Touring Deep Time, Part 4

The intro is the same because, as I said at the end of Part 3, it’s series, you know? So be sure to read the previous episodes, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

On our recent tour through New Mexico and Arizona, my wife Molly and I found ourselves in the presence of some deep time. And by “found ourselves” I mean “planned our trip to be.” The trip included Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian camp and conference center near Abiquiu in northern New Mexico, the Chaco Culture National Historical Park a couple hours west, Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona (which has its own little time loop), and the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. An unscheduled but anticipated stop at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, fit into the scheme as well. Each site confronted us with history on scales from human generations to older than human civilization, to a significant fraction of the age of Planet Earth.

Grand Canyon

Our tour continued through deep time with a slight detour. On Monday we were in Flagstaff, AZ, which is the home of the Lowell Observatory. This had been one of my favorite stops in 2018, and while we didn’t have it scheduled, I was pleased that Molly wanted to see it. Certainly an observatory with instruments that helped identify the expansion of the universe, besides the discovery of Pluto and investigations of Mars and such, could be considered as part of our exploration of deep time. But I’m going to skip over it and stick to terrestrial and geological targets. Suffice it to say we had an enjoyable day of exploration at Lowell.

Tuesday morning started bright and early, a bit brighter and earlier than usual, as we were heading for the Big Ditch, the Grand Canyon. I had reserved spaces for us on an all-day tour with Canyon Dave Tours, a company that comes highly recommended for good reason. Our guide, Keaton, picked us up at our hotel in Flagstaff at 7:45 a.m. in a 10-(or so)-passenger van with the plan to pick up another couple in Wilson and another in the Grand Canyon National Park. That would be our entire tour group! We would see vistas and historically significant buildings and points of interest all along the South Rim, working our way around to the East Rim. Lunch was included. Keaton turned out to be a perfect tour guide with a wealth of knowledge on the canyon’s geology, flora and fauna, Native American habitations, and National Park history. Pretty much anything you would want to know about the Grand Canyon, Keaton had an answer. Plus, he was genuine and engaging with a good sense of when to jump in and when to leave space. At day’s end, Keaton drove us all back to where we belonged to the strains of Carlos Nakai, famed Native American flute virtuoso. Of our landmark tours, this was the most expensive, but it was also worth every dollar. But enough about the process. Let’s talk about the Canyon.

The Canyon

They always say that pictures don’t do it justice, and that turns out to be true. The Grand Canyon overwhelms one’s sense of scale at first sight. Standing between ten and 18 miles across from the South Rim to the North, between .75 and 1.25 miles in vertical depth, and 277 miles from end to end, this is the biggest canyon on Earth, at least on land. The Colorado River runs through the heart of it, having carved the canyon’s root over millenia. But as we learned, it is not the Colorado alone (averaging 300 ft. wide in the canyon) that made the canyon so wide. That was the work of various tributaries and erosion all along the length of the canyon on either side of the Colorado. The result is a spectacular display of revealed geologic layers in multiple shades of red, brown, green, gray, yellow, brown, and more.

Just as the layers of the mesas at Ghost Ranch revealed the ancient building and erosion of the landscape over millions of years, so the layers of the Grand Canyon reveal the same sort of processes, but going back much farther in time. In fact, the top of the canyon is about as old as the bottom of Ghost Ranch, about 270 million years. Think about that for just a moment. Standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, you are starting at a point 1000X older than the modern human species of homo sapiens. You are starting at a time before dinosaurs appeared. You are starting in the era when all the continents were mashed together into a single landmass called Pangaea. The deeper you go, the older things get, and as we’ve seen, it gets pretty deep.

At the bottom of the canyon, the Colorado is currently cutting through layers called the Vishnu schist, or the Vishnu Basement, and beyond. These rocks are about 1.7 BILLION years old. That is about a third of the age of the planet. This is an era when the only life on the planet was single-celled, mostly bacteria and eventually some algae. Fungus was still a thing of the future. The atmosphere was still in the process of becoming oxygenated for the first time. There was only one supercontinent, but it is called Nuna, the great-grandparent of Pangaea. (Nuna would break up and recombine twice before Pangaea formed.)

