Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Supreme over all is silence. Discounting the cry of the occasional bird, the wailing of a pack of coyotes, silence—a great spatial silence—is pure in the Basin and Range. It is a soundless immensity with mountains in it. You stand, as we do now, and look up at a high mountain front, and turn your head and look fifty miles down the valley, and there is utter silence. It is the silence of the winter forests of the Yukon, here carried high to the ridgelines of the ranges. “It is a soul-shattering silence,” the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote of southern Nevada in Disturbing the Universe. “You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing. No rustling of leaves in the wind, no rumbling of distant traffic, no chatter of birds or insects or children. You are alone with God in that silence. There in the white flat silence I began for the first time to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard?”

  What Deffeyes finds pleasant here in Pleasant Valley is the aromatic sage. Deffeyes grew up all over the West, his father a petroleum engineer, and he says without apparent irony that the smell of sagebrush is one of two odors that will unfailingly bring upon him an attack of nostalgia, the other being the scent of an oil refinery. Flash floods have caused boulders the size of human heads to come tumbling off the range. With alluvial materials of finer size, they have piled up in fans at the edge of the basin. (“The cloudburst is the dominant sculptor here.”) The fans are unconsolidated. In time to come, they will pile up to such enormous thicknesses that they will sink deep and be heated and compressed to form conglomerate. Erosion, which provides the material to build the fans, is tearing down the mountains even as they rise. Mountains are not somehow created whole and subsequently worn away. They wear down as they come up, and these mountains have been rising and eroding in fairly even ratio for millions of years—rising and shedding sediment steadily through time, always the same, never the same, like row upon row of fountains. In the southern part of the province, in the Mojave, the ranges have stopped rising and are gradually wearing away. The Shadow Mountains. The Dead Mountains, Old Dad Mountains, Cowhole Mountains, Bullion, Mule, and Chocolate mountains. They are inselberge now, buried ever deeper in their own waste. For the most part, though, the ranges are rising, and there can be no doubt of it here, hundreds of miles north of the Mojave, for we are looking at a new seismic scar that runs as far as we can see. It runs along the foot of the mountains, along the fault where the basin meets the range. From out in the valley, it looks like a long, buff-painted, essentially horizontal stripe. Up close, it is a gap in the vegetation, where plants growing side by side were suddenly separated by several metres, where, one October evening, the basin and the range —Pleasant Valley, Tobin Range—moved, all in an instant, apart. They jumped sixteen feet. The erosion rate at which the mountains were coming down was an inch a century. So in the mountains’ contest with erosion they gained in one moment about twenty thousand years. These mountains 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 about eight million years. This fault, which jumped in 1915, opened like a zipper far up the valley, and, exploding into the silence, tore along the mountain base for upward of twenty miles with a sound that suggested a runaway locomotive.

  “This is the sort of place where you really do not put a nuclear plant,” says Deffeyes. “There was other action in the neighborhood at the same time—in the Stillwater Range, the Sonoma Range, Pumpernickel Valley. Actually, this is not a particularly spectacular scarp. The lesson is that the whole thing—the whole Basin and Range, or most of it—is alive. The earth is moving. The faults are moving. There are hot springs all over the province. There are young volcanic rocks. Fault scars everywhere. The world is splitting open and coming apart. You see a sudden break in the sage like this and it says to you that a fault is there and a fault block is coming up. This is a gorgeous, fresh, young, active fault scarp. It’s growing. The range is lifting up. This Nevada topography is what you see during mountain building. There are no foothills. It is all too young. It is live country. This is the tectonic, active, spreading, mountain-building world. To a nongeologist, it’s just ranges, ranges, ranges.”

