biography (HarperCollins, 1997), Fortey traced the natural history of the Earth over four billion years. Now he has turned his attention to the annals of the very Earth itself. The tale has been largely rewritten since 1963, when Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews published in Nature their famed essay “Magnetic anomalies over ocean ridges”.

Fortey takes my mind still further back, to the swinging big bands of my youth. In the opening number I applaud when, under Fortey's direction, the ’bones resume their seats and the golden sax section takes over. The star trumpet inspires foot-tapping ecstasy with an up-tempo eruption. The male vocalist takes over the mike to add his gravelly contribution. And all the while the entire outfit swings forward to the exciting, thrusting beat of the rhythm section. Count Basie and Benny Goodman may have gone, but the sheer energy of Fortey's plate-tectonic rhythm section ensures that the geology big band will continue to swing before large audiences for decades to come.

I wholeheartedly approve of Fortey's literary strategy. He wishes us to remember that his is a field-based science. Through these pages we are taken to examine actual rocks. One illustration facing page 214 says it all — five geologists confront a classic section. In days of yore they would all have sported hammers, but today we are in conservation mode and not a single hammer is to be seen.

The book is constructed around a framework of visits to specific geological locations scattered around the world. For each location, Fortey offers a clear, graphic and entertaining exposition of the manner in which, over an eon, the observed geological phenomena have achieved their present state. And he forcefully reminds us that events remotely embedded in deep time may yet be highly relevant as determinants for the lifestyles of modern human communities. And all the while, on page after page, behind Fortey's scintillating solo breaks, we hear the steady, driving beat of that plate-tectonic rhythm section.

The first location to which Fortey takes us is the Bay of Naples, to imbibe the lessons of Vesuvius, Pompeii and the columns of the Temple of Serapis. He finds other didactic locations in Dartmoor and Scotland's northwest Highlands, in the Czech Republic and the Alps, in the Indian Deccan traps and Hawaii, in California and Newfoundland. I have had the good fortune to visit many of Fortey's locations, and his handsomely crafted chapters evoke abundant memories. A traverse of the exposed plane of Scotland's Moine Thrust was for Ben Peach so emotional an experience that it commonly brought tears to his eyes. I feel much the same about the Grand Canyon, which also features here. Fortey terms the sequence exposed there “the diary of the earth”. Never again will I hear the third movement (‘On the Trail’) of Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite without thinking of Buttermilk, the mule that carried Fortey down that magnificent stratigraphic ladder to the great river itself.

Everybody who has ever written a book knows that when the advance copy arrives it instantly falls open to reveal something that one wishes had been otherwise. For Fortey this must have been the NASA photograph on page 462. This is not the Gulf of Aden, as the caption claims, but the Gulf of Aqaba. I offer just one other trivial correction. Throughout the book, Fortey pays repeated and well-merited tribute to Das Antlitz der Erde by Eduard Suess. On page 26 he ascribes the English translation of this classic to Hertha Sollas, ‘wife’ of William Johnson Sollas — William did have two wives (not simultaneously), but Hertha was one of his two daughters. She was one of a talented group of ladies who studied science in Cambridge around 1900 but whose gender denied them any of the university's degrees.

The vast majority of publishers' blurbs are not to be taken seriously, but I think there may be some truth in the claim that this book “will change the way you view the world — permanently”. This is a work that I admire and recommend. My palaeontological colleague of 1968, although long in retirement, remains scientifically active. I will certainly be telling him how much I enjoyed my tour of Earth's crude and stitched mosaic in Fortey's excellent company.