Life lessons from rocks

Case in point: At Arches, the formations there are part of the Etrada Sandstone from the Jurassic period of about 180 million to 140 million years ago. That was in the Mesozoic Era, which spanned 240 million to 65 million years ago, which is a crazy long time ago. The salt bed there was formed when a sea flowed into the area and evaporated around 300 million years ago. When you look at the arches, and everything else there sticking out in such a cool manner, you are seeing where younger rock eroded away. A sense of awe about the passage of time is a common feeling, I’m sure. Still, the arches at Arches are relative babes when it comes to rock formations.

The natural bridges at Natural Bridges are different than the arches at Arches in a couple of different ways. First, natural bridges are formed by the penetration of water, otherwise known as erosion. Arches are formed when the softer and younger rock around them erodes sooner than the harder rock, which I kind of covered before. But the natural bridge formations are part of the Cedar Mesa Sandstone in the Permian period in the Paleozoic Era, which was about 240 million to 570 million years ago. That’s some old erosion. Most of the natural bridges are in canyons, so you look down upon them until you hike down. The feeling you are looking at rock formations from so long ago can be mind-numbing.

If that isn’t enough, you can think about the eras periods before, like the Cambrian and Precambrian. Those eras are super interesting only because of the discovery of the Burgess Shale in Canada, which showed evidence of blooming life that didn’t evolve in the typical trajectory we think of when we think of evolution. There, we can think of the cone of increasing diversity, in that some species just didn’t make it, but could have, and that evolution is not necessarily linear.

That’s a lot to think about when scoping out some old rocks. But it brings to mind the Holocene Era, or human era — when we are talking about the last 12,000 years or so. That marks the very tip of our existence, the historical record as it is. There is evidence of hominids using tools about 3 million years ago, but the general consensus is that humans have been around for about 200,000 years at most. And given the estimated age of the planet is 4.5 billion years, that means our human history is a mere tick on the timeline. And yet we give ourselves such credit for our inventions and modernity — from the Eiffel Tower, space shuttle and iPhone to Hamlet, sous vide and jazz.

When many talk about the changes we are seeing, it’s important to consider the context. The Holocene Era began with the glacial retreat of the Pleistocene Era, often referred to the Ice Age, which was from about 2.6 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago, when the Holocene Era began. We are in an interglacial period, meaning we are between ice ages, yet remnants of the previous era exist in our ice caps. They will eventually melt and our seas are estimated to rise about 450 feet — with us or without us.

Don’t take that as a fatalistic statement that we have nothing to do with climate change. We do. Or, that there is nothing we can do. There is. Our use of fuels based on the fossils of dead animals from older eras is hastening the change. We should do what we can to slow it. Yet, the caps will melt with or without us, and it’s a bit narcissistic to think we have the ability to change the ages of the world just as the trilobites of the Cambrian explosion had no way to stall the end of their era.

However, the urge is strong for all species to survive and thrive; and that is what calls on so many to do all we can to ensure the safety and stability of newer generations of humans, no matter how young our species may be in the grander scale. Today, on Earth Day, our role on the planet is certainly something to consider.

Jon Mays is the editor in chief of the Daily Journal. He can be reached at jon@smdailyjournal.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @jonmays.