Tea and scones with the ghost/Deep time and the Grenville orogen
We went up to the Mackenzie King estate this afternoon to have tea and scones with the ghost.
William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister of Canada on and off for a total of 22 years between 1921 and 1948--through the second world war. His estate at Kingsmere, in the Gatineau hills, is open to the public, and has a nice tea room--it's a great place to go on a cool, sunny afternoon. My lovely wife, my delightful daughter and myself sat on a porch of the estate, overlooking the grounds, which are nicely decorated with flower beds and pseudo-ruins, sipped tea, munched scones with cream and jam.
The 'ruins' are one of the oddest features of the place. Mackenzie King had them built from bits of other buildings he had shipped up to his estate for that purpose--more details here.
Yep. He actually built some ruins. Mackenzie King--grandson to William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion--was marvellously eccentric. A spiritualist, the old gent was infamous for having consulted mediums to consult with deceased relatives. Due to his meticulous diaries--now online here, details of the seances themselves are now public.
The estate is believed by some to be haunted--either because Mackenzie King died there in 1950, or as a byproduct of the 'psychic research' he conducted. Our daughter was disappointed--since we'd told her we'd be having tea with a ghost--that it didn't show up.
We told her it had probably had an early lunch.
The Gatineau hills themselves, in which the estate is located, are themselves much older ghosts--the weathered remains of an ancient landform--the roots of mountains around a billion years old. The Grenville orogen (mountain building era) which formed the mountain range which was later ground down to become the Gatineaus occurred around 1 to 1.3 billion years ago. This orogen was an extensive reworking of older crust--a violent and ongoing plate collision. There are some younger (early Cambrian/late Precambrian--450 to 675 million years before present) intrusions; these are quite small. So; generally, if you tread upon a rock in this area, it's likely to be around a billion years old.
The Grenville orogen may have been the biggest mountain forming system in the history of the world. Formed as plates met and collided in the middle of a continent, the system formed much as the Himalayas are forming today, modern traces of it sketch a line 5,000 km long, from Labrador to Mexico. There's a rift in there; it might not have been quite so long before later crustal movements separated its ends. By any standards, however, it was gigantic.
Contemplating the deep time in the history of this place, the most striking feature I can imagine is nearly endless aeons of silence. At one billion years ago, as far as we know, there were as yet no animals, nothing that could be called multicellular, and eukaryotes were just getting started (or, possibly, a few hundred millions years off as yet; genetic studies are building to suggest primitive fungi may have been getting their start here, though there aren't any real fossils to speak of to address this question more directly). The largest identifiable life forms were the boulder-like communities of blue-green algae called stromatalites, and they'd been clustering in shallow briny waters undisturbed by anything so modern as browsing herbivores since the early Archaean--quite probably, they and their free-living blue-green cousins formed the Earth's oxygen atmosphere, over these billions of years. We don't know if there were yet lichens; the only very few preserved fossils from this age may have been lichen like associations between blue green algae and filamentous bacteria (modern lichens are blue greens in symbiosis with fungi), or, for that matter, may have been inorganic artifacts; though according to recent genetic studies, there may well have been real lichens, and these would have been the sole inhabitants of the great mass of the continents.
Land plants wouldn't be on the scene until at least another 300 million years (and possibly another 500 million years, depending on who you ask). No trees, nothing that walks or crawls, or grows more than the few millimetres high was anywhere to be found on the face of the land. The vast continent would have been utterly silent, apart from the hiss of the breakers at the shores of the ocean, and the occasional sounds of wind, rain, and thunder. It would also have been utterly barren, apart from (again, possibly) carpets of lichens where conditions permitted.
Imagine--nothing moved--nothing that was not moved by the wind or by the action of the waves. And with no trees to soften its edges, the young, jagged mountain range just forming would have had a uniquely stark relief--bare and barren, a jagged scar across the surface of the continent, tracing in a great sinuous line the edges of the colliding plates.
William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister of Canada on and off for a total of 22 years between 1921 and 1948--through the second world war. His estate at Kingsmere, in the Gatineau hills, is open to the public, and has a nice tea room--it's a great place to go on a cool, sunny afternoon. My lovely wife, my delightful daughter and myself sat on a porch of the estate, overlooking the grounds, which are nicely decorated with flower beds and pseudo-ruins, sipped tea, munched scones with cream and jam.
The 'ruins' are one of the oddest features of the place. Mackenzie King had them built from bits of other buildings he had shipped up to his estate for that purpose--more details here.
Yep. He actually built some ruins. Mackenzie King--grandson to William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion--was marvellously eccentric. A spiritualist, the old gent was infamous for having consulted mediums to consult with deceased relatives. Due to his meticulous diaries--now online here, details of the seances themselves are now public.
The estate is believed by some to be haunted--either because Mackenzie King died there in 1950, or as a byproduct of the 'psychic research' he conducted. Our daughter was disappointed--since we'd told her we'd be having tea with a ghost--that it didn't show up.
We told her it had probably had an early lunch.
The Gatineau hills themselves, in which the estate is located, are themselves much older ghosts--the weathered remains of an ancient landform--the roots of mountains around a billion years old. The Grenville orogen (mountain building era) which formed the mountain range which was later ground down to become the Gatineaus occurred around 1 to 1.3 billion years ago. This orogen was an extensive reworking of older crust--a violent and ongoing plate collision. There are some younger (early Cambrian/late Precambrian--450 to 675 million years before present) intrusions; these are quite small. So; generally, if you tread upon a rock in this area, it's likely to be around a billion years old.
The Grenville orogen may have been the biggest mountain forming system in the history of the world. Formed as plates met and collided in the middle of a continent, the system formed much as the Himalayas are forming today, modern traces of it sketch a line 5,000 km long, from Labrador to Mexico. There's a rift in there; it might not have been quite so long before later crustal movements separated its ends. By any standards, however, it was gigantic.
Contemplating the deep time in the history of this place, the most striking feature I can imagine is nearly endless aeons of silence. At one billion years ago, as far as we know, there were as yet no animals, nothing that could be called multicellular, and eukaryotes were just getting started (or, possibly, a few hundred millions years off as yet; genetic studies are building to suggest primitive fungi may have been getting their start here, though there aren't any real fossils to speak of to address this question more directly). The largest identifiable life forms were the boulder-like communities of blue-green algae called stromatalites, and they'd been clustering in shallow briny waters undisturbed by anything so modern as browsing herbivores since the early Archaean--quite probably, they and their free-living blue-green cousins formed the Earth's oxygen atmosphere, over these billions of years. We don't know if there were yet lichens; the only very few preserved fossils from this age may have been lichen like associations between blue green algae and filamentous bacteria (modern lichens are blue greens in symbiosis with fungi), or, for that matter, may have been inorganic artifacts; though according to recent genetic studies, there may well have been real lichens, and these would have been the sole inhabitants of the great mass of the continents.
Land plants wouldn't be on the scene until at least another 300 million years (and possibly another 500 million years, depending on who you ask). No trees, nothing that walks or crawls, or grows more than the few millimetres high was anywhere to be found on the face of the land. The vast continent would have been utterly silent, apart from the hiss of the breakers at the shores of the ocean, and the occasional sounds of wind, rain, and thunder. It would also have been utterly barren, apart from (again, possibly) carpets of lichens where conditions permitted.
Imagine--nothing moved--nothing that was not moved by the wind or by the action of the waves. And with no trees to soften its edges, the young, jagged mountain range just forming would have had a uniquely stark relief--bare and barren, a jagged scar across the surface of the continent, tracing in a great sinuous line the edges of the colliding plates.
posted by AJM at 7:09 p.m. (Permanent Link)
