"Underland"

[fiefoe]

My attention kept slipping away while listening to Robert Macfarlane's latest writing on nature, but when it doesn't the book often turns out to be fascinating and grim.

• In China’s Chongqing province, a cave network explored in 2013 was found to possess its own weather system: ladders of stacked mist that build in a huge central hall, cold fog that drifts in giant cloud chambers far from the reach of the sun.
• The underland’s difficulty of access has long made it a means of symbolizing what cannot openly be said or seen: loss, grief, the mind’s obscured depths, and what Elaine Scarry calls the ‘deep subterranean fact’ of physical pain.
• Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’
• There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin.
• The first fact of limestone is its solubility in water. Rain absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, creating a mild carbonic acid – just sharp enough to etch and fret limestone, given time.
• Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms – crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera – that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds. These creatures once built their skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate, metabolizing the mineral content of the water in which they lived to create intricate architectures. In this way limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again.
• Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit.
• The newspaper that morning reports that geologists have discovered buried seas of water in the Earth’s mantle. Four times as much water might be locked up there in a mineral called ringwoodite as is currently held in all the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ice put together.
• at last it tightens to a silted-up sump that is not the end of the passage for water, but is surely the final affordance for our stubborn, unshrinkable human bodies. <> In that vanishing point, neither of us speaks. Language is crushed. We are anyway too busily engaged building structures within ourselves that might house our spirits, for the pressure here is immense, a weight of rock and time bearing down upon us from every direction with an intensity I have never experienced before, turning us fast to stone.
• Two of the beech’s lower limbs have melted into one another, their bark conjoining into a single continuous skin, their vascular systems growing and uniting. Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid. Like glacial ice – like the halite I had seen in Boulby, like the calcite I had seen in the Mendips, like stained glass in medieval churches which, over centuries, gradually thickens out at the base of each pane – living wood flows, given time.
• Though I know the word ‘inosculation’, I had not known its etymology; what seemed a chilly specialist term gains a passionate warmth, and feels true to this arboreal ‘en-kissing’, which makes it hard to say where one being ends and another begins. I think of Ovid’s version of the ‘Baucis and Philemon’ myth, in which an elderly couple are transformed into an intertwining oak and linden, each supporting the other in terms of both structure and sustenance, drawing strength for each other from the ground through their roots
• ‘From being two hyphal tubes, two fungi are suddenly one, and things can start flowing between them, including genetic material and nuclei. This is why it’s so hard to deal with species concepts in fungi, or even the question of what an organism is – because while fungi do the sex thing, they also have this wildly promiscuous horizontal transfer of genetic material that is unpredictable in a still ill-understood way.’
• Merlin once said to me, ‘they were lichens and fungi. Fungi and lichen annihilate our categories of gender. They reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. They screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent. They utterly liquidate our notions of time. Lichens can crumble rocks into dust with terrifying acids. Fungi can exude massively powerful enzymes outside their bodies that dissolve soil. They’re the biggest organisms in the world and among the oldest. They’re world-makers and world-breakers. What’s more superhero than that?’
• Just a few inches of soil is enough to keep startling secrets, hold astonishing cargo: an eighth of the world’s total biomass comprises bacteria that live below ground, and a further quarter is of fungal origin.
• History no longer feels figurable as a forwards-flighting arrow or a self-intersecting spiral; better, perhaps, seen as a network branching and conjoining in many directions. Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance – but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part.
• There in the grove with Merlin, I recall Kimmerer, Hardy and Nelson, and feel a sudden, angry impatience with modern science for presenting as revelation what indigenous societies take to be self-evident. I remember Ursula Le Guin’s angrily political novel, set on a forest planet in which woodland beings known as the Athsheans are able to transmit messages remotely between one another, signalling through the medium of trees. On Athshe – until the arrival of colonists committed to the planet’s exploitation – the realm of mind is integrated into the community of the trees, and ‘the word for world is forest’.
• There was a young American scientist researching what Merlin called ‘the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis’. Her plan was to collect monkey urine after the monkeys had feasted on fermenting fruit, and to assess the urine for intoxication levels. The problem was that the monkeys tended to urinate from high up in the trees. So she developed a wide-mouthed funnel with which to catch the falling liquid.
• Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means ‘to be a bay’. ‘A bay is a noun only if water is dead,’ writes Kimmerer: <> trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb . . . releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.
