A Geological Interlude

The Strange Case of the Iapetus Suture

The conjunction of the Icelandic eruption with my visit to England (see my last Blog) caused me to wander again in tectonic realms.

My starting point was the matter of volcanic island arcs that are created by the tectonic subduction of oceanic plates. In Himalayan Portfolios I discussed the Kohistan-Ladakh arc that became the area between the greater Himalayan chain and the Karakoram. This topic awakened me to the presence of an arc nearer home. In my April Blog I mentioned the remains of an island arc which runs south to north in Connecticut to the east of the Connecticut valley where it is known as the Bronson Hill formation. It continues up through Massachussets, New Hampshire and northeast across Maine. This arc formed in the early to mid Ordovician period in what geologists call the Iapeatus Ocean. This was a time before there was any Atlantic Ocean and before a diversity of oddly composed continents assembled into the super continent Pangaea. The arc formed off the coast of Laurentia (later to become North America). Continuing plate motion thrust the arc against the mainland around 450 million years ago producing a substantial "Taconic" mountain range. (This is the simple account; the details of the process are exceedingly murky.) The Taconic mountain-building process was an early stage in the formation of the northern Appalachian Mountains. The Scottish Grampian mountain building process took place about this time (see below.)

Also in the Ordovician period, but thousands of miles away on the other side of the Iapetus Ocean, another subduction of the Ocean floor began the process that created the English Lake District. Between 460 and 450 million years ago subduction generated the Eykott Volcanic Group, and, later, the larger Borrowdale Volcanic Group. A large island caldera, similar to the Greek island of Santorini, may have repeatedly built up and then erupted. These volcanic islands eventually docked with the coast of a mini continent known to geologists as Avalonia. Lava flows and vast amounts of ash covered the area and the mountains created formed the core of the Lake District. This European end of Avalonia later became the underlying layers of England and Wales, southeast Ireland, most of the Isle of Man and part of Belgium. Not far away was another slightly larger continent: Baltica (Norway etc.)

The Suture: In the Ordovician period there were no land plants or land animals, but the island volcanoes must have made life very unpleasant for local trilobites and graptolites. These had distinct forms according to whether they resided on the Avalonian or Laurentian side of the Iapatus Ocean. Scotland along with New England was on the Laurention side of the ocean far away from Avalonia and Baltica (hence the Grampian and Taconic connection.) This public-domain map from Wikipedia shows the Iapetus Suture in red and the fosil distribution after the Iapetus Ocean closed about 400 million years ago in the late Silurian and Early Devonian.

The Iapetus closure generated the Acadian round of mountain building on both the Laurentian and Avalonian sides of the suture. [Getting the nomenclature straight for the various mountain building events and rest periods is quite difficult (see Figs 1 and 2, McKerrow, Niocaill & Dewey). The term Caladonian mountain bulidng has been applied in many different ways, somtimes as a part of the Acadian process. In Avalona in its independent period prior to the formation of the Borrowdale Volcanics there was (Late Cambrian and early Ordovician) a mountain building process associated with Penobscot in Maine and with North Wales.

The Split: The process of continental assembly continued into the Permian with the addition of Gondwana (Africa etc) to form Pangea. More mountain building took place in the central and southern Appalachians as a result (Alleghenean mountain building). When Pangea split up in the Triassic and Jurassic period there was a false start creating the Connecticut rift valley, but finally the split came to the east. The magma spewing ridge that created the Atlantic Ocean ignored the Iapetus suture. It sliced through Avalonia leaving part attached to Laurentia and left Scotland attached to England. It also created the Icelandic volcanoes -- which brings us full circle.

