Middle-Earth Here on our Planet? Some Geo-thoughts After the Last Tolkien Movie

Mt. Ruapahu, an active volcano on the North Island of New Zealand

A new world came into being a little over eighty years ago. It formed in the mind of an English scholar, a world with a vivid geography that was populated by a plethora of men, elves, dwarfs, orcs, goblins, dragons, and hobbits. It was a fully realized world with a multitude of unique languages, creation myths, and a long history of wars, strife and horror. At other times it was a world of stunning beauty. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien as a teenager, and the world revealed in the pages of those books was as vivid in my own mind as the real world I lived in.

From other angles, the summit crater of Ruapahu is clearly seen. A lot of it is missing.

Over the years I could relate the places I had seen in my travels with the geography of Middle Earth. It wasn't hard to see the eastern rampart of the Sierra Nevada near Lone Pine as the mountains of Mordor, or the volcanoes of the Cascades as the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.  But Middle Earth really was unique. I knew of no setting on the planet that could really serve as a stand-in for the product of Tolkien's imagination.

Lake Rotorua sunrise (or the eye of Sauron?). Rotorua occupies an active caldera on the North Island

It is no surprise that it took three quarters of a century to bring the complete Rings trilogy and the Hobbit to the big screen, given the technological hurdles of creating an entire world on film pretty much from scratch. But under the direction of Peter Jackson and a host of others (I sat through the entire credits today at the movie), the world was realized in a total of six movies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hobbit broken into thirds. One of the amazing things about Jackson's accomplishment is that he managed to find a fully realized Middle-Earth right here on our own planet: the islands of New Zealand.

A foggy road between Rotorua and Wellington, the closest we came to the filming site of Hobbiton on our trip.

I have found that I can be caught up in the plot of a good movie without losing sight of the choices the directors made for their filming locations. Sometimes it is the recognition of places I know well, which was the case when I watched Wild a few weeks ago. At other times, I am taking in a new landscape, places I have never seen for myself, and wondering where they were filming. And wondering about the underlying geology. In the Tolkien movies, it has mostly been the latter, but I did have one precious opportunity to see parts of the islands of New Zealand, back in 2005. My students and I spent four days on the North Island, and two days on the South Island. It was rushed, we missed many localities I would have liked to have visited, but it was spectacular, and indeed was one of the great journeys of my life.

Tree ferns on the North Island: Echos of the Gondwana flora.

New Zealand is indeed a world apart. It was part of Australia until around eighty million years ago, but it broke away and has been isolated ever since. The non-avian dinosaurs were extirpated here during the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and what mammals were present were too small or rare to dominate the ecosystem. The islands of New Zealand became a kingdom of the birds. Many of the larger birds, having no natural enemies besides themselves, evolved away from flight and became surface dwellers. The dominance of the birds ended when humans arrived on the islands around 800 years ago, and in many ways New Zealand came to resemble the rest of the world, with farms and cities, and grazing sheep and cattle.

Yes, there were once birds this big, only a few centuries ago.

The islands of New Zealand are about two-thirds the size of California, and like California the diversity of the landscape is tied to plate tectonics. New Zealand is influenced by convergence of the Australian and Pacific plates, but some areas of the islands are stretching (extending) and others, primarily along the Alpine Fault, are sliding laterally (much like California's San Andreas). As a consequence, the islands have a diverse collection of volcanoes and calderas, a high alpine mountain range, active faults, and glaciers. Given the low density of the population of the islands, a filmmaker has plenty of choices for wilderness locales in which to place their orc armies, wizard castles, and hobbit villages (Middle-Earth always struck me as a rather wilderness world with only a few outposts of civilization).

The north end of the Kaikoura Range on the South Island, very high and rugged, but less known than the Southern Alps.

My greatest disappointment about my trip to New Zealand was the fact that I didn't get to see the Southern Alps up close. The mountains made for some of the most memorable scenes in the Tolkien movies, including the opening sequence of The Two Towers, and lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King. They could be seen in the far distance while we were in Christchurch, and they were briefly visible as we flew over them on the way to Australia, but that was it. I dearly wanted to see them up close, but that will have to come at another time.

So, to Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and all of the others involved in the production of the movies, I want to say thank you for your vivid imagining of Middle Earth, and your meticulous and careful selection of spectacular filming locales. It added a lot to my enjoyment of the movie, and makes up for your occasional moments of overdoing the special effects (really, Legolas walking up free-falling boulders like a stairway?).

"Are We There Yet?" In Geology, the Journey is the Destination

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, if written the way some people might take a trip to a special place like a national park or recreation area...

A hobbit named Frodo comes into possession of an evil magic ring.
He finds a volcano, he throws the ring in, saving Middle-Earth, and he becomes a hero. The end.

Isn't a little bit missing here? When we ask "are we there yet?" in our travels, we miss out on the value of the journey itself in our explorations. In the same way, the story of a mythological quest like Frodo's (or Luke Skywalker, or Perseus) is a journey, not a destination. The interest, the meaning, the richness of the story is in the insight gained by the hero (and thus the reader) along the way. If it is a mythological story, the hero will succeed or will not, but either way, it the journey that provides the significance to the success or failure of the quest.

