The Sea Will Wait
The sea is rising. Around the world, people check tide gauges, monitor the shore, watch the waves. And we observe that the water is higher than it was. Sure, in a few places the land is moving upward even more rapidly, such the Hudson Bay Lowlands, so recently released from their glacial burden. But globally there is no question: the sea is rising.
People are building dikes. Engineers are designing tidal barriers, planning new sea walls. We humans are an optimistic species; our can-do attitude has made us what we are today. We can solve this problem! We have done this sort of thing before. After all, the Acadians drained and diked the Tantramar hundreds of years ago. Early last century the Dutch dammed the Zuiderzee and reclaimed land in the polders, and just a few decades ago the English built the Thames Barrier. We can defeat the sea. We have the ability.
New York City from Staten Island
But the sea will watch. Its sun-dappled waves may wash gently on the shore, but they are like a flicking watery tail, and just over the horizon a monstrous salty cat is plotting its next move. The sea will wait.
Maybe we will not be able to save low-lying Third World islands like those of Tuvalu. What hope do we have that funds will be found to prevent the Bay of Bengal from sweeping across the low coast of Bangladesh? What hope is there that millions of people on west African deltas will not be displaced?
But here in the West it is different, surely! After all, New Orleans is being rebuilt, isn’t it? And America has the resources to relocate people from the low-lying land of South Florida! And Venice might be sinking, but I’m sure that the Italian government will block the sea!
We can save those treasures now, we can save them next year. But what will the world be like in 50 years? 500 years? 5000 years?
The coast of East Greenland: ice sheet and calving icebergs
The sea will always wait. It will wait with anticipation while ice sheets calve into the great northern and southern oceans. It will wait comfortably while its waters warm and expand. It will watch patiently for its chance, and that chance will come. It is steadfast and resolved, while we are mercurial and easily distracted. Sooner or later we will be transfixed by war, or plague, or recession. We will let down our defences and the sea will come in. Maybe in some places this will be an all-out assault, a tsunami or hurricane-driven wall of water that will suddenly roar across a low-lying coast. But elsewhere it will be a gentle lapping trickle creeping from the estuary up the back streets, while no-one notices from the windows of half-darkened houses.
Paldiski, Estonia
Footprints and waves at the eastern end of Prince Edward Island.
Have you ever been looking at the sea from far out on a tidal flat, and suddenly come to the horrible realization that the water is already behind you, threatening to cut you off completely from the land? The tide moved so quickly, and yet you probably didn’t perceive it until it was almost too late. Did you have to dash to make it to shore before you were soaked? The sea has the capacity to do that to coastal humanity. More slowly, but on a tremendous scale. And we are largely a coastal species. The effects will be immense, greater than any of the catastrophes that affected us in the last eventful century.
This roadcut in the Grand Rapids Uplands of Manitoba exposes a section through the Stonewall Formation, of Late Ordovician age (about 445 million years old). These sedimentary beds were deposited in a tropical sea. The grey marker bed toward the top apparently represents an interval in which the sea left the area for a period of time, before returning to deposit the beds above. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
I stand at a roadcut, by a highway in the centre of North America. All around me are layers of sediment, laid down over millennia by ancient seas that came and left, came and left. How could we possibly think that the waters will never come here again?
The sea will always wait. Its patience is infinite. It has all the time in the world.
Airport Cove, Churchill, Manitoba
The St. Lawrence estuary as seen from St. Joseph de la Rive, Québec
© Graham Young, 2012
McBeth Point and Cat Head, 1997: Part 2
Nick Butterfield (L) and I labour across the loose cobbles that make the walk toward Cat Head such a great workout (someone should design gym machines based on this principle!). Note the snow that still remains in June under the shadow of the cliff. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
Last week, after posting that piece about fieldwork in the McBeth Point – Cat Head area of Lake Winnipeg’s North Basin, I decided that I needed to go through my slides to find more photos of the memorable 1997 expedition. Even better, Dave Rudkin has also sorted through and scanned some of his excellent images, so here is a further sampling from our hunt for Ordovician fossils in that beautiful place.