In between the Vishnu Basement and the rim of the canyon are multiple layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone, each representing a different geologic era. They represent times when the canyon site was variously under an inland ocean or a dense forest or some other environment. The layers tell us of millions of years of deposits pressed down into solid rock. Think of the eons it would take to build up and compress enough sand, plants, and seashells to make a mile-deep mountain. Then think of the eons it would take to erode it all away so we can see it again.

Short Attention Span Eternity

The human mind is not adequately equipped to exist in timescapes that deep. So we can enjoy the glorious beauty of the Grand Canyon, and we can try to fathom its depth of time. But I think in the latter, we will ultimately fail. This is one of the reasons I wonder about God’s intention for us to live in eternity. Not that I don’t believe it. Not that I think God can’t make us fit for it. But as we are now, we can hardly process millions of years, much less billions. I mean, we get impatient waiting 30 seconds for the microwave to reheat our leftovers, or even a couple of seconds for a webpage to load. (Sorry about that big image at the top of the page.) If eternity is an infinitely-long linear time, we just aren’t ready. I believe we need to rethink how we talk about eternity and how we prepare people to live eternal life in this age, so we will be better prepared for the age to come.

Did you read the end first? Well, go back to read the rest! See also: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Touring Deep Time, Part 3

Yes, this intro is the same as in Part 1 and Part 2, but the rest is different, so read them all.

Meteor Crater (via Winslow)

Winslow

The next day we headed to Meteor Crater, but first we stopped in Winslow, Arizona. People of a certain age and/or musical taste will recognize the reference immediately as coming from the song “Take It Easy” by the Eagles:

“I was standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,

Such a fine sight to see.

It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford

Slowin’ down to take a look at me.”

In the great tradition of American kitsch, there is a roadway attraction commemorating this song. Take It Easy Park, on a street corner in Winslow, on historic U.S. Route 66, has statues of Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the leaders of the Eagles. There is a mural of a store window reflecting a flatbed Ford truck with a blonde woman looking out the side, while an actual matching Ford truck is parked on the street. People cycle through taking pictures and selfies with the statues and the truck and all, and we took our turn as well. Winslow looks like it would be a pleasant enough place to live. There were plenty of restaurants, shops, and souvenir places in the area, although we didn’t indulge. Still, it carried me back to my youth. The song was released in 1972 and was a classic by the time I was coming of age. Funny how nostalgia can make you feel young, if only for a few minutes at a time.

Meteor Crater

On we went to the main event for the day. Just about half an hour west down the highway is the exit for Meteor Crater, which is another five miles down the road to the south. It turns out there really isn’t much else anywhere around there. Clever signs appear every half mile or so, building the anticipation with announcements like, “3 Miles to Impact!”

The land is flat enough that when you are still those three miles out, you can make out a ridge in the distance that turns out to be the rim of the crater! It was just a suspicion at first, but the closer we got the more obvious it became. This was surprising and exciting! I’ve actually wanted to see the crater for years since I learned about it, so my anticipation was already running pretty high, even without the fun signs.

The crater did not disappoint. As the name suggests, this is the impact crater of a large meteor that struck the earth 50,000 years ago. The visitor center has an introductory film, a variety of interpretive and interactive scientific displays, a cheesy but fun “4-D” theatre experience, a fairly extensive gift shop, and an overpriced snack bar. All of that is pretty good, but the main attraction, of course, is the crater and the rim tours.

The crater is about a mile across, three miles around the rim, and 550 feet deep. It is a big, old hole in the ground! We took the rim tour, and our guide, Hayden, was very knowledgeable and engaging. Between his talk, the introductory film, and the displays, we learned that, although the crater was long known to people in the area, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that anyone got the idea that it might be an impact crater and not volcanic. To that point, no impact craters were known to exist on earth. The discovery of a large iron meteorite (about two feet long) nearby triggered a decades-long failed mining exploration of the crater, but it also became the smoking gun that led to the impact conclusion. This became the start of a whole line of scientific inquiry into the process of meteor impacts, both here and on other worlds, so that scientists have been able to determine the history of the crater. About 50,000 years ago, an asteroid measuring about 150 feet (45 meters) across came in at a high angle (80º), traveling at 26,000 mph. It buried itself in the ground and exploded, creating the symmetrical crater 550 feet deep and a mile wide in about ten seconds. Other than pretty total local destruction for about 75 miles in any direction and the scar of the crater, they say it had no significant lasting effect on the planet.

