IN THE BEGINNING - Snowball Earth - page 30

ice in Newcastle, his colleagues were scornful. Didn't he know about the new findings? Why was he
still harping on about an interpretation that had been so clearly superseded?
On the bus back from the conference centre, Brian found himself sitting next to John Crowell. He
told John about his glacial rocks in Svalbard, and about his idea of the Great Infra-Cambrian Glaci-
ation. John's response was kindly, and almost unbearably infuriating. They're not really made by ice,
John said. Tell you what. Why don't I get some funding to go to Svalbard? Then I can check out how
your rocks really formed.
Brian ground his teeth. He knew his rocks. He also knew what he was doing. He didn't need
someone else to go and check his work.
In truth, it's not too hard to distinguish ice rocks from those created by mudslides. When ice is on
the move, the rocks that it carries are often scarred and scratched with lines all pointing in the same
direction. You can tell from the types of rocks whether they have been transported from long distances,
or originated close to shore. In your deposit you might find a boulder that appears alone and has gently
distorted the lines of the mud around it. Such objects obviously fell on to the seafloor from a melting
iceberg overhead. Brian knew what signs to look for, and he knew he was looking at the effects of ice.
But nobody would believe him, and John Crowell's new theory stood.
Over the next few decades, Brian published more and more careful descriptions demonstrating that
the Precambrian rock jumbles around the world had been created by ice. 9 John Crowell, meanwhile,
travelled to all seven continents, scrutinizing the rocks, gradually ruling them in (though, ironically, he
never went to Svalbard). In the end, John and the rest of the world conceded. Brian, the man perpetu-
ally ahead of his time, turned out to have been right all along. “He was willing to take a flier,” John
says now, rather ruefully. “And he turned out to be more correct than us sceptics.”
But that still wasn't enough for other geologists. There was more trouble for Brian on the horizon,
in the form of an old theory: continental drift.
I N THE early 1960s, earth science was being shaken to the core. Before then, most people had believed
that the continents were fixed in place. Afterwards, almost everyone believed that they shifted. Com-
pared to this, any worries about the ice rocks seemed minor. For geologists, the safe, comfortable
ground beneath their feet was suddenly moving. Everyone was talking about it.
Plate tectonics, as the theory became known, was the new manifestation of an old idea. Back in
the early 1900s, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener had already made the disturbing proposal
that continents moved around the surface of the Earth.
Wegener was a man blessed with intense curiosity about the world around him. Though studying
the atmosphere was his day job, he found it hard to resist almost any earthly mystery that came his
way. The planet, Wegener felt, was teasing him with its secrets. Once, after a journey to the Arctic,
he wrote about the marvel of the northern lights, and how tantalized he felt by them. “Above us . . .
a powerful symphony of light played in deepest, most solemn silence above our heads, as if mocking
our efforts: Come up here and investigate me! Tell me what I am!” 10
Part-time astronomer, geologist, adventurer, he made many expeditions to the polar regions, and
even dabbled in hot-air ballooning. (At the age of twenty-six, he set the world record along with his
brother, by staying aloft continuously for fifty-two hours.) Though he made important discoveries
about the physics of the atmosphere as well as the wayward behaviour of continents, he was repeatedly