Since it is such a struggle to walk along that beach, it was wonderful to have a boat to retrieve our fossil "booty." Here, Dave Wright takes a morning fossil-pickup run in the Zodiac. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
The dolostone at the tip of McBeth Point is full of beautiful white chert.
The pelicans love to haunt a spot just north of the tip of McBeth Point.
Most of McBeth Point consists of a narrow spit that extends far into the lake. Here, with a north wind, waves pile up on the north side of the bar, while it is calm and blue to the south.
In the evening light, the Goldfield arrives in McBeth Point harbour.
An evening bonfire by the old "mink ranch": (L-R) Nick Butterfield, Christine Kaszycki, Ed Dobrzanski, Dave Wright, and me. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
Our tents sit on the concrete pad that remained from a burned building.
The sun sets into the North Basin.
Christine and Ed by the fire. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
How are we going to fit all the people, gear, and fossils into two small floatplanes? (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
In the Beaver, I fill in the logsheet. These planes have such wonderful instrument panels, like the dashboards of 1950s automobiles! (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
As we fly out, we bank past Inmost Island (that is the Beaver's float in the foreground). Just yesterday we walked all the way around this little island, picking up trilobites and fossil algae as we went.
© Graham Young, 2012
Waiting for the Plane at McBeth Point, June 12th, 1997
McBeth Point from the air, June 12th, 1997. There are large waves on the north side, and relatively quiet water to the south.
We sit in the sunshine on the edge of the concrete pad, looking hopefully southward. Behind us the wind is rising, pushing combers and grinders against the other side of the bar. The pebbles and cobbles complain and grumble as they are pushed up the beach and slide back down with a deep percussive sigh.
This morning we took down tents and packed gear. We folded the Zodiac into its bags, and loaded most of the rocks into pails. Lunchtime is past now, and the other half of our group has already flown out, headed south to Pine Dock and civilization. We hope the north-south bearing of that intense wind holds, because if it moves just a few more compass degrees to the east it will be coming around the point and the plane will be unable to land. The others took most of the camping gear with them in the Cessna, while we held the rocks to put into the Beaver with its far greater load capacity. If we can’t get out of here, it may be an uncomfortable night without tents and stoves!
The southern tip of McBeth Point
The pad we camped on was all that remained of a burned building. The fire must have been brilliant, because strewn across the white concrete were dozens of nails and chunks of melted aluminum; nothing else was left. Just along the shore, at the base of McBeth Point, the tumble-down remnants of another small group of buildings can be seen through the trees. I think of these as a mink ranch, but why I am not sure. After all, why on Earth would anyone want to build a mink ranch out here? I walked over there last evening, discovering that the only inhabitants were rabbits hopping through the wreckage; it doesn’t take long for nature to take back what is hers, especially in this harsh place.
The cliffs near Cat Head
And we really have no idea what our concrete pad might have been for. It was fine to camp on (if a bit hard), but that was in mild weather, and now that it is starting to blow up a bit we realize that there is very little shelter here. The bar is tall but very narrow, and there is a sparse band of vegetation between us and the north part of the North Basin. The cobbles on the other side of the bar are beautifully smoothed, rounded, and sorted; the wave-grinding we hear now gives a clear illustration of the reasons why.
The Beaver at Pine Dock, loading for the flight to McBeth Point
Scrambling up to the top of the bar to watch the weather, we can see the waves breaking along the shore below the fractured cliffs that loom between here and Cat Head. We have been along there on each of the past couple of days. Most of the rockfalls seem to be old and lichen-covered; nevertheless, they are not cliffs to be trusted. There were times yesterday, even with light wind, when we could hear the patter of stones falling to the beach behind us. We mostly looked for fossils in loose blocks along the shore, but an examination of the cliff in its safer parts indicated that the fossils occur as concentrations in sporadic layers, and that they are absent from most of this rock.
