John McPhee’s five-book Annals of the Former World tracks the author’s geologic journey across the United States, at the fortieth parallel, on Interstate 80, using the highway’s exposed rock “roadcuts” to peek into North America’s geologic past. McPhee’s trip was broken into five books, corresponding to the five geologists who toured him through their areas of expertise. The first, Basin and Range, covers Nevada and Utah.
For the second book of the series, In Suspect Terrain, McPhee examines Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Manhattan—where I-80 begins—and Brooklyn, where Anita Harris began. Anita Harris (née Fishman, son of Harry Fishman, née Hershel Litvak) grew up in cramped Jewish Brooklyn. She became a geologist to escape Brooklyn’s confines, after she discovered she could get paid “for walking around in mountains.”
Harris is a notable geologist for two reasons: First, she discovered that the fossils of prehistoric eels could be used to determine where oil could be found, helping start the American oil boom of the post-embargo years. Second, she is one of those unusual geologists who refuses to take tectonic plate theory as gospel. Plate tectonics is the scientific theme that ties McPhee’s Annals together; when McPhee’s road trip began at the end of the 1970s, the tectonic theory was only a decade old, having emerged from a natural-science revolution in the 1960s. While Basin and Range explained tectonic geology amidst the basins and ranges of America west-of-the-Rockies, the second entry is the skeptical counterpoint looking at America around the Appalachians.
In fact, as its title hints, In Suspect Terrain is a tour of scientific skepticism. Much of the American northeast appears to Anita Harris to have been formed by glaciers, not plate collisions. The theory of tectonic plates floating on the Earth’s mantle is used, says Harris, to explain much too much, as a scientific panacea—which is very unscientific.
In Indiana, Harris points to boulders scattered by the road: “Red Jasper conglomerates. Granite gneiss. Basalt. None of those are from anywhere near here. They’re Canadian. They have been transported hundreds of miles.”
Not transported by moving tectonic plates (as, for instance, was all of Minnesota), but transported by ice sheets. Glaciers, says McPhee, “have borne immense freight—rock they pluck up, shear off, rip from the country as they move. They grind much of it into gravel, sand silt, and clay. When the ice melts, it gives up its cargo, dumping it by the trillions of tons… [a] glacier dumped Long Island where it is… and Nantucket, and Cape Cod, and all but the west of Martha’s Vineyard.” And along the way, it carved and gouged the rivers and valleys of New England, New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
But, like plate tectonics, the theory of glacial earth-movers was initially rejected. The theory was conceived by an amateur Swiss mountaineer named Perraudin, who suggested it to a geologist named Jean Charpentier, who ran it by a colleague named Ignace Venetz, who helped him refine it. They proposed it to the geology world at large and were rebuffed. The rebuffers included Jean Agassiz, a young professor of natural history. His rejection notwithstanding, Aggasiz decided to go up into the alpine terrain that had inspired Perraudin to begin with, to see for himself what was what. During his expedition, he not only recognized the simple, elegant truth of boulders being carried around by ice—he formed a new theory, of an ice age that had blanketed Europe in ice “many thousands of feet thick.”
To begin with, that idea was rejected, too. Its reception, writes McPhee, “was colder than the ice.” In the spirit of certain modern science-circles, the anti-ice-age cadre was vindictive. For his heresy, Agassiz was blocked from an appointment to the University of Berlin. He was openly ridiculed by colleagues. He did not, however, give up—and his theory found support among the more adventuresome geologists of the United States.
It was also favored by another controversial geologist, who was then fighting a scientific revolution of his own: Charles Darwin. Darwin thought that Agassiz was worth any three geologists they had at Cambridge or Oxford, and said so. Agassiz did not, however, return the compliment; he thought Darwin’s theory of evolution made logical jumps that were unjustified and left important questions unanswered.
Nonetheless, it’s the skeptics who are the heroes of In Suspect Terrain—Anita Harris included, though McPhee doesn’t hide his enthusiasm for plate tectonics. For her part, Harris does not reject plate theory, just its overuse. She sums her position up in the book’s last paragraph—in terms that I suspect will warm the heart of many skeptical WEEKLY STANDARD readers:
But, she adds, “You’ve always got to have devil’s advocates.”
Joshua Gelernter is a writer in Connecticut.