An Avalonian Trek. Connecticut hosts the end of the non European end of Avalonia. The start of the terrain seems to be the granitic gneiss at lighthouse point by New Haven harbor. A little down the rocky coast is the Stony Creek quarry that provided the granite for the base of the statue of Liberty. The Bedrock Geological Map of Connecticut shows that Avalonian rocks underthrust the gneiss fieldstone in the Eastern Highlands, however, a small area of Avalonian rocks is exposed in the middle of the Eastern region near Willimantic. A walk along the Avalonian terrain would begin in Connecticut, continue through Massachusetts, Maine, New Bruswick, Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland. It would continue through southern Ireland. The suture line in passing between Ieland and the border between Scotland and England clips the western tip of the Isle of Man. Most of the island is Avalonia derived; the short costal strip of Laurentia is known as the Dalby group. The Avalonia trek could wind up in the Lake District and North Wales.

The Noble Cause: Having expounded the case for an independent Avalonia it remains to suggest that Avalonia, less fictional than Ruritana, is clearly in need of a national anthem. There are precedents. Any reasonable suggestion will be posted. It could begin: Rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks/ You gotta learn to take your knocks. / Take em, take em, in your stride/ With the old volcanic pride...

Adventure Travel

An Exultation of Skylarks

My last Blog concerning the UK sales of Himalayan Portfolios was written hastily before I made a trip to England. I went to visit to my brother who lives in Kirkby Lonsdale, a small market town to the north of Lancaster in the Lune valley. This town is on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales and close to the Lake District. In early April it is lambing time. This picture was taken in a field a short distance from my brother's house.


The view from the back widows of the house is towards Middleton Fell, Barbon Fell and Gragareth on the far side of the Lune valley. Further to the distant right is Ingleborough whose distinctive flat top is a layer of millstone grit that sits above the more easily weathered Carboniferous limestone. All these fells are open moorland with occasional limestone outcrops, caves and potholes. The fells are crossed in places by long dry-stone walls. An occasional sheep farm can be found tucked into an upper valley positioned along a spring lines. The following picture of myself was taken at the trigonometric point on the top of Gragareth (627m / 2,057ft). This is the highest point in Lancashire. Few places that I know give such a sense of floating in the sky. We were accompanied by an exaltation of skylarks.
K E Visit

Seven of my view-camera trips to the Himalayas were taken with KE Adventure Travel. My visit provided a splendid opportunity to stop by their Lake Road office in Keswick (in the Lake District) and drop off a copy of Himalayan Portfolios. At the time of my first trip with KE to the Karakoram they were called Karakoram Experience. Since then they have greatly expanded into other areas, hence the name change.

I was lucky enough to find two of my former trek leaders in Keswick: Pete Royal (Rolwaling) and Jonathon Hughes (aka Frog: Gondoro La and K2 BC). Pete was working in the KE office and Frog in a local climbing gear shop. I also met the owner Kit Wilkinson. The upshot was a story about the book posted on their current news letter. As the news letter contents will change with time, the gist of their message will be added to the Reviews on my web site. They plan to keep the book in the office and before long two of my photographs should be hanging on their walls (Snow Lake, p23, and Kangchenjunga, p127). Stop by the office and say hello.

VEy ya Fyat-lah YOU-khut

On Thursday April 15, the day we hiked up Gragareth, the morning news announced the eruption of the Iceland volcano Eyja-fjalla–jokull. By the evening the ash plume had closed most UK airports. It was comforting to learn the name translates as Island-Mountain-Glacier. According to the New York Times it can be sounded out more or less as in the paragraph heading. There is a slight h sound before the initial E and a final glottal t. Begin with “Hey ya, fergot la, yoghurt” and practice.

Each morning brought further messages of doom. I was due to fly back by Iceland Air from Manchester on the Wednesday, April 21. Late Tuesday the ash cloud briefly diverted and next day my flight arrived at the strangely empty airport only three hours late. In Keflavik my continuing flight was waiting and I safely reached Boston. My luggage arrived 3 days later. Manchester airport closed again the next day.

UK SALES

DARK SATANIC MILLS

In February of last year this blog announced that we now had a US distributor for Himalayan Portfolios. Independent Publishers Group (IPG), acts as the channel between the publisher on the one had and book sellers on the other. It warehouses the book, handles orders and billing, and arranges speedy delivery. Unfortunately, it has no warehousing in the UK. Purchases from the UK included the enormous extra cost of shipping from the US. (The standard postage is about $45.)

