Reborn Earth

There is a place on the far southern tip of the South American continent where the Earth is being born….again.

Although The birth is not for the first time, but rather a rebirth, it is no less dramatic or miraculous. The place is in the land called Patagonia,and you can see the birth happening with your naked eye at the western end of Lago Viedma, where the Viedma glacier ends and the Lake begins. You can even walk on the newly emerged infant earth, and touch it’s raw and rarefied skin. It is impossible to find words to describe the surreal grandeur of this place- human language is ludicrously inadequate! Of course there is no substitute for going there yourself, but the trip is long and costly, so I brought back photos.

The Viedma Glacier is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap. This huge (5000 square miles!) expanse of ice sits on the Argentina/ Chile border. The Viedma is one of the ice field’s 48 large outlet glaciers. It originates high in the snow capped southern Andes and wends its way down to the eastern foothills, a 7-square-miles river of ice, terminating in a great blue and white precipice at the west end of Lake Viedma. There the glacier melts into the Lake. The melting is not a peaceful gradual event, but occurs in dramatic fashion, with great cracks and booms and tidal waves and geysers of spray as icebergs peel away and fall from the face of the glacier, events called calving.

Mostly the icebergs are moderate in volume- only the size of a large boat or perhaps a house. But sometimes the entire front edge of the glacier cracks off at once in a cataclysmic event. These events are unpredictable in their timing, therefore it is not recommended to walk on the edge of the glacier or even get too close to the wall in a boat!

Viedma Glacier has been receding rapidly in the past 50 years. In the path of its retreat it happened to leave a peninsula of rock which just happened to be above the waterline of the lake. The Glacier has no problem gouging the earth as much as 400 feet deep depending on the hardness of the rock and the pressure of the massive river of ice, so the existence of the rocky peninsula is in and of itself a miracle and an amazing opportunity for people to get close to the glacier and wonder at its power and its effect upon the landscape. The peninsula has only been there for 30 years. Before that it was covered in ice. Thick, powerful, merciless ice.

The newly revealed peninsular rock was originally formed eons ago by sediments of dirt, debris and minerals falling to the bottom of an ocean. Dust, fish poop, plankton, maybe some seaweed and assorted shells, or bits of whatever life forms crawled or swam over the planet at the time. The sediments fell slowly and gradually for millions of years, eventually accumulating into deep layers, and were then compressed into rock by the pressures of the water and sediments above. Then the sedimentary rock was baked. Hot molten rock or magma deep in the crust of the earth rose upwards and metamorphosed our sediments into super hard dense bedrock. The magma also began to lift the rocks up towards the surface of the earth’s crust in the act of creating the Andes Mountains. At the same time snow was falling. It fell for thousands of years as the rock rose up, so that the land was blanketed in massive ice fields and glaciers as it was lifted on its upward journey.

Having been thoroughly squeezed, baked and uplifted, our sediments still remained deeply buried under more layers of rocks and dirt, and topped by a frosting of ten thousand tons of thick ice and snow. The frosting formed into a glacier and began to move down hill. An oozing river of ice, gouging and scraping everything in its path. The glacier scraped off all of the softer rock and dirt on top of our hardened bedrock. It scraped and scratched and gouged at our bedrock. It carved fissures and smooth round curves. It gave the rock sensuous flowing contours and polished every surface to a glossy sheen. And then it abruptly melted away. Within thirty short years the curtain lifted to reveal the landscape to the light of day. The rock was exposed to sunshine and rain and air, and to human eyeballs; exposed to our hands and feet and high tech gadgets for measuring the vital signs of the land. And for the first time in millions of years the molecular building blocks of the rock were exposed to oxygen.

When I first laid eyes on the Viedma Peninsula I was astounded by the vividness and variety of colors I saw on the surface of the land. It was a kaleidoscope of mottled shades of red, yellow, white, purple, maroon, magenta, and orange. The hues reminded me of severely bruised flesh as it passes through shades of deep red and purple and black to lighter shades of orange and yellow and tan as residual bilirubin breaks down and the skin regains it’s normal shades, and for a moment it seemed as if I was walking on an organic living creature. Like a newborn infant that has come into the world after hours of being pushed and squeezed through a narrow canal may bear mottled patches of red and purple and yellow, the rock appeared to bear the residual pigments from its tortuous journey to the surface of the earth’s crust. But in fact, an entirely different phenomenon had given rise to those glorious hues. Thankfully we had a knowledgeable glacier expert who explained what had really happened. The cause of the color was oxygen. After so many millennia of being buried beneath layers of water, dirt and ice, the minerals in the rock had suddenly been exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere and had promptly oxidized. The skin of our new born infant earth was beautifully swaddled with rust.

Before long the newly reborn patch of earth will get dusty. Dust and dirt will settle out of the atmosphere, winds will blow grit and sand into the fresh fissures and crevices. Birds will drop feces and seeds on the rocks. Plants will colonize the land, sending out tiny tendrils to find tiny cracks and take root and grow. Gradually soil will form, fertilized by bits of organic matter. More plants and more life will occupy the land, nourished in part by the minerals yielded by the bedrock’s infinitesimally slow oxidation and decay. Perhaps the glacier will grow again, or the land will rise or fall. The forces that shape our planet work on a different scale of time than us clever hominids. We’re here today, gone tomorrow. Our time on this planet is fleeting, but for one day I had a chance to have a fleeting glimpse into the incredible powers of the forces that shape the earth we walk on, and bear witness to the beauty of a tiny newborn peninsula of land.

We visited the Viedma Peninsula on the last full day of our trip to Patagonia, but this place of newly re-emerging earth seemed like a good place to begin telling the story of this land, so raw and fresh and so visibly close to the elements and forces of nature.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the photos.

Happy Trails,

Shirley