Love Me Like a Rock

We continue our series on the seven Ocean Literacy Principles. Scientists and educators agree that we can’t understand how the ocean influences us and we influence the ocean unless we are “literate” on these seven principles. “Literally,” we should learn to read them. I am not an ocean scientist, but I am an ocean lover and communicator, and am authorized by my church to be an ocean minister, so I am using these columns to teach myself and maybe others how to read the ocean.

Ocean Literacy Principle #2 reads: “The Ocean and life in the ocean shapes the features of Earth.”

This second ocean principle is not so much about water, the large fluid and wet ocean, but about rocks, the hard, mostly dry material that forms not just land, but the floor and walls of ocean basins.

The five main ideas are:

1. Many earth materials and geochemical cycles originate in the ocean. Many of the sedimentary rocks now exposed on land were formed in the ocean. Ocean life laid down the vast volume of siliceous and carbonate rocks.
2. Sea level changes over time have expanded and contracted continental shelves, created and destroyed inland seas, and shaped the surface of land.
3. Erosion—the wearing away of rock, soil and other biotic and abiotic earth materials—occurs in coastal areas as wind, waves, and currents in rivers and the ocean move sediments.
4. Sand consists of tiny bits of animals, plants, rocks and minerals. Most beach sand is eroded from land sources and carried to the coast by rivers, but sand is also eroded from coastal sources by surf. Sand is redistributed by waves and coastal currents seasonally.
5. Tectonic activity, sea level changes, and force of waves influence the physical structure and landforms of the coast.

“These rocks tell the story of Point Lobos,” said Ed, the geologist leading the walk. “Feel these boulders, see those cliffs, it’s granodiorite, massive and hard, they are the oldest, rocks here, 80 million years old.”

Pointing across the cove to the vast blocks of yellow sandstone with innumerable grey round pebbles seemingly mixed in and hardened, he said, “That’s the Carmelo Formation, younger, only 60 million years old. I wrote my PhD thesis on that rare formation, and geologists come from around the world to study it. After a long career at the US Geological Survey I am happy in my retirement to be a docent here and try to share the stories these rocks tell.”

Ed patiently explained how both these rock formations originated far south and east from this Central California State Park, which now advertises itself, in this latest millisecond of geologic time, as “the grandest meeting of land and sea.”

Point LobosThe grey granodiorite has been moving slowly northwards, at the same rate as our fingernails grow, a couple inches a year, since its story began in what is now Mexico. Some of those same hard rocks moved in a more northeasterly direction and formed the Sierra Nevada mountains; it’s the same granite at the east and west borders of the state.

Carmelo FormationThe journey of the Carmelo Formation is even more complex. Those pebbles seem to have been formed by volcanic activity in the Jurassic period in the Mojave Desert. When the rising sea submerged them, they tumbled in submarine landslides down canyons into the deep sandstone, where they fused into variegated blocks. Then they too began their journey north. Unlike the hard granite, sandstone easily erodes from wind and wave, and the ocean has further sculpted these rocks it birthed.

Geologist often try to explain their difficult science and the vast distances of geologic time and space as “stories that the stones tell.” Walking around Point Lobos with Ed is like listening to a master storyteller, revealing new lands and dramas in the subtle layering of a crumbling cliff.

On that walk Ed was telling just one small story in the vast library called The Second Ocean Literacy Principle. Reading the five sub-points of this Ocean Literacy Principle reminded me of his tale – it was like he was titling his chapters: Sedimentary Rocks, Sea Change, Erosion, Sand and Tectonic Plates.

I too am a Point Lobos Docent. The good State Parks folks encourage us to use our life or work skills as we interpret for guests, as Ed does with his geology. As a writer, I chose to research, collect and publish an edition of poems by 35 different poets, young and old, professional and lay, who had been inspired to write over the past century about Point Lobos. My friend Sally Smith added her drawings, and we decided to call the volume, Dancing on the Brink of the World, Selected Poems of Point Lobos. The title comes from an ancient song lyric of the native people of this region, the Ohlone. We felt those “first peoples” were the first Point Lobos poets; we could picture them dancing on this brink, on the dramatic granite cliffs and in the mysterious cypress forests above the crashing seas.

The word “brink” appealed to us, with its suggestion of danger and drama. And we liked the image of “dancing” also, for it’s not just us land creatures ancient and modern who move and dance here, but the ocean too, always churning and changing.

But I don’t think it was until I took that geology walk, and now trying to wrap my head around the second Ocean Literacy Principle, that I really made the connection that the land is dancing also, moving up and down, north and south, maybe more slowly, not so obviously as the endless waves, but move it does. Granite and sandstone and volcanic rock rise and fall. Now they/we are moving north, but 80 million years hence, in what direction will they be dancing?

Whether you live on the coast or inland, remember that all earth is moving. The atoms, of course, hum and spin. But active also are the tectonic plates, the eroding cliffs, the uprising volcanos, the churning shores.

Like a sculptor, water shapes clay and rock and sand and mountains and valleys. And like a sculpture, land and sea are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Here’s one of the poems from the collection, by Jeanne D’Orge, a Carmel Bohemian artist and writer from the 1920’s.

Hush!

If you lie close to a rock in the silence of the sun
You hear.
You will not hear with the outer ear
But you will hear
Thunder.
It will sound through the rock and through your body.
You will tremble as the rock trembles
At so terrible a sound.
To the end of time you shall never know
If it was the heart of the rock or your heart
Or the sea…..

_________

More info on Pt. Lobos Geology: 

Copyright © 2017 Deborah Streeter