Fortune Head Geologies (2013)
Photographs from Fortune Head Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland, Canada
Fortune Head is the location of a “Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point.” This means it is an internationally recognized reference point in the geologic record, a moment in time and space marked by either a real or theoretical golden spike. A reference point, of course, permits the discussion of one location by describing its relationship to another. In this case, the reference is the line drawn between the Cambrian and Precambrian periods, which provides a way for scientists to navigate the nebulous waves of deep time as they crash together, hinting at the formation of the earth.
On a windy spring day I photograph the rocks, but I cannot see the dividing line. Perhaps the golden spike is invisible to the untrained eye. The strata of rock, like the ticks of a clock, suggest a great passage of time, but still appear indistinct. The dark gray band near the bottom of the rocks is only the result of waves crashing against them.
The Precambrian-Cambrian division is significant in the history of the earth. The period preceding the Cambrian, the Ediacaran, was an era of soft-bodied and frond-like creatures.[1] The Cambrian was a period of great change; it is even described as an explosion, although explosions in geological time still take millions of years. It was a time of massive earthquakes and continental change. New landmasses, oceans, and mountains formed. The very chemistry of the earth system changed. It was also a time of great evolutionary surges, an explosion of new life forms that brought to the world novel biological features, including skeletons, predation, and sexual reproduction.
One important signal that confirms rocks from the Cambrian era is the evidence of “bioturbating” organisms. These small, soft-bodied animals burrowed through the ocean strata while eating the sediment that collected there. Their burrow patterns leave distinctive, fossilized traces in the geologic record, and are abundant in the rocks of Fortune Head.
Our human burrowing activities are marked in the landscape here, too. A rusty orange stain crumbles out of a gully between the grey strata and into the ocean. The men in the lighthouse apologize for its presence, explaining that it is the remains of an old garbage dump which served the town of Fortune before the geological significance of the site was known, that is, before it was re-marked as a reference point.
Notes
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See Don McKay, “Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time,” in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, ed. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruze (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012), 46-54.