The rounded and sorted cobbles made for hard walking; Ed greatly regretted the soft boots he had worn the first day, because they made his feet too sore to make the full trek yesterday, though of course there was still plenty for him to find close to the camp.
A slab covered with the brachiopod Tetraphalerella, collected between McBeth Point and Cat Head (The Manitoba Museum, MM I-3616)
As we wait here, there is time to contemplate the larger blocks we have collected; can they be fitted into the floats of the Beaver? Dave and Nick get to work with their geological hammers, expertly bashing off corners and reducing weight as much as possible (nevertheless, the Beaver will be riding low on its floats when we finally get out of here!). We have to smack our finest Winnipegia slab into two pieces, as it is simply too large to fit anywhere in the plane as it is.
Looking across Kinwow Bay, we see Inmost Island as a pale streak between us and the low dark land on the horizon. We were out there yesterday, dropped off by the kind fisherman Irwin. It took us two and a half hours to go around the little island, picking up every fossil we could find in the warm sunshine. The trilobites and algae were well worth the trip, but thank God that Irwin came back! It would have been an awful, desolate place to be abandoned; the prospect of getting stuck here today seems comparatively pleasant.
The beautiful beach at the base of McBeth Point
Irwin has a 16 foot open boat with a 90 horsepower motor. That sounds like a lot of power for such a boat, but it is critical; all the boats on Lake Winnipeg seem to rely on immense power to push them over and through the waves that can become so steep on this shallow body of water. Irwin’s daughter is his assistant; she has her own fishing licence and will eventually take over his business. Most people at the McBeth Point fishing station are from Fisher River, but Irwin is from Jackhead. He has had much misfortune – his wife died of illness and his house burned down – but he says he is happy, and he appears genuinely cheerful. He seems like a man who has his niche.
Yesterday evening, in the golden light, we were surprised when the Goldfield glided into the harbour at McBeth Point. We were not even aware that there were such vessels on the lake, and yet here it was, this ghost from a time long past, looking huge and solid beside the modern fishing boats. But of course it only makes sense that a ship would be needed to service the active fishing stations on the lake. The McBeth Point station has 50 licences, and each licence allows a catch of 3800 kilograms; how could all those fish possibly get to market without a ship of this size?
Along the cliff toward Cat Head, Nick Butterfield stands at the Winnipegia horizon.
Now a small fishing boat passes us, hugging the southern shore of the point. Pelicans glide over, mostly in groups of two to four. A bit farther off, too far to tell what they are, is a large flock of ducks with white flashes on their wings – mergansers, perhaps? Mergansers have been around in pairs for the past couple of days, but I had not seen a large flock before.
The sun continues to move across the sky, the wind blows a bit harder, and we while away the time by telling stories and attempting to flint-knap the abundant chert cobbles. But we are constantly listening, listening intently for the deep rotary-engine buzz of the Beaver. We hear nothing beyond the wind in the trees and the waves on the shore. Surely the plane must arrive soon. Surely.
The probable alga Dowlingia, collected during the 1997 trip (The Manitoba Museum, MM B-224)
A dendroid graptolite from McBeth Point (The Manitoba Museum, MM I-4345)
Moon, birds, and the harbour at McBeth Point
© Graham Young, 2012
Folk Art Dioramas
The Basin Head Fisheries Museum, Prince Edward Island
Fishing boats at anchor, and fisherman at rest, at the Basin Head Fisheries Museum.
Working at the Manitoba Museum, I have been fortunate to work with some superb artists, and to observe them closely as they prepare dioramas and other artistic exhibit materials. I recognize that dioramas such as ours require extremely advanced artistic skills combined with thousands of hours of research, preparation, and execution.
Those of us who develop exhibits of course tend to view the work shown at other institutions with a critical eye. Some dioramas in other museums are not really quite “there,” while others, such as those at the American Museum of Natural History have justly earned their reputation as lasting pieces of art.
