UKC

Walking down from Great Dun Fell towards Knock a few days ago, the old quarry out of Knock Pike caught the light and I took a (crappy mobile phone) photo.

Zoom in on the top edge of the quarry and there’s a thin band, perhaps less than 50 cm deep, of rich dark soil on top of the lifeless rock.  

While there’s the occasional nematode and bacteria going further down, the soil layer that sustains most of the plant life we see and depend on is an improbably thin layer making up some 0.000008% of the planet’s radius.

Looking at is as we walked past, I had a sudden visceral sense of just how fragile the balance is that enables life on this planet.

Whilst I can't argue with the profundity of your experience, I'd add that there's quite a lot of single-celled plants floating around in the oceans that aren't too fussed about all this soil malarkey.

T.

Very true, and there’s yet more life deep in the rocks and high in the atmosphere, but you and I are creatures of the land.  

I suppose we could live on a barren island in houses made of rock and eating nothing but raw fish and seaweed, but it doesn’t sound like much fun.

Sounds positively Japanese; so you're definitely right about that.  A less tired version of me might have written a haiku about it but as it is, I'll have to leave that for someone else.

T.

We let the Earth die

Soils lost by rains, scorch and flood

Seaweed soup anyone?

Apocalypse on Tuesday?

Odd.. I always think the opposite.

Because I love old quarries, surface and especially underground ones, I find it remarkable just how quickly a building, once the roof is damaged or slates removed and sold, deteriorates. It will go from a pristine roofless building to mounds where the walls were (total collapse in about 30 or 40 years in some cases, example Conglog quarry buildings near Tanygrisiau) and will be green and overgrown. If humans left you'd be astonished how quickly nature reclaims.

Even more dramatic are pics (before the war) if you search for people who made sneaky visits to Pripyat (town next to Chernobyl). Nature reclaims and we may be more fragile than we realise, especially if we don't change our attitude. Take a look at the pics here and read this report. What an amazing adventure of their report. Complete respect - hats off to them! https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/chernobyl-zone-of-alienation-5-days-i...

The geology around the foot of the North Pennine slope is fascinating. It's got more in common with the Lake District. You can tell from the shape of the pikes and other small hills nearby that something is different. When you consider how the Earth just keeps churning around without any regards to our existence it really puts us in our proper place. I love it round there.

We walked close to this spot only a week or so ago (although we were slogging heading uphill, in poor visibility).  Isn’t this area where they used to ‘hush’ for lead ore by damming water and then releasing it to wash away precisely the thin bit of biosphere you noticed in order to get at the minerals beneath?

Interesting area, although I’m afraid the grim, tendon-bruising march down the Corpse Road will be my main memory!

Also, quite near there, I came across some shameless Arc’teryx advertising

Confirmed by what I read about Pangea 2 yesterday - 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/25/supercontinent-could-make-e...

Not something for us to worry about of course.

Soil and worms and roots

Support life as we know it

When it's gone, we're toast

T.

Yes, hushing was used all over the lead mining areas of the Dales and N. Pennines. When I was doing the Pennine Way in 1982 I was fascinated by the industrial landscape the old miners left behind in Swaledale and further north. By contrast my mate thought it was all a blot on the landscape and should be restored.