Taking Greenland’s geology to another dimension

A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice William E. Glassley Bellevue Literary Press: 2018.

Geologist and former surf dude William Glassley has spent six field seasons studying the ancient rock of coastal Greenland. As he probes our planet’s youth, three billion years ago, many will envy him. His brief but ambitious A Wilder Time demonstrates that there’s nothing like geology for acquainting you with the joys of remote isolation at other people’s expense.

The area he explores, with Danish colleagues Kai Sørensen and John Korstgård, is vast: part of the coastal fringe of ice-smoothed rock and periglacial tundra that extends like a valance around Greenland’s enormous central ice cap. There is sea to the west, crumbling ice cliffs 150 kilometres and more to the east. A Wilder Time sees our heroes marooned in this wilderness, alone in the short summer’s perpetual day. Glassley eloquently evokes a place where land feathers into Arctic sea, ice floes glide by on mirror-smooth tongues of clear, frigid water and silence reigns.

What drew the companions there might sound, by contrast, like a storm in an academic teacup. Someone (tactfully left unnamed) had published a paper attacking the established geological view that the study area — between Nordre Isortoq in the south and Disko Island to the north — is part of the roots of an ancient mountain range, the Nagssugtoqidian mobile belt. Geologists are familiar with these Inuit place-names, many ending in ‘oq’. Pronunciation should sound, the late Stephen Moorbath (an isotope geochemist and geochronologist) once told me, “like a piano string being cut at the bottom of the ocean”.

Moorbath helped to make the area famous by finding what are still among the oldest known rocks on Earth, almost 3.8 billion years old. In the 1960s and 1970s, geologists Arthur Escher and Juan Watterson mapped these high-grade metamorphic melanges of altered sediments, mantle rocks and ocean-floor basalts. In the 1980s, Feiko Kalsbeek, Bob Pidgeon and Paul Taylor interpreted it all in the light of plate tectonics. The distinctive east–west shear zones that transected the region were, they said, sutures left by the most ancient plate-tectonic collisions on our planet, during the early Proterozoic eon, which began around 2.5 billion years ago. But seeds of doubt were cast. The new paper made fundamental challenges to earlier interpretations that seemed themselves so misguided and riddled with errors and misconceptions that they could not go unanswered.

Such is the scientific narrative underpinning A Wilder Time, whose rather overcomplicated structure arrives at a satisfying conclusion. The epilogue demonstrates how Glassley’s team confirmed and even refined the original interpretation of the mobile belts, putting its assailants to flight.