  Most mountain ranges around the world are the result of compression, of segments of the earth’s crust being brought together, bent, mashed, thrust and folded, squeezed up into the sky—the Himalaya, the Appalachians, the Alps, the Urals, the Andes. The ranges of the Basin and Range came up another way. The crust—in this region between the Rockies and the Sierra—is spreading out, being stretched, being thinned, being literally pulled to pieces. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City, on opposite sides of the province, have moved apart sixty miles. The crust of the Great Basin has broken into blocks. The blocks are not, except for simplicity’s sake, analogous to dominoes. They are irregular in shape. They more truly suggest stretch marks. Which they are. They trend nearly north-south because the direction of the stretching is roughly east-west. The breaks, or faults, between them are not vertical but dive into the earth at angles that average sixty degrees, and this, from the outset, affected the centers of gravity of the great blocks in a way that caused them to tilt. Classically, the high edge of one touched the low edge of another and formed a kind of trough, or basin. The high edge—sculpted, eroded, serrated by weather—turned into mountains. The detritus of the mountains rolled into the basin. The basin filled with water—at first, it was fresh blue water—and accepted layer upon layer of sediment from the mountains, accumulating weight, and thus unbalancing the block even further. Its tilt became more pronounced. In the manner of a seesaw, the high, mountain side of the block went higher and the low, basin side went lower until the block as a whole reached a state of precarious and temporary truce with God, physics, and mechanical and chemical erosion, not to mention, far below, the agitated mantle, which was running a temperature hotter than normal, and was, almost surely, controlling the action. Basin and range. Integral fault blocks: low side the basin, high side the range. For five hundred miles they nudged one another across the province of the Basin and Range. With extra faulting, and whatnot, they took care of their own irregularities. Some had their high sides on the west, some on the east. The escarpment of the Wasatch Mountains—easternmost expression of this immense suite of mountains—faced west. The Sierra—the westernmost, the highest, the predominant range, with Donner Pass only halfway up it—presented its escarpment to the east. As the developing Sierra made its skyward climb—as it went on up past ten and twelve and fourteen thousand feet—it became so predominant that it cut off the incoming Pacific rain, cast a rain shadow (as the phenomenon is called) over lush, warm, Floridian and verdant Nevada. Cut it off and kept it dry.

  We move on (we’re in a pickup) into dusk—north up Pleasant Valley, with its single telephone line on sticks too skinny to qualify as poles. The big flanking ranges are in alpenglow. Into the cold clear sky come the ranking stars. Jackrabbits appear, and crisscross the road. We pass the darkening shapes of cattle. An eerie trail of vapor traverses the basin, sent up by a clear, hot stream. It is only a couple of feet wide, but it is running swiftly and has multiple sets of hot white rapids. In the source springs, there is a thumping sound of boiling and rage. Beside the springs are lucid green pools, rimmed with accumulated travertine, like the travertine walls of Lincoln Center, the travertine pools of Havasu Canyon, but these pools are too hot to touch. Fall in there and you are Brunswick stew. “This is a direct result of the crustal spreading,” Deffeyes says. “It brings hot mantle up near the surface. There is probably a fracture here, through which the water is coming up to this row of springs. The water is rich in dissolved minerals. Hot springs like these are the source of vein-type ore deposits. It’s the same story that I told you about the hydrothermal transport of gold. When rainwater gets down into hot rock, it brings up what i
t happens to find there—silver, tungsten, copper, gold. An ore-deposit map and a hot-springs map will look much the same. Seismic waves move slowly through hot rock. The hotter the rock, the slower the waves. Nowhere in the continental United States do seismic waves move more slowly than they do beneath the Basin and Range. So we’re not woofing when we say there’s hot mantle down there. We’ve measured the heat.”

