The brief guide to speaking Nepali lay open in front of me with a cup a coffee and cake in the Black and White Café in the main street of Pokhara. This was one of a number of eateries I patronised from many places which fed the appetites of the large tourist trade based on the town’s obvious charms.  Located on the shore of Phewa Tal it looked out over the lake to wooded hillsides in which the Peace Temple nestled behind the village of Anadu. When we had first arrived the view away from the lake was obscured by clouds, but during the afternoon they cleared and by sundown the unimaginably vast line of the Himalayan peaks around Annapurna, centered on Macupachere, were picked out in the distant dusty pink of the last rays of the sun.

I had been waiting to see if I could secure a permit to make the trek around Manaslu, a journey of about 14 days which would take me up to the high pass at Larkye La at 5216m. A lodge had just been opened which allowed for the whole circuit to be walked without the need for tents giving me access to an area which remained relatively uninfluenced by tourism in comparison with the trek I had just completed up to Annapurna base camp.

Languages really aren’t one of my strong points. My ability to retain foreign words seems frustratingly poor – I can hold onto the obscure latin names of long dead creatures from the Cambrian to the Eocene but remembering the words and order and pronunciation to ask for a coffee took forever. It was not just the words and syntax it was the whole social thing. I reckon myself to be extrovert in that I enjoy performance and find ideas spark most vividly when I am talking with others. However, my heritage is shy and introverted. The waiter in the Black and White café had been watching me from behind the bar came across and asked if I wanted another coffee. In doing so he also observed that he had seen me reading and re-reading the Nepali phrase guide, and why didn’t I just give it a go! He was so very right, the point of language is to interact and learning by doing is so fundamental, particularly with a language, any language, where the feel of it in your body and the response to it is what it is about.

This language-anxiety which has been a skein of thought though many of my travels came back to me whilst trying to work out how to communicate the complex language which is associated with geology. I find that once I have established the meaning of words associated with concepts in my mind, that I tend to forget that this may not be the case for others I am talking to. This is something my partner Rachael is good at reminding me of. A while ago we were doing some cooking together, on this occasion making a large crème brulee. I asked Rachael if she could pass the flan dish, the chosen receptacle for the crème brulee. In asking the question I had the whimsical notion, which I unwisely voiced, that flandish sounded like some sort of obscure language. Now, whenever my descriptions of geology flirt with the obscure, I will hear Rachael’s voice calls out “Flandish!” whether she is actually there or not (much in the same way Len Goodman delivers a Strictly Come Dancing “Seven”).

Along with comprehending vast amounts of time and thinking in at least three dimensions, geology’s mountainous conglomeration of words provide a challenge. There’s a lot of Greek and Latin – from the terrible lizards (dinosaurs) to the period of ancient life (the Palaeozoic) – and geologists like their legends too. The Titans (sons and daughters of the original gods of sky and earth, Uranus and Gaia) feature strongly in ocean naming. Iapetus for the Palaeozoic ocean crushed by the Caledonian Orogeny and father of Atlas after whom the Atlantic Ocean is named. Rhea and Tethys also have their own ancient oceans, Rhea being the mother of the Olympian gods and Tethys taking over from Thalassa as the primeval spirit of the sea. Thalassa herself features in the name of the Panthalasic ocean which surrounds the singular continent of Pangea during the Mesozoic era.

Discoverers’ and patrons’ names also make an appearance in fossil names alongside a mass of Greek and Latin descriptors. Dinosaur hunters seem particularly prone to giving out curious names such as Gasosaurus and Irritator with a prize to Bambiraptor feinbergi which combines Disney with patronage (literally the Bambi thief of the Feinbergs – the Feinbergs being the folk who bought the original specimen and lent it to the Graves Museum of Natural History in Florida).

Place names feature most strongly though, which is no surprise as rocks are anchored to place, particularly when naming occurrences of rocks in stratigraphy. The major periods of geological time are derived from understanding the relationships of major rock units and so several of their names feature places, for example the Devonian and Permian. For others of these major time units place has been related to tribe, with the Celtic tribes of the Silures and Ordovices now enshrined in the time periods of the Silurian and Ordovician. Places also feature in mineral names such as Cummingtonite (named after Cummington in Massachusetts) and my favourite the mineral Mullite named after my research area, the Isle of Mull.

