Ask a Geologist what is meant by hidden depths, and you could get a very long and technical answer. Geologists (like me) spend most of their time looking at rocks, working out how and why they have formed and then predicting what they cannot see – the vast volume of rocks layers below the earth’s surface. Ask a mining geologist about hidden depths and they will talk about how to find ore deposits, valuable reserves of metals buried deep within the earth. To find the layers of ore, geologists must read the rocks they can see like a detective. Get the answer right and the rewards can be enormous.
Of course, being a Geologist is not all about financial rewards, and prosperity for gold – nor for that matter about digging huge holes in the ground or sitting drilling rigs to discover black gold beneath a serene and unsuspecting landscape. There are other ways in which hidden depths can be discovered, uncovered, chanced upon.
One of the things that caught my imagination when I was young was the experience of breaking open a seemingly rather dull piece of stone to find a perfectly preserved fossil inside. There’s an example – a perfectly preserved ammonite from Lyme Regis. There’s an art to finding them. The ammonites usually occur in concretionary nodules, hard spherical lumps of limestone that have formed around the animal’s shell shortly after death and burial. The nodules form because the ammonite is there as the decay of organic matter causes chemical changes in the newly deposited mud below the sea floor. The trick, of course is to be able to tell where to find the nodules. The reward is tangible and memorable, as opening that rock reveals something that has never been seen by anyone else, an extinct creature that had lived and died in a sub-tropical ocean perhaps 160 million years ago. Quite something - and here am I, happening upon well-hidden ancient treasure, purely by chance.
So yes, Geology is a science and yes, those fossils can be used to date, to correlate and to tell the palaeoecology of that ancient sea – but there’s more to it than that a feeling of surprise, of awe, of excitement.
CS Lewis, the author, wrote this:
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading a book on Astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures of Godlight in the woods of our experience.”
I understand that completely, I spend most of my time with the mundane, the everyday that tend to occupy my mind all to easily. I don’t have the time to look for deeper meaning very often, to reflect on what’s going on around very often, to reflect on what’s going on around me – but I still like to know – what lies beneath. Like the geologist with a fossil, I am now a different person from the person that bent down to pick up that unpromising rock. Look for those moments – they’re pretty special and they happen to us all.