Because of the extremely dry and reasonably stable climate in northern Arizona, the crater has suffered little erosion and remains in excellent condition, mining shafts notwithstanding. It continues to provide insight into the potential for asteroid impacts on earth. Because this crater was identified as an impact, we have learned that the Earth has been hit many times and by much larger impactors, many of which caused global environmental disasters and mass extinctions. Consequently, we now have active scientific programs to identify potentially dangerous asteroids in the solar system. Scientists and governments around the world hold regular conferences to examine the state of affairs and to practice what to do if/when we find an inbound asteroid on its way. NASA has even sent a successful mission (DART) to impact an asteroid to see what it would take to divert a potentially hazardous one. As Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, is fond of saying, “The dinosaurs were wiped out because they didn’t have a space program.” Meteor impact is one of the few natural disasters that we now have the growing capacity to prevent.

All that from a big, old hole in the ground.

This is a whole series, so you’ll want to binge it all. See also: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Touring Deep Time, Part 2

As I wrote in PART 1 (you did read Part 1, didn’t you?)

Chaco Canyon

Our next stop was the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This is a Native American and World Heritage Site that served as the center of a vast economic, political, and religious sphere of influence reaching as far as California and Mexico from 850 to 1250 CE (in the Common Era). I have wanted to visit Chaco for years since I learned about it, because it has a number of sites and architectural elements that are aligned with celestial events such as the solstices and equinoxes. So it’s an ancient astronomy site, and as an astronomy enthusiast, that’s fascinating to me.

In the book In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time by Dan Falk (© 2008 by Dan Falk, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto), the author describes other similar ancient astronomical sites and warns against calling them observatories, because that suggests a level of study and intention associated with modern scientific endeavor that we can’t assume or confirm for an ancient culture. It is most likely that the ancients were concerned primarily with the agricultural and subsequent religio-cultural times the heavens revealed more than the nature of the heavenly bodies themselves. Nevertheless, the accuracy with which the Chacoans and others were able to mark those celestial events with stone and architecture is remarkable.

The Chaco Canyon complex is enormous, much larger than I had imagined. Pilgrims and traders who travelled hundreds of miles on foot to get there would have been rewarded with an impressive expanse of urban hustle and bustle. Five great houses have been identified in the canyon, each covering dozens of acres. Over four hundred smaller structures have been found using modern technology like ground-penetrating radar and lidar but remain unexcavated. The great houses appear to include a mix of apartments, religious buildings, and perhaps governmental offices or shops, or both, everything you would need for a large crowd gathering for festivals in a capital city. The stonework of the architecture is exquisite with tightly-fitting, thin, flat stones laid expertly and held with a mud mortar. Much of this, as beautiful as I found it to be, was in its day covered with plaster to present a clean, bright facade to the public.

I was confronted with my modern bias when I found myself thoroughly surprised at the sophistication of the structures for people who lived twelve centuries ago. My bias comes into sharper focus when I consider the cathedrals of Europe that were built in the same era. I’ve been taught to expect that for white Europeans such building projects were normal and expected but that Native Americans were just living in animal hide tents and stick huts. It ain’t necessarily so. History, it seems, has more stories to tell than we often get to hear.

Keep going! See also: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4,

Touring Deep Time, Part 1

Ghost Ranch

Taking our tour in order, let’s begin at Ghost Ranch. This first stop wasn’t planned for its time connection but as a site for spiritual retreat to begin my sabbatical. Spiritual retreats have their own time bubbles in our experience, standing outside the usual flow of chronos, the chronological time of schedules and calendars and time management. Instead, they tend to flow, in church lingo, in kairos, the timeless time of the eternal. That’s a special experience where time seems to lose its strict meaning and moments of inspiration seem to last forever while still being just now. While retreats aren’t all made up of kairos, they still tend to have a rhythm of their own outside our usual experience of time. I’ll get into all that more in another chapter. The thing here is we wanted to set the sabbatical time apart and a weeklong retreat seemed like a good way to do it.

What I didn’t realize was how beautiful and remarkable a place Ghost Ranch is. While the retreat program itself turned out not to be specifically spiritual, Ghost Ranch created an experience of a God-blessedness just for being at Ghost Ranch.

