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Humbled by geology?

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mark blake

Reading the magnificent Indica by Pranay Lal, where the author brings alive the ‘deep natural history’ of the sub-continent, one gets confronted with the scale of reality that we inhabit and of our own insignificance in it. We are surrounded by time in a manner that we cannot comprehend. The earth that we walk on, the rocks that we pass by, the hills that we climb, the ocean waves that lap at our feet, these are all creations of millions of years.

Heat, pressure, time, the earth straining against itself, large land masses drifting, asteroids smashing into the planet, the dance of tectonics – these are what have helped create the planet as we know it. And all it would take is a geological shrug of a shoulder for it to change beyond recognition.

In a few hundred million years, for instance, it is likely that the continents will fuse together, going back to a time a few hundred million years ago, when a similar situation prevailed.

Obviously, none of us or our foreseeable descendants will be alive to see that, but the truth is that no one will ever get to experience the change. Nobody will ever notice the biggest changes that the earth will see.

Geological time moves so slowly that it in a sense it does not exist. The world comes into being as a fully realized fact of life without ever quite showing any signs of becoming one.

 

Thanks!

 

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