• On the Anatolian plateau, where ash spewed by volcanoes 30 million years ago has hardened into a rolling terrain of cones and dips, a man is rebuilding his house. He decides to knock down a wall where it stands flush with the bedrock tuff – and behind the wall he discovers a chamber. Off the chamber runs a passage – and the passage leads down to a subterranean city. The city has eighteen different levels arranged over 300 vertical feet, and it offers shelter for up to 20,000 people... The name that will be given to this discovered city is Derinkuyu, meaning ‘Deep Well’.
• That the evening we emerge, the Draconid meteor showers come, showing as silver scratches in the sky.
• Between 1927 and 1940 – the year in which he sought to flee France into the safety of Spain, only to commit suicide in a hotel room in the Pyrenean border village of Portbou – Walter Benjamin compiled one of the most extraordinary city-texts ever written. The Passagen-Werk, as it is known in German – The Arcades Project in English – is a fragmentary, unfinished meditation on the topography, history and humanity of Paris, running to more than a thousand pages at the time of Benjamin’s death. Its form may be compared to a constellation or galaxy, the individual stars of which he drew together over more than a decade, collecting notes, quotations, aphorisms, stories and reflections in dozens of dossiers that he called Konvolute – ‘convolutes’ in English, meaning ‘coils’, ‘twists’, ‘enfoldments’ – each of which was identified by a letter.
• The most subterranean of the convolutes in The Arcades Project is Convolute C, which contains Benjamin’s work on both the catacombs and the quarry voids of Paris. It is in Convolute C that Benjamin proposes his vision of Paris’s invisible city, filled with ‘lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness’.
• All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone-quarrying began in earnest towards the end of the twelfth century, ... The residue of over 600 years of quarrying is that beneath the south of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, organized into three main regions that together spread beneath nine arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières – the ‘quarry voids’, the catacombs.
• So started one of the most remarkable episodes of Paris’s history. In 1786 the process began of evacuating the city’s cemeteries, crypts and tombs of their dead, and transferring the remains of more than 6 million corpses to the quarry region known as the Tombe-Issoire, soon to become Les Catacombes, on what was then the Montrouge Plain. A grim, ritualized production line was established for this task, involving diggers, cleaners, stackers, drivers, porters and overseers. Every night for years, horse-drawn funerary wagons containing the bones of the disinterred dead, covered with heavy black cloths, preceded by torchbearers and followed by priests who chanted the Mass of the Dead, clopped through the streets from the cemeteries to the Tombe-Issoire, where they disposed of their contents.
• By 1940 there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris.
• It is a Cabinet of Mineralogy – a teaching room from the period when the catacombs were part of the real estate of Paris’s School of Mines. The room has been more or less undisturbed since it was closed at some point in the early 1900s. There is an austerity to the room’s structure, and an elaborate care to the ritual placings of the samples – each on its own swept step.
• Odessa, like Paris, is a city built on limestone, and it contains the world’s most extensive sub-urban quarries. Some 1,500 miles of tunnel make up Odessa’s invisible city, sinking to a depth of 160 feet over three levels.
• (The Carso:) ‘We have cave systems here with living glaciers in them, we have caves containing an unmentionable species of blind orange beetles – the Anophthalmus hitleri, which is menaced by extinction because of its popularity with neo-Nazi collectors – and we have caves in which wine is left to rest with, it seems to me, mostly indifferent results. <> ‘And here, the earth itself is tidal. Truly! The rock here reacts to the draw of the moon, just as the water of the ocean does.
• Boulders, huge boulders, embedded in the sand to our right but not to our left. The roaring coming from somewhere far to the right, and the air full of sand, fine black sand, that we breathe in and that swirls slowly in the light-beams. <...> We are terranauts and we have dropped through the roof of this chamber onto another planet – dropped into an underland desert of fine-grained black-gold sand.
• ‘It’s Swiss cheese, this stone,’ says Lucian. ‘Warrened by war. The high ground is a honeycomb of gun emplacements, access tunnels and chambers. The low ground is all trenches and foxholes. They burrowed into the mountains; they made a war-machine of the landscape. You’ll see even more of this from the First World War when we get up into the Julians, where the snow was heavier and the fighting, if possible, more desperate.’ <> I have, again, a powerful sense of this landscape as one in which geology both produces and confirms ways of feeling. Here in this hollow terrain of the karst, historical memory behaves like flowing water, disappearing without warning, only to resurge under new names, in new places, with fresh force. Here in this topography of cavities and clandestine places, dark pasts get hidden, then brought to the light again.
