A guy at the Grand Canyon told me something about the rock layers that I can't forget

I was on the South Rim trail a couple years ago and got talking to this older guy named Frank who was a retired park ranger. He pointed down at the red and tan stripes and said, 'See that line? That's over two million years of quiet, right there.' He meant the Tapeats Sandstone, and it just hit me how a thin layer of rock can hold more time than we can even picture. Has anyone else had a moment like that where the scale of geologic time just clicked?

3 comments

3 Comments

josepha323d ago

It's a cool thought, but I've always wondered if we're just putting our own feelings onto the rocks. That layer was just sand piling up, not some quiet waiting period. The scale is huge, sure, but it's just physics and chemistry over a long time.

michael_coleman103d ago

My buddy Dave, a geologist, said something similar until he was out in Utah. He was looking at a cliff face, all those neat layers, and he told me he just got this weird chill. He said for a second it didn't feel like looking at a thing, but like a thing was looking back, all that quiet time. He still calls it physics and piled sand, but he admits now that the feeling is part of the fact. It's the scale that does it, makes the simple stuff feel heavy.

the_grace3d ago

I read a piece by a park ranger in the Grand Canyon who said the same thing as your friend Dave. He wrote that after twenty years, he still gets a sense of deep time that feels like a physical weight. It's not just seeing the layers, it's feeling them as a kind of slow, patient record. That quiet your friend mentioned is the whole point.