This beautiful mill at Basin Head might have almost stepped out of a Maud Lewis painting.
Knowing what it takes to produce professional dioramas, I am often surprised and sometimes impressed by the work of those who leap into it from the other end of the artistic spectrum: the self-trained artists who are determined to produce three-dimensional representations of life. As these mini-dioramas from the Basin Head Fisheries Museum show, such work can be beautiful, charming, and artistically successful.
The main objective of many of these dioramas is to depict work life as it is or was. This detailed ice-fishing model shows activity both above and below the water.
These dioramas succeed, not in spite of their blithe disregard for some of the standard rules of diorama composition, but perhaps because of this disregard. They substitute exuberance for the laws of perspective and first-hand knowledge for detailed academic research; a desire to represent every aspect of coastal life overwhelms any attempts to trim or edit. In each detail they demonstrate their maker’s love for and understanding of the subject being presented.
As this sealing scene shows, the dioramas pull few punches when it comes to showing the details of life!
These dioramas are really works of folk art, three-dimensional equivalents to the paintings of Maud Lewis or Grandma Moses. In some instances they depict aspects of life gone by, in other places they show life on the land and sea as it still is. In each case they pull few punches: seals are slaughtered with axes, schooners are sunk, and fishermen relax by … going fishing, of course!
Two schooners, one above and one below the water.
The Basin Head Fisheries Museum
Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXIX. Rugose corals from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous) include Lithostrotion aranea (1, 1a), Lithostrotion affine (2, 2a, 2b), and Lithostrotion phillipsi (3, 3a).
Leafing through some of the old books lying around here, I have been contemplating the wonders of the illustrator’s art, and how it can translate across the centuries. There is little question that artistic paleontological illustration reaching its apogee in the mid 19th century, prior to the widespread application of photography as a means of depicting fossils.
In Europe in particular there were many first-rate illustrators, and the lithography was often of remarkable quality. This seems to have begun about the 1820s, and continued as late as the first decades of the 20th century in some countries (such as Sweden) but not in others (the United States, as far as I can tell).
Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXII. The rugose coral Cyathophyllum regium from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous).
Possibly the best lithographic work I have seen is in British Fossil Corals, by the French scientists Henri Milne-Edwards and Jules Haime. I have all of the volumes of this substantial series in modern facsimile edition, but I did not appreciate the true quality of the illustrations when I was lucky enough to be given an original of the volume on Corals from the Permian Formation and the Mountain Limestone.*
The plates are beautiful in the facsimile, but in the original they possess remarkable depth, tone, and crispness. The wonderfully shaded images seem to have an inner glow, the corals floating as if suspended above their deep black background. I apologize that my photographs here do them as little justice as the versions in the printed facsimile editions!
Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXI. The rugose coral Cyathophyllum stutchburyi from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous).
Not only was the 19th century illustration work remarkable, but the lithography was superb and societies such as the Palaeontographical Society apparently spared no expense on printing, resulting in work superior to anything seen in modern scientific publications. Similarly, some 19th century specimen photography was comparable to or better than the best work we see published today; more on this in part 2, perhaps?
* H. Milne-Edwards and J. Haime, 1852. British fossil corals, part 3, corals from the Permian Formation and the Mountain Limestone. Palaeontographical Society Monographs, Volume 6, p. 147-210, pls. 31-46.
Rocket Range
Scenes from Northern Summers (4)
Anywhere you stand in the Bird Cove area of the Hudson Bay coast, the ruins of the Churchill Research Range dominate the horizon. This relic of the great push in Canada and the United States for government-funded scientific research in the 1950s was created as an outcome of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), as scientists sought to understand the atmosphere of the Arctic region.
Largely abandoned as a research facility since the 1980s, much of the range is slowly disintegrating thanks to the brutal winds and weather. The sole exception is the operations building, which has been taken over and re-tasked by the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.