There is a wealth of fascinating information bound up with the words used to name things in geology and there is potential for endless interest in unravelling these layers to help light-up the meaning of the geology.  It is however possible to get tied up in the words and unscrambling their meaning. Understanding the difference between a nonconformity, a disconformity, a misconformity, and an unconformity may have value as each has a very specific meaning (except for one which I made up*) – but they are only of value if they become part of the conversation and create real meaning, a deeper level of knowledge and understanding, self-expression, interest or some fun. For me, the most interesting thing is the way that the words and their meaning, and the conversation that flows from using them, helps to understand the geological processes that make our planet work. There are many other ways that the conversation can turn though, perhaps towards history or people, the language itself or simply getting to know each other.

To my shame I didn’t make much progress with Nepali, too many of the lovely Nepali people were good enough at speaking English and more than willing to do so. I had more success with the permit which came through after a few days and my host Nabraj found me an excellent guide, Roshan. As the trek progressed less English was spoken by the people we met, and the Nepali language was replaced by Tibetan as the primary language. The beautiful traditional greeting of “namaste” (I bow to you) was replaced by “tashi delek” (which translates approximately as “blessing upon you”). To find my way through not just the language but the culture and the practicalities of finding lodging Roshan was invaluable. He had a twinkle in his eye and with boyish good looks it seemed to be a feature of all the lodging houses I stayed in that they were invariably run by rather attractive young women.

It was through Roshan that conversations were started, and I learned more about this remarkable country: learned how hard the Nepali guides worked, many having worked abroad in places like Dubai as labourers in appalling conditions in the frequent times work was not available in Nepal; learned about the mule trains bringing in goods from China across the mountains and learned about the Buddhist stupas, mandalas and mani stones. It is the mani-stones which feature in this month’s mystery rock for the WallCAP project. Each stone has carved on it the Buddhist mantra Om Mane Padme Hum in Sanskrit. The creation of the stones, reciting or chanting the mantra or walking around the stones (to the left of the stones moving clockwise which Buddhist doctrine consider as the way the earth and the universe revolve) are all devotional activities. The mantra itself is symbolic of the pathway to enlightenment through perfecting each of the six practices of generosity, pure ethics, tolerance and patience, perseverance, concentration, and wisdom.  Many good reasons to have this written in stone, and also many good reasons why, as the waiter at the Black and White café observed, that joining the conversation is such a good thing. It also seems to me that there are times when a good guide is exactly what you need.

*Misconformity is not a geological term

@Northumbrianman

The post Written in Stone appeared first on WallCAP.

Coming down the track were some local villagers. They were not the porters I had seen many times, often wearing flip-flops or bright purple wellies carrying cast iron pipes, water tanks, chickens and more. The porters tripped lightly with their massive loads, along the mountain trails which lead through the villages and monasteries around Manaslu up to the high passes of the Nepalese Himalayas and the border with China. These villagers were carrying slabs of stone on their backs, each slab many feet square, inches thick, made of the local metamorphic schists and used as roof tiles in the local houses.  A little further up the track a cluster of villagers gathered around large stacks of the roof slabs taking their turn to pick up a load to be moved down the valley. I enquired of my guide, Roshan, what the reason for the mass movement of roofing material was. He told me that the villagers had found that the mountainside above their village was unstable and was going to collapse imminently in a landslide that would bury the village. The villagers, without any external help, had simply taken their stone-built houses apart, moved them down the valley to a safer place and re-built the village. What I was witnessing was the last step in moving the remaining roofing slates to the new village. I carried on walking up the track contemplating the stoic, hard-working approach of the villagers and the challenges of living in this remote mountain landscape. A few hundred yards up the track we came to the edge of the landslide.  A new track had already been trampled, snaking its way precariously through the morass of sand, mud and rock and showing us our route on up the valley. A tongue of loose material thousands of feet long had spewed down the side of the mountain, with rock shards of all sizes, smothering all before it including the previous location of the village.

The mountain landscape that I had been walking through on this trek around Manaslu, up to the high pass at Larkye La at 5106m was epic in many ways. As a geologist it constantly contrasted the seemingly static geology of the UK with a landscape that was active in all too human timescales and on a scale that was sometimes hard to comprehend. Just recently in Uttarakhand, a part of the Indian Himalayas, a probable glacial collapse on the Nanda Devi glacier caused a flood which ripped down the Rishiganga River wiping out a hydro-electric dam and killing some 150 people. In 2015 an earthquake centered at Gorkha, close to my starting point for the Manaslu trek, killed some 9,000 people with another 22,000 sustaining injuries and over 600,000 homes destroyed. There was frequent evidence on my trek for recent landslides as the still rising Himalayas are cut deep by boulder-choked rivers, cracked by ice and shaken by earthquakes. There was no question that this was a landscape which was actively being formed.