We now have a UK distributor
Gazelle Books
This organization warehouses the book in the UK, promotes the book in its catalog and arranges sales to book stores. It does not, however, sell directly to the public. The list price is given as $70.99, but this is substantially discounted by some booksellers such as Amazon.co.uk. To check out Gazelle, regular book stores or on-line book sellers the easiest way is to use the 13 digit ISBN number without hyphens in the sellers search engine:
9780979059704
(The first four numbers 978-0 are standard for English group books, the last number is a modulus check, the center 8 digits, 97905970, specify the publisher and the book.)

By a curious coincidence, Gazelle Book Services is located in White Cross Mill, Lancaster. At some point long ago, when I was in high school in Lancaster and the mill was still a textile mill, I visited the mill searching for a summer job. I found work in the lab at another and less ancient institution. The cotton mills inevitably bring to mind the lines of Blake’s lyric from the long poem Milton:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Lancaster may get a reprieve. The satanic mills Blake had in mind may have been Oxford and Cambridge.

The Enigma of Perfection

EASTER 2010

Bloodroot flower, roadside bank, Seagraves Road, Coventry, Connecticut, Easter Sunday.

The bloodroot flowers are sparsely scattered just below the stone-wall edging the road. They are confined to this one small area. Sanguinaria canadensis, a member of the poppy family, is highly toxic, though used in folk medicine.

Beyond the wall is a section of State Forest. The whole area consists of Hebron gneiss. This metamorphic rock shows marked layering as a result of the heat and pressure associated with its formation from the deposits laid down on the Iapetus Ocean floor. Tectonic processes created a volcanic island arc off the coast of Proto North America (Laurentia) in the Iapetus Ocean some 440 million years ago (mid to late Ordovician). The arc survives as the Bronson Hill formation. The local section of the arc is the hills at Bolton Notch to the west of Coventry. The tectonic process pushed the island arc onto the Laurentia coast and in the process turned the back-bay deposits of the Iapetus Ocean into a complex Taconic mountain range. The same sort of process occurred when the Kohistan-Ladakh island arc was pushed against the Eurasian coast to form the Karakoram metamorphic complex 70 million years ago (see Himlayan Portfolios p7. p181,p184.) Erosion from the Taconic mountains, with their island arc outer edge, discharged great quanities of silt into the Iapetus Ocean creating a new continental shelf. These Ordovician and Silurian deposits became the shist and later the gneiss of the Eastern Connecticut Highland Terrain. The Iapetus ocean closed when the micro continent of Avalonia was added to the east coast of North America prior to the formation of the Pangaea super continent.

A minor fault line runs through the forest creating sections of cliff that sometimes overhang. My favorite walk, starting from Seagraves road, is to follow deer trails in a haphazard manner just using the lay of the land as a guide and moving towards Coventry lake. A minor scramble up a cliff is an optional extra. The winter provides crisp snow that makes the deer trails easy to find. Soon the opening leaves will make these non-paths invisible and it will be advisable to follow the established trails. But now the woods have their own special music. Since the 15th of March the frogs in the swampy areas have been creating a joyous racket of chirps, trills, gulps and quacks.

New Year's Greetings

Summoned by Yak Bells

An announcement that Canadians were down-loading the sound of cow bells to their cell phones has prompted me to revivify my yak bells. The Canadians were using the sound to support their contestants at the Vancouver Olympics. I needed the bells to celebrate the Tibetan New Year. The sound of the bells is forever associated in my mind with Nepal and the tinkling sound of passing yak trains.

Unfortunately my bells had been displaced from their customary place of honor after I noticed moth cocoons on the yak hair straps. Could the small moths that occasionally show up in my kitchen be the start of a Tibetan invasion? Could I be arrested by the enforcement brigade of the Department of Agriculture? In panic I sprayed the bells and their yak hair straps with insecticide and stored them in a plastic bag. But now the bells, have been released, shampooed, and called on to promote general happiness as we march forward into the Iron-Tiger Year.