• Early this millennium, on the sweltering north coast of Java, a lake of toxic mud has spread over four square miles of landscape, gouting out of a central crater from which a plume of foul-smelling gas also rises, and burying twelve villages. This mud volcano began to erupt ten years previously, shortly after a multinational corporation, drilling for oil in a Late Miocene stratum some two miles below ground, ruptured a high-pressure aquifer and opened a series of blowout vents on the surface – from which ever since has flowed this torrent of ancient, poisonous sludge. By some the mud volcano is seen as a consequence of corporate greed – an unnatural disaster. By others it is seen as an emanation of batin – of the submerged occult forces of the underland, of ghosts and spirits that dwell in the landscape and exist far beyond human bidding.
• The man has forty minutes at most in the Sarcophagus before he is overexposed. In what was once a control room he stops, raises his camera, and takes a slow-shutter-speed photograph.
• Later, he develops the image. It should be an image of darkness. But down through the image falls a scatter of white points of dust, like static or a fine snowfall. These points are not dust, though – they are the imprints on the photosensitive film of pure energy, the radioactivity that was swarming invisibly around him in the Sarcophagus, swarming through him. They are the dazzling radio-autographs of uranium, plutonium and caesium – burning points of light that ghost the eye.
• they represented cheap oil. <> However, these same seas are also home to one of the world’s largest cold-water reefs, and the Lofoten and Vesterålen archipelagos are among the most astonishing coastal landscapes in the world, drawing visitors from across the globe in a highly remunerative tourism industry. The waters off the island groups are also home to the fishing grounds that have been Norway’s gold for a thousand years, long before the discovery of oil.
• Seismic mapping is a means of seeing the marine underland. A specialist ship carrying a low-frequency, high-volume air gun fires sound pulses into the water. <...> Barely audible above the surface, they fathom the seabed. But the sound blasts also travel for hundreds of miles laterally below water, sending thunderclaps sideways through the ocean. Seismic surveys are used not only by the oil industry, but also to target deep-sea sedimentary sections that are suitable for unravelling the nature and causes of past climate change, so that models for future climate change can be tested and refined.
• That night in Andøya, I came to think of Poe’s story as a premonitory oil-dream. In it, the Maelstrom operates both as a kind of boring drill and a means of seeing the seabed where it lies bared at the base of the vortex. Often Poe describes the water of the Maelstrom in oily terms: it turns ‘smooth’, ‘shining’ and ‘jet-black’, it ‘gleam[s]’ like ‘ebony’. Like oil it is both fatal and miraculous – and like oil, it re-sequences time. <> Poe’s story and others like it speak in part of the mid nineteenth-century dreams of the ‘oceans of oil’ that were imagined to exist under the earth. These narratives advanced the Holocene delusion of a planetary interior containing inexhaustible wealth and energy – a delusion that still characterizes expansionist oil discourse, nearly two centuries after Poe was writing.
• Deepwater was a rare laying-bare of the darker operations of the global extractive industries. One of the agreements tacitly made by consumers with these industries is that extraction and its costs will remain mostly out of sight, and therefore undisturbing to its beneficiaries. Those industries understand the market need for alienated labour, hidden infrastructure and the strategic concealment of both the slow violence of environmental degradation and the quick violence of accidents. Deepwater violated that agreement shockingly,
• After returning from Norway, I would learn that the Moskstraumen Maelstrom had become literally enabling of the oil industry. In the 1980s a man called Bjørn Gjevig – an antiquarian scholar, professional mathematician and amateur sailor, who seems as if he must have been invented by Poe, but truly exists – became fascinated by the hydrodynamics of the Maelstrom. Using data gathered in part while sailing close to the whirlpool, Gjevig began to model the maths of its currents. When oil was discovered off the Lofotens, he realized that his data had gained application: oil companies would need to understand such ocean forces in order to construct rigs that could withstand ‘destructive currents of the kind found in the Maelstrom’.
• Our modern species-history is one of remorselessly accelerated extraction, accompanied by compensatory small acts of preservation and elegiac songs. We have now drilled some 30 million miles of tunnel and borehole in our hunt for resources, truly riddling our planet into a hollow Earth.
