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Heard a guy at the Grand Canyon call the rock layers 'just dirt' and it got me going
I was hiking the South Kaibab Trail last month and overheard a guy point at the whole canyon wall and say, 'It's just a bunch of old dirt, right?' to his friend. I almost stopped walking. It's the Vishnu Schist and the Tapeats Sandstone and a billion years of history, not dirt. I ended up talking to them for ten minutes about how each stripe is a different world, like the Redwall Limestone being a sea floor. The guy seemed to get it by the end, said he'd never thought about rocks telling a story. It made me realize how easy it is to see a landscape and not see the time in it. Has anyone else had to give a quick 'Geology 101' lesson to a surprised stranger?
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fisher.diana3mo ago
Jump off from coleman.jade's point about the timeline. It's not just a timeline you walk past, it's a timeline you can actually touch. I remember learning that the Redwall Limestone is full of crinoid fossils, those little sea lily things. So picture this: you're standing on a dry trail in Arizona, and you run your hand over a rock that was literally the bottom of an ocean, with creatures swimming around above where you're breathing. That disconnect is what gets me. It's not just old dirt, it's a whole different planet's worth of dirt stacked on top of itself.
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coleman.jade5mo ago
That idea of seeing the time in a landscape really hits home. I read a piece once about how the canyon walls are basically a giant timeline you can walk past. It makes you want to point at every layer and explain what was living there.
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