  The basin-range fault blocks in a sense are floating on the mantle. In fact, the earth’s crust everywhere in a sense is floating on the mantle. Add weight to the crust and it rides deeper, remove cargo and it rides higher, exactly like a vessel at a pier. Slowly disassemble the Rocky Mountains and carry the material in small fragments to the Mississippi Delta. The delta builds down. It presses ever deeper on the mantle. Its depth at the moment exceeds twenty-five thousand feet. The heat and the pressure are so great down there that the silt is turning into siltstone, the sand into sandstone, the mud into shale. For another example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet loaded two miles of ice onto Scotland, and that dunked Scotland in the mantle. After the ice melted, Scotland came up again, lifting its beaches high into the air. Isostatic adjustment. Let go a block of wood that you hold underwater and it adjusts itself to the surface isostatically. A frog sits on the wood. It goes down. He vomits. It goes up a little. He jumps. It adjusts. Wherever landscape is eroded away, what remains will rise in adjustment. Older rock is lifted to view. When, for whatever reason, crust becomes thicker, it adjusts downward. All of this—with the central image of the basin-range fault blocks floating in the mantle—may suggest that the mantle is molten, which it is not. The mantle is solid. Only in certain pockets near the surface does it turn into magma and squirt upward. The temperature of the mantle varies widely, as would the temperature of anything that is two thousand miles thick. Under the craton, it is described as chilled. By surface standards, though, it is generally white hot, everywhere around the world—white hot and solid but magisterially viscous, permitting the crust above it to “float.” Deffeyes was in his bathtub one Saturday afternoon thinking about the viscosity of the mantle. Suddenly he stood up and reached for a towel. “Piano wire!” he said to himself, and he dressed quickly and went to the library to look up a book on piano tuning and to calculate the viscosity of the wire. Just what he guessed—1022 poises. Piano wire. Look under the hood of a well-tuned Steinway and you are looking at strings that could float a small continent. They are rigid, but ever so slowly they will sag, will slacken, will deform and give way, with the exact viscosity of the earth’s mantle. “And that,” says Deffeyes, “is what keeps the piano tuner in business.” More miles, and there appears ahead of us something like a Christmas tree alone in the night. It is Winnemucca, there being no other possibility. Neon looks good in Nevada. The tawdriness is refined out of it in so much wide black space. We drive on and on toward the glow of colors. It is still far away and it has not increased in size. We pass nothing. Deffeyes says, “On these roads, it’s ten to the minus five that anyone will come along.” The better part of an hour later, we come to the beginnings of the casino-flashing town. The news this year is that dollar slot machines are outdrawing nickel slot machines for the first time, ever.

  Deffeyes’ purposes in coming to Nevada are pure and noble. His considerable energies appear to be about equally divided between the pursuit of pure science and the pursuit of noble metal. In order to enloft humanity’s understanding of the basins, he has been taking paleomagnetic samples of basin sediments. He seeks insight into the way in which the rifting earth comes apart. He wants to perceive the subtle differences in the histories of one fault block and another. His ideas about silver, on the other hand, may send his children to college. This is, after all, Nevada, whose geology bought the tickets for the Spanish-American War. George Hearst found his fortune in the ground here. There were silver ores of such concentration that certain miners did nothing more to the heavy gray rocks than pack them up and ship them to Europe. To be sure, those days and those rocks—those supergene enrichments—are gone, but it has crossed the mind of Deffeyes that there may be something left for Deffeyes. Banqueting Sybarites surely did not lick their plates.

  We rented the pickup in Salt Lake City—a white Ford. “If we had a bale of hay in here, we’d be Nevada authentic,” Deffeyes remarked, and he swept snow off the truck with a broom. November. Three inches on the ground and more falling, slanting in to us from the west. We squinted, and rubbed the insides of the windows, and passed low commercial buildings that drifted in and out of sight. WILD DUCKS & PHEASANTS PROCESSED. DEER CUT & WRAPPED. DRIVE-IN WINDOW. 7:00 TILL MIDNIGHT. Behind us we could not see, of course, the wall of the Wasatch, its triangles and pinnacles white, but westward of the city visibility improved, and soon other mountains—the Oquirrh Mountains—came looming out of the blankness, their strata steeply dipping and as distinct as the stripes of an awning. “Those are Pennsylvanian and Permian sandstones and limestones,” Deffeyes said. “There was glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. The ice came and went. Sea level kept flapping up and down. So the deposition has a striped look.”

