As America and THE WEEKLY STANDARD celebrate the first 100 years of the National Parks Service, worth a read is writer John McPhee’s five-book series Annals of the Former World, a geologic history of the United States that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. McPhee began the series more or less by accident in the late 1970s: McPhee was writing about gold-panning in Alaska and the Yukon, and began to wonder how the gold that washes out of mountains into rivers gets into the mountains in the first place. Living in Princeton, New Jersey, he called the university and asked a geologist, who directed him to a different expert and very colorful geologist named Ken Deffeyes.
A year after McPhee and Deffeyes chatted about gold, McPhee had the idea of driving with Deffeyes to a highway “roadcut” in New Jersey, where they could “look at the blast-exposed face of the rock, read its history, and tell it in the first-person plural,” for a New Yorker piece. As they planned the excursion, McPhee wondered if it might make a better story to drive north through the Adirondacks, going from roadcut to roadcut and watching the geology evolve. Deffeyes told him no: “If you want to do that sort of thing on this continent, go west—go across the structure.”
That was what McPhee decided to do; he drove the width of the country, on I-80, in 5 books, with 5 geologists, over 20 years. He started with Deffeyes, accompanying the gold-vein expert to Nevada silver country, in the great basin and range terrain that dominates America west of the Rockies.
Basin and Range is the first book in the series, and it tells three stories mixed together: the story behind the peculiar geology of those western valley-basins and the mountain ranges that surround them, the life story, in anecdotes, of the fascinating Dr. Deffeyes, and—principally—the story of plate tectonics. The crust-plate theory of how Earth’s continents and oceans came to be had been the subject of a hard-fought scientific-revolution just a decade before McPhee’s road trip began. In fact, more than I-80’s roadcuts, it’s the story of the tectonic “new geology” that ties the five Annals books together. Hard though it may be to believe, it’s a story that never stops entertaining.
The short version of the origin of the Basin and Range Province is this: a flat terrain was puckered up into valleys surrounded by sharp, abruptly risen mountain chains. Death Valley is one of the valleys. The Teton Range is one of the mountain chains. “These mountains,” said Deffeyes, about the Great Basin Ranges in general, “do not rise like bread. They sit still for a long time and build up tension, and then suddenly jump. Passively they are eroded for millennia, and then they jump again. They have been doing this for eight million years.”
The tension that makes ranges jump comes from the force of tectonic plates moving into and past each other. The mechanism that created Nevada wasn’t clear in the late 1970s, and still isn’t clear today. The science of tectonic plates was new then, and it’s new now—though few serious scientists doubt it anymore. The tectonic debate began when geologists started to notice that huge tracts of various continents were not where they ought to be. When rock forms, its magnetic parts are subtly aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field. Near the poles, they’re aligned with lines of longitude; the further towards to the equator the rock forms, the further away from north-south the rock’s magnetic elements lie. So when rock was found to be magnetically out of place, the question was, what had moved? The rocks themselves, or the earth’s magnetic poles? McPhee sums it up, “either the equator had gone to Minnesota or Minnesota had gone to the equator.”
It turned out it was Minnesota that moved. I won’t spoil the story by telling you how that was determined—but it involves a geologist who commanded an attack transport during the second world war, and took crucial measurements of the seabed while landing Marines on Iwo Jima. He went on to become a rear admiral and begin a renaissance in natural science.
Joshua Gelernter is a writer in Connecticut.
