I do hope a geology professor reads this. I've got the most thrilling invocation for her next syllabus:
"The dreams about the modes of creation, enquiries whether our globe has been formed by the agency of fire or water, how many millions of years it has cost Vulcan or Neptune to produce what the fiat of the Creator would effect by a single act of will..."
(Breathtaking, isn't it?)
"...is too idle to be worth a single hour of any man's life."
Ouch. The author? Well, he is rather famous in these parts.
Thomas Jefferson was a man of character. He did, after all, collect prairie dogs, take a giant panther skin to France and behold Virginia's Natural Bridge (a huge rock, no less!) with "a rapture indescribable." But probe the history of the ground beneath his feet? Apparently not.
I must admit, I've been just as guilty -- and I haven't been founding nations in the time I've saved. It's not that geology per se is so dull, but let's be honest: Charlottesville & Backyard is no Grand Canyon. It's ... Well, it's vaguely Piedmont, vaguely Blue Ridge. It's modestly hilly, pleasantly soil-covered and stone-scattered in small, tidy areas. It's a cozy little terrarium, but it's far from the foundry of Vulcan, if you know what I mean.
At this point, the geology professor is chuckling. Of course it looks boring on the surface. So do pterodactyl eggs.
So let's crack it open, hm? I'll spend the idle hour dredging up a few facts; you spare me an idle 10 minutes of reading them. Worth the trouble? Let's see.
Let's start on the Lawn. You are now approximately 500 feet above sea level. You are somewhat less than 4,000 miles from the center of the Earth. Naturally, you don't notice either of these figures immediately. You notice that you are standing on dirt. But that too is just a rough (groan) approximation.
Fact: you are standing on Culpepper fine sandy loam, Albemarle fine sandy loam, the ominous-sounding Louisburg very stony sandy loam, or more likely, an uneven terrane of all three -- plus a swatch or two of more recondite varieties (Cabell Hall beige-and-nondescript loam, for instance). It is probably acidic, but not too severely, and the mineral content is average for agricultural purposes. This may sound unspectacular. Loam? Loam is just sand, clay and finely particulated organic gunk. "I could create all that by a single act of will!" you may be thinking.
But let's assume you're not the Creator. Just how many years would it take you to grind and mix and scatter and compress that unspectacular blanket? Fact: If you believe the geologists, you'd need on the order of 500 million. Most of this soil was weathered straight from the bedrock beneath, which has lain there since the Proterozoic Era. That ended half a billion years ago, around the time trilobites wriggled their way into the fossil record.
Personally, I'm a sucker for trilobites, but perhaps you (and our anti-geology friend) are not yet titillated. So let's keep digging. Eventually you'll hit the bedrock itself. Fact again: It's part of the Lynchburg Group, a stripe of lightly metamorphosed sedimentary rocks that run northeast-to-southwest under the Lawn. Now just wait -- the names alone are irresistible. You've got amphibolite, graphitic phyllite, and best of all: metagraywacke, pronounced
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