Isn’t time interesting? We don’t really know what time is or where it comes from, but, as we grow older, we start to feel its irreversibility. What’s more, we humans love to write and read stories that play with time, perhaps more commonly than any other science-fictiony idea.
Mary and I encountered time on our maiden 2025 campervan voyage over Memorial weekend. We first traveled south to the Cleveland area to visit with dear friends of some decades back. They were perhaps our first close friends when we moved to Minnesota over thirty years ago. We were all young together back in those days. We explored ideas, faith, and life together. When we got together again, it felt like we stepped back into that friendship. Of course, we first had to share with each other the passing of the years: the children who have grown up and begun their own lives, the careers that have bloomed, and faded, and bloomed again, the joys and the challenges.
Time is so full of life and remembrance.
Then we headed into northern Minnesota to prep for a science teacher workshop we plan to offer in July. We stopped at an outcrop in Gilbert MN to look at a world-famous pillow basalt flow (ok, so only world-famous to geologists). Check it out in the picture. The black lines around the pillows are the formerly-glassy areas where the emerging lava froze in contact with the deep ocean water.
Whoa! Volcanoes erupting deep beneath an ocean…in Minnesota? What wonders time has wrought!
Later, we stopped at a borrow pit and checked out the glacial sediments (see picture), telling us that mountains of ice had replaced the former ocean at some point in the past. And in-between those two points in time lay iron deposits that could only form in a world with limited oxygen, mountain ranges that rose and eroded away, vast sand plains traversed by winding rivers, a continental rift that featured new volcanoes (not under an ocean this time), the coming and going of more oceans including a final sea that crept into Minnesota during the age of the dinosaurs.
Such a span of time seems greater than the little human brain can comprehend. The Grand Canyon, famous for its stories of vast time, records just a portion of the time that can be read in the rocks of Minnesota.
Time is so humbling and majestic.
While we’ve travelled, I’ve been working through editorial revisions for my novel in progress, A People Joined Asunder. My protagonist, a self-taught geologist, is trying to figure out the meaning of mysterious stratigraphic records on board a vast ship that may hold the key to surviving a coming alien attack. Perhaps those records also hold the secret to the meaning of time.
Isn’t time interesting? Thousands of science fiction stories on time, and I still want to read (and write) more. That’s because we still don’t know what time is or where it comes from, and we marvel at how it transforms us and our world.
If you really love time and geology, you can check out some of my online ‘field trips’ through Minnesota geology (for science teachers and others) at Selected Geology Stories from Minnesota-Part 1 and Selected Geology Stories from Minnesota-Part 2.