February 15. The year began with the new moon of February 15. This year the start of the Tibetan lunar-solar calendar coincided with that of the Chinese and Vietnamese calendars. This might have been supposed to allow Tibetans and Chinese to celebrate together, but there has been little easing of tension in general. In Tibet monks and laypeople said prayers and threw tsampa in the air to mourn the killings of Tibetans in the 2008 protests that took place all over Tibet, accoding to a Tibetan web site based in south India. There is a further reason for tension. The Chinese takeover of Tibet began in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled to India. The Tibetan calendar consists of a 60 year cycle. Five elements (Fire, Earth, Iron, Water, Wood) are coupled to the 12 zodiac animals (Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, ape, Bird, Dog, Pig, Mouse, Bull, Tiger). The last Iron-Tiger year thus corresponds to the first full year of Chinese rule.

Jim Yardley in the New York Times reported on February 17 that the Chinese have been persuading Nepal to tighten its border with China and send back to China Tibetans who cross the border. Often they do so on their way to Dharamsala in India in search of an education or as a pilgrimage to visit the Dalai Lama. “Until 2008 roughly 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans annually slipped across the border.” Last year it was down to 600. The Chinese have steadily worked for decades to establish Nepal as a client state and pry it away from Indian influence. Road building has been their major method of creating bonds, a technique that is reminiscent of the period of the Great Game.

DALAI LAMA in Dharamsala. Photo by Gaelen Hanson, 2009

February 18. Then came the low-key meeting in the White House between President Obama and the Dalai Lama. Let us pass over the stupidity of smuggling the Dalai Lama out the side door past the garbage bags. Pennance has been done: the Social Secretary has chosen to resign.

February 20. Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times Blog of Feb 20 has tried to explain why it was necessary for Obama to Meet the Dalai Lama and why Obama needs to explain to the Chinese people why they met. (The White House Blog was anything but forceful.)
“ The Dalai Lama is reviled by many ordinary Chinese, perhaps more so by the public than by the Chinese government, although this in part reflects propaganda critical of the Dalai Lama. The most important thing that needs to be conveyed is that it’s in China’s own interests that the world, China included, engage the Dalai Lama. China is making a catastrophically bad bet that after His Holiness dies, the Tibetan problem will be easier to solve. In fact, the reverse is true. The one thing most Tibetans agree on is their reverence for the Dalai Lama. If it weren’t for him, there would have been a much more violent resistance to Beijing, and Tibetans would have turned long ago to terrorism.” “A deal between China and the Dalai Lama is possible —… but it’s feasible only as long as the Dalai Lama is alive. Only he can make the tough compromises necessary, and deliver the Tibetan poeple behind him."

February 26. Reuters corresopondent Ben Blanchard, visiting a region of Tibet outside the most controlled area, reports that Tibetans and Han are ignoreing politics to build uneasy ties based on their common history that links Tibetans and Han Chinese to Buddhism. "Qinghai's Tibetans say they are given far more leeway to practice their religion than those living in what is formally called the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Pictures of the Dalai Lama are openly displayed at major temples in a way unthinkable in that region. At the lunar new year celebrations last week, monks at one monastery freely carried out a complex ceremony complete with ornate, embroidered silk costumes that culminated in the unfurling of a giant image of the Buddha on a nearby hillside. It attracted a small, though fascinated, crowd of Han Chinese tourists. One observer rmarked: "I think we can learn a lot from our Tibetan compatriots. They must be doing something right."

Himalayan Portfolios page 128
Monsoon Storm, Gyamtso La, Tibet, 2003. The pass is the highest point on the way from Lhasa to the Everest Base Camp and the watershed between the Arun and the Tsangpo rivers.
"The storm soon passed;
the Chinese overlordship of Tibet remains."


Dear Chinese & Tibetan friends, you are summoned by yak bells.

Kendal Mountain Book Festival 2009

BOARDMAN TASKER
"The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature commemorates the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who disappeared on the North East Ridge of Everest in 1982, and is given to the author, or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. "

This photograph, a detail from page 112, 0f Himalayan Portfolios, shows the ridge with the Everest summit to the right. The Pinnacles, where the climbers died, are the center point to the right of a jagged ridge section.