For me, the landscape carried much of the blessing. The geology of the area has created a system of mesas, flat-topped hills or ridges with steep sides that rise above a plain. They are refugees of erosion, having an area of denser rock at the top that protected the sedimentary layers below from washing away as quickly as surrounding areas. As a result, the sedimentary layers are laid bare for all to see and for geologists to study, date, and catalogue, and for artists and poets to gaze on in wonder, to capture in color and language. Being one with a love of science and a penchant for art, I was enthralled.

Ghost Ranch has two museums, one anthropological about the Native cultures of the area and one paleontological about the geology and dinosaurs of the area. What I learned about the geology blew my mind. You can look up the details yourself, but the two things that really grabbed me were that the bottom layers of the mesas date back to the time before dinosaurs appeared on earth, and that several of the layers of the mesas were laid down when New Mexico was under an inland sea and all the continents were still all mashed together. In a culture where 50 years is considered historic, walking on 250-million-year-old ground and being conscious of continental drift is shocking.

I wonder what would happen if we carried this awareness with us more consciously in our daily lives. No matter where you stand on the planet, you can have this sort of experience if you let your mind go there. Would we be more humble about our endeavors, less anxious about our mistakes and failures, more careful about how we spend our tiny slice of time, if it were in the context of millions of years instead of hours, minutes, and seconds? Would it be a step toward experiencing eternal life to frame our existence in the midst of such deep time instead of the urgent now?

Wait! There’s more! See also: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,

Here We Go Again!

Can you believe it’s been seven years since my Grand Tour that occasioned this blog? Well, if you are among my ones and ones of followers, you might recognize the fact. It hardly seems possible that it was that long ago. At the same time, the world has changed dramatically since 2018, and that Tour seems like a lifetime ago!

If you don’t know, the Grand Tour was the bulk of my 2018 sabbatical in which I visited 17 astronomical observatories and facilities in nine states in under three months. It was an amazing journey of history, cutting edge science, and discovery. I grew to admire the incredibly detailed work of scientists, the remarkable persistence it requires of them, and the ingenuity and cleverness they deploy to make fantastic discoveries about the universe and our place in it. I mean, that’s a lot of superlatives right there, and it barely scratches the surface of what they do. To learn more about it, just go through my blog posts about it.

Now, it’s 2025, seven years later, and time for another sabbatical. This time, I got it in my mind to work on a book about time and eternity from scientific and theological points of view. This came to me last year when we were on our way across Texas to see the solar eclipse. I was thinking about a summer preaching series, and the eclipse put me in mind of the timing of the movements of the spheres. We happen to live in an era when the moon is just the right distance from the earth to match the apparent size of the sun to create a total eclipse. This doesn’t happen just everywhere in the universe, and it doesn’t happen forever. in a few million years the moon will have moved further from earth and won’t be able to cover the whole solar disk. So we live in a remarkable time. That’s what got me thinking about time as a sermon series theme. Then I realized I could make it into a book during this sabbatical! So that’s been the plan.

As it happens, I now suspect that it is impossible to write a book of much substance in three months. So I’ve scaled back my expectations a bit but still plan to work on the project. I’m thinking about questions like: What is the nature of time? Why do we bother with it at all? Does the past persist? Where does the future come from? What is eternity, and how long is it really? Would humans actually enjoy living forever? Does our view of eternity affect how we behave in this life? I have so many questions! The idea is to consider them scientifically and from a particular Christian framework in a way that is accessible, thought provoking, and maybe even fun. We’ll see how that all turns out. At this point I’m imagining a collection of essays that could be the basis for sermons, lessons, and a deeper book in the future.

Meanwhile, Molly and I have just celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary – hurray! So as part of the sabbatical and as a celebratory trip, we are going out west. We will spend a week at Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian conference center in northern New Mexico. Each of us is taking a class – Molly on writing children’s books and me on painting still-life and landscapes. Then we’re going to Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, a Native American heritage site that I had hoped to get to on the Grand Tour of ’18. The site includes a number of archaeo-astronomical installations to mark solstices and equinoxes and such. It would have been the oldest observatory on my previous tour. Now it will be a stepping stone in considering deep time for life on earth. And the stepping stones get older and deeper! After Chaco, we will visit Meteor Crater near Winslow, AZ, and then the Grand Canyon. I hope these big holes in the ground will give me a richer sense of the passage of geological time that might just make it into the book.

So there you go! That’s what I’m going to be up to for the next few weeks and months. I hope to keep the updates coming here, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride. It’s going to be a fun time!