I have seen the range decay considerably through the years I have travelled to Churchill since 1996; these images are from the latest visit in 2010. It should probably be saved for historic and tourism reasons, but how could this ever be accomplished in our modern era?
On the Platform
It is July, 2011, and we have found time to revisit the beloved main site east of Churchill. It is wonderful to again wander along that ancient boulder shoreline, examining the Ordovician corals that had been strewn there some 450 million years ago. On the hottest day of our northern stay, the bright sun and low tide expose the site to maximum advantage. There is so much to see, and the morning feels very full as we explain this fabulous place to those who have never been here before.
Later we walk westward heading for another favourite spot, a place we have always called “the platform.” There, we know that the smooth warm rock below a stark quartzite bluff will be perfect for a restful break.
Taking a break on the platform toward midday: Debbie Thompson (foreground) and (L-R) Matt Demski, Sean Robson, and Dave Rudkin.
But how did this place come to be, where the quartzite has been smoothed so wonderfully by the action of waves and shore ice? It is clearly a wave-cut platform in the modern world; the paleontologist also tends to wonder whether it took this shape back in the Ordovician Period, when this area formed a tropical marine shoreline. Just a short walk east, between here and the first of the boulder field sites, one can see places where the quartzite scarp is infilled with small patches of brown Ordovician carbonate, indicating that it was already exposed and deeply incised at that time.
The scarp looms behind the platform like a small-scale Ayers Rock.
Seasonal Stars
The star is a powerful form, in nature and in the human world. Best wishes of the season!
Top row (L-R): parquet floor, The Hermitage (Winter Palace), St. Petersburg, Russia; green sea urchin Strongylocentrotus from Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick; parquet floor, Catherine Palace, Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo), Russia; crystal jellyfish Aequorea victoria, north Pacific Ocean
Middle row: starfish on beach, northeastern Prince Edward Island; windmill, Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan; crown-of-thorns starfish Acanthaster, Shedd Aquarium, Chicago; fossil starfish, Silurian Period, from near Churchill, Manitoba
Bottom row: fossil coral Palaeophyllum, Ordovician Period, from near Churchill, Manitoba; 17th Century Spanish tile; lion’s mane jellyfish Cyanea capillata on beach, northeastern Prince Edward Island; church window in Keila, Estonia
Modern Shore: Ice on the Headpond
This afternoon, I experienced one of those perfect combinations of light, place, and season. It was mid afternoon where the Mactaquac headpond meets the end of Keswick Ridge, and the dusting of snow had been winnowed across the new ice on the little bay. I only wish that I had taken the time to really explore the light conditions, rather than taking a few quick snaps and jumping back into the car.
Since this is a geological blog, I guess I should also mention that the rocks beneath the higher ground in the distance include Silurian sediments and metasediments, and Devonian granites associated with the Acadian Orogeny … Read more…
House of Bones and Leaves
In which Montreal’s venerable Redpath Museum is considered through a series of metaphors, similes, and random observations.
♦
♦
The Redpath Museum is like a Ford Ranger truck.
If you look at it without any scale against which it can be measured, you might be hard-pressed to tell that it is any different from the full-sized model, as it is similar in almost every feature. The building looks tremendously tall and impressive, standing in neoclassical splendour as you approach across rising lawns. But after spending time in it, you begin to realize that it is smaller than it had seemed. There is definitely less mileage here than in a full-sized museum, and perhaps it lacks a bit in pulling power. Still, in most exhibit situations it has everything it needs to get the job done.
♦
♦
The Redpath Museum is a Wrangel Island mammoth.
I don’t mean that it has a trunk and tusks, or that it is anything like extinct. But it evolved in what was then a remote “island” environment, far removed from the main herd of grand European-style natural history museums. Sure, Montreal had already existed for hundreds of years by 1882, but it was still a small city near the edge of a great empire. In this colonized place, with limited resources, the Redpath had to be smaller and more efficient to exist and survive.
♦
A view of the main gallery from above
Ancient Shore 