The award was announced on November 20 at the Kendal 2009 Mountain Book Festival. The Kendal Festival closely parallels the Banff Festival discussed last month. Kendal is a small market town that is a south-eastern gateway to the English Lake District and the last town before the M6 road to Scotland crosses Shap Fell.

Entering Himalayan Porfolios for a literary prize was something of a long shot. We would have to convice the judges that the book was an integral work of text and pictures and not pictures with some text attached. Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations by Minor White was conceived as such a unit with "sequences" matched to original text. The works of William Blake that combined poetry and engravings served as a model. The wonderful books by Paul Strand, Time in New England for example, would not qualify because he relied on others to provide a text. Hybrid works are a tricky catagory: Wagner's Ring cycle is a monster example in which a poetic text, music and staging were promoted as one. A phone call from my brother in England told me that my book had been noted as giving particular enjoyment in the award ceremony at Kendal.

The well structured and thoughtful addess by Phil Bartlett, the chair of the judges, has been posted on the web. A paragraph of 145 words was devoted to explaining why Himalayan Portfolios, though much enjoyed, did not qualify to be on the short list. The winner, Beyond the Mountain, an autobiography by Steve House, received 318 words. (He was also a winner at the Banff Festival, see my November 11 blog.) My book was judged to be "a sumptuous collection of black and white photography and serious supporting essays." (For some reason he did not metion the extended title: Journeys of the Imagination.) We did not convince, or manage to slip in without being caught, White House fashion, but we came close enough to be seriously considered. For the full text of the judge's remarks see Book Reviews on my web page or this link.

Kangchenjunga from Pangpema (HP page 126.) First ascent without oxygen by Boardman, Tasker and Doug Scott, 1978 (see also HP page 165).

Banff Mountain Book Festival-2

Finalist’s Report

This report is both sad and happy.

On the sad side the Mountain Image Award went to a super-massive book of color photographs of the Alps. They were taken from an ultra-light motor-glider flown by a Slovenian biologist and mountaineer Matevz Lenarcic (approximate transcription—the name copies as Matevc Lenar i ). The style of his photography is very unlike the austerity of Brad Washburn, the full page presentation of his photographs is totally different from our white-border formality, and his primary aim is environmental advocacy whereas my style might be called photographic introspection. In short, comparing his book and mine is almost impossible. The book is described as “a gesture on a grand scale”, “a mountain manifesto and a call to arms.”
Finalists.
Awards.

On the happy side I had a wonderful time listening to presentations and signing books. The presentations included Steve Winter’s account of photographing the snow leopard for National Geographic. A six month quest in several Himalayan regions, some familiar to me, yielded superb images. Steve House read from his new autobiography (Adventure Travel Award). Climber and artist Renan Oxturk described an epic ascent of the great wall of Mount Meru in the Indian Himalaya. The climbers, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Ozturk, planned for 10 days — the climb took 17days; they lost a lot of weight. When finally they made their superlight summit attempt on the fin-like ridge, the ascent was stopped by a non-negotiable gendarme: so near and yet so far. Amongst the book signers was David Roberts with his new biography of Brad Washburn (Mountaineering History Award.) The book signing allowed many opportunities to chat. The picture shows me with Steve Winter. Finally, I did win something — a spontaneous blessing: a very nice down jacket at a reception sponsored by a group working to preserve an area adjacent to the Banff National Park.



The Banff Center is a great place. I was there over 30 years ago to speak to a biochemistry conference. It was a lot smaller then. I could see a bit of a mountain from my room (as a finalist, complementary), but the dining room gives a three quarters panorama. My dedicated publishers, Gail and Charles Fields, were at the meeting to work on book promotion, but the fringe benefit was that they were up at 5 am each morning to go out and photograph. By the Sunday of our departure they had the back roads well worked out. On the Sunday we set out in pitch darkness and, despite very icy roads, we were at Lake Louise in time for the sunrise. This photo was taken on a back road. The flight from Calgary was at 2 pm. I was home by 1:30 am.