Geology is a mythology of the earth. We often use the term "myth" as something that is somehow untrue, but that's not really the case. Myths are stories that inform us of how our world or society or culture came into existence, and in more ancient times, myths represented the best understanding of the world and how it worked. Even today, part of this definition of a myth has an interesting twist: "Myths generally take place in a primordial age, when the world had not yet achieved its current form, and explain how the world gained its current form...". Doesn't that sound a lot like a definition for historical geology? We have different tools than a shaman had in a different age, but if you listen to geologists in the field discussing a geological problem around a campfire, I am sure the cadence and flow of the narrative will somehow be similar to arguments around fires thousands of years ago. The Earth is a mysterious place, and we want to understand how it works...

I was looking at the schedule for our summer field studies trip to the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains this week, and I had a vague worry about the amount of driving we will be doing. We will be covering a lot of ground, but almost immediately realized how important the journey itself will be. In one stretch of our trip, we will explore the landscape that was shaped by the Spokane floods during the Ice Ages. If you are not familiar with this incredible story, it goes like this:

During the ice ages, a glacier blocked a major river drainage, forming a vast lake in Montana and Idaho. The unstable ice dam collapsed, sending a cataclysmic flood across Washington.

Well. Look at that capsule description, note the resemblance to the LOTR version above, and you will understand the importance of the journey in geology. On our trip, we will follow the incredible flood in reverse, beginning at the mouth of the Columbia River, where the floodwaters poured into the Pacific Ocean. As we spend three days moving eastward, we will see deep gorges that were carved in hours or days by the rushing torrents. We will see deep caves formed by the swirling waters, and giant ripplemarks thirty feet tall. We will see a landscape in eastern Washington so stripped of sediment and soil that we call it the Channeled Scablands. We'll pass through the valley where the ice dam blocked the rivers and see the wave cut terraces and benches where lakewaters lapped against high mountain ridges. Think of the perspective one gains if while driving (or walking) across this landscape, for hours and hours, realizing that during the floods, this entire landscape was covered by water 300-400 feet deep, moving westward at the speeds similar to the velocity of our vehicles on the highway. The journey is everything in understanding the story of the Earth!

Ironically, it took geologists a long time to accept the story of the Spokane floods. The narrative was put together in the 1920's by a teacher named J Harlan Bretz, who spent years collecting data and making observations across the region. Like shamans in the past, Bretz lacked some of the technology that would have made the story easier to prove (like aerial and satellite photography), but he scrupulously recorded his observations, and eventually his spectacular story moved from being perceived as a fable to being accepted as a firmly grounded geologic model.

I'm looking forward to our journey! The picture above is a view of some of the flood channels in eastern Washington from 35,000 feet.
(this is a re-post of the previous blog entry, which mysteriously disappeared in blogger yesterday)

Momma, I want to be a Paleomagnetologist when I grow up!

How many of you woke up one day and told yourself "when I grow up, I want to be a paleomagnetologist"? It's a question I ask my classes as we start to talk about continental drift and plate tectonics, and it's usually good for a chuckle (sometimes even two), and not once has anyone raised their hand in an affirmative response. It's a relatively obscure field in geophysics, and although most geologists know what paleomagnetologists do, most of the rest of us do not. What follows in the class is a rather extended discussion about Earth's magnetic field and the behaviour of compasses. We're trying to get to a comprehension level to where we can talk about one of the more stunning discoveries ever made in the field of the geological sciences, a line of reasoning and research that provided unexpected evidence for continental "drift" and plate tectonics. It had to do with the Earth's magnetic field.

Every child has probably played with magnets, dragging them through the soil picking up iron filings, or playing with the Wooly Willy face drawing toy. Later on, some kids encounter the use of compasses by orienteering while hiking with the scouts or other outdoor groups. For many it stops there, but the exploration of the mysteries of magnetism throughout history is quite an interesting affair, and I was unaware of much of the story. So it was that when I was given a review copy and asked to comment on a new book by Gillian Turner, North Pole, South Pole, I was intrigued, and agreed to check it out. In short, I found the book to be well-written, well-illustrated, and quite interesting. I actually read two books in the last few weeks, and on the face of it they couldn't be more different, but I noticed an interesting parallel. Besides Turner's book, I read an online version of "The Last Ringbearer" by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist (!), a re-telling of the "Lord of the Rings" saga from the point of view of the residents of Mordor. It was a fascinating thought exercise that explores the idea that winners get to write the history, and that Mordor's "evilness" was more a construct of the elve's and men's prejudices than of reality.

I recognized the need for a different point of view of history as I read Turner's book. By concentrating on the study of magnetism throughout history, she provides a whole new perspective of the sequence of events that led to the discoveries of "apparent" polar wandering and paleomagnetic reversals, two of the most important lines of evidence that support plate tectonics theory. Unlike Alfred Wegener, who seemed hell-bent on proving his drift hypothesis, the magnetism people were just following the evidence, trying to understand how the Earth's magnetic field worked, and how it had changed throughout time. When they stumbled onto one of the most critical pieces of evidence for the movement of continents (and ocean floors), it was a happy accident, but they were quick to recognize the importance of their findings, even if others outside the field were not. For instance, the polar wander curves for different continents, an unambiguous record of independent continental movements, were worked out in the 1950's, a full decade before the acceptance of plate tectonic theory by most geologists.

I'm not suggesting that the paleomagnetologist's contributions to the debate over continental drift have been ignored, it's just that their methods and findings can be a bit harder to explain or appreciate. That is the value of Gillian Turner's book. She has provided a concise and interesting history of the study of magnetism, and a fascinating new perspective of one of the most important geological discoveries of the twentieth century, plate tectonics. It's well worth a look!

Turner, Gilliam, 2010, North Pole, South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth's Magnetism, The Experiment Publishing, New York, 272 pages.