John
McPhee gets to the very heart of how the Earth’s
surface can be dramatically changed by slow rates of movement
over vast stretches of time in Annals of the Former World. “When
the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest
mountain,
they set them in snow over the skeletons
of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India,
moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand
feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had formed into
rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements
of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict
all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose:
The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone (McPhee, 1998,
p. 124).”
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