Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
oriented cores, each about an inch long, from the solid rock that makes up
the fossiliferous shale of Hornby Island. On the third day the infernal din of
our drilling was overshadowed by an even louder noise: A Royal Canadian
Mounted Police helicopter landed on our camping spot and proceeded to
root out much of the shrubbery. It was the annual Hornby Island pot raid.
Months later the slow analysis of the magnetic cores was completed,
and it was as if we had been smoking the pot growing so plentifully on
Hornby Island, for many of the magnetic numbers seemed to make no sense.
Cores taken from adjacent beds gave wildly fluctuating results. Some cores
were somewhat "well-behaved" (the euphemism employed by paleomag-
netists for magnetic results that show some semblance of orderly change
when analyzed). Most, however, were far more chaotic. According to Ken
Verosub, who had been involved in my earlier work in California and Spain,
the numbers were too scrambled to be publishable. 1 thought that more than
a few of the cores betrayed the presence of the telltale reversals, but I was
overruled. Even more vexing, the grant that funded this project expired, and
no more analysis could be run. Once again I had completed a project in
which all of the immense work involved in collecting the cores was for
naught, or so it seemed. Our results from this expedition were never pub-
lished. I had to leave the Vancouver Island rocks where they lay. But the
revolution in the earth sciences called plate tectonics, or continental drift,
was about to make Hornby Island a pivotal place in one of the most inter-
esting of all scientific controversies. Central to this would be the magnetic
record from Hornby—and yet another time machine.
Coincidence or continental drift?
The green, fossiliferous shale exposed on Sucia, Hornby, and the other is-
lands of the Vancouver Island region—rocks grouped together by their com-
mon age and origin—make up a terrain that in many ways seems iconic of
the Pacific Northwest. Who could deny the nativeness of this land drenched
with rain, carpeted with fir trees, ferns and clinging moss, and surrounded by
cold green seas once filled with salmon and halibut (riches now supplanted
