Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1
'The Whole Sea Boiled and Blazed'
When we follow humanity in its earliest forms, creeping ten-
tatively out from the African Rift Valley or, later, from what is
now Australia, and moving gradually and ignorantly across the
oceans by means of Continental Drift, we are traversing a period
of two and a half million years or more. Adding on another
ten or twelve thousand years, a blink of an eye by comparison,
we can watch settlement in the Middle East, in the Americas,
continental Europe and Southeast Asia. Here we arrive at the
beginnings of ritual, the making of tools, and the first groupings
of people cooperating to develop agriculture, the beginning of
language and narrative, and the beginning too of accounting
and writing. Across all these expanses of time volcanoes blasted
from much the same weak points in the earth's surface as they
had blasted for aeons before. It's all the same to them. They
carry on in much the same way today. Many weak points have
cooled down and dried up, but the map of the earth's cracks,
now, bears a clear relationship to the map of the crust before
Continental Drift, and is a direct product of the earth's cooling
movements.
Volcanoes were at work long before any form of humanity
began to populate the planet and take notice. Thus to human
history, though both localized and scattered, they are a given,
constant presence. As the most violent terrestrial outrage that the
planet can offer and humanity can witness, volcanic action may
thus be the source of the first faint distant tracings of narrative
on human memory.
