Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Baja British Columbia
The
surface of the earth seems so fixed. And it is, in our short lives. But if
we take a much longer view, we see that the earth's surface is actually quite
mobile. Fot any locality on earth we can ask, "How long has this place been
at this place?" For some decades now the Vancouver Island region, this
book's long-running example of how the various time machines work, has
been suspected of being a "suspect terrane"—a place that arrived at its cur-
rent geography through continental drift. And as it turns out, that suspicion
was well founded. The story of how we reached this conclusion—the time
machine we used to do so—is the subject of this chapter. The story, from my
point of view at least, begins on a small Canadian island north and west of
Vancouver.