It is not all destruction though. The massive scale of erosion in the mountains creates massive amounts of sedimentary material. Within the Budhi Gandaki River, which provided my route in around the east of Manaslu, there were places where piles of sediment many hundreds of meters thick had accumulated. These in turn had been cut into by the river exposing the extent of these recent accumulations in crumbling cliff-faces by the river. Further down-stream where the valley spreads out from the mountain front, enormous volumes of coarse sand and gravel accumulates providing aggregate for concrete, made visible in the form of piles of locally made concrete bricks drying in the sun.

Further east in Nepal lies Kathmandu and the Bagmati River. This river is holy to both Buddhists and Hindus and winds its way around the east and south of Nepal’s capital city. The Bagmati river basin is sandwiched between the massive Gandaki basin to the west and the equally large Kosi basin to the east. Unlike its neighbours which count the highest Himalayan peaks within their patch (Everest is part of the Kosi basin and Annapurna is within the Gandaki basin) the Bagmati river is rain fed rather than gorged on glacial meltwater. In the Kathmandu valley it is a slow river running across the top of the pile of sand and clay that marks where a large lake has silted up, filling in and levelling the valley. This ancient lake not only gave the valley its fertility but provides the area with another valuable resource, clay. The town of Thime to the east of Kathmandu is the pottery making centre of the district, though clay work can be seen throughout the Kathmandu Valley. Just to the north of Bhaktapur (the city of temples 8 miles east of Kathmandu) there are brick making chimneys surrounded by vast piles of bricks, like a Nepalese version of Bedfordshire. The clay isn’t just used for pots, bricks and tiles. Part of the extraordinary architecture of Bhaktapur and the other towns of the Kathmandu valley includes intricate relief patterns made from moulds to create patterned bricks in terracotta-red. These are combined with wood and stone to produce beautiful relief panels, architraves and other features. This work which reached its apogee between 1500 and 1800 AD is part of the reason that the Kathmandu Valley was listed as a World Heritage Site. The citation includes this statement “These monuments were defined by the outstanding cultural traditions of the Newars, manifested in their unique urban settlements, buildings and structures with intricate ornamentation displaying outstanding craftsmanship in brick, stone, timber and bronze that are some of the most highly developed in the world”.

The sedimentary picture painted in the Himalayas has huge brush strokes illustrating in bold the different types of sedimentary process. It shows the power in the forces of wind, water, ice and earth movement to erode. It demonstrates in extremes the relationship between energy and sediment grain-size from the house sized boulders moved by the raging meltwater in mountain rivers to the finest particles of clay filling the still waters of ancient Lake Kathmandu. It also gives a vivid rendering of the karmic nature of sedimentary environments, the give and take that erodes and deposits, creating both destruction and valuable resources.

In a place of extremes like the Himalayas this is all made obvious, though these principles apply just as much in other environments. If we travel the many thousands of miles in distance back to the landscape around Hadrian’s Wall and back in time for 300 million years or so to the Carboniferous period, the same things were happening. The layered stratigraphy of the rocks, varying from sandstone through siltstone to shale and coal speak of the different energies of the environments in which they were laid down. The estimated 2km thickness of Carboniferous sediments preserved in the Northumberland basin points to the huge volume of sediments eroded from the Himalayan scale mountains to the north, the eroded roots of which can now be seen in the Highlands of Scotland. In the same way that the Newars of Kathmandu benefited from the lacustrine resources of the Valley, we too have benefitted from the stone, coal, clay, iron and limestone found in the Carboniferous sedimentary sequences.

The give and take of the Carboniferous sediments is more subtly drawn in the mystery rock in this month’s WallCAP newsletter. Imagine a river going into the dry season, such that the river dwindles into still discontinuous pools in which the remaining sand and clay settle out. The pools then dry out producing a crust of partially hardened silt. Sometime later the weather breaks, a massive storm lashes down soaking the landscape and creating flash floods which create fast flowing turbid rivers. When these rivers overwhelm the old dried out pools, the power of the flow rips up the partially hardened muddy sand breaking it into fragments and carrying them along in the flood. Further down-stream as the current wanes these muddy clasts are redeposited mixed in with sand carried easily in the fast-flowing water. This is this sort of deposit that we are observing in this month’s mystery rock. It is what geologists call a lag deposit and a nice example of the way that sedimentary rocks don’t just record a sequence of deposition but also one of erosion and redeposition too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0o1AhGuwMg&feature=youtu.be

@Northumbrianman

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