Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
entire region, but only from Sucia were fossils well described. Such was the
problem facing me in 1972.
My work in this region had put me in the same boat as William Smith
so long before: Smith had collected fossils from a series of isolated canals
snaking across the English countryside. But which fossils—and their respec-
tive canals—were older and which younger? Had the English rocks been
completely exposed (as in deserts without vegetation), he could have
worked out the age relationships simply by following individual layers of
rock across the countryside. But rocky exposures are the exception rather
than the rule in vegetated country like England, just as they are in my island
country, where the ocean creates far more geological mystery than even the
trees. I had great thickness of strata, isolated by water and vegetation in
many regions (around Vancouver Island), and I had a very imprecise knowl-
edge of the age of these rocks and of how the various islands and isolated
river canyons that exposed rock were correlated one to another. It was nec-
essary to do as the early Europeans had done: spread out, map the various re-
gions (islands and river canyons, in my case), and collect their fossils. The
correct superposition of fossils, once worked out, would serve as a guide to
correlation. The succession of fossils became the tool. Once I knew which
ammonite followed which, I could apply this knowledge—just as Smith and
D'Orbigny had done—to establishing the correct succession of rocks in the
region.
The most critical regions to study are those where two separate succes-
sions of fossils are in contact—where one "zone" (based on a diagnostic as-
semblage of fossils) is directly overlain by another. The problem with Sucia
was that no such zonal contact was exposed there; the same fossils were
found in the lowest beds on Sucia as in the highest beds. Other rocks had to
be searched. Sucia was a "floating" section in that it could still not be placed
in the table of strata for the entire region. Other nearby islands might hold
the key.
I needed a boat and so acquired my father's small aluminum fishing
boat, 14 feet long with a 10-horse outboard. It was very slow. Under perfect
skies I began to ply the calm green waters, using Orcas Island as a base, and
