Ephemeral islands, petrified raindrops, a collection of body stones, a shared birthday with a volcano. Certain geological processes have a way of evoking a more personal response to the idea of geological time.
What is the duration of daily life, the life span of an island, a volcano, your own time floating on tectonic plates? What does a time span of 300,000,000 years actually mean? This is a field guide to new landmass.
PHYSICAL GEOLOGY
While conducting research at the Manchester Museum, in the ‘oddities drawer’ of the Geology Department I came across a fine collection of lava medallions from Mount Vesuvius — magma pressed between forged steel plates to form an imprint (imagine a waffle iron that uses lava as batter). In the same drawer, a small stone relief sculpture appeared to be carved out of pure white alabaster. In fact, it was a limestone cast created via the same process that forms stalactites in a cave – a cave cast, or cast stalactite.
I went to Saint Nectaire, a small thermal town in the mountains of the Auvergne in France to meet with Eric Papon, whose family founded the Fontaines Petrifiantes, and the art of cave casting, seven generations ago. In a normal limestone cave, it takes one hundred years for a stalactite to grow one centimetre, in caves of the Fontaines Petrifiantes one centimetre grows in one year.
Every year Eric and his assistant facilitate the formation of hundreds of cave casts through a labour intensive process involving twenty-five meter high casting ladders, carbonate waterfalls and natural rubber moulds which slowly fill with limestone deposits over the course of a year. In 2008 we began to work together. Over the course of ten months, we made 20 new cave casts formed in the calcifying springs of the Fontaines Petrifiantes. The last casts were cracked open to coincide with my 36th birthday in September 2009.
AN ORGANISM GEOLOGY
There are two carbonate activities that take place inside the caves of Saint Nectaire. Encrustation and casting. You have read detail about the casting process. For encrustation to take place, the following occurs. An animal dies. It is stuffed. It is placed beneath the waterfalls, turned every day, and at the end of a year, maybe two, the animal is entirely encrusted in limestone. You could say it is petrified, but it is not.
If it were petrified it would turn to stone – from a living thing to geology complete. In Saint Nectaire, the animals are encased, surrounded by a stalactite. The boundary between the biological and geological can begin to blur. A mirror to this process can be seen in ‘body stones’ – gall stones and kidney stones excavated by body mineralogists. It took a long time for me to realize that a gall stone is not a figure of speech. The body is a geological agent, it forms geology. Snails form stones. They can be considered as durational geology on fast-forward in slow motion.
An excerpt from a letter written by the keeper of a geology collection:
Dear Both,
Recently read Charles Lyell’s quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which in book 15 are musings on Pythagorean doctrine…“Nothing perishes in this world; but things merely vary and change their form.” He goes on to give examples of these changes including… “13. There are streams which have a petrifying power and convert the substances which they touch into marble.”
We learn that by placing stones on a grave, one participates in building a tombstone. It is a sort of calling card to tell the deceased that you have paid them a visit. Two geological epochs collide when we leave a rock on a gravestone. We facilitate personal orogenies. To illustrate, my father’s gravestone is made of granite. I left a piece of lava we found together in Iceland on top of his stone the last time I was there – metamorphic rock in contact with new landmass. What is the correlation between a body stone and a stone on a grave? In the Fontaines Petrifiantes, animals become Karst. The body (flesh) made stone.
I heard a terrible story. A woman believed she was pregnant, but no birth was ever to follow. Many years later when she died a baby was found to be still inside her, encrusted in stone, discovered during her dissection. A lithopedion, a stone baby.
I spoke with a paleontologist who told me a fossil is the presentation of the moment of death. However trace fossils record an action – eating or walking, but not the organism itself. My father’s name was David. I am named after his father, Isaac Harry Halperin – IHH – the same as my mother’s grandfather. Now that my father is no longer alive, if I have a child, I will name it after him – new initials DAH.
PLACES WHERE STONE TURNS TO FLESH
I have been thinking about specific geological phenomena – caves, waterfalls, lava flows – as a point where the biological and the geological merge – whether through petrification, as in the case of animals in the Fontaines Petrifiantes, or through a more recent encounter inside of a lava tube.
We went to Hawaii to spend time with the volcanoes. Once there, you are 2,500 miles away from land in any direction you look. There are no short cuts to get home. Antarctica is closer to other landmass than that volcanic chain. We slept in a place seven miles from the point where lava enters the ocean. The current eruption has been going since 1984. We heard it was possible to enter a hidden lava tube. We were able to join an expedition that week. We went down a ladder, deep underground. Inside the artery of a volcano.
The volcano is like a body. It pumps lava throughout its system and breathes in and out through the mouth of a crater. A lava tube is like an artery coming out of the ventricle of a volcanic heart. Imagine a tunnel or a very long pipe that happens to be made of cooled magma. Lava travels through the tunnel until it empties out into the ocean. New arteries form as needed. Layers lie down one upon another. Through this process, new land is formed. When a lava tunnel remains empty, it becomes a lava tube.
Once inside the lava tube, the walls appeared to be covered the finest silver lattice work – moonlit lace clinging to every surface. In fact, it was a rare type of bacteria that only lives in several cave environments throughout the world. In the search to understand how chemotherapy could work, these particular bacteria were a critical piece of the puzzle. A most unexpected revelation – to be standing inside of a lava tube on an island 2,500 miles from anywhere else on earth, surrounded by silver lace, and realize these organisms – thriving inside a lava tube – had drastically affected my father’s quality of life. When we entered the lava tube we were told we could not touch any part of it except for the rock floor. Even the natural oils from your fingertips would wipe out the entire bacteria colony.
END NOTES
What is the correlation between a volcanic island, a cave cast and a body stone? Metamorphic rock comes from the Greek to ‘change form.’ On top of a mountain, I found fossils from the ocean floor. In the early days of exploration, new landmass was named – New Amsterdam, Heilprin Land, Ferdinandea. How do we locate a body stone on the map? Should we mark the birth and death of an island? A cave cast is a free-floating landmass that can be passed from one person to another. A body stone, a miniature planet travelling through an interior universe.
We are autobiographical trace fossils.
First published in Physical Geology, eds. S Barnes and A. Patrizio (Berlin: Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 2010).