• I think of the seismic charges detonating underwater, of the oil ships dropping their drills to the seabed, of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and of our species’ instinct to open what has been sealed without thought for the consequences.
• But as global temperatures have risen, so snowmelt is forecast to exceed snow accumulation in the region of Camp Century. In a dynamic I have seen so often in the underland that it has become a master trope, troublesome history thought long since entombed is emerging again.
• At the deepest points of the Greenland and Antarctic ice cap, where the ice is miles deep and hundreds of thousands of years old, the weight is so great that it depresses the rock beneath it into the Earth’s crust. At that depth, the compressed ice acts like a blanket, trapping the geothermal heat emanating from the bedrock. That deepest ice absorbs some of that heat, and melts slowly into water. This is why there are freshwater lakes sunk miles below the Antarctic ice cap – 500 or more of these subglacial reservoirs, showing up as spectral dashed outlines on maps of the region, unexposed for millions of years, as alien as the ice-covered oceans thought to exist on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.
• I think of the accounts I have read of how small craft hugging the Greenland coastline will sometimes find their GPS navigation devices screaming alarm, warning of collision. The coordinates of the former extent of glaciers have been inputted into the mapping, but the retreat rate has been so fast that they are sailing into and through the digital phantom left behind by the ice.
• Ice-core science is industrial work, hard labour. Mulvaney once cored for ninety-two consecutive days, working up to fourteen hours a day in temperatures of -15°C. <...> Ice-core science also tests patience. Once, Mulvaney tells me, he lost a drill 1,000 metres down. That was it. There was nothing to be done. It couldn’t be fetched up. ‘It took a year to set up the drill site, a year to drill to a kilometre, a second to lose the drill,
• Moulins have become increasingly of interest to glaciologists and climate scientists for two reasons. Firstly because they are signs of rising surface melt-rates on glaciers and ice caps. And secondly because the deepest moulins duct water directly to the bed of the glacier. Because the meltwater is warmer than the ice, it transports thermal energy deep into the glaciers and melts more ice – so-called cryo-hydrologic warming. It is now also understood that the water can sometimes act as a lubricant, hastening the rate at which the ice slides over the rock beneath it, such that glaciers ride their own melting.
• There, away to the west, running laterally between the ridges of the highest peaks, is the ice cap itself. <> It appears as a floating band of white, impossibly elevated, nacreous and faint. This is the ‘Inner Ice’ and it extends unbroken to the Arctic Ocean on the west side and the north, running for tens of thousands of square miles. Trillions of tons of ice, up to 11,000 feet thick, so great in their mass that they have warped the bedrock beneath them down into the Earth’s crust by up to 1,180 feet below sea level.
• How can there be shooting stars in broad daylight? I glance back at the summit and stop, amazed. The sun is silhouetting the peak, and the blue air above the top swarms with tiny silver points, swirling and darting with life-like energy and intent. There are hundreds of these glittering sprites, vanishing instantly when they pass into the shadow and out of the light. We all watch, mesmerized, for a minute or two. It is one of the most exquisite, eldritch sights I have ever seen in the mountains – these seething silver sparks, these scattering star-shards. <> Later, we realize that it was probably willow snow, the white wisps of the dwarf willows shedding their seeds, which had been blown by the easterly wind and swept 2,000 feet up from the valley and over the summit, to where the hard Arctic sun backlit and silvered them, and the cold Arctic wind set them dancing.
• We cannot see the glacier but we can hear it. The Knud Rasmussen makes the Apusiajik glacier seem like an introvert. The first roar comes minutes after we have dropped our packs on the ledges of gneiss that will be our home until autumn. The noise comes without warning out of the fog-bank and shakes our bodies like bags of jelly.
• Ice has become dirty, in the sense of Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.
• Ice is blue because when a ray of light passes through it, it hits the crystal structure of ice and is deflected, bounces off into another crystal and is deflected again, bounces off into another, and another, and in this manner ricochets its way to the eye. Light passing through ice therefore travels much further than the straight-line distance to the eye. Along the way the red end of the spectrum is absorbed, and only the blue remains. <> In glacial terrain of that seriousness, you move like light through ice. Time spins away and space misbehaves. You take an hour to travel half a mile in the desired direction. The straight-line distance to your destination is irrelevant, because the ice sends you on a bouncing and deflected course – a blue-line not a bee-line.