  When a mountain range comes up into the air, a whole lot comes up with it. The event that had lifted the Oquirrhs—the stretching of the crust until it broke into blocks—was only among the latest of many episodes that have adjusted dramatically the appearance of central Utah. As we could plainly see from the interstate, the rock now residing in that striped mountainside had once been brutally shoved around—shoved, not pulled, and with such force that a large part of it had been tipped up more than ninety degrees, to and well beyond the vertical. Overturned. Such violence can happen on an epic scale. There is an entire nation in Europe that is upside down. It is not a superpower, but it is a whole country nonetheless—San Marino, overturned. Basin and Range faulting, on its own, has never overturned anything. The great fault blocks have a maximum tilt of thirty degrees. The event that so deformed the rock in the Oquirrhs took place roughly sixty million years ago—fifty-two million years before the Oquirrhs came into existence—and it was an event that made alpine fresh compressional mountains, which had their time here under the sun and were disassembled by erosion, taken down and washed away; and now those crazily upended stripes within the Oquirrhs are the evidence and fragmental remains of those ancestral mountains, brought up out of the earth and put on view as a component of new mountains. The new mountains—the mountains of the Basin and Range—are packages variously containing rock that formed at one time or another during some five hundred and fifty million years, or an eighth of the earth’s total time. It was thought until recently that older rock was in certain of the ranges, but improved techniques of dating have shown that not to be true. Seven-eighths of the earth’s time is lost here, gone without evidence—rock that disintegrated and went off to be recycled. One-eighth, for all that, is no small amount of earth history, and as the great crustal blocks of the Basin and Range have tipped their mountains into the air, with individual faults offset as much as twenty thousand feet, they have brought to the surface and have randomly exposed former seafloors and basaltic dikes, entombed rivers and veins of gold, volcanic spewings and dunal sands—chaotic, concatenated shards of time. In the Basin and Range are the well-washed limestones of clear and sparkling shallow Devonian seas. There are dark, hard, cherty siltstones from some deep ocean trench full of rapidly accumulating Pennsylvanian guck. There are Triassic sediments rich in fossils, scattered pods of Cretaceous granite, Oligocene welded tuffs. There is not much layer-cake geology. The layers have too often been tortured by successive convulsive events.

  The welded tuffs were the regional surface when basin-range faulting began. And for more than twenty million previous years they had been the surface, the uppermost rock, with scant relief in the topography of these vast volcanic plains, whose great size and barren aspect are commensurate with the magnitude of the holocaust that brought the rock onto the land. Up through perhaps a hundred fissures, dikes, chimneys, vents, fra
ctures came a furiously expanding, exploding mixture of steam and rhyolite glass, and, in enormous incandescent clouds, heavier than air, it scudded across the landscape like a dust storm. The volcanic ash that would someday settle down on Herculaneum and Pompeii was a light powder compared with this stuff, and as the great ground-covering clouds oozed into the contours of the existing landscape they sent streams hissing to extinction, and covered the streambeds and then the valleys, and—with wave after wave of additional cloud—obliterated entire drainages like plaster filling a mold. They filled in every gully and gulch, cave, swale, and draw until almost nothing stuck above a blazing level plain, and then more clouds came exploding from below and in unimpeded waves spread out across the plain. Needless to say, every living creature in the region died. Single outpourings settled upon areas the size of Massachusetts, and before the heavy ash stopped flowing it had covered twenty times that. Moreover, it was hot enough to weld. As the great clouds collapsed and condensed, they formed a compact rock in large part consisting of volcanic glass. It was so thick—as much as three hundred metres thick—that crystals formed slowly in the cooling glass. “When you bury a countryside in that much rock so hot it welds, that is the ultimate environmental catastrophe,” Deffeyes remarked. “I’m glad there hasn’t been one recently.”

  The province, stung like that, sat still here for twenty-two million years, with volcanism continuing only on its periphery, while erosion worked on the tuff, making draws and gulches, modest valleys and unspectacular hills, but not extensively altering the essentially level plain. There was no repetition of the foaming, frothing outpourings that had completely changed many tens of thousands of square miles of the face of the earth, but so much disturbance arising from and within the underlying earth was obviously precursive of disturbances to follow, when the plains of welded tuff and some thousands of feet below them began to rift into crustal blocks and become the Basin and Range.